Digital Governance of Education: Technology, Standards and Europeanization of Education 9781350006430, 9781350154711, 9781350006416, 9781350006447

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Digital Governance of Education

Also available from Bloomsbury Education and Technology, 2nd edition, Neil Selwyn Education in the European Union: Pre-2003 Member States, edited by Trevor Corner Education in the European Union: Post-2003 Member States, edited by Trevor Corner Governance of Educational Trajectories in Europe, Andreas Walther, Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Morena Cuconato and Roger Dale The Governance of Education, Suzy Harris

Digital Governance of Education Technology, Standards and Europeanization of Education Paolo Landri

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Paolo Landri, 2018 Paolo Landri has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0643-0 PB: 978-1-3501-5471-1 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0641-6 eBook: 978-1-3500-0644-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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To Nora, Emanuele and Gabriele

Contents List of Figures and Tables Preface Acknowledgements 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Digital Governance, Standardization of Education and Transparency Tracing the Sociomateriality of the Digital Governance of Education Visualization of the European Space of Education Houses of Glass? The Fabrication of a School Data Infrastructure The Use of School Data Infrastructures: ‘Secret Algorithms’ and the Data-Based Governance Becoming Topological: The Development of Digital Schooling Conclusion: ‘Cartographies’ as Critical Tools

Notes References Index

viii ix xiii 1 19 39 59 83 105 127 149 151 165

List of Figures and Tables Figures Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2 Figure 7.3

Fabrication of the European space of education as a space of commensuration Early school leaving in Europe (Education and Training Monitor) Italy and Spain early school leaving (Education and Training Monitor) ‘Scuola in Chiaro’ home page ‘Scuola in Chiaro’ search by location ‘Scuola in Chiaro’ advanced research ‘Scuola in Chiaro’ findings Sociomaterialities of the digital governance of education Digital formations and standardization of education Effects and risks of the digital governance of education

50 53 55 66 67 68 69 129 134 138

Tables Table 1.1 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 6.1

A critical compass to explore the digital governance of education (DGE) History of ‘Scuola in Chiaro’ Self-evaluation report (RAV) National Plan Digital School (2015–2020)

2 71 75 113

Preface In recent decades, we have been witnessing significant investments in digital technologies, platforms and infrastructures all over the world. The uptake of digital technologies concerns most aspects of social life: the development of applications, digital platforms, software, and so on, providing the ‘right’ information, and the appropriate suggestions, regarding any social practice. The ‘digital’ passes through social life and is intended to reshape its practices and spatiotemporal locations. Digitalization is promising to change the space and time of education massively. Digital technologies and infrastructures are considered ‘essential ingredients’ in contemporary forms of schooling. Data, algorithms and platforms are the new policy instrumentations of the governance of education. While a ‘digital deluge of data’ represents most aspects of education systems and practice, digital formations are elaborated to make collective and systemic efforts at improving educational performances and making structures more visible and sustained. This shift signals a change in the materiality of the practice of governing: paper-based instrumentations are giving way to digital technologies, which are augmenting, expanding and partly substituting for the traditional analogue machinery of policies and related circuits of knowledge. The governance of education is becoming increasingly digital (Williamson 2016b), and we are entering, according to some, into digital-era governance (Margetts and Dunleavy 2013), driven by the overall principle of ‘transparency’. The sense of ‘inevitability’ that is accompanying this transformation, however, can be an obstacle to grasping the intricacies of the changes underway. It emphasizes the dominant forms of digital governance of education and puts dilemmas, paradoxes and possible alternatives in the background. Moreover, it fails to recognize how digital technologies and infrastructures relate to the history and dynamics of the new forms of governance, characterized by the hybridization of the state and the market logic, the multijurisdictional nature and the pluralism of stakeholders (Bevir 2011; Rhodes 2007; Ball, Junemann and Santori 2017).

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Digital technologies are changing the world of education and its forms of governance. However, this is not happening according to the promises and the impact of technological determinism. Therefore, to understand the complexities of the current changes, this book proposes a critical understanding of the digital governance of education (Selwyn 2015). By escaping from a one-sided and unilinear technological view, the critical perspective presented here suggests looking closely at the sociomaterial assemblages that are constituting digital governance. Digital formations are increasingly assuming a capacity to act in educational governance, by shaping – and in turn, being shaped by – education systems, schools and individuals. Digital systems are challenging the classical morphology of schooling, and we are witnessing the becoming topological of schools, that is, their transformation in a field of increasing interconnectedness. The critical understanding brings to the forefront (1) how the imbrication of data, algorithms and software is fabricating almost a ‘second nature’ of the current education governance and (2) how this change in the new materiality of educational governance is an unfinished process of translation into digital forms. These transformations are not unfolding in a ‘social’ vacuum. The emergence and the consolidation of digital governance can be related to the standardization of education and the myth of transparency. Far from suppressing the new public management ‘recipes’ in education, the rise of digital-era governance rather seems to reinforce or to offer further policy instrumentations to strengthen them. Digital systems accompany the current wave of standardization of education focused on educational performance indicators (‘learning outcomes’) and the centralization of the curriculum. In particular, they make education systems more visible and transparent and transform schools into ‘houses of glass’, open to being inspected and described. They emphasize an ‘epistemology of seeing’, oriented to dissolving the question of opacity in education and to translating the modernistic dream of the wholly accountable and transparent educational organization into tangible reality. The book shows that the emerging scenario of the digital governance of education is far from being completely transparent. Some aspects of the field of education (schools, the public institution, etc.) are more visible than others (such as algorithms, designers and companies), displaying instead that transparency is a never-ending condition, where each digital mediation is inevitably a limited, partial and politically driven representation of education practice. The development of a critical understanding of the digital governance of education in this volume draws on a specific theoretical sensibility and a

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methodological effort. Theoretically, the book acknowledges the relevance of a sociology of policy instrumentations (Lascoumes and Le Gales 2007) and chooses to disentangle the digital governance of education by taking up the vocabularies of the new perspectives on the sociomateriality of education (Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuck 2011). It privileges the infra-language of actor–network theory (ANT) to follow the assemblages of people, technologies and policies of the digital governance of education in transnational and intra-national spaces. It suggests to enrich the sociomaterialist approach, by looking at related conceptualizations (from after ANT, but also from social studies of science and technologies, feminist studies and philosophical materialism) to escape from non-binary and too-humanistic readings of the current transformations. The volume invites the reader to escape from simplifications and technological determinism to look at the increasing imbrication of digital formations in the fabrication of the contemporary space-times of education. In this respect, the book is an exercise in developing what I have called elsewhere a mobile sociology of education (Landri and Neumann 2014; Landri 2018), to move sociology of education beyond its traditional territories (the human, the state and policy). Methodologically, the study of the digital governance of education presents specific challenges, and the book is also a ‘theatre’ for the experimentation of research protocols. The advent of the ‘digital’ translates, like in other areas of social sciences, into a ‘push’ to rethink the research methodology (Marres 2017). Studies on the digital governance of education are being developed by following a mix of old and new methodological protocols. The research protocols have included documentary analysis, interviews and ethnographies (Williamson 2016a; Selwyn 2016; Ozga 2016; O’Keeffe 2016). Some of these research projects present methodological innovations, since they collect data by engaging directly with the digital systems they are studying. In that respect, the digital governance of education is a field to be researched with the methodologies for exploring internet-mediated social worlds, such as digital ethnography, virtual ethnography and nethnography (Postill and Pink 2012; Hine 2011; Landri 2013). In particular, the presence of digital platforms on the internet is a resource for the researcher. As they are apparatuses for displaying or retrieving data, they are partly accessible through the digital presence of the researcher on the internet and the most popular forms of social media (Facebook, Twitter). The immersive and prolonged experience can lead to thick descriptions of the singularities of digital systems mobilized in contemporary education policy. At the same time, digital systems are not completely open to research. While they enhance the possibilities of ‘seeing’ inside the school and the educational performances, data

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infrastructure and digital systems are opaque. The elusive nature of algorithms, the embeddedness in nested configurations of heterarchic sociotechnical systems between public and private companies and the property rights that protect them are challenging conditions for critical research. They imply a bounded transparency and are an ongoing solicitation for the design of methodological alternatives to study them (Kitchin 2014). Tactics and indirect strategies must be found to circumvent the barriers preventing access to the research field and disentangling the sociomateriality of digital systems. By following the suggestion of mixing methods, our critical understanding draws on a methodology aimed at making cartographies of the becoming digital of the governance of education by composing different research protocols. In following the general strategy of the ethnography of ‘making the familiar strange’, three methods were combined: (1) historical reconstruction, (2) semiotic analysis and (3) multisite ethnography of the use of digital platforms. The resulting composition leads to the drawing of cartographies of the sociomaterialities of digital governance. The emerging maps summarize the findings of the data analysis carried out with the help of the above-mentioned methods. The combination of the three methods was not done linearly, as many overlaps occurred between them which generated productive interferences. More specifically, the methodology proved helpful in describing the landscape of the policy assemblages of the European space of education, and the digital schooling in Italy investigated in detail in the past two years. However, the book can even draw (1) on earlier research I carried out at the beginning of the millennium, when I started focusing attention on the Ministry website and the complex restructuration of educational administration (Landri and Serpieri 2004), and (2) on a long-lasting research programme on the modernization of the Italian school system that started in the middle of 1990 (Grimaldi, Landri and Serpieri 2016). The emerging findings are confronted with the scientific literature on other case studies (the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Australia, Russia, etc.) in countries of the ‘affluent North’. Additional investigations are needed in Western and non-Western societies to explore the dynamics, the effects and the logic of this emerging form of governance. In this respect, the critical exploration of digital governance has just started, and the present work intends to offer some useful theoretical and methodological tools for orientation in the emerging scenarios.

Acknowledgements The production of a book involves a collective assemblage of people, materialities and organizations. It is this assemblage that helps to bring this book to fruition. In particular, this book is part of an overall research programme of the Institute of Research of Population and Social Policies of the National Research Council of Italy, which is where I work. The research programme I coordinate is entitled ‘Social Policies and Innovation’ (SPIN) (INPOS in Italian), and it studies the dynamics of social change and innovation in social policies and welfare systems in Italy and Europe. The research programme has benefited from a grant by Regione Campania that partly funded the field studies and permitted the realization of the multisited ethnographies in schools. Here, I would like to thank Anna Milione and Sandra Vatrella for helping me in this work in collecting data, and discussing the earliest research programme and the first draft of my chapters. However, the investigations of policy assemblages of the digital governance of education would have not been possible without the collaboration of the schools (‘Equitas’, ‘Migrantes’, ‘Astra’, ‘Spartacus’ and ‘Arcum’), and the interviews I conducted in many offices of the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research, and of the related agencies (INVALSI and INDIRE). Many thanks to the head teachers, teachers, officers and colleagues we met in those rooms in these two years. Furthermore, I am grateful for all the fruitful comments I received during the presentations I gave of this work at the sessions of the European Conference on Educational Research in Budapest and in Dublin, as well as for the always-insightful conversations I had with the members of the Network 28 ‘Sociologies of Education’ of the European Educational Research Association. I am also grateful for the comments and criticisms I received on the work from Roberto Serpieri, Emiliano Grimaldi and Silvia Gherardi.

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Digital Governance, Standardization of Education and Transparency

Introduction Digital technologies are changing how education is delivered, practised and managed. Mobile computers, software, smartphones, and so on network together schools and universities, and a massive amount of data on education practice, organizations and institutions are collected and analysed to give updated accounts of education in contemporary societies. The mutual reinforcement of datafication and digitalization in education is paving the way for complex configurations of the digital governance of education (Williamson 2016b, 2017). The investments in digital platforms and data in education policy and practice are becoming, as a matter of fact, ‘uncontested worldwide recipes’ for the improvement of educational systems and of their performances (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] 2016). There is, however, limited research, with some important exceptions (Williamson 2016b), on the sociologies of the digital governance of education, and on its consequences. How is the digital governance of education being fabricated and developed? Is digital governance to some extent related to New Public Management (NPM), and to the neo-liberal agenda in education? Is there some continuity or fracture between NPM and a digital governanceera in education? What are the effects and risks of this new emerging form of governance? Is digital governance delivering on the promises of transparency? This book will explore the digital governance of education in practice to give some empirical answers to these questions and to disentangle its logic, effects and risks. In this introductory chapter, I will set the ‘coordinates’ of the journey in the new scenario of the digital governance of education, and offer, at the same time, a critical compass for the reader to navigate the manuscript (see  Table  1.1.).

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Table 1.1 A critical compass to explore the digital governance of education (DGE) Themes of investigation

Research questions

1. The sociomaterialities

1.1. What are the policy instrumentations of the DGE? 1.2. What are the sociomaterialities of the DGE?

2. The interplay between the current wave of standardization and digitalization

2.1. How and to what extent is DG related to the current wave of standardization of education? 2.2. Does the DGE strengthen new forms of managerialism in education? In that latter case, how do digital technologies support, sustain and accompany the dominant trends in the construction of the extant regimes of accountability? 2.3. How do schools participate in the DGE?

3. The school in the regime of the digital governance

3.1. Is the policy instrumentation of the DGE leading to the end of schooling? 3.2.. Is the logic of transparency implying the reduction of opacity in educational policy and practice?

The critical compass is a grid of research questions that construct the research object and orient us in the making of cartographies of the digital governance of education. A cartography is a ‘theoretically based and politically informed reading of the process of power relations’ (Braidotti 2011), and here it is intended to map both the shifting power relations in the governance of education and the possibilities and the risks of digital governance in education policy and practice. Educational knowledge, like any knowledge endeavour in general, has a performative character: it has effects; it enacts realities, since it helps to ‘bring into being what they also discovered’ (Law and Urry 2004). Here, it foregrounds the increasing power of digital technologies – and of the related sociologies, in the management and the monitoring of education systems, organizations and individuals – to open a space of reflexivity on their workings and effects. Notably, the exploration is oriented to understand how the standardization of education relates to the digital governance of education, and the effects as well as the risks of digital governance both on the morphology of the school and on the transparency of education policy and practice. The grid of research questions concerns, therefore: (1) the sociomateriality of the digital governance of education, (2) the interplay between the current wave of standardization and the digitalization of education and (3) the morphology of the school and the dilemmas of transparency. In the next sections, I will

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explore the themes of investigation and present the research questions. Finally, the chapter will provide an overview of the chapters of this book.

Digital governance The pervasive digitalization of contemporary society has led some scholars to argue that the systems of government have now entered the digital-era governance, that is, replacing the NPM wave in organizational change in the public sector (Dunleavy 2005; Dunleavy and Margetts 2015; Margetts and Dunleavy 2013). Dunleavy and colleagues (2005) describe the current transformations in the public sector and bring to the forefront the neglected relevance of information technologies in the making of contemporary forms of governance. They argue that the persistence of NPM as a discourse and explanation of the current wave of changes in the public sector depends (1) on the underestimation of the potential of technologies in shaping forms of governance and (2) on its dominant focus on organizational solutions and its emphasis on corporate leadership. These scholars do not deny the importance and revival of NPM in some concrete situations; however, they underline the increasing dilemmas and paradoxes that the main characteristics of NPM are confronted with. In particular, they illustrate how the three pillars of NPM, (1) disaggregation (the restructuring of government hierarchies in smaller organizations), (2) competition (between public and private, and within the quasi-market of public administration) and (3) incentivization (in the form of pecuniary rewards instead of the care of professionalism) are coping with difficulties and crises in being implemented. On the other hand, since the beginning of the new millennium, a new ‘swarm of ideas’ tends to define the emergence of postNPM models of change. To underline their relevance, the scholars propose considering this new emergent scenario as the digital governance-era. Two periods are then illustrated: the first wave, from 2000 to 2005, and a second wave from 2005 onwards, with the advent of social media. The idea of the digital-era governance combines the attention to technology (digitalization) with two other organizational arrangements: the regulatory reintegration within government and the decline of disintermediation, and the need-based holism, that is, the reorganization of public services by client groups and not by business. The proposed model has both a descriptive and a normative goal, and to some extent tends to present a new ‘macro-theory of public sector development’. It can be seen, then, as an attempt to consider the restructuring effects of

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digital technology for the forms of government. It underlines the benefits of digitalization in contrast with the organizational arrangements proposed by the NPM. Digital-era governance could have complex implications – both centralizing and decentralizing effects – that should be recognized and analysed. To some extent, digitalization fosters centralization since the opportunities for collecting and analysing data and information in real time weaken middle management while giving higher managers more control over organizational operations. On the other hand, the information available favours decentralizing effects. More data and information for workers and officers at lower and middle organizational levels permit them to handle issues and problems without asking for guidance and direction from higher levels of the organization. Here, digitalization would allow organizational decision making to shift down the hierarchical structure and would make it more distributed. There should be a discontinuity between NPM and digital-era governance. The argumentation of the ‘break’ appears to rely, however, more upon normative premises and less upon empirical grounds. Rather, there is a tendency to see in digital governance a promise for a better and more democratic government that would require the right conditions of fulfilment. Accordingly, the argumentation remains in-between the description of empirical dynamics and elaboration of a normative model. The investigation paves the way for the design of the essential principles for putting digital technology at the centre of the organization of government: a design that draws inspiration from the ‘culture of the internet’, anarchism and techno-enthusiasm of the open source movement. These cultural orientations would be the right milieu to nurture the potential of digital governance and remove the bureaucracy from the ‘burden’ of the legacy of the Weberian bureaucracy and the NPM wave (Dunleavy and Margetts 2015). By suspending the normative ‘afflatus’ for digital governance, and hesitating rather than quickly declaring the decline of NPM in the government of public administration, in this book we will explore how the increasing centrality of digital technologies is reshaping educational governance at transnational, intra-national and school level. Recently, a special issue of the European Educational Research Journal, edited by Williamson (2016b), has the merit of providing some definitions for exploring this emerging issue empirically. In his contribution, Williamson notes that educational governance is increasingly a digital education governance, that is,

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The monitoring and management of educational systems, institutions and individuals are taking place through digital systems that are normally considered part of the backdrop to conventional policy instruments and techniques of government; technical systems that are brought into being and made operational by certain kinds of actors and organizations, and that are imbued with aims to shape the actions of human actors distributed across education systems and institutions. (p. 5)

His definition brings to the forefront a change in the ‘backdrop’ of the instruments and techniques of the governance of education. The shift regards the use of ‘digital systems’, that is, the passage to digital technologies in the management of education systems, school organizations and individuals. In the current education reforms, digital technologies tend to substitute for ‘analogue technologies’, that is, the paper-based instruments and related circuits of expertise. Digital technologies do not suppress the analogue technologies and inscriptions (Lynch 2015); they rather augment them, and accelerate the ‘temporalities of data collection, calculation, and communication’ (Williamson 2016b). Williamson’s definition, furthermore, focuses attention on the sociotechnical chains that design and implement digital governance, and that in so doing constitute and model the conduct of educational systems, organizations and actors. It suggests looking at the emergence and consolidation of digital educational governance. In foregrounding the digital, it rather invites us to understand how digital technologies are embedded in a situated context of production, and how society is shaped by the technologies, without sharing any technological determinism in the change of education system. It draws attention to the sociomateriality of the digital governance of education (Fenwick and Edwards 2010; Fenwick and Landri 2012). What exactly are the sociomaterialities of the digital governance of education? What are its policy instrumentations? In the next chapters, I will describe the concrete conditions of the digital governance of education. Preliminarily, it is possible to reply by saying that the policy instrumentations are made operational by computer codes, algorithms, digital data and data infrastructures (Williamson 2016b). These instrumentations are not merely technical; they are socially produced and have an active role in shaping (and partly reconstituting) the ecology of education policy and practice. Souto-Otero and Montagut (2016) draw attention to the technologies of the production and consumption of data, and in particular, to the artefacts aimed at (1) collecting, packaging and analysing data; (2) displaying data and (3) sorting and retrieving data.

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Collecting, packaging and analysing data are activities required to feed the current emergence and consolidation of the regimes of accountability, where the development of public and private partnership is often visible. Digital data collection, however, is also done by educational organizations and private companies without a commitment to provide a report back to the relevant stakeholders. Learning analytics, here, are elaborated by providing real-time feedback and supporting educational interventions, or by making predictions about ‘students’ behaviours and performances. Companies like Pearson and Knewton are very active in this respect, and promise to furnish data-based information for improving educational policymaking by leaders and those responsible for education systems. Social media platforms (Edmodo, Facebook) are similarly interested in collecting, storing and analysing data so that they can define themselves as spaces for supporting and enabling teaching and learning. Data are not only collected and analysed; there is even an increasing interest in digital technologies for displaying data. The visualization of data is not peripheral; digital technologies provide surprising possibilities by giving opportunities for personalization. There are now several global and national educational databases online equipped with interfaces that can drive users to select educational indicators and modalities of displays. Intergovernmental organizations, like the OECD, for example, give access to data from largescale assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and have designed Education GPS that makes available a wide repository of data on education systems. Similarly, the European Union (EU) displays the educational data of member countries, as well as the accomplishment of its target reforms. National education systems, in turn, are on the internet with their repositories and make their statistics and performances visible. Other possibilities, according to Souto-Otero and Beneito-Montagut (2016), are YouTube and Google channels where repositories of videos about how to use data in education can be used to sustain the implementation of particular education policy (Chapter 5 will describe the case of self-evaluation reporting in Italy). Finally, digital technologies are necessary for sorting and retrieving data: these instrumentations are to some extent required by the excess of data collected and analysed. The datafication of education challenges the capacity of understanding and making use of data from schools, educational leaders and policymakers. This complexity has paved the way for the development of search engines, and of suitable algorithms designed and implemented by governments and private companies. Search engines appear particularly relevant in the case

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of school choices, that is, in the transition between educational levels. Websites like MySchool in Australia (Gorur 2013), School Finder in the UK (Williamson 2016a) and Scuola in Chiaro (from now on, SiC) in Italy offer support to parents in their school choices by displaying educational offers and guiding decision making according to geographical locations and some characteristics of school populations (see in more detail in Chapter 4). Other websites are articulated around more sophisticated algorithms matching data sets and ranking schools by several criteria. Eduscopio in Italy is a project of a bank foundation aimed at helping users to choose the best school for university and the labour market, and it does so by ranking the schools according to the educational outcomes of their past students (https://eduscopio.it). Souto-Otero and Beneito-Montagut draw attention to Rightmove, an application furnished by a real estate company, which interlinks educational data with other information and helps with school selection for families moving home. In all these cases, the availability of data on education offers the opportunity for developing digital technologies that classify and retrieve data for particular purposes. These technologies of production and consumption of data build a ‘bridge’ between the datafication and the digitalization of education. However, to understand what is sustaining the massive datafication of education, in the next paragraph I will suggest that there is a need to look empirically at how the standardization of education and the myth of transparency intersect with digitalization. Are the new forms of accountability thinkable without the ‘affordances’ of digital technologies, that is, by the space of possibilities they offer concerning the analysis, manipulation and rendering of information and data? Does the digital governance of education strengthen new forms of managerialism in education? In that latter case, how do digital technologies support, sustain and accompany the dominant trends in the construction of the existing regimes of accountability?

Standardization of education Standards-based reforms are dominant trends worldwide, and play a significant role in the global education reform movement (the so-called GERM; see Sahlberg 2011). There are significant efforts to clarify educational goals, means and practices; setting educational benchmarks; and facilitating the conditions of imitation of the best school practices by pointing out standards of achievement and meeting the demands of increasing accountability in the education system.

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The standardization of education aims to define optimal conditions for the essential ‘ingredients’ of the ecology of education practice and to promote an objectification of the education practice to accelerate and give direction to organizational change. Standards and standardization concern any aspect of education practice. It is possible to design standards regarding (1) educational inputs (buildings, facilities etc.), (2) educational processes (with the goal of understanding the patterns of best combination of organizational factors to achieve a given educational organization objective) and (3) educational outcomes, that is, the expected learning outcomes for providing directions for the appraisal of the organizational agency. Overall, a standard tends to establish positive organizational states in a given field of practice and is an object of investigation in research for understanding the best values to be achieved in the current exercise of practice. Standards are everywhere and contribute to shaping the common infrastructure of our everyday life: from transport to telecommunication systems, to products and services and much more. However, there is weak agreement about a common definition of ‘standard’, reflecting the broad variety of the use of the word in many domains of activity (Brunsson, Rasche and Seidl 2012; Busch 2011). In a review of the organizational studies on standards, it is proposed to consider a ‘standard as a rule for common and voluntary use, decided by one or several people or organizations’ (Brunsson, Rasche and Seidl 2012, p. 616). The merit of the definition consists of drawing attention to three key elements of standards. A standard is a specific type of rule that states the best conditions and characteristics of activities or results. Also, compliance or alignment to standards is voluntary, and does not follow the forces of other forms of authoritative laws and regulations. Finally, a standard is offered for common use by some to many, that is, it is not limited to some, but it is usually designed by several organizations and spread to many individuals or organizations in a field of practice. Standards can be considered, then, as agreed rules to establish uniformities across time and space, achieving coordination and control of activities at a distance (Bowker and Star 1999). Here, they are recipes for reality, that is, a means by which to order and perform realities (Busch 2011). Importantly, the normativity of standards has permitted us to configure them as an alternative mode of regulation when there is difficulty in the application of authoritative rules. Where organizations or states are weak, standards can be a substitute for ordering social activities. Similarly, standards can be an alternative to expert authorities, that is, they are meant to rely on rules and systems instead of credentialed professionals (Brunsson and Jacobson 2000). In that respect,

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standards are the hallmark of soft law, that is, of all the forms of order where there is a multiplicity of organizations and institutions but no hierarchical ordering or existing authorities of regulation. The construction of the European space of education is an example of the importance of standardization in constituting and regulating a field where education is still under the national legislation. As I will illustrate in Chapter 3, standardization of education is an instance of the contemporary condition of politics beyond territory (Peñ a 2015). While standardization is nowadays constitutive of the globalization of education, the attention to standards is not new, and it has been highlighted several times (Waldow 2015; Landri 2017).1 A watershed event in the history of the standardization of education, however, was the publication in December 2001 of the first results of PISA by the OECD. Since the end of the 1990s, the pressure to change education systems comes primarily from national studies and research. While some countries were aware of having a good education system, the confrontation depended more on good reputation, and not on a systematic procedure of evaluation (Sahlberg 2011). PISA revealed the growing influence of the OECD, and the generally increased influence of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), notably the World Bank, OECD and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organizations), in affecting and constituting the global governance of education. These three IGOs are fostering the global ‘soft’ convergence of national educational policies and support the emergence of the global education reform movement. It is not a neutral convergence: these three organizations tend to perpetuate a neo-liberal economic agenda by putting more emphasis on the interplay between education and economy. The global ‘soft’ convergence develops through different means: (1) the soft law, (2) the direct implementation of policy through grants and loans, (3) policy knowledge and (4) expertise in evaluation (Rutkowski 2007). In particular, IGOs have contributed to shaping data infrastructure in education: since the 1970s, UNESCO has created the International Standard of Classification of Education System, and from the 1990s onwards, with OECD and Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union), has constituted a ‘structured oligopoly’ in the field of educational indicators. In so doing, they have acquired a significant influence on policy knowledge in the field by enacting spaces of commensurability of educational policies and practices. Moreover, they have activated a network of expertise on measuring and evaluating educational performances now considered to be an essential reference for national educational policymakers all over the world. Here, it’s hard to overvalue the success of PISA. While PISA is realized every

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three years and concerns, as it is well known, the learning outcomes in literacy, mathematics and science among fifteen-year-olds in participating countries, its effects are impressive (Carvalho and Costa 2017; Sellar and Lingard 2014). The publication of its results has been affecting educational policymaking, and in some countries has produced a ‘shock’, triggering the development of educational reforms. The presence of a common metric to compare the many worlds of education has reshaped the comparison between education systems profoundly, and has established large-scale assessment as a standard model for the evaluation and comparison of education systems (von Davier et al. 2013). Other metrics, like the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) for the evaluation of adult populations and the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes for university students, are consolidated in other OECD programmes. Overall, these programmes are oriented to the measurability of learning outcomes and to the transparency of educational organizations and systems. This makes them more visible and comparable in spaces of commensuration. Transparency in the form of data, that is, primarily as output standards measured by international large-scale assessments, becomes an ‘intended agent of change’ (Ritzen 2013). In recent decades, this logic of change has given rise, accordingly, to sophisticated digital formations where education systems and agencies are translated into regimes of mutual surveillance (Carvalho and Costa 2015). The fabrication of new spaces of commensuration has been made possible, accelerated and augmented by the process of digitalization of data and by the use of digital technologies. It is relevant to understand how this is affecting education policymaking: how digital technologies are sustaining a specific way of seeing education practice (Gorur 2016), how digital formations are activating new forms of school database governance and whether or not schools participate in and align with this type of governance.

The school in the regime of digital governance A final set of questions regards the effects and risks of digital governance (see Table 1.1.). This book will explore, in particular, how digital governance influences the morphology of the school and the dilemmas of transparency. Is the policy instrumentation of the digital educational governance heading to the end of the schooling? Is the contemporary myth of transparency achievable in practice? How do digital technologies represent educational policy and practice?

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Digital technologies are becoming the ‘hidden managers’ of educational systems and organizations and are playing a constitutive role in the everyday practice of teaching and learning (Lynch 2015; Selwyn 2015). In particular, digital technologies are considered essential ‘ingredients’ in the new anthropotechnics (Sloterdijk 2009). Accordingly, the increasing imbrication of digital technologies is paving the way to a complex restructuring of the association of humans and nonhumans in the ecology of education practice. Hybrid imbroglios in teaching (suffice to consider the video recorder teacher; Perrotta, Czerniewicz and Beetham 2016) and new kinds of students, like ‘digital natives’ or ‘digital immigrants’, are emerging to divide, differentiate and devalue particular qualities and characteristics of teachers and learners (Popkewitz 2004). These multiple changes would lead to the end of school as we know it, that is, the decline of the classical morphology of schooling inherited as a particular invention of the Greek polis. We will then witnessing the conclusion or the attempts to tame the character of the school as a form of gathering, that is, a particular innovation and sociomaterial space arrangement characterized by the suspension, profanation and attention to the world (Masschelein and Simons 2015). Historically, the school enacts a suspension of the natural order, a ‘free time’ that is a ‘non-productive time’, also for those that by birth or social position did not have the right to claim it. It is then a materialization of the possibility of being educated beyond natural and social destiny. This suspension is aimed at slowing down and opening a space where thinking and exercising are possible without the immediacy of the moment or a social and economic predefined end. The past and background of students are not eliminated but are offered a space-time of suspension. In this space-time, things and practices can be freed from their sacred places and manipulated for everyday use; they can be – to use Masschelein and Simons’ terminology borrowed by Agamben – profanated. The invention of the scholastic form was intended, furthermore, to solicit an attention to the world, that is, an interest beyond the topic of the discipline taught (for example, an interest in biology, and not only in the subject of the curriculum of biology). If we share this view on the organizational form of schooling, it is possible to read some educational reform as an endeavour to domesticate or to limit the translation in practice of the characteristics of the scholastic form. In particular, the culture of the double-click learning, the immediacy of the feedback and the interaction, the possibility of learning everywhere and anywhere seem to sustain the construction of space-time of education across the borders of states, classrooms, societies, schools, etc., and the idea that the ‘learning environment’ would be replacing the classical

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configuration of the ‘school’ articulated around the principles of sorting associated with the ‘classroom’. While the argumentation that predicts the end of the school has several advocates among contemporary de-schoolers or un-schoolers, in this book we will see how the digital governance of education does not necessarily mean the end of school, albeit it solicits a rethinking of schooling and a reshaping of school topologies. This problematization can occur in many ways, and it has triggered national and international policies, at EU level and elsewhere, mobilizing diverse circuits of expertise, and with different outcomes in teaching and learning. Here, it is helpful to consider that the digitalization, like any technological mediation, is not a neutral representation. The shift towards digital spaces implies a movement towards new regimes of visibility that translate many aspects of education practice often considered ‘tacit’, or left as ‘implicit’, in ‘codified’ and ‘explicit’. Consequently, there is a tendency to (1) focus on what is measurable, that is, on the learning outcomes; and (b) make education practice more traceable and mobile.2 While digitalization could also counter the standardization of education by fostering the personalization of education, or better its standardized differentiation, as advocated in some experiences of digital schooling (Roberts-Mahoney, Means and Garrison 2016), it also raises new dilemmas in education policy and practice. Is the logic of (im)mediated transparency feasible and desirable? Does transparency imply the reduction of opacity in the education field? I will illustrate empirically how these issues with the digital governance of education relate to wider debates that problematize the myth of transparency (Hansen, Christensen and Flyverbom 2015; Sellar 2015a). A first theme concerns the paradox of transparency. The pursuit of transparency, while carried out with the ‘best’ intentions of institutions, organizations and government, implies practices of selection, of filtering, of classification and of sorting that are rarely open to the investigation, and that leave some aspects of the social practices ‘implicit’ or ‘tacit’. It introduces additional layers of opacity and obscurity that are rarely discussed. Further, the introduction of transparency does not always produce the intended effect of clarity. Information and data are interpreted in diverse ways, and there are differential capacities of organizations, institutions and individuals in understanding and making sense of them. Unintended effects may considerably undermine the benefit of transparency. Openness may reduce trust in organizations and introduce suspicions and uncertainty. It is important to acknowledge that organizations fabricate their image for an external purpose,

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and therefore, they sometimes celebrate their alignment with the logic of transparency while leaving their internal operations unchanged. An increase in transparency, here, may not lead to a gain regarding accountability; it may more resemble an unreasonable search for an unpleasant regime of surveillance and control. Furthermore, an insistence on transparency could illuminate some aspects of organizational, institutional and individual activity, and distract attention from more pressing problems in other areas. The implementation of the logic of transparency, accordingly, does not imply the end of secrecy and opacity. There is not a straightforward opposition of transparency versus opacity; in practice, we are witnessing a complex interweaving of openness and closure, transparency and opacity. In this respect, there is a need to document what is happening in education. A second theme, then, is that transparency is more an ideal than an end state. By definition, transparency means to ‘show light through’ or to ‘come into sight’. While the first meaning is related to things or objects, the second meaning allows reference to those means directed towards desirable social ends, such as preventing corruption or making someone accountable. To produce ‘transparency’, it is possible to mobilize a set of proxies, that is, many possible ‘stand-ins’ such as devices, technologies and tools. An ‘epistemology of seeing’ is foundational for the development of sciences and contemporary culture. Educational outcomes can be measured and made transparent through testing, for example. Other proxies could replace these measurements. Similarly, teaching and learning could be made visible through videos. By the way, testing, videos and the like are proxies, and full transparency is unattainable, since there is hardly an unmediated access to reality, regardless of the sophistication of the forms of mediation. We live, then, in a world of mediated transparency. Accordingly, co-presence and physical proximity can be suspended by an abundance of videos, diagrams, templates, reports, devices, sensors, etc., that can see subjects, objects and activities at a distance for research, economic and security purposes (Hansen, Christensen and Flyverbom 2015). This means that there is both an increase in mutual surveillance and a delegation to algorithms and automated technologies that collect, store and process large quantities of data. At the same time, the production of knowledge from this data is largely opaque, and in some cases kept secret. To understand their growing presence in the reconfiguration of society, some interesting analyses of the social power of algorithms are developing. While they are technical means, they are nonetheless politically shaped, sometimes beyond the apparent transparency of their workings (Beer 2017).

