Christian Ydesen

Europeanising education: governing a new policy space

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Educational testing as an accountability measure: drawing on twentieth-century Danish history of education experiences

This article reveals perspectives based on experiences from twentieth-century Danish educational history by outlining contemporary, test-based accountability regime characteristics and their implications for education policy. The article introduces one such characteristic, followed by an empirical analysis of the origins and impacts of test-based accountability measures applying both top-down and bottom-up perspectives. These historical perspectives offer the opportunity to gain a fuller understanding of this contemporary accountability concept and its potential, appeal and implications for continued use in contemporary educational settings. Accountability measures and practices serve as a way to govern schools; by analysing the history of accountability as the concept has been practised in the education sphere, the article will discuss both pros and cons of such a methodology, particularly as it relates to contemporary education governance.

Creating an Educational Testing Profession in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, 1910-1960

In Sweden, Norway and Denmark national testing communities advocating the introduction and expanded use of standardised educational tests in the national educational systems emerged around World War I. Using international research and cross-border networking activities, these coteries were able to gain power and thus establish and promote a new profession, the educational psychologist, along with instituting practices of alleged scientific tests in the following decades.

Standardised Testing In Compulsory Schooling In England And Denmark: A Comparative Study And Analysis

Within education, national testing is flourishing and, considering the important role which assessment plays in the production and reproduction of culture, it is important to examine further the possible impact of such practice. While England has a long tradition of national educational testing, Denmark, in contrast, has only recently introduced such tests. Thus the two countries present excellent cases for comparison and analysis in order to gain knowledge about the possible consequences of such testing schemes on pedagogy and the content of the school curriculum, as well as the impact they may have on pupils’ perceptions of their potential academic skills. This article draws on research into the national testing of reading conducted in England and Denmark in spring 2013 and draws on the work of Basil Bernstein to compare and contrast both sets of national assessment practices.

Professional encounters with the post-WWII immigrant: a privileged prism for studying the shaping of European welfare nation-states

Abstract This introductory article argues that practices of professional thinking and acting on the presence of the immigrant offer a privileged analytical prism through which to study how post-WWII European welfare nation-states have been shaped and crafted. As such, study of the formation of post-WWII welfare nation-states where one usually does not look for them is suggested: that is, beyond the bureaucratic logic imposed by the state itself. Consequently, a wedge is driven into the mundane professional practices embedded in the immigrant/welfare nation-state nexus, through which may be observed the very heterogeneous production of problems and solutions with immense effect on human lives, communities, and societies. These practices demonstrate the boundary work of the welfare nation-state that shapes it and gives shape to the construction and reconstruction of immigrant children and their families as problems and, thus, objects of integration and professional intervention. In this sense, the prism offers a new approach to writing histories of immigrant children’s education and the shaping and crafting of welfare nation-states that displaces both objects of study to professional practices of their making. In the first part of the article, the privileging of this analytical prism is substantiated historically and theoretically. In the second part, the four contributions constituting this themed issue are introduced. Finally there is a discussion of how the four contributions demonstrate the analytical prism’s cross-national relevance and historical sensitivity, adding new histories of how immigrant children’s education has been caught up in the immigrant/welfare nation-state nexus.

Education governance and standardised tests in Denmark and England

Abstract In this study we identify and compare the impact of standardised student assessment in England, an established neoliberal context, and in Denmark where a neoliberal education reform agenda is emerging in response to both national concerns and international governance. National reading tests for students aged 11–12 years, long established in England, were introduced in Denmark in 2010. The form they take differs considerably, being primarily formative in Denmark and largely summative in England. Culturally sensitive extended semi-structured interviews are conducted with both teachers and students and analysed to identify the extent to which neoliberal reform is mobilised through testing in each context and how testing shapes curriculum and pedagogy. Significantly, we find that in Denmark, where professional judgement still dominates, teachers often deploy pedagogical approaches to service what they believe to be their students’ best interests. In England, however, teachers try to accommodate a concern for both their students’ and their own interests, and the pedagogy they enact is more often controlling, instrumental and reductionist; their wish to be proactive is compromised by their need to be responsive. Hence we show how policy technologies shape practice to undermine a deliberate pedagogy rooted in ideas legitimated though scholarship and experience.

