Standardizing the European Education Policy Space

Abstract

Countries in Europe, through the European Union, are creating, as part of the market and its governance, a new policy space in education. It is being formed through law, regulation, networking and harmonization. The development of standards across the different fields of policy, statistical calculation and commerce underpins and extends the creation of policy spaces. Europeanization processes in education have some subtle and yet powerful features created through measurement and standardization. They may have a technical form but they are knowledge based, policy driven and exclude politics. Europe is at the leading edge of new forms of governance in education.Through the construction of European policy spaces, the European Union (EU) makes Europe governable. The means and acts of governing in Europe appear to be particular to it, and are reflections of the problems of diverse statist jurisdictions, network organization, market solutions and politics. The field of education is one element in this governing problematic and it appears to be represented by soft governance, the use of persuasive power (Lawn, 2006), and an instrumentalization of new forms of non-state power to govern 'at a distance ' (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 205). As education was originally a sensitive area of policy, where hard regulation would infringe national sovereignty, there was always politics surrounding this policy area. This has been overcome with the use of experts and a precise focus on their creation of data through common tools and categories (Ozga et al, 2011), and their production of standards, through networked processes and technological innovation. The governing of European education depends on the production of abstract and commensurable units, enabling exchange across borders and places, and producing a newly transparent domain. The production and use of standards creates an apparently 'loose' form of governing in which 'professional and organizational knowledge-practices are reinvented in increasingly formalized, universalized and standardized ways ' (Higgins & Larner, 2010, p. 1).A new governing architecture of public and private actors and sites is building European education through arrays of interlocking standards. Governing by standardizing excludes politics and relies on experts while offering workable solutions to governing and being governed in Europe.This article attempts to show how standards work to bring into being and shape the social world and its subjects, and make them governable, and to do this in relation to the field of education/ learning, a field which is often rendered invisible through the dominance of other forms of EU study and subjects, particularly in political science, law and international relations. It follows Rumford (2009) andSmith (2009) in searching for productive ways to research Europe, defined as a new political sociology of Europe, operating with the idea of a fragmented and complex government, involving a range of actors who participate 'in the construction and regulation of Eur...

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