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Outline of the book This book is articulated to offer theoretical conceptualizations and empirical answers to the research questions I have so far elaborated (see the Table 1.1. for a summary of the themes of investigation and the relative queries). While each chapter has its specific conceptual framework, Chapter 2 presents the basic theoretical resources: the monograph will draw on actor– network theory (ANT), and in particular, on its updated sociomaterial vocabulary (Fenwick 2010; Fenwick and Edwards 2010; Tara Fenwick and Landri 2012; Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuck 2011). A literature review will illustrate the most significant studies in the sociomateriality of education policy and practice, by paying attention to ANT studies on the recent research of standardization and digital governance of education (Williamson 2016). Finally, the chapter will discuss methodological possibilities (Marcus 1995; Venturini 2012, 2009). A choice is made for a composite approach that includes historical analysis of education policy, multisited ethnographies and semiotic analysis of the digital formations aimed at describing the emergent cartographies of digital governance. Empirically, the monograph disentangles the sociologies of the digital governance of education in three areas: (1) the construction of the European Space of Education, (2) the fabrication of new regimes of accountability and the realization of digital transparent spaces of education in Italy and (3) the policy of digital schooling in the EU and in Italy. The empirical base of the volume is enriched by comparing these cases with the investigations carried out by a group of scholars that are working on other case studies in the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, the EU and Australia (Anagnostopoulos, Rutledge and Jacobsen 2013; Gorur 2013; Andreasson and Dovemark 2013; Hartong 2016; Selwyn 2016; Piattoeva 2016). While drawing on diverse theoretical orientations, from the political sociology of education and ANT to digital sociology, these scholars share an interest in opening the ‘black box’ of digital data and technologies and developing critical studies of education and data (Selwyn 2015). Chapters 3 and 4 will focus on how and to what extent the digital governance of education is related to the current wave of standardization of education in the EU and Italy. In particular, Chapter 3 will illustrate how digital technologies are mobilized to sustain the constitution and the regulation of the European space of education. The chapter describes the history of the Europeanization of education as a movement for fabricating a space of commensuration (Lawn and Grek 2012). While education was initially conceived

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as a nationally regulated field by EU member states, and accordingly, education systems were thought to be incommensurables in the foundational Treaty of Rome in 1957, they were included over time in the space of commensurability through the definition of agreed-upon performance standards. The chapter will illustrate the main passages of this fabrication and will pay attention to the contemporary strategy of monitoring the progress of EU member states towards the accomplishment of new benchmarks in the future landscape of Horizon 2020. In that respect, it will analyse the toolbox mobilized here to accompany the realization of these standards: guidelines, country reports and online dashboards. I will investigate the emergence and consolidation of this digital space, and at the same time, the semiotics of the visual enactment of the European space of education. From Chapter 4 to Chapter 6, I will draw more on empirical materials from the Italian case. Here, Italy is the entry point to trace a history of transnational assemblages of knowledge, people and technologies. Chapter 4 focuses on the trail of school data and on the complex circuits of people, technologies and software that support the fabrication of data for school self-evaluation. New emerging forms of governance of education are increasingly relying on complex databases that are intended to represent the multiplicities of education practice. In particular, this shift reinforces a tendency aimed at transforming schools into ‘houses of glass’ amenable to being visible for external as well as internal inspection. Measuring school performances, describing school ‘inputs’, mapping school processes and infrastructures and locating schools in socio-economic contexts, as well as interlocking data sets, are not ‘simple’ or ‘naive’ processes of representation. To illustrate these dynamics, the case of Scuole in Chiaro (‘Schools in clear light’ – a public open source database of the Ministry of Instruction) and, more generally, the fabrication of a school data infrastructure for self-evaluation in Italy will be presented and discussed. The case study highlights how this fabrication requires a never-ending heterogeneous engineering of humans and nonhumans in the field of instruction that opens a complex political game of displaying and hiding many aspects of the practice of schooling. The chapter discusses the risk of selecting and displaying within school databases what is measurable while forgetting what is hard to visualize in educational practice. Chapter 5 focuses on the enactment of the school data infrastructures, that is, the use of digital data. The diffusion of national standardized testing, largescale survey assessments and the promotion of policies of self-evaluation are transforming schools into data-gathering units for a notable range of educational,

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institutional and socio-economic indicators. This flood of data exceeds the processing capacity of the steering offices of education systems, and opens the door to the development of algorithmic systems that are designed to make sense of the data and to support educational policymaking. At the same time, schools participate in different ways in the digital governance of education. They can resist or be compliant with the policy instrumentation of the digital governance of education. To analyse whether school data infrastructures are configured to be openings for reflection and for rethinking organization, or instruments to reinforce new managerial forms in education, the chapter will draw on some empirical materials taken from multisited ethnographies carried out in primary schools to analyse the shift from school self-evaluation to the design of school plans of improvement in Italy. Chapter 6 analyses the case of policy for digital schooling in the EU and Italy. It describes, in particular, how the standardization of digital schooling is developing in the EU and in Italy. The chapter dwells further on the sociomateriality of a digital school to help us to understand the changing transformations of the scholastic form. Education is increasingly digitalized: lecturing, discussions, exercises, readings, assessments and so on are now mediated to a large extent through digital technologies. The new anthropotechnics are then inevitably enmeshed with the digitalization of contemporary societies so that the topologies of education are being reshaped in a significant way. The chapter illustrates how the digitalization of schooling is occurring in Italy, a latecomer EU country according to the ranking of EU countries as regards digital policies. Chapter 6 illustrates the policy for the implementation of the digital school (Piano Nazionale Scuola Digitale), and describes the networks of expertise that are involved at the national and EU level in the reshaping of school topologies. While it is not the end of the morphology of the school, the chapter illustrates the becoming topological of schooling, that is, an emergent organizational form characterized by increasing interconnections in the territories enacted by the digital technologies, and by the development of post-social relationships (Knorr Cetina 2007). By drawing on the main arguments of this book and, in particular, on the empirical cases, the final chapter summarizes the main findings and gives answers to the research questions presented in this chapter. The chapter will discuss the limitations of this ‘reality test’ and will reflect on what it means to articulate critical research on digital governance. In this respect, it will refer to the current reconceptualization of critique (Latour 2005; Boltanski 2011), and position ANT and the sociomaterial approach more generally as resources

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to develop a critical position in education (Law 2009; Postma 2012; Mulcahy 2011). The chapter argues that the role of critique is to contribute to thinking and to study standardization and digital governance of education differently and consider them open to many possible alternative ontological politics (Braidotti 2005). The chapter concludes by discussing directions for research and the methodological challenges of researching the digital governance of education, an object of investigation that solicits the design of a specific and updated research toolbox.

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Tracing the Sociomateriality of the Digital Governance of Education

Introduction Current investigations on the digital governance of education are renewing and consolidating theoretical attention to materialities in education. The development of sociomaterial approaches is enriching our understanding of the complexities of the contemporary space-times of education (Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuck 2011), albeit there is a tradition of inquiry regarding spaces, buildings, objects, techniques and so in the historical research of schooling (Lawn and Grosvenor 2005). Beyond the diverse academic stories and scientific legacies, in the area of the new sociomaterialism in education, there is a shared commitment to explore and discuss the implications of the constitutive entanglement of humans and nonhumans in education policy and practice. In looking at the intertwinements of humans and nonhumans, objects, technologies and things are no longer peripheral to the analysis of education, or mere instruments empty of agential capacities. They have a ‘power’, and are ‘active players’ with humans in the concatenation of the education agency. In following this epistemological and political view, this book, in particular, intends to contribute to actor–network theory (ANT from now on) studies of education (Fenwick and Edwards 2010; Fenwick and Landri 2012), and to the current ANT literature on digital educational governance (Williamson 2016b). The somewhat ‘esoteric’ vocabulary of ANT will give direction to our exploration, and orient the methodological choices before we start, in the next chapters, our empirical journey in the new territories of the digital governance of education. This chapter will, first, retrace the history of ANT and the central concepts of its open-ended vocabulary. Second, it will focus on how ANT studies

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the standardization of education (Fenwick and Edwards 2010) and digital educational governance (Piattoeva 2016; Decuypere and Simons 2016; O’Keeffe 2016). Finally, it will describe how our empirical studies join this literature, by making our methodological choices explicit in analysing the sociologies of the digital governance of education in the EU and Italy and its dynamics and effects.

The sensibility of actor–network theory It is not an easy task to give a presentation of ANT. In particular, the use of the term ‘theory’ seems, in some way, excessive, since often ‘theory’ refers to systematic and complete theorization, while ANT does not. The story of actor-network theory is not stable, and it is possible even to find various periodizations such as early actor–network theory, actor–network theory, after actor–network theory and so on. However, it is useful to share Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuck’s (2011) idea to consider ANT as a virtual ‘cloud’, continually moving, shrinking and stretching, dissolving in any attempt to grasp it firmly. ANT is not applied like a theoretical technology, but it is more like a sensibility, a way to sense and draw nearer to a phenomenon (p. 171).

This sensibility acknowledges, in particular, the performative effects of its descriptions. The descriptions are intended literally to reveal the ‘scripts’ of the materialities of the social and the natural world to take into account the agency of the multiple entities making up the ‘facts’, the ‘technologies’, the ‘sciences’, the ‘societies’ and so on. At the same time, this sensibility underlines the precariousness of the actual construction and the possibilities of alternative recompositions of contemporary worlds. ANT relies, here, on relational thinking to draw attention to how entities assemble. Historically, this sensibility arose in the field of science and technology (STS) studies at the beginning of 1980 at the Centre of Sociology of Innovations at Ecole Nationale Superieur des Mines de Paris. It is initially associated with prominent progenitors, like Law, Callon and Latour, who have contributed to shaping its direction, coined the label ANT and even discussed it in a milestone collection of studies expanding the perspective (Law and Hassard 1999). It is impossible to provide a full account of this trajectory, and it is not within the scope of this chapter. Here, I will rather summarize some benefits of this theoretical sensibility. The origins of the approach were to provide a

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social theory for STS studies. Since the inception of ANT, however, this project revealed even more clearly that, in turn, the social theory needed some rethinking (Latour 2005). Indeed, ANT (Law 2009) is also an arena where the theorization of the ‘social’ has been called into question to investigate the making of contemporary societies (Latour 2005). ANT offers, in this respect, an infra-language to move from one frame of reference to another and to allow ‘for the vocabulary of the actors to be heard loud and clear’ (p. 30, Latour 2005). The basic ideas of this infra-language include (1) symmetry, (2) agency of nonhumans, (3) translation and (4) network and network effects (Fenwick and Edwards 2010; Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuck 2011; Latour 2005; Gorur 2015). It is relevant to also introduce the conceptualization of ontology politics that arose in after-ANT debates on its usefulness (Law and Hassard 1999; Law and Urry 2004) in paying attention to the multiplicities of the ontologies at stake in the performance of education practice. The first point regards symmetry, and is related to the relational thinking introduced earlier. In ANT, humans and nonhumans are treated equally. This means that humans are not considered above nonhumans, and neither is a primacy of nonhumans over humans assumed. There is rather a decentring from the intentionality of the human subject: the latter is no longer the only ‘engine’ of the agency, the beginning and the end of the investigation on the dynamics of action. The principle of symmetry problematizes the separation between nature and the culture that has been foundational in social science and in the constitution of modernity. Here, there is an invitation to reverse the classical sociological claim to consider the ‘social facts as things’, and explore the ‘things as societies’ (Latour 2010). The aim of this inversion is to research the mutual constitution of nature and culture in a symmetrical way, that is, without assuming a priority of one over the other. It rather suggests bringing to the forefront the relations and the assemblages of humans and nonhumans in investigation and reflection. The principle of symmetry has the effect of multiplication of agencies. The capacity to act is not only a human affair; it is redistributed among many entities (objects, artefacts, technologies, texts and so on) that are co-implicated with humans in the capacity to act. Accordingly, the goal of the research is to pay attention to how the entities come together and manage to hold together in networks that produce effects: agency, power, force, knowledge, identities, illness and so on.

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It is important to remember that ANT is not interested in what a text or an object means. Rather, it focuses on what it does in connection with other entities (humans and nonhumans), forming assemblages that sometimes are considered ‘actors’, with clear identities. To give an example: a mobile phone is an assemblage, or a network of things, composed of the screen, the touch button, the microphone, the plugs, the software, the cover, the Bluetooth, the wifi, the cell, etc., that are connected to one another in a particular way. At the same time, a mobile phone is an actor in itself, able to produce telephone calls, pictures, messaging, videos and so on. In other words, it is an actor–network. In turn, the things that compose the mobile phone are emerging in the web of relations and can be seen in connection with other actor–networks. Anything can be analysed regarding its reticular character and its singularity, that is, in its being an actor that can connect with other entities. The symmetry then directs us to look at the heterogeneity of the entities (humans, objects, technologies, etc.) in the everyday life of our educational organizations, and consider how they are assembled to form the actor–networks of our education systems. A second basic idea related to symmetry is the agency of nonhumans. Objects, technologies and so on are not inert instruments; they shape the conditions of possibility of an action, and have a ‘power’ in shaping human conduct. One of the reasons for the popularity of ANT relies precisely on the idea of considering objects as participants in a course of action, a suggestion that for some appeared a novel determinism, while for others, it was seen as a naive anthropocentrism shifted to the objects. The issue is rather related to the making of associations, and, in particular, of their durability in space and time. More generally, it is a question of the stability of society. When entities come together in a larger network of things, and relations of people and things, what holds these assemblages together? The typical replies which refer to generic social skills, to the symbolic sphere, to the discourses, to the human milieu are considered incomplete. ANT suggests that we look precisely at the entanglement of humans and nonhumans to understand how stability is achieved and how assemblages are consolidated over time. This entanglement is the sociomateriality (the ‘glue’) that holds together all the elements of practice (Gherardi 2016a). It is, in particular, an investigation of the mechanisms of domination and power relations that reveals the need to include the agency of nonhumans in the making of social fabric. An exclusion of their agency would make it difficult for any explanation of the exercise of power and the reproduction of the asymmetries in social relationships. Nonhumans are ‘active players’ in co-constituting social activity. The stability of human-to-human relations, in other words, is accounted

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for in the sociomateriality of their association. I will give many illustrations in this book of the ‘power’ of digital formations and of the complex ‘imbroglios’ of humans and nonhumans in education policy and practice in transnational, intra-national and school spaces (Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6). While nonhumans have the power of being the ‘glue’ of the social, it is not easy to describe their modes of action. Often, they tend to recede into the background by remaining invisible in the course of action. It is well known, for example, how infrastructures, like harbours, transport, information systems, etc., are difficult to describe, regardless of their relevance in shaping the social agency (Star 1999). For this reason, ANT has been used – generally by STS scholars (Latour 2005; Hackett, Amsterdamska and Lynch 2007) – to devise several strategies of investigation to bring the agency of nonhumans to the forefront. The study of innovations, for example, is a way to understand their agency. In the first stage of design, the things, the objects, the artefacts and so on are open to investigation. It is easier to understand the ‘scripts’ that define their capacity to act during the construction phase. The design stage is exactly the time when it is possible to describe the alternatives on the table, and, accordingly, to understand the different ways of restructuring the sociomateriality of practice. Another chance is to analyse the breakdowns, the incidents, the controversies, and so on when something interrupts the flow of activity, and it is possible to understand the role played by nonhumans in the ordering of practice. The incident calls the ‘taken for grantedness’ of nonhumans into question, and it problematizes the stability of the sociomateriality of the association by allowing us to understand, for example, what went wrong (Was it triggered by humans, or not? Was it a system fault?). Finally, the availability of archives, documents, memories of techniques, objects and so on allows us to retrace the histories of the artefacts, and therefore to understand the development and transformation of nonhumans over time. Here, the current status of an artefact is revealed to be the effect of sometimes complex socio-technological projects that have had diverse possibilities of realization and overlap. Later in the chapter, I will describe the methodological choices for disentangling the digital governance of education. I will return, however, to this point in the conclusion of the book for its relevance to the unfolding of critical studies of digital technologies in educational governance. A third basic idea of ANT infra-language is the notion of ‘translation’, which will be widely assumed to account for the making of concatenations of the items in digital governance (see in particular Chapter 3, but also Chapters 4 and 5). In its early stages, ANT was defined as the sociology of translation since it invites

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us to look at what happens when entities come together and try to connect with one another (Callon and Latour 1981). In linguistics, to translate means to establish equivalence between words across languages; here, it is rather intended to describe the dynamics of negotiation that occur when the entities come to be associated. Some of them can translate other entities, and these latter entities can negotiate the terms of their translation in the emerging frame of reference. In paying attention to the translation, the focus is on how entities influence other entities, how they establish assemblages, expand and possibly become more powerful by acting on others. In so doing, the notion of ‘translation’ underlines, in particular, that the destiny of a statement, a text, technology and so on , is not defined by its essence, but that it is in the hands of others. It depends, in other words, on how and whether it is taken, or not taken, by others. This view contrasts with the common idea of the ‘diffusion’ of the ideas, where the spread of anything is related to the intrinsic characteristics of the elements, or to the intentionality of the proponents. In the case of education policy, for example, it suggests a shift from policy diffusion to how the policy is translated or not in practice. The sociomaterialities of education policy become the privileged unit of analysis to understand the enactment of a policy (Landri 2015). In one of the foundational articles on ANT, Callon (1986) outlines the essential elements of the process of translation. This starts with problematization when an entity, trying to establish itself as an obligatory point of passage, raises concerns about a given state of affairs. Problematization has the effect of ‘setting the scene’ and framing the situation in a particular way to configure the entity as an ‘obligatory point of passage’. For instance, in introducing a particular form of teaching, the proponents problematize the everyday teaching as particularly demanding in the target teaching, and in so doing, the new form of teaching introduces itself as an obligatory point of passage. The sustainability of this framing requires the collaboration of other entities so that several negotiations are performed to adapt their participation. This develops into the stage of interessements, where some entities are included and others are excluded. Once this step is realized, the entities accept the identities and the agencies they are assigned to play in the emerging network. This ongoing alignment is defined as enrolment in the network relations. Eventually, the network becomes so stabilized that it can be placed into other domains and fields of activity. It can be mobilized. This four-step model (problematization–interessement– enrolment–mobilization) can explain the emergence of a network as well as its growth, in so far as each node of the network may, in turn, trigger further processes of translation. The model has been taken to explain the complexity of

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the negotiations that happen when a given assemblage is emerging (Grimaldi and Barzanò 2014). It is not, however, a prescriptive or managerial model. The translation may, in practice, unfold in many nondeterministic and linear ways. Moreover, the translations are always at risk. Other counter-networks emerge; breakdowns and incidents require constant attention and repair of the networks. The closure in a regime of translation is never complete: the entities ‘betray’ the roles they are assigned by sometimes moving in unexpected ways. The idea of translation allows us to clarify the notion of a ‘network’, the fourth basic idea of ANT. A network, here, is an assemblage of elements that are held together by processes of translation that are oriented to realize specific operations. The term is nowadays much abused and has triggered some confusion and overlap with other perspectives. On the one hand, the spread of the importance of technical networks in contemporary societies explains the interest of many researchers in investigating the working of networks such as electricity, the internet, transport and so on. On the other hand, the sociology of organization considers a ‘network’ as a mode of organization that differs from market, bureaucracy and enterprise. For some scholars, ‘network’ refers to the informal way of sociality. Other sociologists take the conceptualization to define the dominant logic of contemporary capitalism (Boltanski and Chiappello 2005). In ANT, a network is rather (1) a tool oriented to describe sociomaterial entanglements, and not necessarily the content of what is expressed; and (2) a ‘point-to-point connection’ established by a flow of translations (Latour 2005). This definition also differentiates ANT from social network analysis, as the latter tends to privilege a collection and a rendering of data mostly concerned with visualizing the connections among individual human entities. Nonetheless, critical reflection on the concept of a ‘network’ has led to the enhancement of vocabulary of the sociomaterial studies (Law 1998; Latour 1999). Besides inflation, and partly the overlap of the meanings of the concept of ‘network’, there are other reasons to explore alternative metaphors of the social. One of the risks concerns a linear model of the network that tends to emphasize the traceability of relationships among entities and puts in the background the messiness of the dynamics of negotiations, leading to flat accounts of the phenomena under investigation. Another risk regards the concentration on ‘robust networks’, and on privileging the descriptions of those involved in the networks, leaving little space for the perspectives of the underprivileged and marginalized. To counter these dangers, a sensibility for the complexity has been solicited to underline the multiple instantiations of the social spaces, and to problematize the network-ontology of ANT. The vocabulary of ANT

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has been enriched, therefore, by a renewed attention to the multiplicities of the enactment of the social space. As a consequence, investigation of the patterns of relationships among the entities recognizes the possibility of their alignment in diverse topologies, such as the regions, the networks and the fluids (Mol and Law 1994). These developments relate to current interests in social theory for topology, and to the insights they offer in the analysis of education policy and practice (Lury, Parisi and Terranova 2012; Lewis and Lingard 2015; Thompson and Cook 2015). In this becoming-topological, augmented by the digital technologies, as we will see in Chapter 6, the morphology of the school as a particular sociomaterial arrangement is experimenting with strong tensions and surprising changes (Masschelein and Simons 2013). The critique to the network-ontology in after-ANT debate also introduces the concept of ontological politics (Mol 1999; Law 2012). This notion draws attention to how an object can be performed in many ways, and how we live in multiple realities. It acknowledges, at the same time, that a particular version of it – a piece of knowledge, a truth – comes to dominate the alternative performances of an object. The implication is that the knowledge of an object can be contingent and that any object can be enacted in different ways (there is some malleability of the ‘realities’). Instead of being enclosed in matters of fact or in one dominant form of knowledge, the objects can be a matter of (diverse) concerns, and of diverse forms of knowledge. ‘Ontological politics’ reminds us, in our case, that the digital governance of education can be enacted in many ways, and directs attention to the dynamics that reinforce the dominance of some of its configurations over other alternative enactments.

ANT studies on standardization and the digital governance of education The meeting of ANT with educational research was not immediate. Initially, ANT attracted the attention of science educators and researchers interested in educational technology. Later, the publication of some major investigations (Nespor 1994; Verran 1999), of key introductory books (Fenwick and Edwards 2010; Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuck 2011) and of a special issue of a leading scientific journal (Fenwick and Landri 2012) consolidated the sociomaterial approach as a theoretical sensibility for researching the objects of education. ANT solicited investigations in the materialization of learning (Sørensen 2009), in education policy (Gorur 2015) and in what constitutes learning (Verran 1999).

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Of particular interest here are ANT studies that concern (1) the standardization of education and (2) the changing sociomaterialities of the digital governance of education. Often, research on standards in education tends to underline the effects of reduction and uniformity and the risks of impoverishing education practice as an unavoidable consequence of assuming strict normative specifications. While standards provide direction for education practice, they can also produce a comparability among diverse cultures of education, as is the case with the introduction of international standardized testing like PISA and TIMMS that can reduce plurality in the curriculum. Others have highlighted the convergence between standardization and the neo-liberal agenda in education (see also our considerations in Chapter 1), and have described the reinforcement of the policy of constructing educational quasi-markets. Moreover, standardization would provoke a deprofessionalization of teaching and a notable reduction in the opportunity to learn that could be particularly severe for marginalized and unprivileged students, thus risking enhancing instead of limiting the reproduction of educational and social inequalities. Overall, standardization is associated in many analyses with a dystopian future for education. ANT suggests, instead, that we take a complex understanding of the function of standards in education. This view is inherited by researchers in science and technologies studies where standards and standardization are recurrent themes of investigation. To map the working of standards, ANT calls for the opening of ‘black boxes’ of standards, and researching in detail the ordinary conditions of working on standards. This plea is an invitation to not consider standards as a matter of fact, but rather to analyse them as a matter of concern. When standards are a matter of fact, they are treated as a complete artefact, able to produce what they are intended for; when, instead, they are matters of concern, they are investigated as assemblies of entities networked together. This epistemological shift allows us to understand how they emerge as well as their effect on educational practice. In this perspective, educational standards appear in practice to be less predictable beyond any a priori presumption. By drawing on ANT, Tara Fenwick and Richard Edwards (2010) argue that educational standards can be considered, to some extent, as immutable mobiles. Standards are stable, fixed; they are then immutable and can travel with few transformations across the political, geographical and institutional boundaries to rule a practice. A closer look at their ontology, however, reveals that they are more complex than expected. In her study of teaching standards in Australia, Mulcahy (2011) illustrates how standards can be considered in representationalist ways as a set

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of statements that prescribe and value specific characteristics of the teaching profession and make explicit a preferred professional identity. At the same time, her research highlights that teaching standards can be enacted in different ways; they can be (1) embodied practice in classroom, (2) quasi-statements in a local consultation website or (3) a list of statements in a panel of experts and teachers about the writing of a list for standard teaching. They can have diverse instantiations. Likewise, their workings in practice are not linear, so the achievement of uniformity is not automatic. The application of standards, even if it comes with a strict protocol, implies, as a matter of fact, a local universality (Timmermans and Epstein 2010). Any application of a universal standard is therefore realized in a unique way. By looking at the coexistence of space of prescription and space of negotiation, it is possible to grasp this complexity. In the former, standards are performed in the tight network of practice, while in the latter, standards are frequently overlooked, connections are contingent and many negotiations occur between network-builders and local sites of application. The sensibility of ANT suggests, therefore, that we pay attention both to the conditions of production of the education standards and to standardization in practice. Empirical investigation highlights many dynamics of negotiation and translation so that the ordering effect is not entirely predictable. The fluidity of standards and their many enactments in diverse ontologies reveal a space of productive tensions and allow us to engage critically with standardization, without being limited to a sterile and harmful denouncement of their risks and dangers (Gorur 2012). New ANT literature on digital governance of education focuses on the power of nonhumans, and on their new entanglements with humans in the practice of education governance (Piattoeva 2016; O’Keeffe 2016; Decuypere and Simons 2014). In her investigation, Piattoeva (2016), by drawing on a document analysis and some interviews with evaluation professionals coming from diverse research projects, describes how video surveillance technology became a full-blown actor able to connect formerly weak social ties in the practice of testing. The video surveillance was related to the standard test exam that was made compulsory in Russia for school leaving and admission to tertiary education from 2009. The test, called USE, was intended for the selection and certification of students’ abilities. However, data from USE performed many tasks at the same time: it gave information about the attainment of quality standards in the Russian Federation, and it held regions and schools accountable. Its introduction then reshaped the educational policymaking that aligned the OECD and World Bank

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recommendations that invited compliance with the principles of management by outcomes. However, the quality of data from USE has been contested since the beginning. There is widespread recognition that data are distorted due to high stakes for regional administration. Since 2014, the regions have been ranked for transparency, that is, they are evaluated by their capacity to guarantee the ‘objectivity’ of the testing. The regions are ordered concerning several indicators, such as the way they prepare for testing beforehand, the number of rooms equipped with video surveillance cameras, etc., and are assigned a colour accordingly: red, green or yellow. Here, the red-coloured regions were those where careful inspection and monitoring of activities may be required to enhance compliance with assessment protocols. In 2013, examination of the data collected during the national standard exam revealed significant alterations in information, and the score levels of some regions were higher than expected. In 2014, it was decided to invest further in the development of a video regime of surveillance. In particular, the Ministry of Education and Sciences of Russia established the use of video cameras in the examination rooms, the storerooms for materials before and after the examination and the meeting rooms where the examinations are evaluated, as well as in the rooms where the experts work to design the standardized testing. In addition to video cameras, the federal authorities recommended equipping the entrance halls of examination rooms with metal detectors, mobile signal jammers and private and public security firms. Here, video surveillance was considered essential for the ‘objectivity’ of the testing to such an extent that, while a substitution of a human tester was permitted, the failure of the technical system led to the postponement of testing. The case highlights how a sociomaterial entanglement represents the ‘glue’ of an otherwise unreliable network of actors, institutions and practice. It illustrates, at the same time, how augmented transparency of testing (through a reinforced alignment to the national protocol by digital video surveillance) risks reinforcing a logic of mistrust among all the human agents of educational policymaking, thus making video surveillance even more inevitable. This ‘unavoidability’ also highlights the increasing imbrication of commercial partners (here, from security businesses) in the field of education, and their growing role in assuring the working of the new regime of accountability. In his work on the PIAAC, O’Keeffe (2016) pays similar attention to the changing sociomateriality of assessment. Here, the focus is on the e-assessment event of the PIAAC of the OECD, a further occasion where to analyse growing entanglements with software, codes, algorithms and their effects. The PIAAC is a network that assembles researchers, national institution agencies, software, IT

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companies, experts and administrators, and is aimed at making e-assessments of adult workers. These assessments are intended to map their competencies by providing a rich database that can be used to inform policymaking in the fields of education, welfare and the labour market. O’Keefe offers a vision of the OECD as a centre of calculation that, with the PIAAC, proposes to (1) measure the ability of adults with literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills in a high-technology environment; and (2) establish new ways of calculating human capital. Of particular interest, here, is how the data from the PIAAC are produced. This is not possible without the agency of digital actors. The main innovation of the programme consists of e-assessment, that is, computer delivery, since the interviewer reads the background questionnaire to the respondents and records the replies online, and then asks the respondent to participate in a survey by inviting him/her to complete the testing on the same laptop. Moreover, the entire procedure is monitored by software that has the task of surveillance of test takers and interviewers to ensure that they comply with the protocols and guidelines of the programme. One such nonhuman actor is Blaise, a software and computing language that has been given the task of selecting the test respondents. Blaise is considered to be more reliable than the interviewers in sample selection, that often take some decisions that are not strictly aligned with the envisaged rules of sampling. Blaise communicates with another application, Maniplus, to assign the households to be contacted to the interviewers. Interviewers are asked to contact households using a laptop that includes the Computer Personal Assisted Interview. Once in the participant’s home, Blaise invites the interviewer to include data on the people there, and then a random sampling gives direction on who should take part in the assessment. It is worth noting that Blaise can trace the interactions and assume information about whether the interviewer has followed the rules of the protocol or not. The system can also control the respondent in a way that follows the track that was carefully designed before the testing was administered. Here, Blaise has been delegated the role of supervisory staff to ensure compliance with the rules and a high quality of information. The purpose of the screen is the main focus of the analysis of Decuypere and Simons (2016). Even in this case, attention is on the performance of nonhumans, and how it is (re)shaping the sociomateriality of practice. Here, a detailed ethnography of academic work follows the track of digital studies focused on understanding how a specific device (the delete button, for example, in the study of Lynn Thompson 2012), or a 3D digital environment

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in the case of the Sorensen study (2009), affects the mundane activities of educational practices. The investigation describes, in particular, the roles that the screen performs and the synchronization or incompatibilities emerging with the use of the screen in academic activities. Regarding the roles, the research underlines eight screen performances: (1) it may act as a wall in activities of projecting, when the screen is a surface where something is made public – this something can be a text, images or a video; (2) it is a slate in most of the activities of typewriting that represent, with reading, a notable aspect of academic work; (3) it can be a frame to present our activities or the institutional activities in an easy and efficient way that is appealing to the audience; (4) it is a billboard to display, for example, an institutional logo; (5) it is a grid for exploring the content of the internet; (6) it is a memory, since it extra-somatically recalls something of importance to be retrieved, and acts accordingly in accordance with academic activities; (7) it is a window, allowing users to display something happening in other space-times as in the case of pictures or live calls (Skype call, Hangouts, etc.); and (8) it is a sign, when it reminds users to use the computer in particular ways (using passwords, etc.). These roles summarize the ways the screen shapes the field of possibilities and rules the conduct of academics. It does so by offering a space to perform many operations. At the same time, it is an obligatory point of passage for academic life and directs attention to the timeline of these performances, which are expected to be performed one at a time and with careful attention to the management of these activities. Decuypere and Simons (2016) illustrate how the uses of the screen interweave with other activities, and when they can be compatible or out of sync. The incompatibility may occur during lecturing: the lecturer may disconnect from the screen to make the audience more attentive to her voice, or the other way around – she may move to put herself in the background, and the figures or videos projecting onto the screen to the forefront. This disconnection may be done purposefully or may happen because of a breakdown in the flow of activities, as in the case of the screen projecting something which is not what the lecturer is talking about. In other cases, compatibility emerges when the screen and the humans act with one another, and their activities are interconnected when something is projected and augmented (by first directing attention to a geographical map, and then by zooming in on the map to clarify some aspects of the map, for instance). The study illustrates how academic work is becoming more and more ‘fragmented and busy’ because of the screen, but it is also argued that academic activities are globalized and interconnected. The presence of the screen reminds users

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that globalization is not an all-encompassing surface; it implies rather ‘mobile localities’, and the fragmentation of academic work.

Focusing on the sociomateriality of the digital governance of education in the EU and Italy In the next four chapters, this book joins the emergent ANT literature on the digital governance of education in analysing its sociomateriality in the overlapping educational policy arenas of the EU and Italy. Empirically, and coherently with ANT, the book focuses on assemblages of humans and nonhumans that give rise to the digital governance of education. Widely used in nomadic theory (Braidotti 2011), and more generally in the new philosophical materialism (Dolphijn and Tuin 2012), the concept of ‘assemblage’ is opening interesting readings of education policy and practice, drawing also on other theoretical and disciplinary perspectives such as anthropology, policy, sociology and critical geography (Youdell 2015; Gorur 2011; Savage 2017; Savage and Lewis 2017). The notion of ‘assemblage’ helps to overcome the limitations of established theories, including rational-technical, institutional perspective and too state-centric views of the policy and the practice of education, and to recognize the policy mobilities and transnational networks of governmental and non-governmental actors shaping the contemporary condition of the new governance of education (Savage and Lewis 2017). An assemblage is not an organic whole, that is, it is not an integrated totality. It is a multiplicity of parts that are autonomous; it is then more a concatenation, an alliance made of strict interdependencies among the elements, than a ‘whole’: it is an agencement, to use the original and partly untranslatable French word (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Gherardi 2016b). An assemblage is made of heterogeneous parts that are constantly put together, and that may acquire a different degree of consistency (De Landa 2006). By focusing on the dynamics of the assemblages, we can highlight the complex entanglements of the transnational and intra-national spaces, the co-implication of humans and nonhumans and the emergent and contingent features of the digital governance of education. Three policy assemblages have been, in particular, our points of entry: (1) the emerging transnational space of education of the EU, and how it is digitally visualized and enacted through the online visualization tool of the Education and Training Monitor (ETM) of the EU; (2) the fabrication and uses of the complex data infrastructure for school accountability in Italy; and (3) the policy of

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digital schooling in the EU and in Italy. These assemblages are a ‘window of opportunity’ to reveal the dynamics of the transnational spaces of policymaking in the European space of education and the new emerging intra-national spaces of education articulated around the digitalization of the management of education systems and practice. How they relate to one another, how policies travel across sites, and what mobilizes them – and with what effects – are the objects of investigation. Digitalization is a key priority in the EU and, in turn, of its member states. A Digital Single Market (DSM) Strategy has been designed at EU level for (1) improving access to digital goods and services, (2) developing an environment where digital networks and services can flourish and (3) leveraging on the digital to sustain EU growth. The implementation of this strategy is far from being the same as that of the country members. Moreover, the digitalization of education systems, organizations and institutions is not homogeneous in the European space, as confirmed in one of the most recent surveys on the topic carried out by European Schoolnet (European Commission 2013). In the Nordic countries (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, etc.), schools present high levels of entanglement with digital technologies, as is apparent from the percentages of computers, laptops and so on for students and teachers, and the high bandwidth in all schools, often well above the EU average. However, there are some countries that still have a low level of engagement with digital instruments in schools, albeit, as in Italy, notable investments and reform efforts have been started to fill in the gap. The strategy of investigation intends, therefore, to understand the intertwining between the making of the global supranational space of the European education and, at the same time, the restructuring of the intra-national space of Italy through the lens of digital governance of education.1 Methodologically, policy assemblages have been analysed through a composite and pragmatic approach that combined policy historiography (Gale 2001), semiotic analysis of the digital formations (Cabitza and Mattozzi 2017) and a collective project of multisited ethnographies (Marcus 1995). To some extent, our approach has taken in but also expanded some of the methods of data collection of network ethnography (Ball and Junemann 2012; Ball 2016). More particularly, it envisaged (1) ethnographic observations in multiple sites (schools, ministerial offices), (2) internet searches, (3) interviews with key informants of the policy assemblages, (4) the semiotics of digital formations and (5) the writing and visualization of the cartographies of digital governance as the endpoints of the investigation.

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The policy historiographies were oriented to reconstruct the history of the policy assemblages through primary sources (documents, official reports, governmental texts, minute meetings) and secondary sources (academic and newspapers articles) to understand how they emerge in the present and are related to the past. The semiotics analyses were intended, on the contrary, to unravel the agency of the digital formations that were mobilized as policy instrumentations in the policy assemblages making up the digital governance of education. ANT drew heavily on semiotics to articulate its infra-language to such an extent that this sensibility can also be called ‘material semiotics’, as it can be seen as a way to extend ‘semiotics beyond the signs’ (Law 2009). In particular, I have partly followed the semiotics of configurations (Cabitza and Mattozzi 2017) that sustain the description and the design of interactive and computational systems. The developmental side of this semiotics was not part of my approach, which consisted of a description of the singularity of the digital formation (i.e. an ‘actor’) and, at the same time, of its reticular character (that is, a concatenation of items and potential scripts). Notably, I focused (1) on the digital artefact as a closed and stable individual object in order to describe its inherent relations, that is, its plastic qualities (shapes, colours, contrasts, analogies), its corporal relations (enframes, relations of inclusion and exclusion) and its figurative sphere (its nameable and recognizable aspects) and (2) on the digital artefact as a set of scripts, that is, a network of several programmes of action.2 While the semiotics focused on the affordances of digital devices, the collective project of the multisited ethnographies was aimed at delving into the design and use of digital formations in practice. Ethnographies tried to follow the ‘policy trail’ (Cort 2014) and, in particular, where possible, the trail of digital formations from design to the context of use. The realization of multi-sited ethnographies has solicited the unfolding of the researcher’s ability to be ‘dwelling but also travelling’ from the global to the local, from the public to the private, between the vertical and the horizontal dimensions of the heterarchies constituting the fields of educational policymaking at present. It has required, in particular, the exercise of cyberflaunerie, that is, the practice of wandering on the internet and collecting information from websites, blogs and social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. (Hogan 2016). In so doing, it has enacted a complex presence of the ethnographer in the field, that had to be (1) embodied to be there in the traditional ethnographic sense, (2) distributed as required to be a cyberflaneur in the digital worlds and (3) mobile, that is, ready to move from site to site (Landri 2013). The collective project of multi-sited ethnographies related directly to a former research project

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in which I investigated, in collaboration with a group of researchers at the Universities of Rome and Naples, how the new technologies of information and communication were reshaping the circulation of information, policy knowledge and educational management and administration practice in the first years of the millennium (Landri and Serpieri 2004). It was not possible to describe the policy assemblages with the same set of methodological tools: the collection of data would have required open access to the research field that was not permitted in some cases (for instance, the designers of the digital formation ‘SiC’ in Italy were extremely difficult to contact). Therefore, the cartographies of each policy assemblage were realized by combining different data sets. The first policy assemblage concerning the transnational space of the EU was analysed by drawing on a policy historiography of the fabrication of the European space of education and a semiotics analysis on the ETM 2016 (http://ec.europa.eu/education/policy/strategic-framework/et-monitor_en). The materiality of this latter digital formation has been connected to the history of the Europeanization of education by drawing on EU documents and some research on the circuits of expertise that sustain the enactment of a European space of education as a space of comparison. The second assemblage, regarding the construction and use of a complex data infrastructure aimed at the implementation of school database governance, was disentangled by policy historiography, semiotics analysis and multisited ethnographies. In particular, I focused on the web platform ‘SiC’ that is the Italian gateway to a complex school data infrastructure. The platform is intended to make the school more transparent and accountable and contains a lot of information and data, including the outcomes of school self-evaluation and the school improvement plan, that is, the set of goals that each Italian school is committed to achieving. The platform is analysed to reveal its semiotic configuration and retrace its history as an assemblage of actors, technologies and policies. The history of the web platform has been reconstructed by downloading documents and videos of presentations from the websites of the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (www.miur.it), and of the Institute for the Evaluation of the Education System (INVALSI – www.invalsi.it). Several interviews have been conducted with executives and officers of the ministry and with groups for school self-evaluation at INVALSI in Rome to understand the development of the platform over time and the realization of a new algorithmic system, like the Dashboard, to mobilize and use the school data infrastructure

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to advance the implementation of the new system of evaluation. Access to the ministry, to INVALSI and also to the other agency of the ministry, the so-called INDIRE (Institute for the Documentation, Innovation and Educational Research) has been available throughout the project. In particular, I have participated in some working seminars on the evaluation which had a restricted attendance, in the sense that the audience was composed of experts and officers. Similarly, I had the chance to participate in conferences and seminars on the new regime of accountability and on the setting up of the system of evaluation of the head teacher that was organized by the most representative associations of the field (ANDIS, FLC-CGIL, etc.). In all these cases, I have been able to record and later to transcribe the interviews or the seminars. The main difficulty was to cross the line between the public and the private, that is, to meet the designers of the web platform and the algorithmic system. Regardless of several attempts and requests, it was not possible to interview them and to obtain their views. In that case, ministry officers were able to filter my inquiry and, to some extent, to postpone indefinitely my access to the designers of the artefacts. Four school ethnographies helped us to understand how the data infrastructure and the platform were enacted in practice. These schools functioned as experimental sites for comprehending how this policy instrumentation of digital governance was activated, and with what effect. Four elementary schools in the city of Naples were selected to describe how they have updated ‘SiC’ and how it has been relevant to support processes in school evaluation and improvement. The schools were (1) ‘Equitas’, (2) ‘Migrantes’, (3) ‘Astra’ and (4) ‘Spartacus’.3 The sample of schools takes into account their geographical position (urban, suburban, peripheral, rural) and the Economic, Social and Cultural index of the school’s location area. The ethnographies were made with the collaboration of other two ethnographers. I followed two schools (‘Equitas’ and ‘Spartacus’), while the other two followed ‘Migrantes’ and ‘Astra’, respectively. The three ethnographers performed the task of taking ethnographic notes of their browsing of the websites of the schools in ‘SiC’. Furthermore, they were able to retrace the history of the use of ‘SiC’ through interviews with the teachers included in the group for self-evaluation and with the head teachers. Eventually, the ethnographers attended several meetings in schools to document the effects of the regime of accountability and the use of digital technologies in self-evaluation. It is worth saying that the three ethnographers had diverse tasks: all three had the task of doing ethnography on ‘SiC’ as an object in use in the schools, and one ethnographer had the additional task of attending the meetings and conducting

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interviews with the ministry officers and the agencies. For some time, one of the ethnographers had a mixed identity, meaning that she also had, at the same time, the task of performing school inspections in other schools: these multiple identities granted her access to the hidden backdrop of the school platform, a position that allowed the team of ethnographers to have a subtle understanding of the dynamics of digital governance. The third policy assemblage is the policy for digital schooling in the EU and Italy, which has been investigated by policy historiography and a school ethnography (‘Arcum School’). To do so, I first examined how the idea of ‘digital schooling’ has been translated into practice by the National Plan Digital School, the institutional strategy for the digitalization of schools. Second, I analysed the sociomateriality of a digital school included in ‘Avanguardie Educative’ (Educational Movement Vanguards; from now on, AV), the widest network of innovative schools supported by INDIRE that are experimenting with new ‘bottom-up’ ideas of schooling. The analysis of EU policy, of the National Plan Digital School and the dynamics of a school proved to be helpful in providing empirical bases to understand how the making of the digital school is reshaping the morphology of the school. The collected empirical materials from the three policy assemblages have been analysed with the help of TAMS Analyzer (Hart 2011), a free qualitative data software analyser. The analysis, in particular, has permitted the writing of cartographies of digital governance that are presented in the coming chapters and are finally made visible in the concluding chapter. Overall, this composite methodological approach, with its unavoidable limitations, chronicled the increasing implication of digital formations in the governance of education in the EU and in Italy. It looked at their significant ‘power’ in terms of educational policymaking, how digital governance is related to the standardization of education and its effects on the morphology of schooling.

3

Visualization of the European Space of Education

Introduction In this chapter, we start the empirical journey in the assemblages of the digital governance of education. I will focus here on how the concatenation between the standardization of education, the datafication of education and digital technologies makes visible the European space of education. Preliminarily, it can be said that the making of a European space of education is a complex and unending policy assemblage. It is a process at risk as it is, to a large extent, the fabrication of common spaces of coordination and the governance of economic, political and social diversities of the European member states. Started officially with the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the project of cooperation among different European member states has been a delicate construction since its inception, emerging through measures of harmonization, and in some cases of standardization, within the requirements of national legacies and prerogatives. In the beginning, the idea of cooperation in education was unthinkable, and the only chance of a successful European cooperation was seen in the economy, where the composition of mutual interests was considered easier to realize. At the end of 1990, however, with the Lisbon Strategy (known also as the Lisbon Agenda), the condition of impossibility was circumvented, and while education is still under national legislation, a space of commensuration has been enacted through the definition of agreed-upon performance standards, and the education systems of member states have been made comparable. Lately, with the launch and the revision of the Treaty, and the definition of the Education & Training 2020 strategy, this space is made visible through digital displays and dashboards that remind us, by following the logic of the current regime of accountability, of the degree of accomplishment in fulfilling the common benchmarks.

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What happened in these sixty years? How do incommensurable education systems become commensurable? How were the operations of education made visible and displayed through digital visual renderings on the internet? Are these digital visualizations merely reproducing the European space of education, or do they have a performative effect in the enactment and, notably, in the visualization of the European space of education? In other words, what is the role they play in the Europeanization of education? This chapter will address these questions by illustrating how the governance of the European space of education is related to the current wave of standardization of education, and how the digital displays of the European space of education support, sustain and accompany the dominant trend of standardization of education. The digitalization, here, is premised on the standardization of the educational policy arena. It draws on the increasing datafication of the European education systems and emerges from a transnational assemblage of databases, codes, software, digital technologies and circuits of expertise. While it is often presented as an objective representation of the European space of education, it is far from producing neutral visualizations since it sustains, and is intended to monitor, the strategy of monitoring the progress of EU (European Union) member states towards the accomplishment of new benchmarks in the future landscape of Europe 2020. To trace the history of these digital visualizations, this chapter describes the process of the Europeanization of education as a movement for fabricating a space of commensuration (Lawn and Grek 2012). The chapter will illustrate the main passages of this fabrication and will analyse the semiotics of the visual enactment of the European space of education.

Making education systems visible Digitalization offers ‘surprising’ ways to visualize the dynamics and workings of education systems. By translating them into the digital world, they are made more visible, and, as celebrated in the dominant rhetoric, transparent. This translation is related to the increasing datafication of education, that is, to the growing relevance of data and of evidence-based policymaking in the governance of education. Overall, the technical affordances of digital technologies allow us to bring to the forefront measurable and less measurable aspects of the ecology of education practice that were hitherto obscured or even unknown to the most experienced policymakers and researchers.

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While the digital visualizations are contemporary innovations, the visualizations of education systems per se are not. Therefore, the current visualizations of the European space of education have to be included in the long story of the project of making education systems visible. This history, in particular, intersects with the formation of the nation states and can be traced back to the Great Exhibitions and the World Fairs of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries (Lawn 2013). There are some continuities in the exhibitionary practices of the education systems of those times that are useful to recall before approaching the fabrication of the current digital visualizations of the European space of education. International exhibits in the past were characterized by some tensions that also occur today in the production and circulation of data related to education systems. Expositions were intended to present education systems, or portions of them, to external audiences. They offered a unique possibility to collect, select and display the characteristics of different education systems, and to place them side by side in a three-dimensional space of comparison. However, they triggered a lot of discussion about the best way to do this, reflecting changing conceptualizations in displaying. In an interesting contribution, Sobe (2013) illustrates the rules that governed the translation of the education system in these spaces of exhibition, where the complexities and plurality of objects, artefacts and people in education systems were translated within small portions of space in a wider hall. In those cases, the main organizers of the international exhibits designed detailed protocols to guide exhibitors in the rendering of the education systems and contributed across the exhibitions over time to define the ‘best’ rules to achieve the task more efficiently and appropriately. Whatever the rules, they shared with the contemporary producers of data on education system the concern of opening a reliable space of visibility to have a clearer picture of the differences and uniformities of education practice. What should be displayed, and the rules for displaying the best practices of the education systems were not definitively agreed on during the nineteenthand twentieth-century exhibitions. The curatorial principles changed over time, and appeared to swing between focusing on ‘appliances and instruments’ or on ‘outcomes and results’. In any case, a careful standardization in the presentation of the tools and the results was recommended to ensure a proper display of the education systems and to use the space of visibility to foster effective and desirable imitations of ‘best practices’ in education. Standardization was a constant concern in the curatorial literature, and the ongoing preoccupation of

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the organizers was to enact a seamless space of visualization and comparison. It regarded the apparatuses, appliances, methods and so on, but also the teaching surveys that accompanied the exhibits, and the ‘live demonstrations’ through which a ‘window’ to the innovations in methods of teaching and learning (such as in the case of Maria Montessori’s kindergarten method that was popularized in the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915) was offered to the exhibition visitors. International exhibits played, in that respect, an important role in the professionalization of educational research. They solicited the development of statistical analysis and the refinement of the practice of data collection and analysis at national and international levels. They further mobilized different circuits of knowledge to make education systems visible, and in particular, to produce accurate representations of them. What was presented in these exhibitions became progressively more influential over the pre-reflexive and limited experience of the dynamics of education policy and practice, and represented then the building blocks of the subsequent exhibitionary practices of education systems. They depicted landscapes of education systems and shaped the knowledge on emerging modern education systems. The ‘messy’ worlds of education were simplified and presented through exemplary objects, apparatuses, symbols and signs that sometimes assumed the shape of maps, diagrams, charts, images, figures and so on. The materiality of these exhibits underlines, therefore, that the visualization of education systems and their comparability is mediated. This requires an important investment in standards, and in particular, the transformation of the complexities of education systems into sets of inscriptions that are meant to represent faithful intermediaries of the ‘reality’ of the ecology of education practice. We are reminded that the work of inscribing is a process of translation and that any visualization of a system of education is a contingent outcome of ongoing efforts of inscriptions. In Chapter 2, I introduced the concept of ‘translation’ in my presentation of the theoretical background of this book. By following ANT, the concept of translation is not restricted to the linguistic meaning. A translation ‘implies a transformation, and a possibility of equivalence, the possibility that one thing (for example an actor) may stand for another (for instance a network)’ (Law 1992). It draws attention to what happens when entities come together, and describes the negotiations occurring between them. It may happen that some entity becomes dominant and influences other entities, while others negotiate the terms of their translation in the emerging

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frame of reference. It directs attention, then, to the strategies of translation, that is, to the sociotechnical machinery transforming formerly heterogeneous items into a coherent and partially ordered set. Here, it focuses on the heterogeneous engineering of texts, standards, knowledge, people, organizations, institutions, etc., making education systems visible, and on the work needed to install a space of visibility. In analysing the processes of translation, it is important to recall that the installation of a space of visibility does not lead to mere reproductions of education systems. It adds ‘reality’ to new spaces of education since it leads us to consider the logic of ‘exhibits’; whether or not, for example, it opens up a space of comparison and confrontation between education systems and how this, in turn, affects the governance of the education system. Shifting education systems in a new space, in other words, is not neutral and has political implications. Furthermore, focusing on the translation helps to remind us that the fabrication of a space of visibility is a never-accomplished task. In previous exhibits, for example, it implied the quest for a precarious locus of balance between attention to the ‘accomplished results’ and the instruments for displaying the education systems. It is useful to underline that the inscriptions can be incomplete and changing over time, so that the visualizations of education systems can be fluid, and far from being stable. Even more, at any time, it may happen that the work of translation may stop or fail, so that the ‘reality’ of the emerging space can be diminished and the ‘heterogeneous bits and pieces’ of which it is composed may follow their trajectories. In the latter, unfortunate, case, the patterned network disappears, and so the ‘punctualized’ actor comes back to the uncoordinated and messy heterogeneities of the point of departure (Law 1992). The visualization of education systems, like any translation, meets the resistance of heterogeneous items constituting the network. The alignment, the collaboration in participating in the space of visibility, is not to be taken for granted; it entails continuous processes of negotiation that can also lead to the refusal of the ordering processes, and accordingly, to the ‘defeat’ of the emergent frame of reference. It always starts from a condition of impossibility, and in case of success, ends with a temporary social ordering that is a contingent and highly processual solution to alternative forms of ordering and programmes of resistance. Having underlined the continuity of the current visualization of education systems with the exhibition practices of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of twentieth centuries, I will turn attention to the history of the Europeanization of education in the following section. I will illustrate the

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processes of translation leading to the development of the European space of education as a space of commensurability. I will then highlight how this space is made visible through digital visualizations: I will describe, in particular, how this interlaces with the governance of the European space of education. Overall, the EU is making massive investments in the digital: the forming of a Digital Single Market is one of the priorities of Juncker’s Commission. This is a big strategy for ensuring the free circulation of goods, persons, services and capital, by removing the conditions that prevent the full development of the potential of digitalization and reinforcing the position of Europe as a leading digital economy. By drawing on some standard stories of the Europeanization of education, and on the EU documents supporting this construction, I will describe the processes of fabrication of the European space of education. I will then analyse semiotically how this space is made visible on the internet through the interactive maps of the ETM to reveal how they shape the space of visibility of education policy in the EU.

Europeanization of education The celebration in 2017 of sixty years since the signature of the Treaty of Rome was a time to reflect on the making of the EU and to underline the accomplishments in the long road to the realization of the conditions of possibility of the EU project. The fabrication of the EU is always at risk, and it is particularly in the balance nowadays in a period characterized by the difficulty in economic recovery after the financial crisis of 2008. Many societal challenges (such as terrorism and migration) are eroding the basis and the meaning of the strategy of harmonization and collaboration between member states (as in the case of Brexit, the negotiation between the United Kingdom and the EU regarding the United Kingdom leaving the Union). These celebrations overlapped with the thirtieth anniversary of Erasmus. Since 1987, Erasmus has been a flagship European project in the field of education that has fostered the mobility of students, teachers, head teachers and so on; promoted the circulation and exchange of experiences among education systems; enhanced the possibility of finding a job; sustained the learning of new languages; and increased awareness of European citizenship. While the collaboration in education is far more extended and now includes school education, adult education and vocational training, it was not initially

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taken for granted, as can be seen from the statements of the Treaty of Rome of 1957. Education was not at the centre of the project of cooperation among the six founding member states of the EU: the treaty was mostly concerned with economic integration and agricultural policy. The Second World War had left deep wounds, and although most European leaders expressed the need for reconciliation after the years of destruction and conflict, the first European agreement was limited in scope. Education was, in particular, ‘out’ of the European agenda, and treated as an item of the national sphere, to some extent ‘untouchable’ at European level. Accordingly, it took twenty years before the first meeting of the Ministry of Education of member states, and the cooperation developed slowly and with some difficulties until the Strategy of Lisbon in 1990, where education finally became one of the most important aspects of the fabrication of the European space. This fabrication is a process of translation: it starts from a condition of incomparability among the education systems, leads to the mobilization of the network of expertise and notable investments in standards and to the emergence of a space of commensurability, and makes the European space of education digitally visible (Pé pin 2007). By reconstructing the development of the cooperation in education and training in Europe during the celebration of the fifty years from the Treaty of Rome, Pé pin (2007) identified four stages: (1) 1957–1971: prehistory, (2) 1971–1992: the years of foundation of cooperation in education, (3) 1992–2000: enhancement of the cooperation in education under the favourable conditions of the emergence of concepts of lifelong learning and knowledge society and (4) 2000–2006: the Lisbon Strategy for 2010. In the first stage of this history, education was completely out of the European agenda. The unification of Europe was a great hope at the end of the Second World War; however, the possibility of its realization was meagre. It was decided to foster collaboration in the economy, and to then proceed step by step to the fabrication of a space of coordination to enhance cooperation and open perspectives of harmonization among states that were enemies at the end of the recent conflicts. The strategy was ‘economy first; then the politics will follow’ (Jean Monnet). Agreements regarded the coal and steel industries, the establishment of the free market, the customs union, a common agricultural policy and atomic energy. The Treaty of Rome in 1957 did not explicitly mention cooperation in education. The principle of the freedom of movement affected the qualification of workers; therefore, the treaty envisaged a common vocational training policy. To some extent, European education systems were considered incommensurable, and it was only in vocational training, as regards

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the recognition of diplomas, certification, formal qualifications and so on that the need for developing cooperation was seen, provided that it was related to that aspect of education more connected to the economic sphere (art. 128). Only in 1971, therefore, was a first meeting of the ministers of education possible. Education was a ‘sensible’ topic, mainly under the control of national policy. The lack of a formal basis for cooperation, in particular, meant that there were difficulties in finding an appropriate way to foster the cooperation. The road of intergovernmental cooperation appeared more feasible than the full integration of education into the community framework that would pave the way to an acceleration of the collaboration, almost a partial delegation of educational policymaking. Before that meeting, a decision taken in 1963 introduced ten general principles to develop a common policy framework in vocational training, yet limited cooperation among member states was realized even in this field. Vocational training was not at that time a priority. After the first meeting of the ministers of education in 1971, the infrastructure of the cooperation gradually developed. A specific Directorate for Education and Training was set up in 1973, and in 1976, a community action programme was finally decided at the level of the Council with a Resolution. While the Resolution was a non-binding legal document, it nonetheless pointed out the political will to enhance cooperation among the member states on a ‘sensible’ topic and should be considered the foundation of the construction of the European space of education. The programme included six priority areas: (1) education of the children of migrant workers, (2) interplay among education systems, (3) higher education, (4) documentation and statistics, (5) teaching of foreign languages and (6) equal opportunities, and it was mainly implemented via transnational projects, study visits, exchanges of information and experiences and research. This form of cooperation describes the development in this field of a mixed approach that combines the community framework for intergovernmental cooperation before the definition of the principle of subsidiarity. Of course, the cooperation met further ‘resistance’, in particular, at the end of the 1970s when some communications concerning education were blocked, and the coordination stalled until the beginning of 1980. The lack of a legal basis and the limited resources devoted to this field of cooperation provoked difficulties and little progress. However, the community action programme and the implementation of the envisaged activities demonstrated the possibilities of collaboration even when faced with complex, and in some cases, ‘adverse’, institutional conditions. It also facilitated cooperation in the field of vocational training. The block in cooperation at that time highlighted the need to show

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the link between the Treaty of Rome and the objectives of the community programme in education. The broad interpretation of Article 118 of the treaty in the Gravier case at the European Court of Justice, then, was particularly welcomed. This interpretation gave support to the cooperation in the field of higher education, paving the way to several programmes from 1985 to 1992 such as Erasmus, Petra, Force and Tempus. These programmes, albeit with the usual difficulties and a lot of negotiations, fostered the development of a European arena of collaboration in the area of higher education and vocational training, accompanied by an increase in budget and activities. The Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 led to the end of the disputes among the member states and the community about the lack of a legal basis for cooperation and removed one of the reasons limiting the development of the collaboration. Higher education and school education (Article 126) received full recognition in the treaty, and the article concerning vocational training was also reformulated. Harmonization of the systems was ruled out; it was made clear that community action was aimed at the support and supplementation of the national policies, while the member states maintained control over the content and organization of the education system. Similarly, the ‘common policy for vocational training’ was replaced by ‘a vocational training policy’ so as to underline the responsibility of the member state for the content and the organization of vocational training (Article 127). The cooperation in education was supported in the 1990s by the Treaty of Maastricht, which settled the controversies as mentioned, but also by the wide acceptance of the ‘planetspeak’ discourses of lifelong learning and the knowledge society. The publication of Jacques Delors’s White Paper on growth, competitiveness and employment in 1993, and the European Commission’s White Paper ‘Teaching and learning – towards the learning society’ aligned around the acknowledgement of the relevance of knowledge in contemporary society and proposed the key idea of lifelong learning to cope with the challenges of the advanced technological transformations of what has been defined as ‘knowing capitalism’ (Pollard 2006). At the same time, an overall restructuring concerned the community programmes in education and resulted in an expansion but also an increase of consistency among the ‘pillars’ of the projects. The end of the decade closed with the Sorbonne Declaration in May 1998 when four ministers of education launched the Bologna Process, a process of harmonization of higher education: the initiative developed out of the community framework, and had an intergovernmental nature. The Bologna Process is a telling event in the history of cooperation in higher education in Europe. It showed a move towards a convergence of the systems of higher

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education through a standard framework and a standard platform (ECTS – the European Credit Transfer System) that make the transferability and then the circulation of people, professions and work possible in a space of equivalence. It is a process that similarly makes the European space of higher education visible and comparable (Brø gger 2016). A ‘quantum leap’ in the Europeanization of education developed with the Lisbon Strategy at the beginning of the millennium (Lawn and Grek 2012). Here, a notable step towards the commensurability of European education systems was made possible. The convergence of European leaders is somewhat surprising, considering the harsh defence of the responsibility of member states in the regulation of the content and organization of education systems. On the other hand, rising youth unemployment, the complex transformation of work due to the introduction of new information and communication technologies and the belief in the centrality of the investment in ‘knowledge’ and in the perspective of lifelong learning to make the EU the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world may explain this notable turn towards an integrated policy framework for the modernization of education systems. The Lisbon Agenda fostered further collaboration in the field of education and training by providing a set of objectives and a method of work: the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). The method of coordination envisages the convergence between systems and the monitoring of progress. The method of working, in particular, counts on exchanges of good practices among member states, educational indicators and standards to measure progress and peer learning. It implies agreement on common objectives, and the translation of these goals into performance standards, that is, into benchmarks to be achieved by 2010. Notably, educational indicators and benchmarks concern (1) early school leaving (2010 EU goal: average of no more than 10 per cent), (2) low achievers in reading (2010 EU goal: 20 per cent decrease in the number of fifteen-year-old low achievers), (3) completion rate of upper secondary school (2010 EU goal: 85 per cent of twenty-two-year-old students), (4) graduates in maths, science and technology and gender balance (2010 EU goal: 15 per cent increase in the number of graduates) and (5) lifelong learning (at least 12.5 per cent of the adult working-age population are expected to participate). While these indicators and standards may appear objective and neutral, in practice they embodied several normative choices. These choices depend on the circuits of knowledge and expertise mobilized by the Directorate-General for Education and Culture to support the Open Method of Coordination. The policy knowledge that emerges in a complex assemblage of networks constituted

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by the OECD, European institutions and experts (Normand 2010; Grek 2014) privileges a translation of education practice in a logic of correlation between variables, and is oriented by the vocabulary of the human capital theory that put an emphasis on the economic value of the stock of knowledge of a population. It makes visible some aspects of the workings of the education systems and puts in the background other dimensions of their functioning. It enacts, then, a space of commensuration that is oriented towards the vocationalism (Holford 2017), on the premise of relating education to the economy and promoting economic competitiveness. This orientation is confirmed even in the passage from the Lisbon Strategy to Europe 2020 (that is, the overall ten-year strategy proposed by the European Commission in 2010). Difficulties in achieving the goals of the Lisbon Agenda, the scarce effects in terms of the contribution of the progress of education to the economic growth in the economic crisis, and the growing threats to the overall sense of the unification appear to not have affected the EU agenda, and in particular, the role education systems are expected to play. Nonetheless, standards and benchmarks are far from being stable. Several adjustments have been made already during the implementation of the Lisbon Strategy, yet a new Education and Training strategy (ET 2020) was devised to create the list of objectives to be met by 2020. A closer look at the list of benchmarks reveals continuity, but also difference. The differences regarding novelties are concerned with (1) the increase of benchmarks (eight from 2012) and (2) some revisions of the benchmarks already in the list of ET 2010. The increased benchmarks are related to early childhood, tertiary attainment, learning mobility (adopted from 2011), employability of young graduates (from 2012) and language teaching (from 2012). Revisions regarding the benchmarks for early school leaving, low achievers and lifelong participation have been broadened. Finally, the completion rate of upper secondary school is no longer on the list. Two benchmarks are among the five headline targets for ET 2020, namely, early school leaving and tertiary attainment. One of the results of this long process of fabrication is the translation of the European space of education into a space of commensuration. The initial condition of heterogeneity among the education systems is temporarily tamed (Figure 3.1) by (1) the rewriting of the legal basis of the cooperation in education and training (the passage from the Treaty of Rome to the Treaty of Maastricht), and the experimentation ante litteram of the principle of subsidiarity; (2) the consolidation of organizational conditions for the constitution and support of the collaboration in education and training at the level of the commission (the making of a DG in Education); (3) the development of transnational networks of

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Figure 3.1 Fabrication of the European space of education as a space of commensuration

collaboration activated by the communitarian programmes (Erasmus, Tempus and Socrates); (4) the circulation of the discourses of knowledge society and of lifelong learning through authoritative texts; (5) the implementation of the Open Method of Coordination during the Lisbon Strategy; and (6) the inscription of the workings of education systems in standards and common metrics. The irreducible issue of European identities is put in the background and substituted for apparently objective questions of measurability. It is a shift to governance by data, or to governance by numbers (Grek 2009; Grek and Ozga 2009; Lingard, Martino and Rezai-Rashti 2013).

Visual enactments of the European space of education The reduction in the complexities of education systems in numbers fosters an increasing datafication of education that is supported by digital technologies.

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Digitalization expands the possibilities to see, and to make education systems visible. To illustrate this point, I will turn now to the ETM, the revised apparatus for monitoring progress in achieving the objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy. By drawing on the semiotics of configuration (Mattozzi 2010) that I have described in Chapter 2, it is possible to bring to the forefront the rules of the digital renderings of the European education space. In particular, the description of the plastic configurations (shapes, colours, lines, etc.), the corporal dimensions and the scripts, which are the programmes of action of this digital formation, will help us to understand the instantiation and the ‘doing’ of this space of visibility on the internet. ETM is on the website of the European Commission. It can be found in the subsection that concerns the strategic framework – Europe 2020.1 ETM is presented on the web page as ‘an annual publication that captures the evolution of education and training in the EU’. In practice, it is a multimedia publication that displays data and information by interconnecting standard templates and formats. The first release of ETM was carried out in 2012: it is now on its fifth edition. To exemplify the displays, I will focus on the overall framework of ETM, and nationally, the case of Italy in 2016 that will also be the unit of collection of the data in the next chapters. ETM is a network of items organized in documents and data. Documents and data, in turn, are articulated to make comparisons between the EU level and the member states’ levels. Furthermore, detailed data and information about the single countries are visible and downloadable. As to the plastic configuration, the web page of ETM is divided into several sections. The header on the top is coloured grey, while the body of the page is white. Under the header, the left of the page contains a list of the other subsections with the respective links to the education and training section of the European Commission, while the right of the page is filled with eight greencoloured rectangles ordered in a table-like form. The green colour contrasts with the white background and draws the attention of the reader. By scrolling down the page, it is possible to read a discursive presentation of ETM, and to see a short video where the Commissioner for Education, Training and Youth makes a brief speech on the latest reports from ETM. The long ETM web page also comprises a structured disposition of flags and little grey-coloured rectangles, bringing each black arrow down, oriented in the form of a table. The web page closes with a ‘Questions’ section, and a ‘Finding Out More’ grey-coloured rectangle. At the corporal level, ETM is made of several layers. In the semiotics of configurations (see Chapter 2), the concept of ‘enframe’ it is helpful here,

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pointing to ‘anything acting as a frame or a border that, by enclosing something, makes it a content and distinct from the rest’ (Cabitza and Mattozzi 2017). In that respect, ETM’s web page is itself an enframe, that includes several enframes. The table-like form under the header introduces the contents of ETM by enclosing them in the eight green-coloured rectangles organized in two columns. The two columns sort the contents into (1) ‘download documents’ and (2) ‘explore data’ that, as we will see later, are two scripts of ETM. Within the column ‘download documents’, we find (1) EU report, (2) Country Reports, (3) Executive Summary and (4) Leaflet. Inside the column ‘explore data’, we find instead (1) Interactive maps, (2) Key indicators and benchmarks, (3) Policy measures library and (4) Infographics. The textual presentation of ETM encloses a link to the recording of the conference launch of the Monitor that lasts two and a half hours, and Commissioner’s video. In the section after the textual presentation, each flag stands for a member country. The grey-coloured rectangle under each flag contains the name of the country and an arrow that displays a scroll-down menu. The logic of the presentation is to describe the situation at EU level and to furnish data and information at the country level. At the same time, ETM also offers some instruments to make comparisons across countries. However, education systems are inscribed in member countries and analysed as such. Further, each country is displayed in a standard manner. The scroll-down menu illustrates three choices: (1) country reports (in English and in the languages of each country), (2) a country factsheet (in English and in the languages of the member states) and (3) infographics. The situation of each member state and the EU is translated through cascades of inscription and made available on the internet. Other enframes regard the ‘Questions’ section, where an e-mail address is provided for further information about the tables presented in the full report, as is a hashtag on Twitter to follow the travel of ETM inscriptions (#ETMonitor). The ETM web page ends with a ‘Find out more’ section that encloses links to previous Monitors in reverse chronological order (2015–2012). This section is meant to be the repository for the Monitor. The visualization of EU space is therefore oriented to the present and projected into a future made operational and measurable regarding benchmarks to meet. The links to previous Monitors also permit us to understand how the apparatus has changed over time. We are very far from the international exhibits of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. At the same time, ETM inscribes the European education space in the space of digital commensuration, where education systems can be made visible and comparable everywhere, and anytime, provided that the necessary sociotechnical infrastructure is available.

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The ETM page contains several scripts. The core is represented by scripts related to the downloading of documents and the exploration of data. The former are aimed at providing closed texts to be downloaded and read; the latter are an invitation to ‘play’ with the data and to refine the analysis. The hypertextual logic of the web page makes us aware of the double nature of ETM, which has a unitary character but is made of a network of items. The list of the scripts for direct downloading concerns the EU report, the Executive Summary and the Leaflet. The button regarding the country reports, instead, shifts the web page to the sections with the flags and rectangles with the arrows heading down. For exploring data, the scripts available are the interactive maps, the key indicators and benchmarks, the policy measures library and the infographics. Except for the infographics, which I will comment on later, the scripts permit a more dynamic and flexible exploration of the data. Interactive maps are a visualization tool that displays the geography of the progress towards the eight European benchmarks. To illustrate how the digital renderings work, I will take the example of the display of the early school leaving indicator (see Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 Early school leaving in Europe (Education and Training Monitor)

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The plastic configuration envisages, on the left of the display, contrasts of colours: the blue of the EU, the intense and different colours of the EU member states, the uniform grey of the European and non-European countries that are not members of the EU, the white of the seas. On the right, a coloured area is contrasted with a white area for the instructions. Here, and on the bottom right, a frame includes several rectangles with the same colours, but with different heights. The display is made by three overall enframes: the geographical map, the text and a histogram. Inside the map, each member country is enclosed in its geographical border and is given a colour depending on its progress in the achievement of the European benchmark. The colour range consists of red, orange, yellow, light green, green. The green points to the best situation, namely the realization of the benchmark, and the recording of a higher level of standard for the indicator; the red, on the contrary, signifies that the country has not made much progress towards the achievement of the European benchmark. The histogram, finally, highlights the trend from 2011 to 2014; here, it illustrates a shift towards the objective. The visualizations therefore enable us to have quick and synthetic summaries of the EU’s progress towards the benchmark. They also allow us to understand the details of the country members. Interactive maps enact some scripts that make the visualizations more dynamic and fluid. By moving on the map, the statistics about country members are highlighted. Further, by clicking on the map of the country members, it is possible to look at the progress on the achievement of each country target and the European benchmark, and to get more information about the demography of the phenomenon, that is, on the statistical distribution by sex, and by origin (nativeborn or foreign-born). Complex issues are simplified, and attention is oriented to what is considered the key aspects. Multiple comparisons among country members are possible through histograms on these standards and educational indicators (see, for example, Figure 3.3.). Two other scripts for exploring data in ETM are the key indicators and benchmarks and policy measures library. As to the former, its plastic configuration is composed of the contrast between the off-white of the background and the white of the rectangle on the page, and inside the white rectangle, between the closed rectangle and open text space. At the corporal level, the page includes the enframes of the white rectangle, that include a closed box on one side with the EU28 label, an empty text space, a scroll-down box to choose the years for comparison and a rectangle with the script ‘Apply’. Here, the interactive reader is expected to enter one or more member countries to obtain a list of data on the educational benchmark. Once the script ‘Apply’ is

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Figure 3.3 Italy and Spain early school leaving (Education and Training Monitor)

enacted, a table is elaborated and displayed. The tables elaborated this way can be downloaded and made available in Excel format for further analysis. When it comes to the policy measures library, a search engine for the policy measures at the level of country members allows further understanding of the specific measures adopted on educational issues. While the maps and benchmarks are mostly expressed by numbers, the policy measures are described in textual ways. ETM, finally, includes a notable number of infographics that clearly capture the progress on the achievement of objectives of ET 2020 and can be downloaded. In ETM, therefore, the European space of education is made visible as a whole, consisting of the composition of many national education systems. As a whole, the European space is enacted as a space of commensuration, where each national education system is measured against common agreed and measurable benchmarks. The emerging panoramas underline speed diversities in meeting the national and European targets. While it does not directly rank the EU education systems, through the interactive maps ETM furnishes coloured pictures of the European space of education that quickly illustrate through naming, shaming and faming (Brø gger 2016) the ‘worst’ and the ‘best’ country performances, helping, at the same time, to direct attention towards those aspects that require the most immediate intervention to meet the established national and European benchmarks. The cascades of visualizations in ETM are not simply representations; they are designed to monitor the degree of achievement and to raise the desire of fulfilment of the agreed-upon national and European benchmarks. Digitalization contributes to accelerating the circulation of these inscriptions, and of this representation of European education systems. It is, accordingly,

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an instrument that displays the standardized differentiation of the European space of education. It accompanies the soft convergence of the performances of the education systems. The fundamental impossible incomparability is circumvented by a mix of standardization and differentiation: standards are provided at European level; however, they are not imposed uniformly. There is some malleability of standards and benchmarks to take national diversities into account. This reminds national states of their responsibilities in achieving the agreed-upon objectives, and fills the horror vacui of the diminished role of the state, in a state where the education policymaking arena is de facto increasingly interconnected at European level.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have focused on the creation of the European space of education, and in particular, on the digital visualization of this space as a process of translation. Heterogeneous entities (in this case ‘education systems’ that followed their national trajectories, and were considered ‘irreducible’ for several years) have been finally made comparable, visible and governable through cascades of numerical inscriptions. These cascades circumvented the impossibility of a supranational European education authority, in the sense of a hierarchically ordered entity, which materializes, as a matter of fact, in a ‘magister of influence’ in the European educational policymaking arena. In retracing this history, it is possible to highlight how it emerged through the sustained investment and concatenation of many ‘forms’: the rewriting of the legal basis of the cooperation between European member states, the construction of organizational structures of the European Commission, the setting up of a network of collaboration and expertise, the fabrication of an infrastructure of standards and the common orientation of the institutional discourses towards the ‘planetspeak’ discourses of the knowledge society and lifelong learning. The process of translation aligned with the current wave of standardization of education draws attention to ‘learning outcomes’ and ‘output standards’ that are measured through the ‘gold’ standard of the international scale assessments (like PISA), or through educational indicators that orient policymaking towards output performances of educational systems (see Chapter 1). A turning point in that process was the Lisbon Strategy, where the Open Method of Coordination and the agreement on several benchmarks enabled the creation of a space of commensurability. While the fabrication of the European space of education

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can be read as a process of standardization (Lawn 2011), it was not oriented rigidly. It can be rather characterized as a flexible standardization: while it is assumed that some standards will be adopted universally, others may be applied differently. The achievement of the European benchmarks (a universalist expectation) is therefore combined with the declaration of national objectives (a local standard) to fulfil. Consequently, as was also clear in the passage on the Lisbon Strategy to the current ET 2020 framework, the standardization is more fluid than expected. The chapter has also analysed the visual enactment of this European space and, in particular, the details of ETM highlight how this digital visualization can be included in the long history of the visualization of education systems (Sobe 2013; Lawn 2013). Regardless of the discontinuities, the installations of the past in the exhibitions and the digital formation on the internet were and are oriented by a common logic consisting of visualizing, comparing and competing (Lundahl 2016). The semiotic analysis of ETM has highlighted how it reinforces and sustains the strategy of flexible standardization by visualizing the European space of education as a composition of single societies, and the performances of the single societies on the common agreed-upon benchmarks. At the same time, it allows the side-by-side comparison of education systems to raise a desire to emulate and to reach a positive position on the visual displays. While the countries’ performances are not ranked, the numerical comparisons among the countries and the coloured displays of the geography of the achievement solicit a logic of improvement in educational performances. By studying the Bologna scorecard in the case of the construction of the European Higher Education space, Brø gger (2016) underlines a similar mechanism: a multicoloured scorecard refines the logic of naming–shaming–faming in comparison among higher education systems, naming ‘undesirable' colours (‘red’), and ‘desirable’ colours (‘deep green’) in the overall display of the different states of European education systems in achieving agreed benchmarks. In both cases, the coloured displays are intended to provoke a feeling of discomfort (‘shame’) for the worst performers to move them to find a strategy of improvement. The instruments, the digital renderings in particular, are not simple representations; they are designed to evoke a mimetic desire. Digitalization, in the case of ETM, allows us to augment this process by accelerating circulation of the knowledge base in the many inscriptions that combine numerical and visual representations (tables, charts, infographics, summaries of policies, etc.). A complementary semiotic analysis of ETM by Decuypere (2016) concludes that the ‘diagrams present on its website enact a form of authority that is equally dependent on attractivity

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(of the visuals incorporated), simplification (not only of reality into numbers, but equally of a highly selective portion of these numbers into visualizations), and words (sometimes accompanying numbers, but equally often substituting them)’. Whether it triggers the desire for change in practice is a matter for empirical investigation; it nonetheless enacts and gives shape to the European space of education as a digital space of commensuration. This digital formation works as a permanent exhibition of the European education systems of ‘what they are’ and ‘what they should be’ that is made mobile and visible on the internet. Of course, this digital visualization is not an all-embracing view of the European space of education. It performs, as I have illustrated, a particular enactment of the Europeanization of education that is inscribed in the logic of vocationalism, privileges the human capital theoretical imagination and tends to translate the complexities of education policy and practice in the causal-like reasoning logic of the systems of variables. This orientation is long-lasting and was confirmed in the passage on the Lisbon Strategy to the ET 2020 perspective. The financial and economic crisis does not seem to have changed the subordination of education to the economy too much. The implication is that there are many possible alternatives for making the European space of education visible, and the dominant perspective tends to put in the background the risk of dissolving, in the sense of leaving ‘reality’ to, the diversities among European educational traditions (Holford 2017). In practice, different visualizations of the European space of education are already proliferating, as in the case of EPALE (the Electronic Platform for Adult Learning in Europe), Open Education Europa, eTwinning and School Education Gateway.2 This proliferation underlines the increasing investment of the European Commission in the making and use of these platforms in educational governance, and at the same time, the many possible designs of these digital formations. In the next chapter, I will shift attention to digital governance in the case of a national platform, ‘SiC’. The investigation of the fabrication of this platform and of its dynamics will help to shed light on the complex assemblage that makes this digital formation possible, and on how it has reshaped the logic of governance in an intra-national space.

4

Houses of Glass? The Fabrication of a School Data Infrastructure

Introduction In this chapter, we will further the exploration of the dynamics of the digital governance of education, and in particular, of the interplay between the standardization of education and digital formations, by looking at the emergence and the consolidation of a school data infrastructure (‘SiC’) in Italy. So far, we have seen how standardization and digitalization make the European space of education visible, and how this is premised on the transnational assemblages of the data infrastructures of EU member states. In this case, I will describe how the fabrication of a school data infrastructure shapes an intra-national space that overlaps with the European education space. In the last two decades, the intra-national space of Italy has been interested in a reculturing of the education system. The Europeanization of education (Lawn and Grek 2012) and the implementation of NPM-inspired reform ideas (Grimaldi, Landri and Serpieri 2016) are slowly restructuring the welfarist configuration and Napoleonic statist legacy of the Italian education system. The heritage of the past centralistic bureaucratic government is still present and the educational performances are still below European averages, soliciting the need to change the institutional and organizational frameworks to meet European benchmarks. Nonetheless, the reculturing of the education system is following the lines of the dominant NPM discourses through (1) the making of devolved educational environments through disaggregation strategy (here, solutions of the school autonomy and decentralization), (2) the fabrication of systems of evaluation oriented towards educational outputs and (3) the transformation of professional management via performance-management technologies and related systems of rewards and sanctions. Moreover, in recent years, a growing

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attention to the logic of e-government and the datafication of education, and an increasing investment in digital technologies of government, are accompanying these policy solutions. Digital formations and applications are becoming common policy instrumentation and ubiquitous devices in these processes of reculturing the education policy and practice. The role they perform here is not to counter NPM ideas, as they rather play as ‘allies’ in the emergent transformations of the governance of education. This alliance, of course, is not without consequence, as it materializes a space of transparency that tends to transform the schools into ‘houses of glass’ amenable to being visualized for external as well as internal inspection. Measuring school performances, describing school ‘inputs’, mapping structures and locating schools in socio-economic contexts, as well as interlocking data sets, however, are not ‘simple’ or ‘naive’ processes of representation. They are the effects of the fabrication of school data infrastructures that enact spaces of commensuration and comparison. More data and information on schools are intended to make them transparent both to improve their performance and to display their pedagogies and related methodological options to their wider ‘audiences’. Transparency is not considered, then, an inherent quality of schools; it is rather a characteristic to be achieved by countering, according to the proponents of this policy idea, their organizational tendency to remain opaque and invisible to the external outlook. The shift from opacity to transparency is not straightforward; it requires, as we have already seen in the case of European education systems (Chapter 3), massive datafication and digitalization of school life, and in particular, the mobilization of complex assemblages of people, technology and policies. While essential to current educational policymaking, these assemblages work in the background and tend to remain ‘behind the scenes’. Data need to be collected, analysed and displayed; moreover, they have to be, in some way, ‘thought before’, by assuming some choices concerning their construction, the methodology of collection and analysis and the means of disseminating and communicating. School data infrastructures are, therefore, not ‘neutral’, and are far from being ‘mere’ transparent representations of schools. They embody choices about what to display and what to hide, and have a constitutive role in establishing the ‘right’ method of schooling and in underlining conceptions on what is a ‘good’ school performance or not, and what is a good school or a failing school. To illustrate how school transparency is achieved, and the dynamics of the complex data infrastructures, this chapter will present the case of ‘SiC’ (‘School in clear light’), the public web platform of the Italian Ministry of

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Education, Universities and Research. ‘SiC’ is a search engine that promises to turn into practice the desire to make schools transparent and accountable. It is an interface that makes schools knowable, and partly comparable. It is, then, a point of entry for understanding the making of a digital formation for the governance of education. The fabrication, maintenance and updating of ‘SiC’ has required a never-ending heterogeneous assemblage of humans and nonhumans: the opening of a complex political game of displaying the many aspects of the practice of schooling. The working of a digital formation is often invisible to the wider public, and partly even to the school. This chapter will perform an infrastructural inversion (Bowker and Star 1999) to understand how the infrastructure arises and how it comes to be connected and linked to the search engine, that is, to bring to the fore the power of this digital technology. The chapter will be articulated as follows: first, it will pay attention to the notion of infrastructure, and more particularly, data infrastructure; second, it will describe in detail the policy assemblage of ‘SiC’; finally, it will draw some conclusions on the making of these digital formations and their power in shaping educational governance.

The fabrication of school data infrastructures The notion of infrastructure is used to refer to the ‘underlying structure’ of a city, region or nation state. It speaks, then, of the basic foundations that anchor the flows of societies materially. Infrastructures are bridges, roads, cables, harbours, computers and so on that are interconnected in complex systems, like water and sewer systems, railways, airports, ports and highways. New flows of communication also require a solid infrastructure to enable their everyday working. Recently, there is renewed interest in school infrastructures, and in particular, in school data infrastructures (Sellar 2015b; Gorur 2012; Williamson 2016b). Examples of these infrastructures are the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD Education GPS (http://gpseducation. oecd.org), The Learning Curve from Pearson plc (http://thelearningcurve. pearson.com), Analyse School Performance in the UK (https://www.compareschool-performance.service.gov.uk) and MySchool in Australia (https://www. myschool.edu.au), all drawing on intergovernmental organizations, public and private partnership, foundations, enterprises and so on. This attention depends on high expectations for improving school performances, and is oriented to

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make schools more transparent and accountable to internal and external audiences (von Davier et al. 2013). However, data appear as ‘objective’ and ‘self-evident’ and infrastructures are usually concealed in everyday school life. Spaces often are given, electricity systems are working, computers are interconnected and a wireless space of communication is assured in classrooms or in all the learning environments. Therefore, they go unnoticed, and are put in the background, unless something (events, a breakdown or an investigation, for example) transform them into matters of concern. When ‘something’ happens, it is possible to investigate the sociomateriality of infrastructure, and an infrastructural inversion starts (Bowker and Star 1999). The inversion allows us to understand what a given infrastructure is and what ‘work it does’. In the case of school data infrastructure, it allows us to focus on how school data augmented by digital technologies increase schools’ transparency. Mostly empirical analysis on infrastructures suggests, however, that their analysis is not an easy task. They raise ontological and methodological issues that make them quite elusive. Ontologically, infrastructures have some features (embeddedness in layers of structures, the wider scope in space and time, their taken-for-grantedness, their inertia, etc.) that make them quite challenging to study and to analyse (Star 1999). Methodologically, the notion of infrastructure is fundamentally relational, since a bundle of interplays becomes an infrastructure only when it is connected for some people to organized practice: it means, then, that what an infrastructure is for some could become a topic of investigation and attention for others (practitioners, researchers). In line with the theoretical sensibility of the book (see Chapter 2), I will consider infrastructures as assemblages. In a publication on datafication and information systems in the case of US education, the concept has been usefully applied to the analysis of the infrastructure of accountability (Anagnostopoulos, Rutledge and Jacobsen 2013). Here, school data infrastructures are analysed as assemblages of people, technologies and policies that extend far beyond the realm of data management to include networks of practices, organizations, institutions, circuits of expertise, parents, stakeholders and other audiences that are partly both their users and producers. It is possible to see how school data infrastructure emerges from a concatenation of diverse and somewhat separate elements developed in different space-times. It draws attention to the public– private partnerships, institutional configuration, digital applications, texts, documents, server computers and knowledge, etc., constituting the technical and social ‘machinery’ of the infrastructure.

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It further illustrates how the assemblages of people, technology and policies are not leading to simple representations. School data infrastructures activate new topologies of education at local and global levels, affecting the conceptualization of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ school performances. The policies of transparency translate logics of accountability and improvement, fostering a broad datafication of the ecology of school practice realized through quantification, classification and measurement of the different characteristics of school performances and processes. That way, they support the unfolding of spaces of comparison, made possible by the processes of commensuration of input, process and output educational items. The fabrication of these spaces can serve many purposes: it can provide spaces of exercise where schools are expected to participate in a practice of selfevaluation, or in an open competition with other schools; they can be spaces of guidance where other users, like parents, are helped to make informed choices and avoid risking a bad decision in terms of school applications; or they can have a general aim of supporting evidence-based policymaking as in the case of school data infrastructure, such as the Education GPS that is also intended to provide data for educational researchers. Whatever the purpose, these spaces have several shades of transparency. Regardless of the intention, a school data infrastructure is not a definitive shift from opacity to school transparency. It rather enacts a complex game of transparency between what is to be displayed and what is to be concealed. In the next section, I will present the case of ‘SiC’, the public search engine of Italian schools that shares some of its characteristics with RAISEonline and MySchool in Australia. I will start the description of the case from the announcement of a new release of the search engine and then reconstruct its history backwards: the infrastructural inversion of the platform will disclose its assemblage of people, technology and policies.

Schools as houses of glass On 3 November 2015, the press office of the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research of Italy, reported the achievement of a significant outcome for the educational system. The then minister of the Renzi Government, Stefania Giannini, declared: This is an extraordinary day for our country! Schools have demonstrated great maturity and responsibility, by making their data transparent. We are in front of a powerful instrument bringing us into the avant-garde in Europe. In one year,

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What had been so important in that day to deserve the minister’s statement? What is the ‘powerful instrument’ putting the Italian education system among the leading countries of Europe? Why have schools been tested to prove their maturity and responsibility in displaying their data? What exactly does it mean to say that Italian schools since that date are more transparent than before? Does it imply they were opaque before? By retracing the history leading to these statements, it is possible to reply to these questions. The minister makes this declaration during the conference in Rome to present the web platform ‘SiC’. The ‘powerful instrument’ is SiC, a web platform that makes available on the internet a massive amount of data and information about schools (http://cercalatuascuola.istruzione.it/ cercalatuascuola/). The declaration of the minister contains two keywords: ‘transparency’ and ‘responsibility’. SiC is a public web platform displaying school data and feeding information that invites users to search for schools, analyse them and compare their characteristics, and is linked to online public services like school registration. SiC is also a public space for making schools fully accountable for their learning outcomes, school practices and inputs and strategies for restructuring educational practices and performances in an ongoing attempt at fostering and possibly realizing better results regarding the quality of education. It makes the school self-evaluation report and the school plan for improvement available, two significant documents where schools reveal their strengths and weaknesses and take public responsibility for their commitment to improving their educational provision and performances. The minister’s words, and in particular her emphasis, illustrate how the configuration of SiC is an accomplishment, that is, a macro assemblage that is an interesting point of entry to understand the contemporary development of the digital governance of education in Italy. In the following, I will first pay attention to the actual configuration of SiC, that is, to its contemporary singularity as an online assemblage. I will then draw attention to the history of the platform, and in particular, to how the present configuration emerged. I will highlight how these assemblages are made of various layers, sometimes visible, sometimes not entirely accessible to the wider public on the internet, in a game of transparency and opacity. In describing the history, I will draw on public documents and

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interviews with major officials of the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research, while I will analyse the platform, as already done in the case of ETM in Chapter 3, via a semiotics analysis of the contemporary configuration on the web.

The configuration of ‘SiC’ SiC is the institutional search engine and open data web platform of Italian schools. It is a complex assemblage of data, software and practices interlocking schools, technical expertise, the ministry and related agencies. SiC is aimed at enacting a space of research and investigation where schools are given the identity of transparent and responsible organizations. In this section, before I describe its history, I will draw attention to the singularity of SiC and its contemporary configuration by analysing the semiotics of its configuration, that is, its materiality as an artefact and as a set of a script. In particular, I will illustrate first the plastic configuration, its corporal and enunciation level, and second, I will briefly introduce the scripts that will be investigated when I focus on the emergence and consolidation of SiC as an assemblage. In looking at the ‘home’ page of SiC, its plastic configuration (Mattozzi 2010) is composed of a light blue background, and several nested forms: the placeholder, the sphere, the rectangle (see Figure 4.1). The homepage is completed by the contrast between the three lines located in the top left corner of the page, and, in the top right corner, the logo of the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research. In the centre of the page, the placeholder is repeated three times by analogy and by difference. A large placeholder made of a collage of words surrounds two other ones: a white placeholder and a light blue placeholder included in a white sphere. The large placeholder has a downward-pointing spike, and evokes the effect of a drop in liquid by producing ripples around the point of the spike. The white placeholder, in turn, surrounds an internal ‘eye’ and lies on a white filled ellipsis. On the left side, there is another sphere that includes a magnifying lens, while on the right side, there is a sphere that includes a sort of dotted arrow sketched by parallel light blue lines. By default, the sphere on the left activates a white rectangle divided by a line into two parts: in the lower part, a wide rectangle depicted in black, and a narrow green rectangle. On the bottom, a rectangle of the same dimension is

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Figure 4.1 ‘Scuola in Chiaro’ home page

filled in blue and put in contrast with the white rectangle. By clicking on the sphere at the centre, the one with the placeholder within, another horizontally oriented rectangle is activated that surrounds on the right a geographical map, and on the left, white rectangles for research, two rectangles with scroll-down menus and asterisks, two squares with tick boxes and filled grey rectangles on the lower side. Also, some placeholders on the top of the map are coloured in blue, orange and green. Finally, by clicking on the sphere with the dotted arrow inside, another rectangle oriented along a vertical line brings a scrolldown menu, tick boxes and an open rectangle on a white background. A greencoloured rectangle lies at the bottom of the vertical rectangle. Contrasts and differences are solicited by the spheres and the diverse complex articulation of the rectangles linked to the spheres. At the corporal level, the homepage presents an overall body coloured in light blue with the placeholders; on this layer, the rectangle linked to the sphere with the lens is given prominence and appears by default. The other rectangles related to the spheres with the placeholder and the arrow are activated only on demand by moving the pointer on the screen. Rectangles are, in turn, bodies constituted by a white layer that enframes other rectangles, maps, scroll-down menus and tick boxes. The scripts of SiC permit three kinds of research, and accordingly, different types of enunciations to ‘give value’ to the research: (1) a quick search, (2) a search by location and (3) advanced research (see Figures 4.2 and 4.3). The quick search can start with any value (school name, municipality, city, etc.), and gives a list of schools. The search by location asks for an address, area,

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range of kilometres or type of school, and displays the results on a map or as a list. Finally, the advanced research has more fields (regions, provinces, type of instruction, etc.), and presents the findings as a list of schools. Whatever the search, SiC gives mostly a list of schools or some placeholders on a geographical map in the case of a search by location. The lists are then the point of departure for making comparisons among schools (a maximum of six schools at a time), or to analyse school profiles more in detail. The comparison among schools is limited to some basic variables (number of students, classrooms, number of students per class, etc.), while data and information concerning individual schools are quite extensive, and cover a lot of the characteristics of the ecology of education practice. Data are provided by the ministry and by the schools that interact to collect, check and update the information according to different practices (see Figure 4.4).

The history of SiC SiC started as a project at the end of 2011. The ministry already collected school data and elaborated on many statistics and reports on education policies and practices (enough to refer to statistics about personnel, early school leaving, etc.). It did so as a direct task via the statistical office, or as a by-product of the work of its many departments in following the activities of policymaking and implementation. More recently, it was also possible to download some open

Figure 4.2 ‘Scuola in Chiaro’ search by location

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Figure 4.3 ‘Scuola in Chiaro’ advanced research

data from the ministry website, taken from the institutional repertoires, albeit the data were furnished in a form that favoured ‘skilled users’ able to process them with the use of classically simple and more sophisticated statistical tools. Besides this ministerial source, many school websites on the internet provided additional information and data on school projects, activities and results with the effect of multiplying the excess of information about the schools. The SiC project was born, then, to introduce principles of order in the information and data about schools, and to channel the complex repertoires of schools by diverse interlocking data sets within the ministry. The core idea was to make ‘available in organic form all the information related to all the Italian schools’ (my translation, Circular n. 108 MIURAOODGSSSI Prot. 6756, 27 December 2011). The aim was to build a ‘whole’ that included in a systematic way the many scattered, fragmented and, to some extent, disordered information about Italian schools. The project is not a simple representation; it is a reconfiguration of the schools to make them more transparent on the internet. To this end, a dedicated section of the ministry website, called SiC, would publish some of the available data in the ministerial data sets, and additional information would be provided and regularly updated by the school according to a table of content and common templates. At this stage, SiC consists of (1) the available data from the ministry; (2) the uploading application located in the Information System of Education (SIDI), the overall information system and the point of access for many administrative,

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Figure 4.4 ‘Scuola in Chiaro’ findings

financial and managerial school operations that draws on a centralized data set covering all the information related to schools; (3) additional and updated data from schools; and (4) a geolocalizing application to show the school location on a map, enacted by necessary information about the school (school code, address, postal code, etc.). SiC would have allowed the development of new online services. A crucial shift, here, occurred when SiC was related to online school applications. The knowledge base of SiC could be of help in making informed school choices: it opened the possibility for parents and students to submit school applications by drawing on extended, certified and standardized data sets. The rationale of the link between SiC and school applications reinforced the association: the more informed, the better the school choice. Once the SiC-school application link was established, the development of SiC involved a set of steps where the web platform underwent some refinements and enlargements until the minister’s announcement at the end of 2015, when it had a substantial refurbishment. Refinements and enlargements reinforced the territorialization of SiC on the internet and gave the platform its growing and emerging identity, connecting disparate elements.

Online school application The association of SiC with the online procedure for submitting school applications is made explicit in most of the Ministerial circulars and notes published by the print office of the ministry from 2012 to 2015 (see Table 4.1).

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Every year, the circulars remind readers of the timeline for updating school data, and in particular, the tasks to be performed by the department of the ministry and by the school, and the variations concerning the procedures from the previous year. Here, the concatenation between the items making up SiC is displayed and communicated to the parents that will be involved in making informed choices about schools. A note by the print office of the ministry clarifies what parents would have seen when clicking on the internet address (Print Office Note, 12 January 2012). SiC would have made school profiles. In particular, profiles would have been articulated in seven areas: (1) home page, that is, the core information about the school with the chance of including an image of the institute; (2) didactics, that is, information on educational activities, and in particular, the plan of the educational provision (POF), timetable, specific projects and office hours; (3) services, that is, online services (certificates, school reports, etc.), school canteen, library, concert hall, theatre, meeting rooms, facilities and so on; (4) students, that is, data on the number of students per school year, completion rate, distribution of marks at final examinations, average number of students per class, number of licentiate students and so on; (5) staff, that is, number of teachers, civil servants, technicians, percentage of teachers according to the type of contract (temporary, or permanent), rate of absence from work, rate of teaching turnover; (6) finance, that is, indicators from the balance sheet concerning school funds distributed by source; and (7) evaluation, that is, information on the assessment of learning outcomes. The design of these profiles would have allowed parents to know more about the schools, to navigate through the profiles and to eventually compare them and make a ‘good’ school choice. Of course, the chance of realizing this objective relies on robust information and regular updating of data. Consequently, in SIDI, an application would have allowed schools to upload their data and information throughout the year and to make them available in SiC. A handbook (Scuola in Chiaro – Guida Operativa, 3 January 2012) and a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ 19 January 2012) was then created to give detailed information about the schools’ tasks in the overall process of updating information. The handbook described in detail the application available in SIDI and furnished suggestions and hints to facilitate the schools in the completion of their tasks. When it comes to the latter, the first implementation of the online school application resulted in some questions from users and schools that required additional clarification.

Table 4.1 History of ‘Scuola in Chiaro’ Documents

Author

Government

27 December 2011

Circolare n. 108 MIURAOODGSSSI prot. 6756

DGSSSI

Monti (18 November 2011–21 December 2012)

30 December 2011 12 January 2012 19 January 2012 16 April 2012 27 September 2013

MIURAOODGSSSI prot. N. 6865 ‘Al via il progetto la “Scuola in Chiaro” FAQ ‘Scuola in Chiaro’ AOODGSSSI prot. n. 1774/RU/U, Scuola in Chiaro – GPS ‘Aggiornamento Scuola in Chiaro’

DGSSSI Press Office Not Specified DGSSSI DGSSSI

31 October 2013 8 November 2013 21 November 2014

MIURAOODGSSSI prot. 2667/RU/U, ‘Osservatorio Tecnologico’ AOODGSSSI prot. n. 2728/RU/U ‘Aggiornamento 2013–14’ MIUR.AOODGCASIS Prot. 0003159 ‘Aggiornamento 2014–15’

DGSSSI DGSSSI DGSSSI

3 November 2015 16 December 2015 18 December 2015 21 December 2015

‘Da oggi on line i Rapporti di autovalutazione delle scuole’ ‘Iscrizioni on line’ Aggiornamento 2015–16 ‘Scuola. Pubblicata la circolare sulle iscrizioni’

Press Office Press Office DGSSSI Press Office

Letta (30 April 2013–14 February 2014)

Renzi (25 February 2014–12 December 2016)

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Date

Legend: DGSSSI (Department of the Ministry: Dipartimento per la programmazione e la gestione delle risorse umane, finanziarie e strumentali – Direzione generale per gli studi, la statistica e i sistemi informativi); Press Office (Press Office of the Ministry)

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While SiC is visible on the internet, SIDI has a limited access provided only to school administrators and head teachers. Moreover, both are authored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services Italia – Auselda AED Group – Accenture, that is, the joint venture of companies coordinated by Hewlett Packard Service Italia (HP) responsible for the infrastructure and the management of ministry data. Here, we are bringing a key layer of the digital governance of education in Italy to the forefront: the private technical partners of the ministry. Two companies of this network, HP and Accenture, are multinational enterprises with extensive links to public administrations all over the world. The network of firms, and in particular HP, transformed the portfolio of the ministry applications entirely: they are fundamental to the overall information system of the ministry, the infrastructure of data and the development of specific software and applications for school management. However, while the notes and ministerial circulars are open to scrutiny, technical partners tend to be ‘hidden’ and to remain in the background, in spite of the relevant investment and increasing confidence in the digitalization of education policy and practice. Moreover, while notes and circulars are written in a bureaucratic style, their documents are articulated in a technical mode addressed to an administrative audience and intended to accompany the successful workings of the applications according to a problemand-solution mode of writing. Finally, circulars and notes have a signature, a name and a surname; here, technical documents lack names and surnames while referring to the collective of the networks of enterprises. The presence of this consortium reveals that digital governance draws on a technical partnership that translates political aims and bureaucratic lines into an apparatus composed of an infrastructure of data and a set of interlocking software applications. This translation is oriented to find a balance between uniformity and difference. For instance, the application form to submit has a standard protocol; however, if wished, and according to specific goals, this protocol can be personalized by the schools. Flexibility is then guaranteed in a common framework that materializes the idea of a regulated school autonomy. Further, there is an effort at refining the application, and to broaden the school data available for inspection. In 2012, a note invited users to correct, through an improved version of the application in SIDI, school geolocalization in the case of misplaced locations on the maps (AOODGSSSI Prot. n. 1774/RU/U, 19 April 2012). In 2013, further changes concerned the data sets and the web platform. First, the available school data were enlarged with a new collection of data concerning the technological assets of each school. To this end, a further section in SIDI was opened, and

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schools were asked to contribute to the collection of data on the ‘technological capital’ of schools regarding computers, labs, multimedia technologies and so on (MIURAOODGSSSI prot. 2667/RU/U, Osservatorio Tecnologico, 31 October 2013). Second, SiC was reshaped with a new search engine aimed at filtering information more efficiently, and presented a renewed section on didactics (AOODGSSSI Prot. n. 2728/RU/U, 8 November 2013). For the search engine, two new possibilities were introduced, concerning primary and lower secondary schools, to select schools according to the ‘school time’. The changes in the section on didactics, on the contrary, regarded the display of the educational provision. This latter update could also highlight the type of course and the school time, and schools could advertise the opening of new classes in advance, a possibility particularly useful during the period of school selection. Corresponding amendments in the SIDI application would have permitted schools with a scroll-down link to select authorized new types of courses for the next year. Another subsequent circular announced significant changes related to the need to align SiC with the reform ‘La Buona Scuola’, a broad strategy of change in the Italian education system introduced by the Renzi Government in the late summer of 2014. ‘La Buona Scuola’ envisaged a new release of SiC. We have almost reached the time of the minister’s statement, yet to give a complete account, in the next subsection I will take the reader on a small, yet related, detour. There is convergence, here, with an important change in the Italian education system: the consolidation of the system of evaluation.

The construction of the system of evaluation As I have illustrated so far, SiC constitutes its identity in its relationship with the online school application. This practical achievement enabled the mobilization of the energies of schools, the ministry and the technical partners in sustaining and consolidating the new assemblage of data and applications on the web page. However, the availability of information on the internet and informed school choice are not the only purposes of this platform. The investment in SiC is also related to the dynamics of the constitution of the national system of school evaluation. The common framework for ordering data and information, the school profile, was already articulated to offer a section on evaluation. As was clear in the first presentation of SiC, the policy of transparency was oriented to give information, to develop online services like the school application and to allow comparisons among schools with the idea of soliciting in a ‘soft way’ the

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improvement of school performances. SiC does not make any ranking among the schools, and it is not oriented to a logic of benchmarking, but it has nonetheless hosted an enriched evaluation section of school profiles since the new release published on 3 November 2015 that included the school self-evaluation report and school plan of improvement. That way, schools are made transparent, also in the process of evaluation, and, as the minister said in the initial statements I have reported, take public responsibility for the improvement. The shift synchronized SiC with the construction of the national system of evaluation and happened at the end of the full digitalization of self-evaluation reporting. The history of the national system of evaluation brings us to the late 1990s. ‘Evaluation’ is a critical theme, and the constitution of a system of evaluation developed slowly, and not without raising controversies, debates and conflicts about its pros and cons, and accusations of neoliberalism, conservatism and so on. The need for a national system of evaluation arose when schools were attributed more autonomy, and the rhetoric of governance translated at the end of the 1990s into an extensive project of reculturing the education field (Grimaldi and Serpieri 2012). The ‘planetspeak’ discourses here suggest a move from the government to the governance of education, from hierarchy to heterarchy, from top-down to network forms of governmentality, including a plurality of institutional and organizational expectations. The same global agenda suggested counterbalancing the possible adverse effects of ‘school autonomy’ with ‘systems of accountability’. The disordered effects and potential increase in the inequalities related to increased school autonomy would require the control of a system of evaluation. Of course, there are many ways of developing a system of accountability, since there is not a straightforward and unique trajectory to constitute a system of evaluation. In the case of Italy, the setup of the latter draws on the knowledge base provided by INVALSI, the Institute for the Evaluation of the Education System that was constituted in the second half of 1999 (Legislative Decree n. 259, 20 July 1999). The knowledge base has two pillars: the standardized national testing (INVALSI tests) and the report for self-evaluation (called RAV). INVALSI tests are mostly shaped by the model of large-scale international assessments, albeit they are oriented by the objectives of the guidelines for the Italian curricula. Since 2008, census-based testing concerns all students in the second and fifth grades of primary school, sixth and eighth grades of lower secondary school, and tenth (end of the compulsorily schooling) and twelfth grades of upper secondary school. RAV, on the contrary, is an attempt at broadening the school evaluation and drawing on an assisted process of school self-evaluation composed of a

Table 4.2 Self-evaluation report (RAV) Documents

Author

28 March 2013

DPR 80 Regolamento sul sistema nazionale di valutazione

MIUR

18 September 2014

Direttiva, n. 11 ‘Priorità strategiche del Sistema nazionale di Valutazione per gli anni scolastici 2014/2015, 2015/2016 e 2016/2017’ Circolare 47 AOODGOSV – Prot. n. 0006257 Nota MIUR.AOODGCASIS. 0000767.27-02-2015 Nota Prot. 1738 Orientamenti per l’elaborazione del Rapporto di Autovalutazione Nota Prot. 3746 MIUR.AOODGOSV.REGISTRO UFFICIALE(U).0003746.30-04-2015 Nota Prot. n.7904 del 2 settembre 2015 Nota tecnica, Riapertura del RAV: Situazioni particolari Nota tecnica SNV – Riapertura e aggiornamento del Rapporto di autovalutazione per l’a.s. 2015/16 Nota prot.n. 6809 del 20-06-2016 ‘Chiarimenti in merito al Rapporto di autovalutazione per l’a.s. 2015/2016’

21 October 2014 27 February 2015 2 March 2015 30 April 2015 01 September 2015 09 September 2015 15 April 2016 20 June 2016

Government

Monti (18 November 2011–21 December 2012) MINISTER Renzi (25 February 2014–9 December 2016) DGOSV DGSSSI DGOSV DGOSV DGOSV

DGOSV DGOSV

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Date

Legend: DGOSV (Dipartimento per il sistema educativo dell’istruzione e della formazione, D.G. per gli Ordinamenti scolastici e la Valutazione del S.N.I.); DGSSSI (Department of the Ministry: Dipartimento per la programmazione e la gestione delle risorse umane, finanziarie e strumentali – Direzione generale per gli studi, la statistica e i sistemi informativi); Press Office (Press Office of the Ministry)

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complex infrastructure of data, protocols and rubrics. Self-evaluation is not limited to testing but includes other items and a corresponding set of indicators. The inspiring model, here, is explicitly the CIPP evaluation framework (Context, Input, Process, Product) (Stufflebeam 2000). The consolidation of the two pillars requires some experimentation. Therefore, the national system of evaluation (SNV) was first codified in 2013 (Legislative Decree n. 80) and made operational in September 2014 by the ministry (see Table 4.2). SNV draws on three organizations: (1) INVALSI, that is, its coordinator; (2) INDIRE, which is the national agency dependent on the ministry, and has the task of supporting the schools in their project of improvement; and (3) the body of school inspectors of the ministry. The core of SNV is school self-evaluation: a supported knowledge-based process interlocking ministry data sets and school collected data, information and self-reflection, which is oriented mostly at school improvement, and, more widely, at organizational learning. The tasks of data collection and school self-evaluation, in this case, were performed schoolby-school by head teachers and groups of selected teachers with (at least it was suggested) the widest possible school participation. In particular, the whole process was framed by a digital platform called POU (an acronym standing for the operational uniform platform). In practice, schools were guided in an exercise of comparison on several items, which were broadly related to operationalized outcomes and processes regarding test performances and educational indicators. The exercise draws on data from (1) several data sets provided by the ministry, and (2) national standardized testing and a collection of school data furnished by INVALSI. For the latter, data collection from schools was carried out using a questionnaire, and additional benchmarks for educational indicators besides the testing were provided in the platform (March 2015). The first round of self-evaluation was then ready to be launched, and schools were expected to complete it and to make the results available on the internet in SiC by July 2015. By drawing on the RAV framework, the digital platform enacts a school-like space of commensurability. Head teachers and task forces of teachers will be the compilers of the reports articulated in three sections of analysis: (1) Context, (2) Processes and (3) Outcomes. A final section concerns the priorities for school improvement: here, by comparison, schools are expected to develop positive trends regarding objectives to be achieved for the next three years. ‘Context’, ‘Processes’ and ‘Outcomes’ contain a set of indicators and benchmarks intended to facilitate school self-evaluation. Several questions are provided to enable reflection when mapping the ‘constraints’ and ‘opportunities’ in the case of ‘Context’. Additional questions regarding ‘weaknesses’ and ‘strengths’ are aimed

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at easing the understanding of the condition of possibility of ‘Processes’ and ‘Outcomes’. Finally, schools are asked to (1) appraise themselves on a scale from one to seven – where one is the lowest rank, and the less desirable, and seven is the mark of ‘excellence’, and the highest position; and (2) elaborate the reason for the mark with the help of rubrics of evaluation that describe in a discursive way the motivation behind the marks. The digital platform then helps the schools not only to position themselves in the space of commensurability but also gives them ready-made codes to speak about their performance in the exercise of evaluation.

Shades of transparency The envisaged deadline for completing the first round of compilation of RAV was postponed to the end of September 2015 to allow all schools to complete the self-evaluation and to make the outcomes ready to be displayed in SiC. It was then at the beginning of November 2015 that the minister could announce that the new version of SiC was available: the trajectory of the online school application and the construction of the system of evaluation was finally met. She could then declare that more and more data should improve the schools, by making them less opaque and more responsible. Digitalization introduced, however, new dilemmas concerning their public accountability on the internet. How transparent and open to inspection should the self-evaluation be? Is the school self-evaluation mainly an internally oriented process, albeit framed as a digitally augmented protected space of reflection? In other words, how should this space be visible from the outside? This issue concerns, in a straightforward way, the policy of transparency. Digital technologies work here as ‘gatekeepers’: they can leave the door open to see, or close it to the view. The default option of POU was to publish all the information on the internet, except for a meta-evaluation section, where schools furnished information and elaborate judgements on the whole process of self-evaluation. Designers and policymakers seem to shape a wide open policy of transparency. Whether schools agree with this choice or not, they have to take an active role in the digital platform. Head teachers, in particular, are asked to decide between the shades of transparency when they publish the reports of self-evaluation, either by accepting the default option or by deselecting some indicators they are not interested in displaying openly. It is important to note that this choice is not reversible since it is given in the

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timeframe of the opening of the digital platform that depends ultimately on the departments of the ministry. In submitting and closing the self-evaluation report by the agreed deadline, head teachers are informed that RAV will be displayed in (1) complete, or (2) simplified mode. The complete mode implies that all details of the school self-evaluation are completely open to being seen on the internet; the simplified mode, on the contrary, summarizes the selfevaluation in a diagram composed of the marks schools have decided to assign to themselves on the items concerning Processes and the Outcomes. In sum, in submitting the RAV, self-evaluation reports are publicly visible and are then instantiated in three ways: as a diagram, as a list of selected indicators and as printed and digital documents. Several constraints on transparency concern the data available in printed and digital documents in SiC. In particular, it was decided to make public all the selected indicators and the additional indicators provided by the schools except for data regarding the ECSC of school students and the percentages of families in each school with both parents unemployed. Further, the Outcomes section would limit the publication of the indicators ‘differences in language and mathematics with school-like profile’ and ‘variance between the classrooms’, concerning the outcomes related to standardized national testing (see the transcription from the video on the ministry website). The former was introduced to avoid the stigmatization of schools with the lowest socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, while the latter was to counter a concern about the use of data from the Outcomes in standardized national testing. The issue was raised for public debate by a major trade union of teachers (FLCCGIL). The publication of some indicators (scores on language and mathematics by the overall school, classroom, school sites and so on.) would have permitted the development of school rankings at national, regional and local level. The details of the data, in particular, would have furnished information on the ‘best performing classrooms’ in the national standardized testing, and create generalizations of the best performing teachers according to the students’ results in testing. This implementation would have been encouraged by the default option of the publication, that, as I have illustrated, implies a focused attention by the head teachers and, in case of non-compliance with that option, a commitment to define a policy of transparency in the school self-evaluation report on the internet. With the idea of assuring a more effective safeguard, the trade union presented an appeal to the Italian data protection authority (FLC-CGIL 2015). The appeal argued that the complete publication of the data could harm or reduce the teachers’ professional autonomy. Accordingly,

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the contestation suggested that the ministry should limit, as I have said, the transparency of school data on the outcomes in SiC.

Conclusions In this concluding section of the chapter, I will sum up and discuss the findings by reflecting on the power of these digital technologies. They instantiate a regime of visibility that highlights some aspects of schooling and puts other items of the ecology of practice in the background. In so doing they contribute to the reshaping of what a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ school is. School data infrastructures are the building blocks of the digital governance of education. They are intended to make schools ‘transparent’, that is, to transform them into houses of glass that can be seen through, and to enact new topologies of education. The detailed description in the case of SiC, the public search engine of Italian schools, illustrates both the building of an infrastructure and the power of school data infrastructures.

Assemblage of people, technology and policy SiC emerges as an assemblage of people, technology and policy. I have illustrated how it has grown from a project to finally becoming a web platform; this materialization has given the platform some consistency by interlocking different heterogenous layers. The history of SiC has revealed dilemmas and tensions behind the peaceful scene of the web pages. The investigation of these digital technologies is, then, an interesting entry point to mapping the configurations of the digital governance of education. SiC in its singularity is an interface that has a specific configuration of plastic, corporal and figurational items on the internet. This singularity – as I have illustrated – is an effect of an ongoing history, so that the interface is a layer in a complex concatenation. SiC intersects the departments and offices of the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research; the National Agency for the evaluation of the system of instruction (INVALSI); a consortium of technical and private enterprises; and the administrative, managerial and educational staff of the schools. Of particular interest, here, is the public–private partnership that is one of the pillars of the search engine, and of the overall information system of schools in Italy. This partnership concerns the collaboration between the ministry and a joint venture of enterprises coordinated by the Italian branch of

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HP, a leading multinational company in the field of e-government. SiC is made possible by the invisible work of the staff of these companies. The collaboration with the ministry is considered by HP Italia as one of the best projects of the company and has also been the topic of publication in an international book on the development of e-government all over the world (Smith and Laszewski, 2010). The partnership allowed an overall process of rationalization of the information system of the ministry. The architecture of the collaboration and the affordance of the new technologies reinforced the centralization of the information system, renewing the centralistic heritage of the educational system while at the same time giving rise to a market of satellite companies providing applications and consultancy services for school management. This regulated market is paving the way to the integrated school information system intended to increase the interoperability of applications among the information systems of the ministry and the package of applications utilized by schools. SiC draws on a network of practices crossing diverse organizations in the field of education. It is a ‘gathering’ point for the analysis and updating of data produced by the ministry, data collection, and self-evaluation by the school; the testing and framing of the self-evaluation of INVALSI; and school selection. SiC is also the locus of a digital recomposition of school data. The application in SIDI permits the collection of data from school administrators, while the POU application guides the self-evaluation made by the head teacher and a selected team of teachers at the schools. SiC, as a search engine, interconnects school data via the interface for analysis and comparison. The ontology of SiC is then given by algorithms that inform the search engine and that, in this case, retrieve school data profiles according to three possibilities: simple, geographical and advanced research. Algorithms are written by the technical partners of the ministry and translate the expectations of policies. Here, the search engine appears more oriented towards providing information on single school profiles than on a comparison between schools. Even the lists retrieved from the platform are not ranked according to some standard or specific benchmark. The development of the system of evaluation tends to privilege school self-evaluation and the forms of improvement not triggered by a ‘high stakes’ logic of accountability. The appeal against the default option of publication prevented, in some way, the unfolding of a competitive arena among school performances. Finally, SiC emerges out of the intersection between multiple policies. As a matter of fact, the platform promotes (1) a policy of open data, by making ‘transparent on the internet’, some school data sets; (2) a policy of informed school choice, by providing parents and students with a protocol and an

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organized school data environment for school selection with a lot of information about key items of school outcomes and processes; and (3) a policy of school self-evaluation, by involving schools in a process of assessment of pedagogical choices, processes and performances that is made visible to the external ‘eyes’ of stakeholders and school constituencies. The intersection developed over time as the search engine increasingly became an ‘attractor’ of previously unconnected educational policies.

The power of school data infrastructures Once in place, SiC is a multipurpose search engine that emerges as an assemblage of people, technology and policy. It comes out, as we have seen, from a difficult and complex intersection of elements that are partially independent of one another. What is the power of this search engine? And, more generally, what is the power of school data infrastructures? SiC performs and reinforces a standardization of school data and information. Technically, it is a web portal that puts together data and information from diverse sources in a uniform way. The plurality of schools is made comparable by a standard, the school profile, that in turn interconnects standardized data and protocols. While schools may have institutional websites displaying the diversity of their activities, SiC brings them into a web platform according to a common frame, that is, seven areas that select key information. That way, the somewhat disorderly and thick descriptions of the school activities are translated into ‘thin’ school standard descriptions. This operation of selection contributes to shaping what it is to be a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ school. It does not do so in a straightforward way, but by shaping the informational basis to arrive at this judgement. In the case of school choice, parents and students are invited to go to SiC to get information on schools, to compare them and to make an informed choice. School profiles, here, act as a screening device for drawing the choice on the most reliable information. This means that parents and students are redirected to digital technology to take a decision and are not relying only on what appears on the school websites, on the information provided by school visits, by meetings with the teachers or on what is heard about schools in informal ways. When it comes to school self-evaluation, it is clear that this is not a closed question, but a process open to an external view. In that respect, SiC materializes a regime of visibility where schools are asked to become accountable both for self-evaluation and also for the responsibilities they take to achieve their promised future improvements. In this regime of visibility, stakeholders and

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school constituencies have a chance to look at school performance standards, and at the standard protocols for school self-evaluation. They can profit from the data collected and analysed for that purpose to draw some conclusions about the functioning of the schools. At the same time, schools are expected to develop a reflection and assume strategies to meet performance standards by comparing themselves with schools in the same socio-economic conditions. The transparency implies a public assumption of responsibility for present and future performances. Finally, this data infrastructure exercises its power by its materialization. School profiles, performance standards, standard protocols and so on are embedded in digital technologies. It appears ‘natural’, ‘objective’ or ‘flexible’ only within the limits and the conditions of the platform. Its materialization then solicits compliance with its rules and truths, by constraining and reshaping the conditions of human agency (Anagnostopoulos et al. 2013). It displaces school choice and school evaluation in new topologies enacted and augmented by digital technologies. Of course, there is not any determinism between these materializations and school compliance. In the next chapter, I will highlight how schools use these infrastructures: they can align to them or resist them, and their responses are not entirely predictable. On the other hand, there is an overall tendency towards the exercise of power by an increasing imbrication of data and digital technologies. This imbrication is taken for granted and represents by now a ‘second nature’ of the contemporary education policy and practice.

5

The Use of School Data Infrastructures: ‘Secret Algorithms’ and the Data-Based Governance

Introduction In the previous chapter, I illustrated the fabrication of a school data infrastructure by highlighting how it is emerging as a complex and nevercompleted assemblage of people, technologies and policies. This chapter will draw attention instead to the use of school data infrastructures, that is, how they are mobilized in practice. The diffusion of national standardized testing, large-scale survey assessments, the promotion of policies of self-evaluation and so on are making large amounts of data on education systems available and transforming schools into collecting units for a notable range of educational, institutional and socio-economic indicators. The datafication and related digital technologies for collecting, analysing, retrieving and displaying data activate, at least in principle, new spaces of visibility and forms of school data-based managerialism. However, there is not a direct and automatic causality between the massive accumulation of data, organizational governance and organizational improvement. While the policy of transparency is oriented to the development and consolidation of data-based school governance, its implementation in practice remains an open question. It solicits investigation of the enactment of school data infrastructures to understand their mobilization in the governance of schooling. This chapter will focus on (1) the increasing delegation to algorithms and (2) school databased governance. Algorithms are ubiquitous ‘characters’ of the digital world. They are lines of code instructions aimed at performing tasks in almost automatic modes. They are constitutive of school data infrastructures since they are recursively designed to elaborate, make connections among data and facilitate educational

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management and administration. Digital data exceed the capacity of elaboration and create the conditions, often at the level of the governing bodies of education systems, for the design of algorithms to help in making sense of data and orienting educational policymaking. On the other hand, and particularly at the level of schools, the enactment of school data infrastructures is partly unpredictable. Schools can align with the digital technologies and data or they can resist this in many ways. They can fabricate their data, or use them partially and instrumentally, by gaming with the current regime of the digital governance of education. To understand whether the algorithmic systems and the emerging digital governance of education are configured to be openings for reflection and for rethinking organization or more closed apparatuses for disciplining and controlling, this chapter will analyse an algorithmic system for scrutinizing the school selfevaluation process, and the unfolding of school database governance in Italy. The chapter will first focus on how to study algorithms and school data use. Second, it will describe (1) the story of an algorithm for the meta-evaluation of school self-evaluations and (2) some strategies for implementing school databased governance. Finally, it will draw some conclusions about the diverse scenarios of the digital governance of education.

Algorithmic systems and school data uses School data infrastructures, as we have seen, are complex concatenations of people, technologies and policies. Their construction is a fragile composition that activates spaces of comparison among sites of education augmented by digital technologies. School data infrastructures permit a datafication of the world of education and contain several ‘scripts’ to, for instance, elaborate, display, search and retrieve this data for many possible purposes (school choices, self-evaluation, ranking, etc.). While their design is oriented to specific goals, in practice, the enactments of school data infrastructures are open to uncertainty. The use of these infrastructures can be ‘surprising’ since it rarely follows the intended purposes, or at least, the expectations of designers and policymakers. The enactment of school data infrastructures is then a ‘test-bed’ to understand how they intersect, interplay and impact with the ecology of education policy and practice. Like any object or technology, school data infrastructures can be used in many ways, some of them not entirely predictable. The concept of ‘enactment’ is taken here precisely to bring to the forefront that the digital

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governance of schooling may assume diverse instantiations, often unexpected by designers and policymakers (Braun et al. 2011; Maguire, Braun and Ball 2015). In the following pages, I will pay attention to how digital governance translates into the development of algorithms and the unfolding of database school governance. The trend of making and using algorithms accompanies massive investments in collecting data. Big data have the effect of making more visible a given field of practice; their availability, however, can ‘exceed’ the organizational and institutional capacity of elaboration and investigation. These limitations in confronting the apparently unrestrainable need for further data and information solicit the design of helpful devices for making repetitive operations, possible sophisticated elaborations, investigation and analysis of data and, in some cases, delegating organizational and institutional services. Algorithms thus represent an ‘intelligent’ resource for using data, supporting and even automating organizational workings. The deluge of data is limited and partly made manageable by designing lines of codes that relate data, information and texts in sets of instructions for performing specific operations. Recently, there has been a new interest in the agential capacity of algorithms, and in particular, in their power for shaping organizational, institutional and individual decisions (Beer 2017; Ziewitz 2016). This issue is relevant both for the pervasiveness of algorithms in everyday life and for the role played metaphorically by the algorithms in modelling the dominant logic of ordering in contemporary societies. Investigating algorithms is not an easy task, and it was not simple in our research. Algorithms are widely employed in many tasks (such as booking a flight, or online trading); however, there is a lack of knowledge about the way they exercise power on us (Kitchin 2014). They are mostly black-boxes, beyond any question and enclosed in large infrastructures, so that it is hard to get a more in-depth understanding about how they are reshaping economic and social life. In other words, while algorithms take consequential decisions on many occasions, there is a notable lack of knowledge on how they work in practice. It is difficult to get access to the coding and to contact the teams of coders working in private companies and for the state. It can be hard, therefore, to make observations about how programmers work, to interview them and to analyse how they translate the scenario and logic of problem-solving into the lines of programming code they are using. It should be remembered that algorithms are key assets of the companies, and in some cases, even public offices are interested in keeping them secret to protect against possible gaming effects.

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Also, algorithms are quite complex to analyse since they are frequently embedded in complex algorithmic systems that see many people working at different times and towards different goals. The implication is that often there is not a single programmer that has a complete understanding of an algorithmic system. More probably, many groups of developers contribute to the working of algorithmic systems; some are distributed all over the world and work on specific segments of coding, and may ignore the interdependencies of systems of algorithms. Full access to the groups of programmers might not, then, eliminate the opacity of their work. Finally, the ontology of algorithms is always in becoming: they are contingent and emergent over time. In some cases, they are designed to change over time, to adjust themselves during any iteration, to learn, in other words, from any instantiations. They are continually refined, and their recursive character is revealed while they regularly perform operations that operate upon themselves (Totaro and Ninno 2014). The investigation of data-based school governance was more straightforward. Comparatively speaking, a striking contrast emerged in our research between the secrecy of algorithms and the openness of schools in describing their use of digital platforms and data. In mapping these enactments, it is relevant to consider the current literature on school data use, and the complex dynamics between alignment with and resistance to the digital governance of education. As a matter of fact, and despite the massive investments in school data infrastructure, a key question is the situated configuration of the use of school data to understand the stage of implementation of school data-based governance (Coburn and Turner 2011). More data do not automatically imply organizational change or improvement. The development of the database for school governance is not taken for granted. While it is among the range of possibilities, the practice of school data use and digital technologies reveals complex scenarios. In presenting their analytical framework to organize the research on school data use, Coburn and Turner bring to the forefront the processes of sensemaking that have a social and materially situated configuration (Coburn and Turner 2011). This suggests analysing in detail how noticing, interpreting and constructing implications from data occur in practice, and are affected by organizational and political context. Noticing, interpreting and constructing implications are not an individual affair, they depend on several conditions: the routine of school data use, access to data, the time to look at and analyse data, school leadership, the norms and the power relationship in which school data use develops. The enactment of school data use, and therefore the activation of

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the digital governance of schooling, relates, then, to the situated intersection of these aspects. In the next sections, I will illustrate how this occurs in four cases selected from my research on digital governance in Italy. The investigation of these dynamics highlights, and allows us to appreciate, how schools exercise their agency (Braun et al. 2011). Concerning data-based school governance, schools can align or display diverse and combined strategies of resistance. They can explicitly or implicitly accept governance by data and the associated digital technologies; they can also resist them. Of course, the concrete descriptions of the case studies can clarify the dominant response or the mix of strategies currently enacted. It is also possible to understand whether the either/or implication that accompanies a too-strict definition of school alignment versus school resistance still holds. If not, the description furnishes the range of open possibilities and details of their agency: in other words, the situated singularity of the school responses. Schools can fabricate themselves according to the principles of digital governance; they can then apparently adhere to it, opt out and so on, as well as highlight combinations of these strategies (Souto-Otero and Beneito-Montagut 2016).

The Dashboard: An algorithmic system of the Ministry School data infrastructures are not static repositories of data and information; they are, as I have illustrated in Chapter 4, dynamic assemblages of people, technologies and policies. The dynamics are also related to the applications, the software and the lines of codes, that is, to the algorithms that accompany, help, facilitate, standardize and automate the collection, elaboration and searching of data. Here, school data infrastructures stimulate the development of algorithms to make governance from a distance more effective. This gives an occasion for experimenting with the use of algorithms in the governance of education. Whether efficiency is the result, however, is a disputable point, as I will illustrate. Nonetheless, investing in algorithms could be seen as a move to reinforce the centralization of the educational system, and to reverse the imbalance of a devolved schooling environment with a renewed control by the offices of the ministry working in close collaboration with the private partners responsible for school data infrastructure. Algorithms, in other words, are not neutral; they have a politics that is possible to deconstruct.

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To illustrate this aspect, I will describe an enactment of the school data infrastructure via an algorithmic system that draws on the data, information and text of the school self-evaluation reports I have talked about in the previous chapter. The focus will be on the algorithmic system that gives rise to the Dashboard, an application designed by the Ministry Office for Evaluation, and realized by the HP service enterprise, the private company responsible for the school data infrastructure of the ministry. The application remains opaque, and it is possible to describe it only through some of the traces it has left. Its analysis, however, allows us to understand some directions of the digital governance and to further explore the dynamics of opacity and transparency. Here, the application is realized to support the implementation of the national system of evaluation. The history of the Dashboard starts with the compilation of data and information required by school self-evaluation reports (the so-called RAV – see Chapter 4 and Table 4.2 for its story). At the end of the first round, a note from the ministry clarifies some rules to have a ‘good’ self-evaluation report (note n. 7904 – 1 September 2015). The elaboration of the self-evaluation reports should meet the following criteria: (1) adequacy (‘the report is entirely compiled’), (2) coherence (‘the report has a consistency and interdependence in its parts’), (3) reliability (‘data and evidence are used in an appropriate way’), (4) relevance (‘the analysis uses all the data and information available’) and (5) concreteness (‘priorities and objectives are stated in clear and measurable ways’). The note informs that a digital formation (‘sistema informatico’ in Italian) is performing ‘automated controls’ to support head teachers and schools in this task. As the head teacher is responsible for the confirmation and publication of the self-evaluation report in ‘SiC’, the digital formation sends notifications about inconsistencies. Notifications are aimed at making schools reconsider their self-evaluations before online publication. The ‘check’ is identified with the icon of a coloured pencil. ‘Green’ means that the self-evaluation has passed the automated control. Inconsistencies, on the contrary, are classified into three types: (1) if not all pencils are coloured in green, some sections of the self-evaluation report have not been completed; (2) a school attributes a low score to an item, and does not include this item among the organizational priorities at the end of the self-evaluation report; and (3) self-evaluation and the choice of priorities for improvement relate to an item for which no evidence or certified data are provided, that is, where the system does not provide national data and benchmarks. According to the note of the ministry, the first reading of a random sample of self-evaluation reports before the

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deadline for publication in ‘SiC’ highlights a ‘weakness’ in designing objectives in measurable and operational terms. While this note is not imperative, it reveals the mobilization of knowledge, here through an algorithmic system, to orient the implementation of the selfevaluation reports in their making. It is also a shift in the steering of the policy. So far, the design of protocols for self-evaluation, the collection of school data on several protocol items, and the first pilot of the self-evaluation reporting were carried out by INVALSI, the ministry agency responsible for the coordination and construction of the national system of evaluation, which assisted and guided the schools. With the generalization of self-evaluation, the offices of the ministry take the lead in the process. This passage affects the orientation of the school self-evaluation exercise. Schools are informed that their self-evaluations have been made public via ‘SiC’ and that their reports have been checked automatically to avoid inconsistencies. The strategy is to turn the school self-evaluation into an open and controlled process. Further, a meta-evaluation of the self-evaluation is set in motion. The meta-evaluation gives the ministry information about schools’ self-assessments and permitted to refine the protocol for the evaluation of the head teachers. Additional ‘eyes’ from the internet stimulate a public assumption of responsibility for the self-assessment and the setting of priorities for school improvement. While the first piloting of the school self-evaluation was mostly aimed at reflection and research, its generalization appeared to follow the contours of a control-oriented and potentially high-stake protocol of accountability. An investment in an algorithmic system, the Dashboard, made this shift operational and connected this step to the assessment of head teachers. In the previous chapter, I described how the construction of the national system of education draws on two pillars: (1) the national standardized tests that are developed according to international large-scale survey assessment models, and (2) the self-evaluation report. However, it is important to add that the evaluation also concerns the school staff, that is, teachers and head teachers. In 2016, the schools’ assessments of the teachers’ performances led to the distribution of merit pay (‘bonus scuola’), and the ministry outlined the future scenario for evaluation of the head teacher. The history of evaluation of the head teacher dates back to the beginning of 1990 and is characterized by limited experimentation and much failure (Serpieri 2013; Gunther et al. 2016). However, a turning point is represented by the interplay, and partly by the overlap, between the priorities and the goals of the school’s improvement plans, defined as a result of the organizational self-evaluation and the objectives of

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the head teacher. The head teacher assessment consists, here, of the appraisal of their capacity to fulfil the school’s organizational goals emerging from the school self-evaluation. The self-evaluation envisages ‘areas of organizational and managerial improvement’ related to the work of the head teacher, while the school improvement plans include the goals to be assigned by the Ministerial Regional Offices to the responsibility of the school principals (comma 4 and 5 of the art. 6, DM 28 March 2013 n.80). A ‘bridge’, is thus established between the school self-evaluation and the head teacher assessment. The characteristics of the Dashboard, that is, of the digital formation that would have been of help in the meta-evaluation of the self-evaluation report and the head teacher assessment, are quite hidden, however. The Dashboard is evoked several times in institutional discourses, public presentations, etc., yet its workings are never completely disclosed. A popular national newspaper revealed some information about some of its algorithms on the occasion of the announcement of the head teacher assessment. Head teachers would be evaluated and rewarded or eventually ‘blamed’ for their capacity to meet the assigned organizational goals (‘How to evaluate a head teacher’, Paolo Di Stefano, Corriere Della Sera, 7 July 2016), by drawing on ‘grammatica valenziale’, that is, dependency grammar in linguistics (Á gel and Fischer 2009; Tesniè re 1959). The mobilization of dependency grammar was related to the collaboration between the Francesco Sabatini and the ministry offices. Sabatini is a former president of Accademia Della Crusca, a leading institution researching the Italian language, and a prominent scholar in the field. Sabatini has written hundreds of publications drawing on dependency grammar and the valency theory to suggest a more engaging pedagogy to reflect and teach language grammar (Sabatini, Camodeca and De Santis 2011). As it is well known, dependency grammar allows us to analyse the sentence by looking at the valency of the verb. The valency is the number of potential actants of a verbal carrier. Each verb can have a different valency (in English, for example, ‘to give’ has three actants, and it is trivalent). The idea was to apply the dependency grammar to the normative sentences of the school selfevaluation reports to understand their coherence and clarity. The analysis of the thousands of pages of the self-evaluation reports, however, would have required an ‘army’ of researchers and a very long time. Almost all the schools in Italy completed their self-evaluation report so that nearly 11,000 self-evaluation reports have been uploaded (8,000 public and 3,000 private schools) to the school data infrastructure. By drawing on dependency grammar, and with the

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aim of reversing the imbalance, the ministry offices, in collaboration with HP, designed an algorithmic system to scrutinize the self-evaluation reports and to check their objectives and priorities of improvement in particular. In practice, a digital formation to perform automated content analysis of the self-evaluation reports was set up. According to some users, the algorithms of the platform worked quite well, and the digital formation grew to perform additional tasks. As a ministry executive of the Office of Evaluation clarifies: You have a lot of levels of analysis that you can develop on the self-evaluation report… . What I was talking before is a quantitative analysis, since you put together a kind of assessment where you have a number that schools assign to themselves… . You link it with the data from the standardized testing (‘prove Invalsi’), and there the algorithm sees a quantity, that is whether you stay, or not, within a range… . This is the easiest you can do, and there you have many threads of quantitative investigation. (interview with the Executive, 3 November 2016)

The platform also realizes more complex analysis by including contextual socioeconomic variables related to schools. The Dashboard is visible only in limited ways, and the algorithms for the compliance check are classified. While the principles of dependency grammar and the valency theory are open to scientific investigation and debate, their translation in the lines of code of the platform is not displayed. The dependency grammar is translated in an algorithmic system and mobilized to draw attention to the ‘right way’ to frame the objectives of school improvement: You detect those verbs that are verbs of improvement. Therefore, you have a vocabulary that has been done and see whether this verb is filled with those contents that represent the ideal-typical construction of a sentence, that is a minimal sentence, i.e. whether this verb is saturated concerning its potential. It is building diverse shades of saturation, and when the verb is not saturated, that is when the sentence is not designed well, even in that case the ‘red light’ turns on… . And we say to the regional officers: Warning! According to our algorithm drawing on dependency grammar, etc. … . Of course, I say ‘turning the red light on’ to simplify, yet in having a look at what schools write in these cases there is something wrong (interview with the Executive, 3rd November 2016).

Many times, the results of the checks are made public (meetings of the ministry officers with the schools, teachers, head teachers, trade-unions and so on),

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and the map of use and the users becomes more evident. First, the platform helps to orient schools and head teachers to define their objectives; second, the Dashboard is offered to the regional offices of the ministry for the nomination of the head teachers. The Dashboard elaborates data that are presented mostly by the executive of the ministry at the many seminars for head teachers and teachers on the implementation of the head teacher’s assessment. The seminars are also a chance to hear about some descriptions of the application. By attending a seminar, I could see and describe some features of the platform: The software is framed in seven sections, and it is focused on the objectives/ priorities of the self-evaluation reports. In particular, it permits the analysis of the valency and the semantics of the texts. Further, it allows to understand the ‘compliance’ of schools, that is those schools that align with the guidelines to define their objectives and priorities and those not aligned. The histogram highlights in green the compliant school, in red the no compliant schools are pointed out, and in yellow, schools in-between that are expected to update their self-evaluation reports. On the right of the screenshot, the map of the schools of Italy with the geographical distribution of the compliance. The software also performs a more detailed analysis of school objectives and priorities, albeit it appears to prevail a strategy of check the compliance to the guidelines (source: fieldnote, seminar organized by ANDIS, Caserta, 21 October 2016; verbatim transcription from the digital registration of the seminar)

The presentation of the results of the analysis during those seminars is aimed at underlining examples of ‘good practices’, when schools comply with the rule of focusing on few strategic priorities and objectives (mostly 2 or 3), or to avoid cases of ‘bad practices’, here represented by those schools that included in their self-evaluation reports too many priorities and objectives to fulfil (an expectation of improvement perceived by the ministry offices as ‘unrealistic’). By commenting on the tables from the platform, the ministry executive highlights that: We have 35 schools with 28 objectives and 16 priorities … however, a head teacher that would like to foster the improvement cannot point … it has been written in the guidelines, we have advised two, or three objectives, because if the head teacher is aiming to 10-12-20 priorities, maybe, it is because he/she has not clear what is the role of school management… . Our expectation, we as the national system, we are expecting that if they want to make a good school focus on here, that is focusing on two, three core priorities with some 5–6 objectives on the organizational processes (Source: seminar organized by ANDIS, Caserta, 21 October 2016).

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Data are mobilized during the meetings with the head teachers to focus attention on the issue of school organizational goals and to solicit the assumption of responsibility for the objectives and priorities included in the self-evaluation reports. The knowledge reported back to head teachers also clarifies the interlocking between school self-evaluation and the head teacher assessment. It reminds us that school self-evaluation was not a mere bureaucratic exercise without tangible effects. It suggests that it will be carefully monitored by the ministry and that it will affect the way head teachers will be nominated and evaluated. While the Dashboard is not available at present to head teachers, it is accessible by the officers of the regional department of the ministry. Here, the platform offers a map of the distribution of the objectives of school improvement that will help both the definition of more specific regional goals and the nomination of head teachers, by providing their targets and the priorities. A set of scheduled meetings is offered for learning the software that is furnished to the ministry offices of the centre and at the regional level to monitor school goals and assign head teachers their objectives of management. To some extent, a loop seems to close down. Goals and priorities of improvement are defined first within the school self-evaluation; second, the ministry checks by drawing on the Dashboard whether they are defined in measurable and operative ways, and the objectives of improvement are assigned to head teachers; finally, head teachers are expected to fulfil the objectives and are evaluated for their capacity to realize them in practice. From June to September 2016, the Dashboard was mobilized to perform a compliance check by the staff of the regional offices of the ministry. This control had the effect of identifying non-compliant schools and led to the revision of their objectives and priorities of improvement. While the next release is not ready yet, the next step is to offer the Dashboard to head teachers to provide them with comparative data from across schools. As is, the Dashboard helped the ministry to control the self-evaluation, to achieve a certain degree of standardization of the process and to connect the self-evaluation with the head teacher assessment. The case of the Dashboard illustrates how the ‘deluge’ of data in education may stimulate the unfolding of algorithms and automated forms of control intended to reinforce the processes of standardization. More than opening for reflection, here the digital governance is oriented to favour the design of policy instrumentations for discipline and control. Of course, this is not always the case, and in the next section we will look at the school experiences of digital governance.

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Data-based school governance? Until now, I have illustrated how school data infrastructure has been mobilized by a government body to perform a meta-evaluation of school self-evaluations, and to advance the implementation of the national system of evaluation. This view risks, however, taking for granted the schools’ participation and their alignment to data-based school governance. The research on school data use, and more generally, the investigation into education policy, suggests that this is rarely the case. Policy enactments follow complex dynamics where school reactivity may be variable, so that it is possible to detect strategies of alignment and resistance, sometimes in a complex mixture escaping a simple either/or logic. Furthermore, these strategies can vary over time, and sometimes are not an intrinsic characteristic of a school. The description of these strategies implies, however, a restarting of our research journey to follow the policy trail of the digital governance of education in school spaces. The national documents and the current research on school self-evaluation affirm that public schools in Italy have done the self-evaluation reports (RAV), and have partly aligned with the discourse of self-evaluation by also assuming the vocabularies of the rubrics of evaluation to describe themselves (see INVALSI, 2016). This result is not surprising and suggests that the orientation towards self-evaluation was able to counter the protest against national standardizing testing, which was often in news headlines. Careful descriptions of the current dynamics recorded through prolonged exposure to everyday school life reveal nuanced scenarios. Beneath the ‘surface’, our collective multisited ethnographies in the four primary schools in Naples (‘Equitas’, ‘Migrantes’, ‘Astra’ and ‘Spartacus’) highlight various strategies in the enactment of school data-based governance. In particular, we have identified four ideal types: (1) alignment or compliance, (2) ‘muddling through’, (3) fabrication and (4) opting out. The typology partly overlaps with the one presented by Souto-Moteiro and Benito-Montagut (2016).

Alignment Alignment implies that schools conform with the logics of data-based governance. It is a compliance that may occur in an explicit or a more implicit way. In other words, it is a conformity that is the result of a process of self-reflection, or the effect of uniformity emerging without too much discussion. In our research, we have seen that the four schools officially align with the development of the regime of accountability. In practice, a close look at their documentation and

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at their organizational lives displays diverse shades of alignment and resistance. In ‘Equitas’, the alignment is the most passionate, and the compliance emerges from adherence to the principles of the national system of evaluation. Here, school self-evaluation is what they have already been doing since they started to regularly monitor their school performance more than a decade ago. The school has a long story in quality assessment. It is on the list of a network of schools (‘Polo Qualità ’) interested in implementing the many tools of Total Quality Management and in promoting the improvement of the organizational performance according to compliance with standards of excellence. The school was able to apply the Common Assessment Framework, elaborated by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM – http://www.efqm. org), and was awarded at national level with certification recognizing its capacity to use this methodology in the field of public administration. This continued investment in quality assessment and school improvement was initiated and supported by the head teacher and consolidated a local circuit of expertise that accepted the challenge of enlarging their professional background. The circuit was aimed at measuring educational performances and designing methodological tools (questionnaires, data analysis, etc.) to foster the development of school quality and improvement. Accordingly, in September 2015, when the head teacher announced during the assembly of teachers that the school was asked to perform the school self-evaluation to comply with national policy (see Chapter 4), the news was accepted without much discussion. The issue, rather, was to adapt the toolbox to the new instruments of self-evaluation and to understand how to use the digital platform to perform the new task. Furthermore, the novelty was to consider the evidence provided by national testing and by the data furnished by the ministry, and to compare their performance with that of other schools. The point of friction was the data on standardized testing, where their scores were far below the national average in language and mathematics. This result contrasted with the data concerning educational performances as it was registered by school teachers evaluations. While these data were positive, the scores on national testing were not, and led the school to attribute the lowest mark to this item; this was meant to design an objective of improvement that related explicitly to the enhancement of school performances on this aspect. The ‘bad’ performances on the standardized testing were considered an occasion to problematize their education practice and to change their methodology of teaching. This also raised serious concerns about the remarkable diversity between the assessment of educational performance made by teachers in their

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everyday practice and the protocol of standardized testing that envisaged a standard of excellence that was difficult to achieve, considering the students’ low socio-economic family backgrounds. By drawing on self-evaluation, however, the school changed its collection of data and defined a school plan of improvement where objectives and priorities were elaborated in measurable and inspectable ways.

‘Muddling through’ While the ‘Equitas’ school highlighted a willingness to align and was able to mobilize a circuit of expertise to adapt the self-evaluation to standard protocols, the case of the ‘Migrantes’ school was characterized by a mixture of alignment, imitation and resistance. In other words, the school enacted a set of strategies for muddling through to face up to the unavoidable regime of accountability augmented by digital technologies. Likewise, the two schools registered ‘bad’ educational performances in the standardized national testing. Further, ‘Migrantes’ assigned a very low mark to this item in the school self-evaluation report. By reading these data, the school tends to consider itself unable to respond to the needs of target groups it is working with (disadvantaged students, immigrants and lower-class families). Data in the platform confirm the great difficulties of students and the inefficiency of teachers’ attempts to raise school performances. Students display language deficits so that a wide gap is brought to the forefront by comparing the language of the national test and the everyday language of most of the students (dialect, and native foreign language). At the same time, the efforts made at promoting intercultural education and many forms of active citizenship in these classrooms do not appear to be well appreciated by the overall framework of school self-evaluation. Teachers and head teachers accept the data as they are; they do not resist standardized testing and consider it positively as the benchmark to tackle and to achieve. To reduce the distance, they begin a strategy of imitation to prepare the students. During the past year, the head teacher invited teachers to design mock tests of assessment that followed the same protocols as the standardized testing. The idea was to stimulate teachers and students to align with the logic of the test and to modify their teaching and learning accordingly. The school then activated a pilot study to see to what extent the school performances depended on time and on the language effect, that is, on the way the wording of the tests was written and elaborated. Unfortunately, the pilot revealed unexpected

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difficulties: (1) the preparation of the materials was demanding, and teachers faced increasing difficulties even with the necessary photocopying of the tests; (2) the pilot was perceived as a simulation of the standardized testing; (3) a high percentage of answers to the tests were biased by teachers’ suggestions, so that the school performances were surprisingly high; and (4) analysis of the data, regardless of the limited dimension of the database, was complex. In the end, the pilot study was a failure: it showed, in particular, the lack of resources and expertise in preparing, submitting and analysing the tests. To some extent, the school underestimated the costs and time necessary to design and consolidate a system of assessment like the national standardized testing. The pilot meant high pressure on test performances. The frequency of high marks then resulted less from students’ increased capacities and more from the ‘relaxed’ application of the protocols in submissions of the test (cheating, or suggesting the right responses). The school tried to align by imitating the standardized testing: the imitation, however, led to a ‘faded copy’. The school could not draw on a solid repertoire of knowledge that could at least give a credible approximation of the standard model.

Fabrication In other cases, the strategy tends less to alignment and more to display a tendency to fabrication. Here, schools fabricate themselves on the purposes of the evaluation, and according to the dominant rules of accountability. It is gaming the system. In our research, the ‘Astra’ school is, of the four schools we have investigated, the one that most displays an ‘oblique compliance’. Here, selfevaluation was a ritual of bureaucracy. ‘Astra’ is a school where most students are from middle-class families and it has a high reputation for its quality of teaching and the educational performances of students. Overall, there is a general belief that it is a ‘good school’, where ‘everything is alright’. The data from the standardized national testing are positive (the score is above the average), albeit the self-evaluation report on this item tends to overestimate the educational and organizational capacity. Further, the reading of this report and the way the school occupies the web space on ‘SiC’ reveals poor attention to the making of the self-evaluation and the use of the institutional platform. In particular, the objectives and priorities of improvement are loosely connected with the analysis of the weaknesses and the strengths of the organization of the school envisaged

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by the self-evaluation procedure. There is a lack of problematization of education practices; at the same time, there is not a clear description of the characteristics of education practices and their distinctiveness. The document published on the internet would need heavy editing for the extensive presence of misspellings, typos and so on. The self-evaluation was a closed process: the participation of teachers was limited, and the head teacher delegated the work to her close staff without a comprehensive discussion in the teacher assembly. The change in head teacher during 2016 did not affect the elaboration of the document. While his style introduced a notable ‘break’ in school management and administration, the changes did not concern the school self-evaluation, or at least the selfappraisal defined by the institutional regulation. Their organizational attention is always elsewhere, and the self-evaluation is out of focus: it is a bureaucratic task to be done, without too much organizational involvement. There is not a group dedicated to the self-evaluation. There is then a scanty memory of the whole process. Not surprisingly, the self-evaluation did not affect education practice, and while at the beginning some attempts at opening up participation were made, the work of compilation prevailed against a pressing deadline. In conclusion, their self-evaluation has been intermittent, characterized by limited attention from the school teachers, and has appeared as a ritual of bureaucracy. It has been composed of the interpretation of the guidelines of the procedure, the gathering of existing documentation and the online compilation according to the deadline. The ritual of bureaucracy is celebrated, and the confrontation with the data does not trigger any problematization of the organizational attention that is not on the school self-evaluation. The data preferably tend to confirm that everything is alright and that there is no need to start a reflection on the ordinary way of schooling. To some extent, the school resists self-evaluation in limiting itself to the basic requirements of the procedure.

Opting out The dynamics of alignment and resistance can be, as we have seen, complex. Alignment and resistance can have shades of intensity, and they can emerge in different mixed strategies in the everyday life of a school organization. In one of our four schools, the resistance was open, and resulted in a decision of ‘opting out’. A part of this school refuses to contribute to feeding the logic of transparency, by folding.

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‘Spartacus’ school in our investigation includes two primary schools (for age 6 to 10) and a low secondary school (for age 11 to 13). The school appears in ‘SiC’; however, one of its primary schools refused to participate in the standardized testing. Therefore, school performances are visible and comparable in limited ways. The self-evaluation report provides information that some data on national standardized testing are not available since one of the school units of the primary school opted out. The reason for refusing to participate in the testing is related to the history of this unit and to its methodological approach. This primary school has a long tradition of experimentation and is recognized as one of the most innovative schools in the city. In the middle of 1970, the school became an avant-garde for a movement of change in educational practice, drawing inspiration from the pedagogy of Freinet. The pedagogy includes a particular attention to the affectivity, the body, the personal research for identity. Further, it implies an ongoing orientation towards experimentation and pedagogical research, the integration of disabled students and the opening of classrooms which are not fixed, but are highly variable according to the strategy of grouping. By fostering a ‘natural’ way to learn, this approach is highly critical towards all the education proposals that reinforce the instrumental and cognitivist tendency to learning. In that respect, the school unit developed an active pedagogy, where students learn by participating, and in so doing, develop high-order competencies, like cooperation, critical thinking and problem-solving. This long experimentation infused this school unit with a distinctive organizational identity. It enhanced teacher professionality and contributed to rethinking the educational spaces, since then restructured in a non-traditional way. The school’s reputation grew, as did its fame for being hard to govern. Its pedagogy reinforced its singularity, and the coordination with other school units was complicated. Nonetheless, the school unit continued to attract a notable number of students, living in some cases far from the school site in the urban landscape, and mostly from middle-class families interested in educational activities promoting a progressive education. Finally, some of the educational innovations they experimented with were later consolidated into the standard national regulation, and their experience became a model to be imitated. The development of the national system of evaluation, and of the new regime of accountability, was not seen as being in line with this pedagogy. The national standardized tests were considered an attack on its principles, and they were publicly refused. Except for one year, when the school unit was forced to submit

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the tests, teachers – with the support of the parents – opted out seven times and were reluctant to participate with the other school units in the development of the school self-evaluation report that was perceived as being based on the standard tests. Paradoxically, the only time students were allowed to participate in the testing, they had the highest scores in mathematics and language. The resistance arose because of incompatible pedagogical approaches. According to the teachers of this school unit, the standardized testing is aligned with an ‘AngloSaxon pedagogical approach’. This testing is oriented to evaluate the teachers and not the students; it follows an approach to reading that is at odds with their promoted pedagogy (due attention to reading, personal approach, ‘slow’ time and so on); it completely upsets their teaching by forcing them to teach to the test. In refusing to submit students to the tests, the teachers, during the envisaged date of submission, organize and advertise alternative pedagogical activities and reflection. Opting out, in this case, requires a deliberate choice and the mobilization of alternative circuits of educational knowledge. It is the expression of a political agency and is not aimed at gaming the system. It is a public protest aimed at problematizing the policymaking and the dominant policies of accountability. It tries to defend the existing pedagogical choices, and at the same time tends to influence the remaking of the rules of the game.

Conclusions This chapter focuses on the uses of a school data infrastructure in school selfevaluation. In particular, I have illustrated how the school data infrastructure has been enacted and mobilized in this case by the central office of evaluation of the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research and by some schools in Italy. School data infrastructures are intended here to make schools more transparent and are considered a space for the rethinking of educational organizations and practices. Digital platforms and applications are designed to guide the problematization of school performances and activities and to stimulate dynamics of school improvement. This chapter draws attention to how this problematization may happen by analysing the case of the Dashboard, a digital formation aimed at the meta-evaluation of school self-evaluation reports, and by considering the enactments of data-based governance in schools. Overall, the findings highlight that (1) there is increasing investment

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in algorithmic systems in the governance of education and (2) at the same time, schools’ participation in the digital governance of education should not be taken for granted: they can align to or resist it in many ways. There are then many enactments of school data infrastructures; some instantiations tend to discipline and control the world of schooling, while others are more oriented to problematize educational practice. The investigation of school enactment gives some information about the conditions of this rethinking.

The investment in algorithms School data infrastructures contain vast amounts of information. There is a risk of policymakers, executives, officers and schools becoming overwhelmed by data. Algorithms promise to be useful for educational policymaking since they simplify information with their formulas, make sense of big data and offer solutions to ‘hard questions’. In our case, school self-evaluation reports contain a vast quantity of data and information about school performances and processes. Offices, schools, stakeholders and citizens can have access to a wide range of descriptions of the many worlds of Italian schooling through ‘SiC’. The complexity of data can be treated in different ways and for many purposes. In any case, to be manageable, there is a need to simplify the data and give it an orientation. The Dashboard offered the opportunity to the general office of evaluation of the ministry to scrutinize the school selfevaluation reports quickly to find inconsistencies and to promote the alignment of schools to the policy of self-evaluation. The algorithm system is helpful in countering the imbalance of forces between the multiplicities of data and the scarcity of time and resources to check and analyse them. While algorithms can be attractive as technical solutions, they are not without drawbacks. They are assigned agential capacity in the governance of education, though they are opaque and imbued with politics. The policy of transparency is oriented to make school performances and processes more visible and amenable to inspection. The meta-evaluation algorithms of the school self-evaluation reports reinforce this policy even more by introducing a level of control and judgement. The lines of code of the algorithms searching for inconsistencies are not public, in contrast with the full traceability of the knowledge process leading to the models and protocols of school evaluation reports. By investing in algorithms, then, an important part of the knowledge practice that constitutes the digital governance of education is taken out of public reflection and discussion. The algorithms are developed in the public–private partnership

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of the ministry and HP that is mostly invisible to scientific debate. This secrecy may erode the confidence between schools and policymakers. It counters the openness of school self-evaluation and feeds the idea of conspiracies behind the new regime of accountability. Algorithms, far from being ‘cold’ technical objects, have politics. The Dashboard helped the ministry offices to regain control of school selfevaluation, whose protocols were experimented with and then consolidated by the INVALSI (the Institute of Research on the National System of Evaluation), after a long period of pilot projects. The Dashboard was helpful in simplifying the exercise of control and discipline by identifying critical issues and focusing more directly on objectives of school improvement. The algorithmic system reinforces the interplay between the central office for evaluation and the regional offices of the ministry and allows them to implement the first step in the realization of head teacher assessments. Algorithms can be conceived less as openings for reflection and more as technologies for management and control, where bureaucratic heritage finds an additional ally in informatics to shape the world of education.

School participation in digital governance The investigation reveals complex dynamics in the use of the school data infrastructure. The enactment of data-based school governance can follow diverse configurations, and school participation in the digital governance of schooling can follow different trajectories. They can align to it, or alternatively resist it. In most cases, a mix of alignment and resistance happens in practice in many schools. I have described four strategies that partly overlap with the typology of Souto-Otero and Beneito-Montagut (2016). To some extent, I have tried to enrich this typology by looking at subtleties of the enactments of digital governance in the ecology of school practice. While there is a tendency to overvalue alignment or to consider alignment and resistance as opposite to one another, in practice there are many shades of alignment and resistance. For example, we can have a passionate alignment, such as in the case of the ‘Equitas’ school, where there is wide acceptance of data-based governance due to a long investment in time and expertise over time, and a logic of imitation, where there is unproblematized acceptance of the circuits of knowledge supporting the dynamics of self-evaluation as defined at the institutional level, as documented in the case of the ‘Migrantes’ school. Similarly, resistance can be found in the fabrication of compliance according to the requirements of self-evaluation and

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the logics of transparency, such as for the ‘Astra’ school, or it can be expressed openly through a decision of opting out, as described in the case of the school unit of the ‘Spartacus’ school, where the choice of not participating with the aim of contrasting the emerging regime of accountability is clear. The research is helpful to also understand the singularity of the schools in relation to the policies of digital accountabilities. It provides some information on the space of school agency, and in particular, on the capacity of each school to react. To understand the singularity, it is interesting to look at how noticing, interpreting and drawing conclusions from data are related to the mobilized circuits of knowledge. The investigation focuses on how the confrontation between the data and the schools develops, and whether this meeting leads to a problematization of organizational practice or not. Problematization occurs in two cases, the ‘Equitas’ school and the ‘Migrantes’ school. In both cases, the ‘bad’ performances in the national standardized testing lead to a rethinking of the education practice. However, the rethinking is mediated by diverse circuits of knowledge – a consolidated data-based governance in the case of the ‘Equitas’ school, a ‘weak’ circuit of knowledge that tries to imitate the model of the standardized assessment. In the case of the ‘Astra’ school and of the school unit of ‘Spartacus’, the test data do not trigger any problematization. For the former, the data confirm that ‘everything is alright’ (or are fabricated to confirm this cognitive frame), so that the circuit of knowledge enacts a ritual of bureaucracy with limited participation by the school. When it comes to the latter, a circuit of knowledge is mobilized by the school unit to counter the construction of the system of evaluation. Here, the epistemological premises of the pedagogical approach are in conflict with the ‘philosophy’ of the government of accountability and solicit a straightforward decision to opt out, that is, a decision not to participate in the emergent system. Schools can draw on different repertoires of knowledge in reacting to the digital governance of education. They can be subjected to it, or they can creatively react to its policy instrumentations.

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Becoming Topological: The Development of Digital Schooling

Introduction In the previous chapters, I have focused on how education systems are made measurable and digitally visible. I have illustrated the sociomaterialities of the digital governance of education in the case of the fabrication of the European space of education, and of the Italian education system. In particular, I have highlighted how the digital governance of education is related to the current wave of standardization of education and reinforces the ongoing development of new regimes of accountability. This chapter intends to further the investigation into the policy of digital schooling by analysing additional effects of digital governance. Education is increasingly digitalized: lectures, discussions, exercises, readings, assessments and so on are now mediated to a large extent through digital technologies. This chapter is interested in understanding the conditions of digitalization (the policy instrumentation, its fabrication in practice, etc.), and how digitalization is reshaping (or promising to transform) the morphology of schooling. In Chapter 1, I raised the issue that if digitalization tends to translate schooling into a regime of transparency, it is important to map how this is happening and with what effects, regarding the forms and dynamics of the school as we know it (Masschelein and Simons 2015). The issue of the morphology of schooling has been long debated (Vincent 1994; Maulini and Perrenoud 2005; Tyack and Tobin 1994). It concerns the permanence of characteristics that define a specific form of gathering as a ‘school’ (the ‘scholastic form’), and that recognize in the ‘scholastic form’ the dominant mode of organization for basic and compulsory education. This form is usually contrasted with non-scholastic forms that organize alternative practices of socialization and circulation of knowledge. These latter forms are home education, private tutoring, communities of

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practice and so on, and they usually run in parallel – sometimes in a conflicting way, other times ‘peacefully’ – with the classic morphology of schooling. The basic assumptions of the scholastic form are (1) the separation between the field of ‘authentic’ agency and the field of education that envisages, codes and plans what is to be learned in the ‘real’ situation and (2) the asymmetry between those who teach (the knowledgeable) and those who learn (the ‘ignorant’) (Maulini and Perrenoud 2005). This separation gives rise to an organizational enclosure, which legitimates the idea of education as a ‘proper ontological region’ (Massa 1991). The limitations, dilemmas and contradictions of the scholastic form have triggered, according to some scholars (Maulini and Perrenoud 2005), innovations in schooling, and have led some critics, as early as the 1970s, to argue in favour of deschooling society. Recently, some contemporary advocates of deschooling and of un-schooling have predicted the end of school with the full advent of digital technologies. While these predictions are supported by the ‘hype’ of the digital world and by faith in technological determinism, there are emerging complex transformations of the space-times of schooling, which is progressively losing its topographical aspect, and is becoming topological. By reflecting the more general rationality of the becoming topological of culture (Lury, Parisi, and Terranova 2012), we are witnessing the becoming topological of school (Thompson and Cook 2015). The rationale for the ‘becoming topological’ is in the development of a ‘new spatiotemporal order of continuity’ through practices of sorting, naming, numbering, listing, calculating and so on. These practices are augmented and made possible by digital formations (apps, platforms, websites, portals, etc.) that are transforming education in a field of increasing connectedness. The new rationality overlaps, intersects and complements, while not substituting, the more classic Euclidean and disciplinary ‘forms of school’. Becoming topological implies, in particular, the opening of a new space of relations that makes hitherto ‘invisible’ or ‘implicit’ aspects of educational practice visible and traceable through rigorous processes of standardization and the mobilization of digital technologies. The sense of ‘becoming topological’ is mobilized here to understand to what extent schooling is experiencing a deformation of its space while retaining its basic properties, that is, how digital schooling is activating a homeomorphic change in the scholastic form (a change without rupture). This modification can be read as a process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; De Landa 2006) from the classic morphology to a new one, the becoming topological of school, that asks the school to assemble new materialities, expertise and knowledge programmes.

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The chapter illustrates how the becoming topological of schools is occurring in the EU and Italy, a latecomer EU country according to the ranking of EU countries by digital policies. In the first section, the chapter illustrates the policy for the implementation of the digital school in the EU and Italy (‘Piano Nazionale Scuola Digitale’). Later, the chapter will analyse in detail the dynamics of the becoming topological of a secondary school in the south of Italy that displays a high level of digitalization of the ecology of education practice. This school is included in a network of schools called Educational Vanguards (Avanguardie Educative) that are experimenting with the restructuring of the forms of schooling triggered by digital technologies, and in a wider sense, by the need to improve educational practice. By focusing first on the policies and then on a single school in a larger network, I will aim to reveal the assemblage of policies, technologies and people that are promoting the topological transformation of schools.

Europeanization as digitalization of schooling The development of digital schooling mirrors the wider trend towards the digitalization of society and the economy all over the world. The large consensus on the benefits of digitalization in education is reinforced by establishing a direct link between the need to improve the digital repertoire of populations and the competitiveness in the global economy, which is expected to expand more and more into digital technologies. The EU is elaborating an overall strategy, the DSM, that measures the level of digital skills across the European member states and maps the ‘stock’ of human capital available for the development of the digital economy. The DSM is a key priority of the EU. It is listed in the top ten strategic orientations of the European Commission of Juncker’s presidency (from 2014 until now). The DSM is an arena ‘where the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital is ensured – and where citizens and businesses can seamlessly and fairly access online goods and services: whatever their nationality, and wherever they live’1. It is a harmonized space with no barriers, and with fair limitations to access; a locus of exchange, in other words, with mutual benefits for European businesses and consumers. The realization of the DSM is intended to sustain and relaunch the EU’s economic development by creating new sources of employment, attracting financial investment, promoting opportunities for existing enterprises to expand and for new start-up companies to emerge and

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consolidate and soliciting improvement and change in public services. In a situation where education is still under national regulation, as I have described in Chapter 3, the EU helps its member states to improve their positions in the digitalization of schooling, and more generally in education, by providing data policy knowledge about digitalization. It gives a framework and orients educational policymakers by favouring harmonization of the field that can be considered as a form of standardization. It provides ‘normative specifications about how to steer an educational system’ (Waldow 2015), by suggesting the directions in which to move the digitalization of schools and permitting the ranking of member states by digital schooling. Particularly interesting here is the investigation promoted by the European Commission called Survey of Schools: ICT in Education (European Commission 2013). The investigation is not only an exercise of mapping the digitalization of schooling in Europe; it furnishes the basic policy knowledge for orienting educational policymaking. At the same time, it gives directions for the schools to become topological, in the sense that it provides the desired standards for transformation into a digital school. It furnishes (with policy knowledge coming from the OECD) the basic building blocks for ‘Opening up Education’, the European initiative for exploiting the chances offered by technologies and the use of the open educational resource (OER) in the framework of the goals and overall strategy of Horizon 2020. The research findings name the best condition as ‘digitally supporting school’, pointing to the ‘right’ humans and nonhumans entanglements, that is, between the technical and social ingredients needed to successfully transform the morphology of the school in the digital era. This school is ‘digitally equipped’, that is, it has a high level of equipment, fast broadband (more than 10 Mbps) and high connectedness among websites, emails, virtual learning environment and a local network area. It is a school that can count on a ‘solid’ information and communication infrastructure. At the same time, a ‘digitally supportive school’ is not made only of technological ‘gadgets’; it is an assemblage of people, technologies and digitally oriented policies. It is populated by ‘digitally confident and supportive teachers’ and by ‘digitally confident and supportive students’. These new identities are the effects of policies that support the integration of ICT and education (in educational technology more generally, and in the specific subjects), and of the concrete measures implemented at the school level (incentives, teachers’ professional development, ICT coordinators). ‘Digitally confident and supportive teachers’ have confidence in their ICT skills in education and social media, a positive attitude towards these skills and few obstacles to their use at schools. ‘Digitally

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confident and supportive students’ display high use of and access to ICT at school and at home, increasing their confidence in ICT and social media by being invited to use digital technologies during school activities and also at home. The identification of the best conditions for digital schooling enables us to understand their distribution across the different European countries by drawing a map of where they are fulfilled, and where they are far from being realized. According to the survey, on average up to 50 per cent of students attend digitally supportive schools that implement specific support measures. Substantial differences are reported, however, across the EU countries. While Denmark, Norway, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovenia, Spain, Bulgaria and Ireland have 50 per cent of students in grade 4 attending digitally supportive schools, less than 10 per cent of students are in schools of this type in France, Croatia and Greece in grade 8 and grade 11 (European Commission 2013, p. 14). Other differences concern the distribution of digitally confident and supportive teachers and students. On average, 20–25 per cent of students are taught by digitally supportive teachers, but with wide diversity across Europe and the grades (less frequent in grades 4 and 8, and more common in grade 11). On the contrary, 30–35 per cent of students are digitally confident and supportive, with the highest percentage (40–45 per cent) in Denmark in all grades, and Norway in grade 11. Overall, the highest rates of this type of students are to be found in grade 11, where many national policies across Europe have concentrated their investments in the digitalization of education practice. The situation in Italy regarding the new emerging morphology (the ‘digitally supportive school’) positions this country among those member countries where the digitalization of schooling is developing slowly (OECD 2013) (Pitzalis et al. 2016). Furthermore, the country ranks 25th out of 28 EU country members in the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), with a low percentage of human capital in digital skills, the measured stock of competencies allegedly needed for competitiveness in the digital era. Nonetheless, there are positive attitudes among teachers and students about the impact of new information and communication technologies on the improvement of learning outcomes, motivation and the development of transversal and higher-order competencies. With a view to describing in more detail the story of the digitalization of schooling, it is useful for analytical purposes to identify three stages: (1) 1985–2007: from the National Plan for Informatics to the Digiscuola initiative, (2) 2007–2014: from the first National Plan Digital School to the second National Plan Digital School, (3) 2015–present: from the second National Plan Digital School

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of the Renzi Government. The difference between the first stage and the other two stages is in the policy approach. While the first phase was characterized by a segmented approach that was mostly subject-specific, the other two phases assume a holistic perspective and propose an all-embracing framework for the digitalization of schooling. In the first stage, the National Plan for Informatics concerned mathematics and science teachers in upper secondary schools who updated their subject knowledge with informatics. In early 1990, the ‘Programme for the Development of Educational Technologies’ offered schools opportunities to devise computer labs and to invest in teachers’ professionalization. Another major initiative at the beginning of the millennium, called ‘ForTIC’, enabled even more investment in professional training in the use of ICT in the teaching of all subjects. In the meantime, the reform of school autonomy significantly changed the governance logic of the education system. It gave more responsibilities to schools and delegated some tasks previously administered by the ministry to regional and subregional authorities with the aim of fostering the consolidation of devolved spheres of educational policymaking (Landri 2009; Grimaldi and Serpieri 2012). Schools were more ‘free’ than before to make their own choices; moreover, the reform stimulated the agency of schools, and of the local educational authorities, to establish collaborations with vendors that guided, in particular in the wealthiest regions, the introduction of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) and other equipment in the classrooms. Other initiatives were funded by the European structural funds in the southern regions to support the introduction of IWBs and for school improvement. The Digiscuola project in 2007, for example, involved 3,500 mathematics teachers from upper secondary schools. They had IWBs in their classrooms and in-service training in education technologies; however, they placed the whiteboards in computer labs and dedicated rooms, leaving the traditional schooling space mostly untouched in the absence of ministerial direction (Prosser and Ayre 2010). In the second stage, from 2007 to 2014, the first National Plan Digital School provided an all-encompassing strategy for the digitalization of schooling for the first time. The plan comprised a large-scale intervention (‘Piano LIM’), and several pilot projects (Cl@asse 2.0, Scuol@ 2.0, and Editoria Digitale) to provoke a technological ‘shock’ in the hope of paving the way for innovative teaching practices in Italian schools. The basic idea of Piano LIM was to ‘bring the whiteboards into the classroom’ to overcome the segmented strategy that had taken the whiteboards into a separate environment and prevented the restructuring of education practice. Schools bought the IWBs through a procurement procedure

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that envisaged a central marketplace operated by CONSIP, a state-owned company that is the key provider for all public administrations. The Smartboard firm held a leading position in the market share (39 per cent) (https://education. smarttech.com), followed by Interwrite (17 per cent in 2010) (https://www. turningtechnologies.com). At the end of 2012, almost 11 per cent of classrooms had been equipped with a technological kit that included IWBs and some computers. Overall, 90 per cent of lower and upper secondary schools and 95 per cent of primary schools were involved in Piano LIM, and 64,456 teachers were trained. New models of learning and teaching through the ICT experimented with the Cl@sse 2.0 and Scuol@ 2.0 projects. The projects involved limited numbers of classrooms and schools (416 in the case of Cl@see 2.0 and 14 in the case of Scuol@ 2.0); however, additional resources expanded these projects with agreements between the state and regions. Finally, a project concerned the development of native digital textbooks in highly equipped classrooms in a sample of twenty schools. Other initiatives contributed to the unfolding of digital schooling: (1) from 2012–2013, the consolidation of online national information systems (see also Chapters 4 and 5) pushed the schools to abandon paper and to implement school electronic registers; (2) from 2014–2015, it was recommended that schools adopt textbooks with a digital version; and (3) business-led consortia experimented with new devices for the promotion of the policy of smart cities and smart education. Especially important here was the approval of the Italian Digital Agenda, a cross-governmental initiative mirroring the European Digital Agenda. The goal was to develop policies, guidelines and ideas to foster the digitalization of the economy and society. The task force on digital skills was coordinated by the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research. One of the priorities was to sustain the development of the digital school, that is, ‘school access to broadband; cloud resources for teaching and learning; transforming learning environments; digital contents and e-books; teacher training through blended e-learning; interactive whiteboards; e-participation’. With the legal framework of a decree (called Crescita 2.0, i.e. decree law 179/2012, converted into law 221/2012) actively sponsored also by the European Commission, the scaling up of the digital school was therefore fully integrated into the overall strategy of the digitalization of the country.2 The new morphology was aimed towards the benchmark of ‘digitally supportive schools’ elaborated in the European survey quoted previously (European Commission 2013). Further, the policies of the plan aligned with initiatives already taken by the leaders of OECD countries in the field (Singapore, Korea, UK) (OECD 2015).3

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In the third stage, which started in 2015, the strategy of development and consolidation of the digital school was confirmed and relaunched in the ‘Reform of La Buona Scuola’ of the Renzi Government. In the new National Plan Digital School, the vision undertakes a sensible change. It is not just a technological ‘deployment’. The plan’s ambition is rather to develop and implement a perspective on education in the digital age, where ‘technologies become enabled’ in a complex process of restructuring of the ecology of school practice. In that case, digital technologies are not merely following the dynamics of standardization of education, as I have illustrated in the previous chapters; here, they are the ‘cornerstones’ for school innovation, and they are expected to become the ‘building blocks’ of schooling. The idea is to challenge the traditional model of the ‘classroom’, and to move towards the notion of a ‘learning environment’ for experimenting with complex interplays between spaces, digital technologies and pedagogies. The National Plan of the Renzi Government envisages three foci (see Table 6.1): (1) tools, (2) competencies and contents and (3) in-training services and accompanying measures. The first focus concerns the investment in technologies and infrastructure. It implies several policies for the improvement of school access to the internet (broadband, Wi-Fi, wiring, etc.), the rethinking of the school space, the digital profiling of teachers and students and the digitalization of school administration. The second focus reveals the pedagogical choices and the digital contents. For the former, the plan refers to the twenty-first-century skills framework promoted by the World Economic Forum, and to DIGICOMP, ‘A framework for developing and understanding digital competence in Europe’ (2013), and suggests the need to update the national curriculum. It sustains, further, the development of computational thinking (‘coding’) at the level of primary schools in coordination with European initiatives in the field, and dedicates a specific attention to tuning the world of education to the emerging dynamics of entrepreneurship, the changing nature of work and the digitalization of the economy and society. When it comes to the digital content, it provides guidelines for developing the interoperability of the learning environment and promoting OER. Finally, the third focus regards in-training service and accompanying measures. In that respect, it confirms the investment in professional development of teachers and head teachers, and furnishes some concrete actions, such as ICT coordinators and school agreements, which are intended to fabricate and expand the implementation of digitally supported schools.

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Table 6.1 National Plan Digital School (2015–2020) Tools

Competencies and content

Access Fibre and ultra-wide band before the door of each school Wiring school spaces (LAN/W-Lan) Connectivity fee

Competencies of students A common framework for the digital competencies of students Innovative scenarios for the development of applied digital competencies A research unit for twenty-firstcentury competencies Bringing coding to primary schools Updating ‘technology’ teaching in lower secondary school

Spaces and learning environments Digital environments for teaching Challenge prize for the digital school Guidelines for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy Plan for practical learning Innovative school building Digital identity Single sign-on Digital profile for each student Digital profile for each teacher Digital administration Digitalization of school administration Digital school record ‘School data’ strategy

Digitalization, entrepreneurship and work A digital curriculum for entrepreneurship Girls in tech and science Plan for digital careers Stages for digital companies Digital content Basic standards and interoperability of online environments for teaching Promotion of OER and guidelines for the self-production of digital content School libraries for digital literacy

Training and accompanying measures In-training service In-training service for organizational and didactical innovation Reinforcing initial training on didactical innovation Technical assistance for primary schools New training services for early career teachers

Accompanying measures ICT coordinator (‘animatore digitale’ ) in each school School agreements Stakeholders’ club for the digital school A gallery of best practice Giving innovative networks permanent attention Observatory for the digital school A scientific committee for the National Plan Monitoring the plan Linking the National Plan with the three-year school plan

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Overall, the National Plan Digital School of the Renzi Government describes the innovative scenarios of school transformations. It designs the conditions for education in the digital era by giving a framework for the governance of opportunities offered by new digital technologies. It models the future of Italian schooling, and in doing so, it transforms the morphology of schooling. The underlying theory of change envisages, in particular, a complex fine-tuning of the sociotechnical networks making up digital schooling. As a matter of fact, the text of the plan emerged through the collaboration of a composite task force made up of (1) the staff of the ministry (mostly coming from a think tank of committed professionals and researchers – RENA), (2) teachers and head teachers from innovative school experiences (Educational Vanguard), (3) experts in educational policy (in some cases, consultants from the first National Plan Digital School) and (4) leading academics in the field of educational technology and media studies from public and private universities, and public research organizations. The framework of the plan is an assemblage of policy knowledge coming from the EU, the World Economic Forum and ‘bottom-up’ school experimentations with digital and academic knowledge. While the plan gives direction to digital schooling, it moves Italian schooling outside the territory of the regime of accountability inscribed in the new national system of evaluation (see Chapters 4 and 5). The self-evaluation report and the school plan are oriented mostly towards standardized testing and contain few items concerning the learning environment and digitalization. Furthermore, the plan tends to shift schooling outside the territory of the actual coordinates of the regimes of accountability, underlining a need to coordinate with new emerging frameworks of competencies by referring to the European Digicomp and the 21st Century Skills debate (Ananiadou and Claro 2009). This mismatch might imply that a ‘digitally supportive school’ (the ‘gold standard’ according to the European document) could not display excellent learning outcomes as defined by the national standardized testing.

The sociomaterialities of a digital school While so far I have described the unfolding of digital schooling by focusing on policy knowledge that is accompanying the becoming topological of schools in the EU and in Italy, this section will turn attention to the dynamics of digital schooling in a case study taken from the multisited ethnographic project that contributed to the empirical basis of this volume (see Chapter 2 for the specific

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presentation). In particular, I will describe the new sociomaterialities of the school, and how the morphology of this school is transforming in a field of increasing interconnectedness. The case study is an instance of a ‘digitally supportive school’: the EU standard for digital schooling. It is presented here to display what a description of the standard as ‘matter of fact’ inevitably simplifies, that is, the complexities of organizational change and the sociomaterialities at stake in the becoming topological of the school. The case study concerns an upper secondary school in the province of Naples (in the south of Italy), the ‘Arcum School’ that is becoming a point of reference for the digitalization of education practice and for in-service teacher training for digital schooling in the region (Campania). The ‘Arcum School’ has recently been included in Educational Vanguards, a network and movement of innovative Italian schools aimed at changing the morphology of schooling. Educational Vanguards is promoted by INDIRE, the National Institute for Documentation, Innovation and Educational Research, which is linked to the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research. INDIRE is the oldest research body of the ministry and was founded in 1925 at the time of a National Educational Exhibition on the ‘products’ of the ‘new’ schools. INDIRE is very active and acts as a ‘benchmark’ for educational research in Italy. It supports the process of school improvement by acting as a mediator, standardizer and supporter of innovations in teaching and learning in education. With INVALSI and the body of inspectors, INDIRE also has responsibilities in the development and consolidation of the National System of Evaluation. The ‘Arcum School’ has been included in the list of leading schools of the Educational Vanguards for its accomplishments in the implementation of one of its key ideas, namely the integration between digital content and textbooks. This acknowledgement places the ‘Arcum School’ in particular at the forefront of innovation in the production of digital educational content. The school has realized a decisive shift towards digitalization that regards many aspects of the workings of the educational organization, from administration to teaching and learning activities. The school was founded in the school year 1989–1990 as a vocational education and training institute in the field of commerce and tourism. Later, further courses were added for professional training in health and social services. It was, however, only with the national reform of the upper secondary school that, in the school year 2010–2011, the ‘Arcum School’ formally became an upper secondary institute. At the moment, its educational provision comprises four courses: (1) commerce, (2) tourism, (3) health and social services and (4) graphic design and communication. Its story can be described as a success since

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the school has performed as a leading state vocational education and training institute in the south of Italy. It has seen the consolidation and growth of students’ registration over time and celebrated the ‘good performances’ of the courses in commerce and health and social services in the INVALSI national standardized testing in 2015. At the moment, the school is quite stable regarding students and teachers with more than 1,500 students, mostly coming from families with low socio-economic status, and 150 teachers. These good results are commonly attributed to the definite shift towards digital education. However, these accomplishments are not the product of technological determinism. They are rather emergent effects of a careful assemblage of technological, organizational and professional items. In particular, the alignment between the standardization of education practice and the digitalization of schooling has given rise to the opening of a spatiotemporal order of continuity that supplements, and overlaps with, the Euclidean space of the school. Paradoxically, the move to digital schooling substituted some deficits in the off-line spaces located in a building that was not originally designed to host a school. The case study confirms the role played by the infrastructure of information and communication as a condition for the unfolding of digital schooling. In this respect, the ‘Arcum School’ took the chance to be part of the GARR (Group for the Harmonization of the Network of Research), the Italian Consortium for Broadband aimed at supporting research organizations and the world of education.4 Mostly composed of public institutions, GARR is a non-profit association funded by the National Research Council, the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, with the Conference of the Rectors of Italian Universities Foundation as spokesperson, in particular, for the Italian public universities. In return for participating in a European project, the consortium offered fast broadband internet (100 Mbyte) to a selected group of schools. Since the application was accepted, the school had the potential to develop high levels of connectivity. Further, the school now has wi-fi and LAN architecture in all of its four sites. Other funding coming from regional financing in collaboration with European structural funds (FESR) permitted the wiring of the school with optical fibre. The wiring covered most of the school sites. Where it was not possible to have fast broadband guaranteed by GARR, contracts with private internet providers assured a speed of 50 Mbyte to sustain the effort towards digitalization. The material condition of internet access was very different: some sites were considered ready for the technical requirements

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of GARR, while others were granted access only through private provision at a lower speed. The school also made other choices regarding the infrastructure. While most Italian schools opted for IWBs as a result of national policy, as we have seen in the previous section, the ‘Arcum School’ limited their purchase. The maintenance of IWBs can be expensive; therefore, to save costs, it was decided to equip the classrooms with video projectors and connected computers. The network internet connection plus a computer in each class plus video projectors may be considered an alternative and cheaper technical arrangement, reducing the school’s dependency on private providers. These choices were the premise for experimenting digital schooling in the school year 2013–2014, extending it to the first classes of courses in the school year 2014–2015 and generalizing this mode of schooling to all classes in 2016–2017. Of course, the adoption of digital schooling was to some extent prepared for by the work of a group of teachers who, in collaboration with the head teacher, took the opportunities offered by digital technologies to ‘expand the frame’ of the ecology of education practice, and acted as mediators for the installation of new spaces of education. They realized a work of inscription of the school administration and the ingredients of the education practice in digital formations. The digital inscription was carried out by relying on the skilful use of existing software and platforms. Regarding the school administration, the inscriptions concerned the school website, a software application and a private platform. The school website was designed at the beginning of the millennium using a popular platform (WordPress) and a hosting service to give visibility to school projects and activities, but also to offer parents, students and teachers a platform for information and services. The website has had many redesigns: the latest was done in 2011. While, over time, the website has become quite ‘crowded’ by the many initiatives of the school, it has exercised agency in the local governance of the school. It has acted as a frame for connecting teachers, head teachers, students, parents and other stakeholders at a distance. The software application (app) complements the work that made the school website, and it is available on mobile phones on the Google Android platform. It is an app that is regularly updated and notifies users of new content and information. The app is used to keep users updated on circulars, letters and so on and the decisions taken in school. It is designed for teachers. While the school website performs similar tasks, the app acts as an automatic reminder. Once it is downloaded onto a mobile phone, it enacts a sound-alert when new content is uploaded. It is then appreciated by teachers since it draws attention to new information.

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When it comes to the platform, the school chose a popular private web application (ARGO) as a substitute for the school register, which is acting as an intermediary between teachers and parents. The platform collects data on school attendance, lecture content, homework, timetables, student marks and so on by acting as the electronic archive of this information. The platform enables the coordination of some school activities at a distance and requires the collection and the input of data by teachers, head teachers and officers. It opens a window of visibility to parents so that they can have real-time information about school attendance and students’ marks. In other words, it displaces, and partly complements, the usual parent–teacher meetings. Furthermore, it facilitates the preparation of teacher committees by giving the initial setting to their off-line discussions. The platform has the ability to allow different levels of access to information to different users, and in that way, it builds up layers of diverse levels of visibility, where the head teacher usually has the ability to ‘see everything’ while other users (teacher coordinators, teachers, parents, etc.) have limited access to the information. When it comes to education practice, this is increasingly mediated in the ‘Arcum School’ by digital technologies: educational websites, applications, e-books and so on. The school has focused on the integration between the production of digital content and textbooks, where teachers and students are asked to be active participants. Particularly interesting here are two projects: (1) ‘Pillole per la conoscenza’ (Pills of knowledge) and (2) ‘Book in progress’. The former translates as an educational website that contains short videos made by the students with the support of the teachers on different topics. The project has been funded by the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research and has received many acknowledgements as a ‘best practice’. In practice, it makes short lessons in humanities, sciences, technologies and information available on the internet for the students of upper secondary school. Each ‘pill’ can be used by teachers who will decide how to include it in their teaching and their educational activities. The realization of the short videos mobilizes and gives purpose to the students of the ‘Arcum School’ as they participate actively in their making. The latter project, ‘Book in progress’, is a network of production of digital content for schooling. The network includes many schools in Italy and invites teachers to become active producers of digital content for education. The digital textbooks are made available through open access to the schools that belong to the network and that contribute to the development of content. The products are validated at the level of the ministry. As a result of the Italian digital agenda,

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schools are asked to adopt e-books and to make only those textbooks that have digital versions compulsory. This policy forced the educational publishers to give a boost to digital publishing. The other possibility for the schools was to produce their own digital content and to use it in educational activities. Most schools choose their textbooks by making a selection from a list provided by the publishers. The ‘Arcum School’ decided to follow the idea of the digital content made available by ‘Book in progress’. It implied a collective decision, where the council of each classroom decided to opt together to adhere to this logic. The benefit for students and the parents consisted of having access to digital content free of charge, and to be invited to buy a computer or laptop that was necessary to read the content and to have full access to the resources that the school made available. At present, all classes in the first two course levels of the school have chosen the option of ‘Book in progress’. However, to make the option even more accessible, the school has also developed an app (in the Android environment) and a dashboard in the institutional website to download the open access digital content via a registered username and password. Teaching and learning at the ‘Arcum School’, then, require the skilful orchestration of digital forms and technologies. Recently, each classroom has been working with cloud computing that allows them to have a shared space where they can produce, elaborate and store digital content that is created together. Cloud computing is used when working with students, but also with other teachers. For instance, examination of the final student tasks – here, an interdisciplinary project work where students were asked to make the development of competencies explicit – was done collectively online, by sharing the students’ final reports and by asking teachers to express their judgement on the work done. Cloud computing opens a window on the evaluation process: it allows users to see the making of different evaluations and facilitates the drawing of general conclusions about students’ tasks. In sum, the vast investment in digitalization in this school creates a space of connectivity and visibility that extends well beyond the spatiotemporal arrangements of traditional space-times of schooling. This topological transformation that is mobilizing complex sociotechnical apparatuses leads inevitably to some frictions that are made explicit in a particular way in the case of the transfer of teachers from other schools and the induction of new teachers. Here, a negotiation develops between Arcum staff teachers and new teachers to align with digital schooling, and there is not any guarantee that it ends with a ‘successful’ enrolment, that is, with the acceptance of the ‘Arcum School’ mode of organizing. The choice to adopt only digital forms triggers discomfort in

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those that prefer the paper-based version of the text, or at least prefer to have the digital and the paper-based versions. It requires the conversion to a different teaching and learning environment and the acceptance of the risk of exploring a new ‘unknown’ professional territory. It can be perceived as a ‘threat’ to the professional autonomy and identity of the teacher. The uncertainty of the negotiation also reveals that digital schooling has been accompanied by a high degree of standardization of education practice. The standardization depends, partly, both on the current enactment of Europeanization (see Chapter 3) and on the development of the regime of accountability in Italy (Chapter 4). It can be related as well to the local organizational conditions of the school, and by the need for an ‘invariant structure’ that can offer a solution to the problems of coordination. The ‘Arcum School’, as we have recalled, is composed of four courses that have diverse educational objectives, yet it aligns with competency-based educational planning. It means that the educational planning is not oriented by the disciplines (mathematics, language, informatics and so on); rather, it is aimed at the development of competencies. This planning has a vocational orientation, that is, while they are intended to unfold and reinforce professional competencies in commerce, graphic design, tourism, etc., they are not restricted to the specific field of vocational education and training. Instead, they also extend to include general or transversal competencies (citizenship, character skills and so on). Accordingly, each course is oriented to develop a set of competencies of a professional profile that mirrors the European Framework Qualification, the common standard for professional qualifications. At the same time, the educational offering is also intended to sustain the development of ‘key competencies for citizenship’. In practice, it translates into a structured form of educational planning, where each competence is defined operationally and the disciplines are required to contribute to their development. There is, then, a tendency to acknowledge the value of ‘knowing-in-action’ instead of the mere recognition of ‘declarative and inert knowledge’ that is associated, instead, with a disciplinary form of schooling. This shift implies increasing coordination in the planning and delivery of educational activities. There is, then, joint planning of the activities of classes of the same grade: a practice that breaks with the standard educational planning that is usually limited to the teaching staff of the same class. Furthermore, teachers of the same grade work together to prepare tests for each discipline as well as the intermediate and final performance tasks (‘prova di prestazione’).

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This structured form of organizing solicits the multiplication of roles of middle management. As matter of fact, 17 out of 150 teachers are selected to play coordination roles at the level of disciplinary departments, course departments, digital schooling, infrastructure of information and communication, software, quality assurance and so on; a distributed educational leadership that operates to recompose and perform the organizational reality of the school. As to students’ performances, they appear positive in school testing, and somewhat similar if not the best in comparison with other schools in the national standardized testing (especially in language; less so in mathematics in some courses). Early school leaving, a key benchmark at European level and an important national objective, is reducing and this confirms the strategic choices made by the ‘Arcum School’ in investing in a significant way towards digital schooling and the better structuration of the organizational setting. Some discrepancies, however, are emerging between the national standardized testing and the school evaluation that can be related to the diverse orientations of the systems of evaluation. It can be noted that the emerging regime of accountability pays little attention to digital schooling. Finally, the school aims at the evaluation of professional competencies that are not the focus of a specific assessment at national level.

Conclusions This chapter addresses the changing morphology of schooling, and in particular, the challenge of digital technologies to the form of schools. Schools are becoming topological: digital technologies provide new frames of schooling, supporting the development of networks and causing new spaces to emerge. Education is transforming in a field of increasing and, in some respects, unexpected interconnections. Digital technologies are acting as ‘frames’ that open onto larger spaces and enact a multiplicity of new relationships among humans and nonhumans. They tend to change the enclosures of the form of school into topological spaces. The effect is a problematization of the territories of schooling (identities, modes of organizing, etc.) and their remediation in the logics of the digital. This chapter has analysed these transformations by zooming in on three foci of investigation: (1) the intersection between the Europeanization of education and digitalization, (2) the educational policymaking in Italy regarding digital schooling, and (3) the sociomaterialities of a digital school. The movement between these spaces has revealed the interweaving of the global and the local,

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and in particular, the interplay of processes of standardization with national and local conditions. By looking at the policy of the European DSM, I have related the making of digital schooling to the wider strategy of digitalization of societies and economies devised by the EU. Digital technology is considered here as the driver for sustaining the growth and competitiveness of EU member states in the global economy. Accordingly, a space of commensuration is enacted to understand the capacity of member states to implement the strategy for ranking them (via the DESI), and give to each member state some direction on where to improve their performances in the overall digitalization of economies and societies. Furthermore, and by recognizing the limits of EU legislation for education, data and policy, knowledge is provided to orient the making of digital schooling. Of particular interest in that knowledge production is the topological notion of the ‘digitally supportive school’, a normative description of the transformation of schooling in Europe. The ‘digitally supportive school’ is presented as a harmonized concatenation of humans and nonhumans to exploit the potential of digital technologies, a highly connected assemblage peopled by digitally confident and supportive teachers and students, and premised on a robust information and communication infrastructure. The identification of a good standard for digital schooling is helpful to map how this emerging morphology is realized across EU member states. The unfolding of digital schooling is primarily oriented at EU level, but also at national level, where member states design their strategies. In many documents, digital technologies are unquestioned: they are the uncontested frontier of innovation, the taken-forgranted solution for the future of schooling, and they support the realization of the positive landscape of digital economy and society. Educational policymaking is oriented to support the widespread diffusion of innovations, of which they are the conveyors. In the case of Italy, the policies for digitalization have accompanied the topological transformation of schooling by devising initiatives and regulations that could back the ‘technological shock’. Here, an assemblage of EU and intergovernmental recommendations (from the OECD, in particular), of ‘bottom-up’ school experimentations, of private and public partnerships and of academic knowledge projects, orientate the change of the form of school that is asked to become a learning environment. The challenge is problematizing the enclosures of the classrooms, the traditional territory of schooling, to open up into topological spaces, where complex relations between spaces, digital technologies and pedagogies can develop. While the classrooms offer a fixed

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arrangement, however, the emerging learning environments appear open to many (and some unpredictable) solutions. As a consequence, the school comes to be seen as a socio-spatial assemblage (Dovey and Fisher 2014) augmented by digital technologies. Of course, how these imagined landscapes and high standards translate into practice depends on the local conditions of schooling. The case study of the ‘Arcum School’ presented in this chapter is helpful to explore the sociomaterialities of digital schooling in more detail. The history of the dynamics of this school highlights the work of inscription by the school administration, and of education practice in digital formations: school websites, software applications, private platforms and e-books constitute the emerging materialities of digital schooling. These materialities shape the local digital governance of education in a significant way. They are not simple intermediaries; they are rather active mediators and are becoming increasingly imbricated and instrumental in schooling practices. The circulation of information, the notification of new circulars from head teachers and news about school projects are all mediated through school websites and by a mobile phone app. The school timetable, the recording of school attendance, the archiving of school marks and other operations are mediated by private platforms. Digital formations open new spaces of relations among the head teacher, teachers, students, parents and other agencies interested in school activities, and increase the connectedness of the education field. They activate spaces of visibility at the same time: they enable users to see and to install ‘windows’ on selected aspects of the ecology of education practice. Further, the ‘Arcum School’ in particular allows us to focus on the transformation of the textbook. The paper form of the textbook, its enclosure and boundedness, is problematized, and the textbook tends to become a topological space: a network of knowledge and information that circulate mostly on the internet, and that may (or may not) be materialized in paper form. The school decided to opt for ‘Book in progress’, a network of teachers committed to the making of open access digital books, and in particular, to relying on them as the compulsory texts for the classes of their courses. At the same time, the school tried to generalize a mode of schooling based on the making and availability of digital content. That way, teaching and learning draw on the concatenation of many knowledge resources, and on the skilful use of software, platforms and applications. The fabrication of digital schooling relies on a solid infrastructure of information and communication, on digital formations and on a group of knowledgeable teachers in the field that is asked to make decisions about a panoply of dispositifs furnished by public and private providers. Internet access, broadband, software, applications

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and platforms are offered by a notable number of possible companies, big and small enterprises, private and public partnerships and so on. Therefore, digital schooling requires a capacity to exercise a choice on seemingly technical issues, like the type of internet access, cloud computing, the type of software preferred and the digital platforms on the web that also have political effects, since each decision also brings the question of the possibility of their compatibility in terms of ‘philosophies’ of their design and ways of working. The case of the ‘Arcum School’ displays, in that respect, the professional commitment of a group of school staff (head teacher + teachers) able to organize the provision of sociotechnical apparatuses made up of platforms, software and websites and to make strategic choices in the process of organizational change. It is a case where the inscription in digital formations unfolds through a reflexive enactment on the new dispositifs. School staff are not only able to make decisions on the current provision of digital formations, but also to contribute to the making of digital technologies, as in the case of the production of new applications for digital governance; of the collective elaboration of e-books, required by the participation in the ‘Book in Progress’ network; and of educational websites. The school accepted that it would itself be shaped, but it also contributed actively to shaping the emerging morphology of digital schooling. This resulted in a successful orchestration of public and private digital resources, and public acknowledgement of the innovative character of its becoming topological. There is, of course, a price to be paid. The alliance of digitalization with the standardization of education practice (primarily of educational planning and delivery) is still provoking tensions and frictions among the overall teaching staff and in relation to the socialization of ‘new’ (to the school) teachers. A stronger coordination between the teachers, the shift towards digital formations and the ‘disappearance’ of textbooks can be destabilizing, especially in the case of teachers that were mostly adapted to the classical morphology of schooling, establishing a regime of closure and separation between head teachers, teachers, students, parents and other relevant school stakeholders. Furthermore, the national current system of evaluation is not particularly focused on digital competencies, with the effect of underestimating, and consequently not fully appreciating, the standards of excellence and the organizational transformations that the school is contributing to development in this field. Overall, the investigation here on the intersection between the Europeanization of education and digitalization, the policy of digitalization of schooling in Italy and the dynamics of a ‘digitally supportive school’ does not give any sign of an imminent disappearance of the school as an effect of digital technologies.

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Rather, digitalization offers ready-to-hand solutions to the perceived crisis in the world of education. The morphology of the school becomes topological, as a mirror of a becoming topological of the culture. Here, the change in schooling is not carried out through education policy; it is performed day-to-day through the adoption and composition of digital formations that are implemented and perceived largely as technical solutions to the closedness of the classical morphology of the school. The Europeanization of education is following this transformation and is considering the digitalization of economy and society as strategic drivers of societal and economic transformations. The EU and state members such as Italy, therefore, are supporting this change by giving direction to this complex restructuration in the form of standards. The policies of regulations can be read as an invitation to participate in digital schooling by updating the morphology of schooling to a dominant institutional discourse and rhetoric, but also as a defence of its excesses. The presence of digital formations becomes pervasive, and they are delegated increasing numbers of tasks in schooling practice. They offer a chance to private and public providers to actively participate in educational and administrative activities and to shape the conditions of possibility of contemporary education.

7

Conclusion: ‘Cartographies’ as Critical Tools

Introduction In this last chapter, by drawing on the main arguments of the book and, in particular, on the empirical findings, I will sum up the results of this exploration of the digital governance of education, and conclude with what it means to articulate critical research on it. I will reflect on the opportunities and the limitations of the approach I have proposed, and also offer some trajectories for future research on this topic that proposes specific theoretical and methodological challenges. In some respects, research on the digital governance of education has just started, and so there is a need to map this emergent territory that is profoundly reshaping the space-times of education, its forms of government and the actual conditions of education practice. This book offers cartographies of the digital governance of education, that is, theoretically and politically informed readings of the present (Braidotti 2011). Each chapter of the book contributes to developing complex cartographies of the digital governance of education, by zooming in and out of the EU transnational space and Italian spaces of education. Here, the cartographies have been realized by historical reconstructions, semiotic analysis and multisited ethnographies that have followed the trails of the policy instrumentations of the digital governance of education and studied their creation and effects on the ecology of education practice. These cartographies are not just descriptions, and can be resources to develop a critical position in education. Descriptions are not simple representations of the topics and phenomena under scrutiny: doing cartography is also an opportunity to retrace them, and to test their ‘reality’. They solicit the consideration of digital governance of education as being open to many possible alternative ontological politics (Braidotti 2005). In that respect, making cartographies of the digital governance of education aligns with recent attempts at the reconceptualization of the critique (Latour 2004; Boltanski

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2011), and the development of a mobile sociology of education (Landri and Neumann 2014). This chapter will first summarize the findings of theoretically informed readings of the development of the digital governance of education. It will then display the critical contribution of the making of cartographies of educational policymaking, and in particular, of the digitalization of the ecology of education practice. Finally, it will argue in favour of developing a critical research agenda on digital governance, by pointing to future directions of investigation and methodological challenges.

Cartographies of the digital governance of education In Chapter 1, I introduced some questions to define a compass for our journey in the emerging forms of digital governance. The questions addressed: (1) the materiality of digital governance, that is, its singularity as well as its networks of association; (2) its relationship with the current wave of standardization; and (3) the effects and the risks of digital governance, by focusing, in particular, on the modification of the morphology of schooling and the new paradoxes of transparency. In this section, I will sum up the research findings and underline how they display generalized trends in the digital governance of education.

Sociomaterialities Our investigation has described some sociomaterialities of the digital governance of education. These sociomaterialities are increasingly characterized by digital formations, that is, by apparatuses of software, algorithms, codes and data circulating in complex infrastructures of information and communication (computers, cables, electrical systems, etc.). These dispositifs are made up of complex, heterogeneous and multilayered assemblages of people, technologies and policies, and install a new space of visibility in education policy and practice. These digital formations are imbued with agency: they are not simple intermediaries, but are rather active participants in the making of educational policy and practice (see Figure 7.1). In Chapter 3, I retraced the history of the Europeanization of education, and in particular, I paid attention to how the European space of education emerged and was made visible. I focused on the ETM, a digital formation on the European Commission website that displays the degree of accomplishment of European benchmarks. The digital formation is an enactment of the European space of

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Figure 7.1 Sociomaterialities of the digital governance of education

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education: it allows member states to understand their positions concerning the realization of national objectives as well as their distance from the European average and the other member countries. ETM permits the circulation of tables, charts, infographics, videos and statistics about European education systems, like a permanent and dynamic exhibition of the Europeanization of education. In some respects, its logic is aligned with the Great Exhibitions of the end of nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century since it illustrates what the education systems, and the overall European space of education, are, and what they should be. The analysis of semiotics of this digital formation clarifies their design and the type of agency they perform. ETM is not only a mean to represent and make educational performances visible. It is also a frame that works to allow visualizing, comparing and competing (Lundahl 2016). It describes the Europe of education as a space of commensuration and is, in particular, an apparatus to support the development of a mimetic desire (Brø gger 2016). The digital renderings, the use of colours and the aesthetics of the infographics and tables are designed to materialize a logic of naming, shaming and faming. The digital formations are aimed at soliciting a desire for imitation, and a feeling of uneasiness in those positioned in the lowest ranks for the achievement of national and European benchmarks. In Chapters 4 and 5, we turned our attention to two digital formations realized in Italy, namely a digital platform called ‘Scuola in Chiaro’ (SiC) and an algorithmic system named ‘Dashboard’. SiC is a search engine that is based on a school data infrastructure. As a platform, SiC is officially aimed at assisting with school choice. It organizes school data to facilitate an informed school choice. In practice, it is at the intersection of many policies: (1) the open data initiative, intended to make the complex school databases of the ministry available on the internet; (2) school guidance, that is, the goal of helping students and parents to make a ‘good’ school choice, especially in school transition from compulsory schooling to upper secondary school; and (3) school self-evaluation, a guided process of self-evaluation where schools are asked to assess their performances and to make the evaluation visible and transparent on the internet. In SiC, Italian schools are reshaped as ‘houses of glass’, that is, as educational organizations open to inspection. The digital platform, here, standardizes the public display of schools on the web; it gives them a validated format of illustration of the school profile. This format enables the comparison of many schools on a set of basic information, and facilitates school choice. At the same time, the search engine, by making school performance visible, makes educational organizations publicly accountable.

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The analysis of this search engine allows us to highlight how the unfolding of digital platforms is solicited by the vast amount of data on education that play the role of ‘raw materials’ to be organized in a meaningful way. It is here that algorithms, or better, the development of algorithmic systems, can appear useful. Of course, algorithms are not neutral; their ‘automatic’ performances are oriented in particular directions. SiC as a search engine is designed to help make school choices according to geographical location, type of school and so on. It is not always clear, however, how the algorithms work in practice, and how they contribute to modelling school practices. In Chapter 5, I described the Dashboard, an algorithmic system of the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research in Italy. School data infrastructure can be analysed to gain a competitive advantage regarding policy knowledge. In that case, an algorithmic system is designed to automatically check the ‘goodness’ of school self-evaluation reports and pave the way for the evaluation of head teachers. The Dashboard is intended to perform automated ‘compliance checks’, and in particular, to measurably reshape school objectives. Here, the algorithmic system reinforces the power of the ministry, in particular, of the office responsible for school evaluation in modelling school autonomies. In a situation where schools can autonomously define their plans, the ministry draws on an algorithmic system to reverse the imbalance between the centre and the multitude of educational organizations, by making governance at a distance possible. The case of the Dashboard is not isolated and it reflects a general policy of ‘exploitation’ of big data. In the same year, the ministry relied on an algorithmic system to assign teachers their posts, by distributing them throughout Italian schools. The assignments, however, were highly contested and triggered loud protests from a large number of teachers that felt discriminated against by the algorithm. Similarly, the insistence on algorithms and digital platforms in the case of the implementation of head teachers’ evaluation would have later caused intense contestation from the same head teachers, that refused to follow the requested assessment protocols. The research findings are helpful in understanding how the digital governance of education, and the digital trend in education as a broader term, is contributing to the unfolding of post-social relationships in education policy and practice. The term post-social relationships, introduced by Knorr Cetina (2001), brings to the forefront the object-centred relationship that characterizes sociality with digital formations and algorithms, and, more generally, the structuration of our contemporary societies where new bonds between humans and objects are becoming increasingly important (such as in the case of environmental policy,

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in the electronic markets or for scientific and technological objects). While postsocial relationships point to the vast objectualization of social life, they also underline how these object-worlds become more and more fascinating, even more than humans, since they play the role of bearers of experiences (remembering, feeling, etc.) that we tend to attribute to intersubjective relationships. By zooming in on and zooming out from a transnational arena to a national locus and school fields, I have also been able to describe the organizational networks mobilized in the articulation of digital formations in Italy. Notably, these networks are composed of public and private organizations. Regarding the former, a relevant role has been played by the offices of the ministry and by national agencies, that is, the Institute for the Evaluation of the Education System (INVALSI) and the National Institute for Documentation, Innovation and Educational Research (INDIRE). INVALSI is detrimental to providing the knowledge base for the implementation of the system of school evaluation; INDIRE, on the contrary, is contributing to the changing morphology of schooling, accelerating the widespread adoption of and experimentation with digital technologies in teaching. Regarding enterprises, it would be impossible to deny the importance of private companies in the digital governance of education. They are developing and consolidating it in many ways (Williamson 2016a, c). For some authors, digitalization is related to the neo-liberal agenda in education (Saltman 2016), and to contemporary forms of platform capitalism (Armano, Murgia and Teli 2017; Srnicek 2017). The pervasiveness of private companies is confirmed in our research. The making of a school data infrastructure, the realization of SiC and the algorithmic system for the automatic analysis of the self-evaluation report draws on public–private partnership between the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research in Italy and a joint venture of private companies (Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services Italia – Auselda AED Group – Accenture) with responsibility for the information system of the ministry (Chapters 4 and 5). The ministry has also regulated the field of private software producers for school administration, by standardizing and making their applications interoperable. Multinational telecommunication companies have offered access to the internet, broadband and so on to schools, with some exceptions, as in the case of the ‘Arcum School’, where it was partly provided by GARR, a non-profit association (Chapter 6). Private companies furnish schools with IWBs, projectors, laptops, tablets and computers. They also provide many applications, platforms and so on, as well as services from cloud computing (Google Drive, Dropbox) to digital content.

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Our cartographies confirm, then, how the materiality of the digital governance of education is shaped by heterarchies (Ball, Junemann and Santori 2017), that is, by complex policy networks and public–private partnerships where strategic alliances are developed, and where public education becomes a field of increasing interconnection with education businesses, associations, etc. Heterarchies manufacture the intra-national space of Italy, and the transnational space of the EU, by constituting the ‘social’ infrastructure of the EU DSM Strategy (Chapter 6).

Standardization and digitalization The interplay between standardization and the digital governance of education is complex (see Figure 7.2). While digitalization intersects with the standardization of education, our cartographies reveal a multilayered landscape. The standardization of education is a key feature of the so-called ‘global education reform movement’ (Johnstone, Pairaudeau and Pettersson 2011) and the neo-liberal agenda in education (Ball 1998). Standardization here points to the shift to ‘outcomes’ in the policy epidemic of global reforms, that is, to student learning and school performances on the one hand, and on the other hand, to centralized, prescribed curricula, a trend that would increase the homogenization of education policies and practices. Standard-based reforms emphasize what is measurable in education practice, and this, in turn, translates into an increasing datafication of education. Digital technologies, here, contain a potential for analysis, manipulation and display of data that enhances the ‘possibility of seeing’ and making the ecologies of education practice more visible. The current wave of standardization is then reinforced by digital technologies. Investments in digital formations are intended to have the effect of alignment with, and partly of amplification of, the current standardization of education. Our empirical results have documented the process of reinforcement between digital formations and standardization. Of course, analysis of the construction of the European space of education (see Chapter 3) and of the development of the new regime of accountability of Italian schools (see Chapters 4 and 5) has enabled more subtle descriptions of these dynamics. For the former, I have illustrated how the making of the European space of education has required an important investment in standards. By retracing its history, I have highlighted how this developed as a process of translation that started from a condition of impossibility. Education was out of the European agenda; education systems

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Figure 7.2 Digital formations and standardization of education

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in EU member states were meant to be incommensurable. Europeanization began as an economically driven process. It took some time, then, to develop a collaboration in the field of education. Acceleration was provided by the Lisbon Strategy when the European space of education transformed into a space of commensuration, thanks to the adoption of several performance standards. Here, the orientation was towards a flexible standardization, where the fulfilment of European benchmarks is mediated by the realization of national objectives. ETM followed this orientation with a policy implementation tool of this enactment of Europeanization. For Italy, the case displays a similar alignment with outcomes, and with the multiplication of educational indicators in the development of a school regime of accountability. Here, in some way, institutional choice for school self-evaluation tends apparently to soften the standardization. In practice, standardized testing, the adoption of standard formats for self-evaluation and the introduction of a school profile by way of ‘SiC’ reinforced a trend towards uniformity. It provided a ‘recipe for reality’, a standard model for the process of school improvement. In my research, I have seen (Chapter 5) how the construction of a school data infrastructure is a premise for a form of managerialism that can be called databased school governance (Selwyn 2016). I have, in particular, paid attention to the case of the algorithmic system known as the Dashboard, and the participation of several Italian schools in the digital governance of education. Data-based school governance assumes that the data collected and analysed in the school data infrastructure, and further elaborated and conveyed by digital formations, lead to an objective evaluation of school performances. I have described diverse enactments of data-based school governance. The Dashboard, as an algorithmic system, is a multipurpose platform that can perform several operations. It enables the performance of a compliance check of school self-evaluation reports, and in that way, it orients schools and head teachers to define their objectives as measurable. Further, it enables the regional offices of the ministry to check the content of school self-evaluation reports at a distance and to help in the process of head teacher nomination. Through an algorithm, the ministry is able to control the alignment of schools to the guidelines for self-evaluation, and then to shape the way schools make their objectives public on the ‘SiC’ platform. The Dashboard also contains a considerable amount of data that can be useful to guide school autonomies: it has been used, for instance, to process knowledge on the implementation of a ‘school bonus’ to teachers (a highly debated extrasalary incentive offered by the government to schools). Data-based governance is implemented in the case of Italian schools by providing educational indicators

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and school-like comparisons drawing on standardized national testing, and from the national information systems. Here, data-based governance models the space of the possibilities of educational decision making, by asking the school to devise and consider an extended and ‘robust’ knowledge base. Of course, the knowledge mobilized here is aligned with the school effectiveness and improvement movement, and with a causal-like reasoning model of education practice that puts other epistemological perspectives in the background. The digital formation, ‘SiC’ in this case, enacts a window to see ‘how this happens’ in the public space of the internet: transparency translates as an invitation for the schools to assume responsibility for the realization of the stated objectives of improvement, or better, for the partly predetermined goals of school improvement. How do schools participate in this managerialistic enactment of the digital governance of education? Official data seem to display a high rate of alignment to data-based governance. In practice, our ethnographies from four schools highlight a mixed scenario (see Chapter 5). This means that there is a space for the school agency in the digital governance of education. By drawing on modified Souto-Otero and Beneito-Montagut typology (2016), I described strategies of (1) alignment, (2) ‘muddling through’, (3) fabrication and (4) opting out. These strategies pointed to specific directions and involved the whole school or part of it. In the case of alignment, there is compliance with the logic of data-based governance. The ‘muddling through’ solution instead displays a mixture of imitation and resistance. In that case, the school aligns with data-based governance, gives it a ‘value’ and tries to implement it. However, it lacks the knowledge repertoire to do this successfully; as a result, it produces a ‘proxy’ of the dominant model. As to fabrication, the school formally adheres to the institutional logic, yet in a very bureaucratic way. Here, it is more a ritual: the school follows the standard protocol, but the data do not trigger any problematization of the local education policymaking and practice. The organizational attention is elsewhere. Fabrication is not an open resistance to data-based governance; at the same time, it does not see it as highly relevant. Finally, opting out implies active resistance. In particular, it highlights a refusal to participate in standardized testing and to provide school data. This strategy is directed at contrasting the development of a regime of accountability that is perceived as ‘external’ and harmful to the quality of education practice. Its realization results in the invisibility of school practices on digital formation. These four strategies highlight that each school has a singularity that is not entirely reducible in the frame of data-based governance. There are different shades of alignment and resistance that depend ultimately on the professional

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knowledge repertoire of each school, and in particular, on its orientation towards current standardization and the digital governance of education. To conclude this section, it is important to recall that digital formations do not necessarily support the current standardization of education and the related managerial versions. There are many digital formations that are oriented to enact diverse space-times of education not aligned with the dominant logics. Digital technologies are fluid, and open to many possible instantiations. For example, in the case of the digital governance of European education, other platforms, like EPALE (Electronic Platform for Adult Education Learning in Europe), eTwinning, School Education Gateway and so on are enacted. They are designed for different purposes and propose a diverse ‘frame’ to make the processes of Europeanization visible. Educational policymaking seems, therefore, to imply an increasingly successful orchestration of many digital (and non-digital) technologies.

The school in the regime of transparency Finally, in the previous chapters, I have addressed some questions concerning the effects and the risks of digital governance (see Figure 7.3). I have explored, in particular, the issues of the morphology of schooling, and the dilemmas of transparency. Digitalization is a planetspeak discourse; it is considered an essential ingredient of innovation in schooling, and in all forms of education. It is rare to meet the resistance of a counterargument against this ‘veritable truth’ of contemporary education. Therefore, digital technologies are at the forefront of any change in educational organizations, and in the economy and society at large. Digitalization, according to some, would accelerate the processes of un-schooling or deschooling. The analysis of the making of digital schooling at EU level, the description of its implementation in the case of Italy and the scrutiny of the everyday practices of a digitally supportive school suggest a different scenario. At least at European level, and in the case of Italy, there is not a disappearance of the scholastic form; we are instead witnessing a complex change in the morphology of schooling, and of the space-times of education that are becoming topological (Thompson and Cook 2015). The topological character of the change consists of a deformation of the ‘envelopes’ of education, that is, in the problematization of their enclosures, and in particular, of their boundedness in the traditional territories of nation states, schools, classrooms and so on. The effect is a re-spatialization of education augmented and partly performed by digital technologies.

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Figure 7.3 Effects and risks of the digital governance of education

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In Chapters 3 and 6, I illustrated how this is happening in relation to the fabrication of the European space of education: an unfinished and complex reassemblage of education systems. In particular, I highlighted how this is occurring through the making of spaces of commensuration and in the case of the digitalization of schooling, where European schools are made comparable concerning their degree of accomplishment of the standard of a ‘digitally supportive school’. In Chapter 4, I described how, in the case of Italy, this re-spatialization implies the unfolding of a new regime of accountability augmented by digital formations. In all these cases, the ‘here-and-now’ of education practices are problematized, made visible and compared, by challenging the established frames of reference. In Chapter 6, the topological notions presented in the European documents to give direction to the digital trend are particularly interesting. The concepts of ‘digitally supportive school’, ‘digitally confident and supportive teacher’ and ‘digitally confident and supportive student’ conceive the ‘school’, the ‘teacher’ and the ‘student’ as territories of ‘positive’ entanglement of humans and nonhumans. In these entanglements, digital technologies are considered essential items in the new anthropotechnics of Europeanization (Sloterdijk 2009), and contribute to the fabrication of ‘human kinds’ (Popkewitz 2004; Popkewitz 2013). These new identities, together with others like ‘digital natives’, ‘digital immigrants’ (Bennett et al. 2008) or ‘video recorder teacher’ (Perrotta, Czerniewicz and Beetham 2016), help to define ‘actual’ and ‘desired’ conditions for education. In so doing, the new identities differentiate and divide ‘avant-garde’ from ‘backward’ teachers, students and schools, and in that way, it contributes to the production of new inequalities in the field of schooling. Some qualities are valued, and the qualities of other people, nation states, schools and so on are devalued or, at worst can be objects of abjection. In the case of the ‘Arcum School’, I have described how the implementation of digital schooling is carried out by a group of teachers, and how this ‘knowledgeable’ group of teachers sometimes relates problematically to ‘less-digitally competent’ teachers. More generally, schools have a differential agency in the digital governance of education, as already noted in the previous section. Some schools are more able than others to influence the emerging forms of digitalization of the ecology of education practice. Some schools are shaped by, while others can actively shape, digital formations. The production of new inequalities with the becoming topological of the space-time of education reminds us that transformations, and the digital trend, come with opportunities, but inevitably also with new risks. In reading the risks through the lens of transparency, I have tried to understand whether digital governance reduces the opacity in educational policymaking and practice

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and how stable the forms of transparency are. My research illustrates that we are always dealing with a mediated transparency (Hansen, Christensen and Flyverbom 2015). In other words, we see what the ‘epistemology of seeing’, in which we are involved, allows us to see. This epistemology depends on the dominant circuits of knowledge mobilized and on the framing of digital formations. Europeanization of education and the Italian system of evaluation are modelled by the vocabularies of school effectiveness and the school improvement movement that lead to the causal-like reasoning of educational policy and practice. These vocabularies focus mostly on what is measurable in education, by assuming that what is not measurable cannot be part of the discourse of evidence-based policymaking, and is not to be admitted to the corpus of scientific statements (Meyer 2017). Furthermore, the ‘epistemology of seeing’ is oriented to vocationalism, that is, to the aspect of education mostly related to economic performances. The likely effect of this ‘epistemology’ is to see like large-scale international assessments, and in particular, to ‘see like PISA’ (Gorur 2016) such that ‘thin’ and simplified descriptions translate the complexities of education. While any exercise of evaluation and measurement, and the same practices of educational decision making, imply a form of simplification of the reality, that is, a specific ‘investment in form’ (Boltanski and Thevenot 1999), there is an underestimation of the impact of this mediated transparency on the ecology of education practice. The ‘frame’ of the dominant epistemology of seeing tends to narrow down the curriculum and to reduce the outlook on education. Only what can be translated in data is valuable; measurability is fundamental to establishing what ‘good education’ is (Biesta 2008). Some circuits of educational knowledge are brought to the forefront; others are put aside, or considered peripheral and less important. The emphasis on ‘transparency’ does not eliminate opacity in educational policy and practice; it rather introduces complex interferences between transparency and opacity. While schools are transparent and accountable, digital platforms and algorithms are not. This suggests that the digital governance of education comes with additional layers of opacity. The case of SiC in Chapter 4 and the algorithmic system in Chapter 5 are exemplifications of these dynamics. For the former, all the school data (with some exceptions) from the self-evaluation report are by default made public on the internet. To limit the transparency, schools, and in particular, head teachers, had to take a decision by deselecting the kind of data they would not like to display. This means that system designers and policymakers automatically endowed SiC with a policy of completely open transparency that raised serious doubts and protests about the possible use of

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the platform for surveillance and control. Beyond the intended transparency goal, the SiC would have permitted the introduction of a naming–shaming– blaming logic that was initially excluded during the development of the system of evaluation. Regarding the algorithmic system called ‘Dashboard’ described in Chapter 5, this was never entirely presented in public. The Dashboard was offered to officers of peripheral departments of the ministry; however, it remained to some extent opaque. This has had effects on educational policymaking since ‘Dashboard’ was utilized for compliance checks and for redefining school objectives. More generally, and regardless of their concrete effects, investments by the ministry in algorithms remained non-transparent. Any attempt to make them public failed: issues of copyright and questions of public secrets were in opposition to calls for their workings to be revealed and criticized. It happens that the automatization of parts of the governance of education can develop without being open to public scrutiny. This can be treated as a technical issue, empty of political implications. Given the extensive use of algorithms, and the diffusion of digital formations in education, the risk of digital governance of education is to delegate an increasing number of activities (even non-routine decisions) to algorithms without recognizing and discussing the effects of this automatization on educational policy and practice.

Directions of research on digital governance The exploration of the digital governance of education is just beginning, and more research is needed to understand its dynamics. The cases I have presented and the reflections developed so far contain, as always, some limitations. I had the opportunity to detail the visible aspect of digital governance, that is, to follow the trails left by documents, algorithms, digital formations and so on and to meet most of the public officers of the ministry and the school staff. More difficult is meeting with the designers and experts responsible for school data infrastructure and digital technologies. Their accounts would have disclosed the complexities of making new object-worlds of the new digital technologies. What was missing in the descriptions was partly compensated for by the same digital formations that are open to exploration on the internet, and contain many useful elements of self-description. The cartographies are therefore incomplete and offer only some (hopefully intriguing) glimpses of the emerging terrain. My research findings support the call for developing a critical sociology of the digitalization of schooling (Selwyn et al. 2016) in the hope of having a

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more comprehensive understanding of how this transformation is occurring and with what effects. In the remainder of this chapter, and to conclude, I will address what it means here to develop a critical sociology and underline some methodological challenges of this project.

What type of critique? The turn to the digital appears to be an ‘indisputable truth’ of the contemporary economy and society. It is hard to play the game of being against it. The debate is often underdeveloped and split between techno-enthusiastic and dystopian visions that are not helpful in advancing our understandings (Selwyn 2017). The proposals to develop a critical agenda are therefore very timely (Selwyn 2015; Selwyn et al. 2016). In that respect, there are some theoretical perspectives sharing this critical interest (Selwyn 2015). The political sociology of the governance of education has explored the turn to data in the new forms of government in Europe and all over the world, by underlining, in particular, the role of intergovernmental organizations, like the OECD (Grek 2014; Ozga 2016; Lawn and Grek 2012). ANT, as I have already said in Chapter 2, has inspired some studies on the digital governance of education by describing the assemblages of humans and nonhumans involved in the making of educational technologies (Fenwick and Edwards 2016; Koyama 2011). A wide range of scholars, whose work can be included in the label ‘digital sociology’, are developing interesting reflections and empirical studies on digital studies and practices, and contributing to realizing some studies that critically reflect on how the digital is shaping the economy and society and at the same time is being shaped by social and economic interests. That way, digital sociology is deepening our understanding of the dynamics of post-social relationships, by helping to relate the digital governance of education to wider transformations of the economy and society (Lupton 2016; Beer 2017; Ruppert, Law and Savage 2013). In making a list of the themes of investigation of a critical sociology in the field, Selwyn et al. (2016) suggested some meaningful areas of concern that I have partly explored with my empirical research, but that deserve further analysis. The areas of concern include (1) the political economy of school and educational technology, (2) the management and governance of school, (3) the digital labour of school and schooling and (4) the surveillance of schools (Hope 2016). While sharing the choice of these research objects, it would be important as well to relate the critical agenda to the current debate on the rethinking

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of the critical approach (Latour 2004; Boltanski 2011). Some aspects of the critical vocabularies are ‘running out of steam’, and there is a need to regain a critical edge in analysing emergent phenomena that seem to escape the conventional ‘grids’ of interpretation. This is particularly true in the case of the digitalization of education, that, as I have already noted, is contributing to the making of post-social relationships. Digital technologies do not necessarily lead to the destruction of societies, nor to a consumeristic individualism. They can also enable new socialities, and emancipatory social interactions. What kind of problematization and critique of the digitalization of education should be welcomed? What, instead, is closest to ