Governance of education is in transition and education quality
represents one key discursive justification for diverse reforms.
Transnational actors and commercial interests play a central role in the
reform movements. Using data as a technology of governance, quality
assurance and evaluation (QAE) is an essential tool for reinforcing
central control while at the same time allowing more autonomy to the
local actors and agents and creating the need for new experts and data
infrastructures. Globalization has been described as resulting in the
rescaling of politics and policy, further complicated by the rise of a
new mode of governance at a distance through QAE techniques and
evaluation data, and the consequent reshuffling of the position of the
nation-state and local space. It rests on the provision and translation
of information about subjects, objects and processes and brings new
limits and possibilities for agents. The new architecture of governance
relies on the production and mobility of data. The expanding practices
of evaluation produce knowledge about education, which may allow the
nation-state to extend its capacity to govern across territory and into
the classroom through standardization, commensuration, transparency and
comparison and have severe unintended consequences to the behavior of
educational agents. Simultaneously, states are increasingly incorporated
into the global accountability regime that helps the “national eye” to
govern with the “global eye”. Places are the locus where all scales
conflate, from the supra-national through to the national and local.
There, the educational system becomes “real schools” embedded into a web
of multi-scalar and multi-actor relations. The degree of freedom of
agents in defining and implementing strategies, taking decisions and
accessing resources, relies on those relations, but is never fully
determined by them nor straight carry out the intended aims. Most
reforms are changing the situations, but also influenced by various
educational policies, interest groups, the working of the economy,
public meanings, and ways of conceiving the specific issues, evaluation
results and other factors. This applies to all aspects, from teacher
training, how to handle educational disadvantage or the involvement of
other actors. This chapter analyzes the unintended consequences of
governance of education at a distance through assessment and
standardization to the changes of national and local agents.