Contextualizing the datafication of schooling – a comparative discussion of Germany and Russia

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to a growing body of research on the increasing datafication of schooling, which has become a salient topic in comparative education and education policy research. Specifically, we address the rising scholarly concern about the meaning of (comparing) contexts as bounded localities facing an increasingly fluid and generative process of datafication. This concern is closely related to wider (and also older) calls to denaturalize space as a territory and instead to approach space as relational and consisting of complex constellations of changing topologies. Topological theorizing emphasizes spatial complexity and dynamism, and it simultaneously maintains that it is necessary to bridge topological and topographical perspectives and to understand their mutually constitutive nature in space-(re)making. Accordingly, we use the recent expansion of standardized assessments in Germany and Russia to illustrate the coming-together of topological and topographical space-making in datafication. One of our arguments is that the value of the concept of data infrastructures does not stop with pointing to the topological ‘side’ of datafication, but may also help to capture the complexity of the interplay of multiple topological and topographical moments of bordering, their mutual constitution and simultaneity at different phases of data design, collection, processing, analysis and reporting.

KEYWORDS:

• Datafication
• (international) comparative research
• context
• data infrastructures
• standardized assessments

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This paper derives from research data generated and analysed by the authors for these former research projects, combining policy documents, laws and ministerial circulars, information from the websites of different institutional actors central for assessment policies and practices and also interviews with policy actors and school officials (see e.g. Hartong, 2015, 2018; Piattoeva, 2015; Piattoeva et al., 2018). We re-used this material for this article while also engaging with the existing literature not only from the field of context-sensitive comparative education, but also with literature focusing explicitly on German and Russian state structures, including their federal arrangements (e.g. Stepan, 1999; Kropp, 2010; Drewek, 1994; Braun, 2003 for Germany; Starodubtsev, 2018; Busygina et al., 2018; Busygina, 1998; Brubaker, 1994; Tolz, 2001; for Russia).

2. We use the term Länder throughout the text to describe the subnational ‘units’ or ‘entities’ of German educational authority. While acknowledging the asymmetrical and heterogeneous nature of the Russian Federation, as we explain below, we still call all of its ‘sub-federal’, topographically demarcated units ‘subnational units’ or ‘subnational entities’ for simplicity.

3. It is interesting to look at the actual labelling of the recently adopted education standards and assessments in the two countries. In Germany, both standards and assessments are termed national, whereas in Russia, countrywide assessments are termed national or state-wide, whereas education standards are referred to as federal.

4. Moreover, in contrast to the early post-Soviet period, all school textbooks have to pass federal textbook expertise requirements before being approved as teaching materials – the motivation of the federal ministry being to reduce the variety of textbooks.

5. It is important to mention here that the reform agenda also included a growing influence of programmes by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) to foster monitoring and accountability, yet mainly through funding schemes for empirical research or for district-level school activities.

6. At the same time, the KMK has been fostering the expansion and alignment of sub-national school statistics that should be delivered to the KMK database (Hartong et al., 2019). The collection of administrative data has also expanded in the Russian case (see Gurova, 2017; Gurova & Piattoeva, 2018).

7. Mathematics and Russian are the only compulsory exam subjects of the USE, and in addition, pupils choose optional subjects depending on their interests and the requirements of the tertiary education institution of their choice.

8. In some Länder, VERA is even given a different name (e.g. KERMIT in Hamburg).

9. For a more detailed description of the distribution of VERA tasks between the IQB and the Länder see https://www.iqb.hu-berlin.de/vera.

10. Additionally, despite its subordination to the KMK, which also pays for VERA test development (but not for its administration), the IQB and its Forschungsdatenzentrum (Research Data Center) are actually co-financed by the BMBF, which is also the federal institution for research funding. This gradually increasing influence of the BMBF has again operated through the promotion of topologization and its channelling through data infrastructures, and has included the initiation of large funding programmes to strengthen and stabilize educational data networks (particularly at the district level, thus not intervening in the KMK), the creation of databases in the field of surveys (such as the National Education Panel Study, NEPS) and (also) assessments, thus accumulating ‘policy evidence’ which increasingly feeds into KMK decision-making.

11. In Germany, the school systems of the Länder have traditionally been structurally segregated into different school tracks. The implementation of that segregation, however, has again varied widely between the Länder and the different political constellations.

12. The Tatar language is one of the two official languages of the republic, alongside Russian, and Tatar language is the second biggest language after Russian in the entire Russian Federation. Also, Tatars form the majority of the population in the republic, followed by ethnic Russians and ethnic groups from the neighbouring republics.

13. The precarious position of the Tatar language can be demonstrated by numerous recent debates and political measures which, on President Vladimir Putin’s initiative, increased the number of teaching hours allocated to the Russian language and made instruction in official languages other than Russian contingent upon the written consent of pupils’ guardians.

Additional information

Funding

The research on the German case analysed in this article was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project number [HA 7367/2-1].

Notes on contributors

Sigrid Hartong

Sigrid Hartong is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Education at the Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg, Germany. She holds a PhD in Sociology (University of Bamberg) and a Habilitation degree in Education Science (Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg). One of her main scholarly interests lies on global-local education reform dynamics, both from single-case and international comparative perspectives. Additionally, her work focuses on the growing datafication and digitalization of education policy and practice, particularly visible in the rise of (big) data infrastructures and mobilities. Her previous research explored policies on educational standardization in Germany and the US, including the implementation of curriculum standards, standardized assessments and new monitoring procedures.

Nelli Piattoeva

Nelli Piattoeva is Associate Professor in New Social Research programme and the Faculty of Education and Culture at Tampere University, Finland. Her research principally focuses on the transnationalization and datafication of education policy. She is concerned with national and international large-scale assessments as sources of evidence for policymaking and new technologies of governance at a distance, examining these through the lenses of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Her previous research explored state- and nation (re)-building in the post-Soviet societies and changes in school curricula and the perceptions of ‘good’ citizenship entangled in these processes. She is also interested in Russian aid to education, as well as the practices of scientific knowledge production on socialist and post-socialist countries. Nelli’s primary geographical focus of research is Russia and the post-Soviet space.