The Imperial Welfare State? Decolonisation, Education and Professional Interventions on Immigrant Children in Birmingham, 1948-1971.

Abstract This article approaches debates about how the history of the post-1945 English welfare state might be written. It argues that professionals’ interventions on immigrant children can serve as a prism for understanding the crafting of the modern English welfare state. In this sense the article engages with the narrative concerning the resilience of a post-war British history that sees 1945 as a moment of profound rupture symbolised by the demise of Empire, the development of a universal welfare state, and the coming of mass immigration that brought with it social problems whose management presaged a distinctive British multiculturalism. Due to its influential impact on the development of immigrant education policies in England and because of its extensive education archive the article uses the Birmingham Local Education Authority (LEA) as an empirical and historical case. The significant British Nationality Act of 1948 and the Immigration Act of 1971 serve as demarcations of the period treated. The article concludes that the immigrant child and the child’s background were consistently presented as educational problems and as the cause of both poor academic attainment and a more intangible unwillingness to assimilate. In this lens the crafting of the post-war English welfare state was a continuation of an imperial project shoring up imperial boundaries within as the former colonised appeared on English soil.

High-stakes educational testing and democracy – antagonistic or symbiotic relationship?:

This article argues that high-stakes educational testing, along with the attendant questions of power, education access, education management and social selection, cannot be considered in isolation from society at large. Thus, high-stakes testing practices bear numerous implications for democratic conditions in society. For decades, advocates of high-stakes educational testing have argued that testing would result in meritocracy, ensuring that everyone would be afforded the same opportunities to find success in adulthood. Examined from a critical perspective, however, we learn that testing is also extremely well designed as a bulwark against opposing or alternative outlooks and opinions, because testing is a complex tool requiring highly specialised knowledge to administer effectively. This article sets out to investigate the relation between high-stakes educational testing and democracy drawn from the experiences of 20th-century high-stakes educational testing practices in the Danish history of education. Among other things, the article concludes that a combination of different evaluation technologies – some formative and some summative – might be the safest way to go from a democratic perspective.

The international space of the Danish testing community in the interwar years

The focus of this article is to draw attention to the presence and importance of travelling ideas, knowledge, and practices in Danish history of educational testing. The article introduces and employs a spatial methodological approach in relation to the connections between the international testing community and the emerging Danish practice of intelligence testing in the interwar years. The article represents a contribution to an investigation of the social and cultural exchange of educational ideas between the Anglo-Saxon world and Scandinavia, in general, and Denmark in particular. Moreover, the article argues for the positive gains of drawing on a spatial frame of interpretation when dealing with national educational history.

Playing the game of IQ testing in England and Denmark in the 1950s and 1960s - A Socio-Material perspective

ABSTRACT The promotion of performance measurement and international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) is often explained in terms of the rise and expansion of the neoliberal thought collective; in other words, testing constitutes a core component of neoliberal education reform. A less well-known feature of the neoliberal regime is its numerous precursors and antecedents in the 19th and 20th centuries. This article provides a study of such historical precursors in the treatment of children seen as ‘mentally defective’ in two emerging welfare states, namely Denmark in the interwar period and England in the immediate post-war era. Based on the records of municipal educational psychology offices in Denmark and the Birmingham Special Schools After-Care Subcommittee respectively, we argue that IQ testing and other metrics were integral to efforts at universalising treatments in the fledgling welfare states; but that the nature of such testing, numbers, and metrics components left them open to being gamed by various involved actors, meaning that the very instruments which were implemented to underpin the ideal of the universalistic welfare state to a certain extent worked to undermine it. In a similar fashion, the contemporary neoliberal education regime might face challenges from the metrics so intrinsic to its modus operandi.