The ‘grand simulation’ and dreams of success by assessment: Baudrillardian reflections on (trans-)national school policy

Abstract

Since the 1990s, European school policy has been steered by management dreams that systematic monitoring and assessment would guide schools and society toward a future of greater quality, efficiency, and growth. This article, drawing on Jean Baudrillard, explores whether it makes sense to rearticulate this dream of optimization by assessment in terms of a 'grand simulation' that brings into circulation a play of signs in terms of global quantifiable comparability supported by the aura of objectivity, statistics and big data. Does this dream of optimization suck us into a virtual world of 'ingrowing obesity,' where an uninterrupted supply of statistics and digital platforms loosens our grip on the real by the alchemical use of numbers, algorithms, and signs? The article argues that by observing school policy as seductive effects of a larger crisis-producing and competition-motivating (self-)assessment simulation, it becomes possible to rearticulate a persistent trend in (trans)national school policies in a language different from this trend's own self-referencing logic-and thus to question the trend itself. Danish school policy demonstrates as a European national case how the simulation changed local educational traditions by building up a national curriculum that made schools and students comparable and hereby amenable to increased assessment. Word count: 9 972 (incl references)2 Observing School Policy and the Dream of Optimization as a SimulationDrawing on Baudrillard's conceptual framework, this article explores the dominant trend of governance by assessment in current school and education policy as a 'grand simulation'. This 'grand simulation' expands both internationally and domestically through integration of national policies into loosely coupled governance networks that extend both outward to transnational actors such as the OECD, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), and the European Union, and inward via national ministries of education to municipalities, schools and 'learning subjects' (Krejsler, 2018;Lawn & Grek, 2012;Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Baudrillard's concept of simulations is furthermore employed to frame the larger context of assessment in school policy in relation to neoliberal reforms and profound changes in

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