Session Information
23 ONLINE 48 B, Assessment
Paper Session
MeetingID: 826 1305 4951 Code: 0M30fY
Contribution
This paper explores the struggles over the development of a new educational assessment system in Denmark before, during and after the lockdown of the education system. The process was formally initiated as part of the government program for the new Social Democratic government taking office in June 2019. The new assessment system was announced in October 2021 and it will be implemented from the school year 2026/27. The core components were the replacement of the adaptive principle with a traditional linear system, replacement of the current national tests at the end of the academic year with a skills test at the start of the academic year, a sole focus on reading and maths skills, and the abolition of student plans and municipal quality reports. An exploration of the political context in which the plan about a new assessment system emerged reveals a plurality of actors, both internal and external to the political system, playing into the policy processes behind the broad political agreement. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these actors reflect different agendas and priorities, and they invoke different types of knowledge and arguments. For instance, we see how different actors try to use the same evaluation report to reach very different conclusions. This testifies to the inherently political nature of policy formation (Ozga, 2019), which can involve a considerable level of cherry picking.
This paper takes a critical look at the stakeholder positions, arguments and discourses involved in the process as a lens for understanding the politics of assessment policy formation.
Method
In order to work analytically with the complex interactions between stakeholders I draw on the theoretical concept of historical assemblage which means that different historical events and tra-jectories come together to problematize, order and classify the present and that it has implica-tions in terms of ‘what is seen, acted on, and thought about in educational reforms’ (Popkewitz et al. 2018, p. 109). The paper draws on three data types, 1) policy documents about the current as-sessment system in Denmark, the political agreement from February 2020 about a new assess-ment system, and the final political agreement about the new assessment system from October 2021; 2) interviews with teachers, school leaders, local authorities, ministerial civil servants, and a high-level politician participating in the negotiations conducted during the pandemic in the au-tumn of 2020 and autumn of 2021; 3) public debates about the national testing system in the spring of 2021.
Expected Outcomes
I expect to find a number of concerns in assessment policy formation explaining the tensions be-tween renewal and orthodoxy; 1) the global framing of education; 2) priorities from the admin-istration and collaborative partners; 3) the parliamentary situation; 4) the functionality of the as-sessment system in light of colliding agendas about accountability, inclusive education, and students’ wellbeing and human flourishing. So far, my findings about the formation of the assessment policy are: The parliamentary situation and the tradition for broad political agreement in education play a role in explaining what could be seen as a pragmatic turn in the process, the key stakeholders – in the form of the Teachers’ Union, the School Leader Association, and the Association of Municipalities – seem to have exerted considerable influence with their joint proposal on what seems to be the end result, considerable inertia seems to exist at the systemic level. Here I find concerns – among civil servants, parts of the advisory group, and among the what works segment of the research community – about securing data flows and the consistent delivery of evidence for both governing and research purposes. The development of adequate assessment systems able to serve the priorities and agendas of all stakeholders – and not least the hope associated with the design of such assessment systems – is of pivotal importance in all countries. Approaching this issue from a Nordic perspective may yield results with global impact because the Nordic model still stands as an attractive model for educa-tion around the world.
References
Dovemark, M., Kosunen, S., Kauko, J., Magnúsdóttir, B., Hansen, P., & Rasmussen, P. (2018). De-regulation, privatisation and marketisation of Nordic comprehensive education: Social changes reflected in schooling. Education Inquiry, 9(1), 122–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/20004508.2018.1429768 Foucault, M. (1997). Politics, polemics, and problematizations. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The essential works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. I, Ethics: Subjectivity and truth. Allen Lane. Gustafsson, L. R. (2012). What did you learn in school today? How ideas mattered for policy changes in Danish and Swedish schools 1990–2011 [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Arhus University. Milner, A. L., Mattei, P., & Ydesen, C. (2021). Governing education in times of crisis: State inter-ventions and school accountabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. European Educational Re-search Journal, 20(4), 520–539. https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041211022198 Popkewitz, T. S., Feng, J., & Zheng, L. (2018). Calculating the Future: The Historical Assemblage of Empirical Evidence, Benchmarks & PISA. ECNU Review of Education, 1(1), 107–118. https://doi.org/10.30926/ecnuroe2018010106 Reder, T., & Ydesen, C. (2022). Policy borrowing and evidence in Danish education policy prepara-tion – The case of the Danish public school reform of 2013. In B. Karseth, K. Sivesind, & G. Steiner-Khamsi (Eds.), Evidence and expertise in Nordic education policies: A comparative network analy-sis from the Nordic region (forthcoming). Palgrave. McNess, E., Kelly, P., Kousholt, K., Andreasen, K. E., & Ydesen, C. (2015). Standardised testing in compulsory schooling in England and Denmark: A comparative study and analysis. Bildung und Erziehung, 68(3), 329-348. DOI: 10.7788/bue-2015-0306 Ozga, J. (2019). The politics of accountability. Journal of Educational Change. Vol. 21, 19–35. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-019-09354-2 Skedsmo, G., Rönnberg. L. & Ydesen, C. (2021) National Testing and Accountability in the Scandi-navian Welfare States: Education Policy Translations in Norway, Denmark and Sweden. World Yearbook of Education Sørensen, T. B. (2011). The bias of markets: A comparative study of the market form and identity politics in English and Danish compulsory education. Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism, Vol. 60. University of Copenhagen. Verger, A., Fontdevila, C., & Parcerisa, L. (2019). Constructing school autonomy with accountability as a global policy model: A focus on OECD’s governance mechanisms. In C. Ydesen (Ed.), The OECD’s historical rise in education: The formation of a global governing complex (pp. 219–243). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33799-5_11
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.