Elastic numbers: national examinations data as a technology of government

Abstract

This article is motivated by interest in the deployment of massive numerical information produced by national examinations in the practices of control and steering. It examines how data generated in the compulsory school graduation examination in the Russian Federation connect together different actors within the education system and beyond, and the nature of the relationships so formed. These questions take as their unit of analysis the relations and relationships created and/or re-ordered through numbers, and they unmask who utilizes the numerical data, and for what purpose. The article brings together two major arguments in the existing literature on quantification, and develops them further into a coherent research framework which is then applied to capture and interpret the circulation and application of the examinations data. The first argument suggests that governance by numbers, characteristic of contemporary regulation practices, relies on and promotes the parallel existence of soft and hard regimes of regulation. The second addresses the increasingly public nature of social statistics, that is, its circulation on both official and popular levels. The article illustrates that it is by means of analysing the overlappings and interdependencies between the soft and hard regimes, and the two levels of data entry, that we can best understand how numbers exercise power and how they become rooted and gain more power in the process.

Keywords:

• technology of government
• national examinations
• data
• high-stakes testing
• accountability
• performance measurement
• Russia
• Unified State Exam

Notes

1. Standardized testing refers in this article to the tests/exams that are uniformly administered and scored (cf. Graham and Neu 2004).

2. Russia is a federal state that consists of 83 constituent entities (federal subjects) with various degrees of political and economic autonomy from the centre.

3. Even though this article is not concerned with the neoliberalization of Russian society per se, Russia can be said to exhibit many features consistent with the neoliberal ideology and the neoliberal governmentality common to advanced liberal regimes. The reforms of the social sphere demonstrate transition from structured dependency to policies premised on the primacy of individual choices handled responsibly, efficiently and cost effectively (Wengle and Rasell 2008; Hemment 2009). In higher education, too, the government has shifted its approach away from welfare toward the underlying neoliberal postulates, such as ‘market mechanisms’, ‘consumer and market demands’, ‘cost reduction’, ‘per capita funding’, ‘capital’ and many others. These are claimed to have become the part and parcel of higher education reforms during Vladimir Putin’s era (Gounko and Smale 2007a, 2007b).

4. On widespread opposition to the USE in higher education, see Drummond and Gabrscek (2012).

5. All translations are the author’s.