April 25, 2024
Written by Laurel White
A new paper by Faculty of Education faculty says that literacy and numeracy assessments commonly used in Kenya are driving a global education reform agenda rather than responding to the needs of individual schools and students. It is said that it is something to do.
articleA paper published in “Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education'' found that citizen-led assessment (CLA), which measures and publishes school learning levels, creates a sense of crisis by predicting poor learning outcomes. , claims to promote education by mobilizing public sentiment. Take action and contribute to the global education reform movement.
Christopher Kirchgasler, an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, co-authored the paper with doctoral student Sunho Choi. Kirchgasler said the analysis shows why so-called “social responsibility tools” like the CLA deserve close scrutiny.
“This article urges families, government officials and the public to take concrete action to reform the Kenyan education system to bring it more in line with global standards for literacy and numeracy instruction with a focus on performance measurement. “It visualizes the CLA's role in instructing the masses,” he says. “In doing so, the CLA will advance a global agenda as if it were coming from the ‘bottom up.’”
The analysis outlined in this article is based on interviews with experts and a review of the tool's technical literature.
Kirchgasler said the study uncovers how the assessments were carefully designed to generate and disseminate information about the nature of educational inequality, which the study intentionally labeled as a “learning crisis.” He said he took it off. Such a crisis designation, he argues, would provoke a public and media backlash and encourage support for education reforms tied to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals' literacy and numeracy standards. The Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by the United Nations in 2015.
Kirchgasler began researching CLA nearly 10 years ago as part of his doctoral fieldwork in Kenya. He hopes this latest publication will fill a critical gap in understanding the exact mechanisms by which CLA is trying to drive change in schools.
“By clarifying the mechanisms by which social responsibility tools work rather than identifying crises, we aim to treat large swaths of the Global South as if they were ‘in crisis’. “We hope to once again take a hard look at the politics of global norms and values that mark things like this. Expert intervention is justified,” he says.
Kirchgasler is affiliated with the African Research Program and the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Research. His research broadly draws on postcolonial and postfoundational approaches to analyze values and norms in curriculum and school reform to understand how they create difference and exclusion. One of his areas of research is transnational and includes research on immigrant reception, global assessment, teacher observation systems, and low-cost, for-profit school education, particularly in Africa, Europe, and North America. I am. His second vein of research concerns the historicization of educational knowledge, including psychological concepts such as curiosity and grit, and curriculum design principles such as efficiency and community voice.
Read the full article “Responding to the global learning crisis: Citizen-led assessment, social accountability, and democratic orientation” here.
