Testing Regimes, Accountabilities and Education Policy

Around the globe, various kinds of testing, including high stakes national census testing, have become meta-policies, steering educational systems in particular directions, and having great effects on schools and on teacher practices, as well as upon student learning and curricula. There has also been a complementary global aspect to this with the OECD’s PISA and IEA’s TIMSS and PIRLS, which have had impacts on national education systems and their policy frameworks.

While there has been a globalized educational policy discourse that suggests that high stakes standardised testing will drive up standards and enhance the quality of a nation’s human capital and thus their international economic competitiveness, this discourse still manifests itself in specific, vernacular, path dependent ways in different nations.

High stakes testing and its effects can also be seen as part of the phenomenon of the ‘datafication’ of the world and ‘policy as numbers’, linked to other reforms of the state, including new public management, network governance, and top-down and test-based modes of accountability. This edited collection provides theoretically and empirically informed analyses of these developments. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education Policy.

Bob Lingard works in the School of Education at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. His research areas are the sociology of education and policy sociology in education. He is the co-editor of the journal Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, and is the author and/or editor of more than 20 books, the most recent of which is Globalizing educational accountabilities, (Routledge, 2015).

Goli Rezai-Rashti is Professor of Critical Policy, Equity and Leadership Studies in the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. Her research and teaching focus is broadly located in the field of sociology of education. She is the author of Gender, Race and the Politics of Role Modeling (2012, with Wayne Martino), and series editor of the book series Routledge Critical Studies in Gender and Sexuality in Education.

Wayne J. Martino is Professor of Equity and Social Justice Education in the Faculty of Education and also an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research at The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. He is one of the editors for the book series Routledge Critical Studies in Gender and Sexuality in Education, and is author/editor of 14 books, most recently Gender, Race and the Politics of Role Modeling (with Goli Rezai-Rashti, 2012). His forthcoming book is entitled Queer Studies and Education: Critical Concepts for the Twenty-First Century (with Ed Brockenbrough, Jennifer Ingrey and Nelson Rodriguez).