How to achieve a ‘revolution’: assembling the subnational, national and global in the formation of a new, ‘scientific’ assessment in Japan

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the complexities, contingencies and tensions involved in the creation of a new, ‘scientific’ assessment in what we call Prefecture A in Japan. We start with a thick, granular description of the complicated and ongoing narrative of a new policy emergence. This descriptive account serves as a precursor to our application of an Actor Network Theory (ANT) approach, particularly the concepts of assemblage and assembling, while at the same time eschewing its depoliticising effect of a flat ontology. Our account details that much work and strategising went into achieving the new assessment but also into holding it in place. This included, strategising inside and across the Prefecture, with the National Ministry, with edu-businesses that had psychometric expertise, with politicians and the board of education and with the OECD and the Director of its Education and Skills Directorate. The analysis illustrates the complex, multi-directional and topological cartographies of power that now work in contemporary education policy processes. As such, we suggest a way to transcend the binary of methodological nationalism and methodological globalism evident in much policy sociology in education work.

KEYWORDS:

• Assemblage
• Actor Network Theory
• assessment policy
• politics
• Japanese education

Acknowledgement

The research reported in this paper was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project scheme (DP15010209). The chief investigators are Bob Lingard, Kalervo N. Gulson, Keita Takayama and Sam Sellar with partner investigators, Chris Lubienski and P. Taylor Webb. We’d like to sincerely thank all the individuals who participated in our study. In particular, we would like to thank the three Ministry of Education officials for their willingness to participate in our study. Lastly, we would like to thank the editors of this special issue for their support, feedback and patience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Private contractors now develop test items for the large majority of prefectural and municipal academic assessments (Kitano and Kosugi 2015). However, it is important to stress that these contractors publish school textbooks and other supplementary learning materials. They possess in-depth understanding of the national curriculum and pedagogical concerns of teachers, often working closely with teachers and curriculum experts. The assessments they develop are closely aligned with the pedagogic concerns of teachers. By contrast, the test developer, featured in our study of Prefecture A, is a distinctly different kind of company specialising in educational measurements.

2 Pseudonyms are used for the interviewed three Ministry officials, Kan, Yamada and Sato.

3 We use gender unspecific pronounces (e.g., s/he) to refer to these officials to avoid identification.

4 We purposely leave vague the exact temporal sequence of the events in this section as part of our effort to prevent the identification of the individuals discussed in the paper.

5 For instance, Ministry’s reports often presented the correlation between students’ daily breakfast and high average scores as if there existed causality between the two. One sociology of education researcher who was involved in the secondary analysis of the Ministry national assessment data justified such an unscientific analysis by arguing that “there is nothing wrong promoting the importance of eating breakfast, right?”

6 Prior to its successful bidding for Prefecture A, the company participated in the bidding for PISA, but was not successful. To the company executives, the biggest hurdle for entering the domestic market has been the very tradition of academic assessment in Japan, where academic assessment is considered as part of pedagogical instruments, as opposed to a scientific measurement of student performance.

7 TALIS is the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey, which collects international comparative data on the working conditions and learning environments of teachers and school leaders. There is an ambition to link such data with student learning outcomes as measured by PISA. See Sorensen (2020) and Sorensen and Robertson (2020).

8 In the same visit, Schleicher visited one of the municipalities in Prefecture A, where PISA for Schools was implemented in March of the same year. It remains the sole case of PISA for Schools ever tried in Japan. It is well known that Schleicher was actively promoting PISA for Schools around the world (see Lewis, Sellar, and Lingard 2016). Yamada confirmed in our interview that s/he had assisted with this arrangement.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported in this paper was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project scheme [grant number DP15010209]. The chief investigators are Bob Lingard, Kalervo N. Gulson, Keita Takayama and Sam Sellar with partner investigators, Chris Lubienski and P. Taylor Webb. We’d like to sincerely thank all the individuals who participated in our study. In particular, we would like to thank the three Ministry of Education officials for their willingness to participate in our study. Lastly, we would like to thank the editors of this special issue for their support, feedback and patience.