Metrics in education—control and corruption

Neoliberalism is a form of governance that has free market economics at its heart: competition, deregulation, and macro-level quantification are its founding blocks. The term was coined in 1938 by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek and was a reaction to forms of governance involving collectivism. The economist Milton Friedman is an iconic figure in the neoliberal field, as are some political leaders—Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair, David Cameron, and Donald Trump. Adherents to neoliberalism subscribe to the belief that economic and individual well-being are best served by liberating individual entrepreneurial skills within a framework of strong property rights, free markets, and free trade. In societies that have come to be governed by neoliberal regimes, few people even recognise the term. This is the equivalent of living under communism or democracy without having heard such terms. In October 2017, when giving a keynote address at an international conference of examination boards, Baird asked the audience whether they had come across the term neoliberalism. Only one third of the participants put up their hands. Yet neoliberalism affects our lived realities as individuals, including through the metrics for which we are objects. Through those metrics we are coerced and controlled and at times rational actors seek to corrupt the system for a range of reasons. Neoliberalism is important for the conceptualisation of what is happening to education because neoliberal views have become such an accepted part of the discourse that they are presented as though there is no alternative. This is reminiscent of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the character Winston Smith explains that the regime’s aim is to narrow the range of thought such that ‘there will be no words in which to express’ certain thoughts. In this context, this Special Issue looks at a range of issues associated with the implications of neoliberal metric regimes in education. This Editorial provides a context for the individual cases in the articles. We discuss the foundational ideas behind metrics such as neoliberalism, performativity, the audit society, managerialism, and workfare. Some of the metrics in education are outlined, including known effects. We then turn to the focus of the Special Issue: gaming, malpractice, and cheating consequences of metrics. In the Florez et al. paper (this issue) and at the end of this Editorial, we ask what the future looks like for metrics systems. This Special Issue looks at a range of ways in which metrics have been introduced in education and how they have provoked unintended effects. The term ‘metrics’ is used for a quantitative measure of educational practice. Quantification brings the power of numbers, in all its forms: numbers can be more persuasive to certain audiences; through aggregation metrics are used to represent large-scale systems in an apparently coherent manner; calculations can be carried out upon them; and they can be compared. Assigning numbers to qualitative features of education gives these benefits, but the richness of life is lost in the process. The context in which the behaviour arose, the people involved, and the institutional arrangements are hard to capture in all of their OXFORD REVIEW OF EDUCATION 2018, VOL. 44, NO. 5, 533–544 https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2018.1504858