By Laurel White
A popular assessment of literacy and numeracy in Kenya does more to advance a global education reform agenda than serve the needs of individual schools or students, according to a new paper from a School of Education faculty member.
The article, published in Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, argues the citizen-led assessment (CLA), which measures and publicizes learning levels in schools, produces a sense of crisis by projecting poor learning outcomes, mobilizes public sentiment in order to spur action, and contributes to a global education reform movement.
Christopher Kirchgasler, assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, co-authored the article with doctoral student Seongho Choi. Kirchgasler says the analysis shows why so-called “social accountability tools” like the CLA deserve closer scrutiny.
“This article makes visible the CLA’s role in directing families, government officials, and the public at large to take specific actions to reform Kenya’s education system to more closely align with global norms for literacy and numeracy instruction focused on measuring competencies,” he says. “By doing so, the CLA advances a global agenda that appears as if it had occurred from the ‘bottom-up.’”
The analysis outlined in the article was based on interviews with experts and a review of the tool’s technical literature.
Kirchgasler says the inquiry lifted the veil on how the assessment was carefully designed to produce and spread information about the nature of educational inequalities, which it deliberately deemed a “learning crisis.” The designation of such a crisis, he argues, leads to public and media outcry that spurs support for education reforms tied to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal benchmarks for literacy and numeracy. The Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by the United Nations in 2015.
Kirchgasler began studying the CLA almost a decade ago as part of his doctoral fieldwork in Kenya. He hopes this most recent publication will fill a crucial gap in understanding the precise mechanisms by which the CLA seeks to drive changes in schools.
“We hope that by revealing the mechanisms by which a social accountability tool performs — rather than reveals — a crisis, we turn scrutiny back towards the politics of global norms and values that mark large swaths of the global South as if ‘in crisis,’ justifying expert intervention,” he says.
Kirchgasler is affiliated with the African Studies Program and the Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies. Broadly, his research draws upon postcolonial and postfoundational approaches to analyze the values and norms in curriculum and school reforms in order to understand how they generate differences and exclusions. One area of his research is transnational and includes studies of migrant inclusion, global assessments, teacher observation systems, and low-fee, for-profit schooling, particularly in Africa, Europe, and North America. The second vein of his work concerns historicizing educational knowledge, including psychological concepts such as curiosity and grit, and curricular design principles such as efficiency and community voice.
Read the full article, “Performing a global learning crisis: citizen-led assessments, social accountability, and directing democracy,” here.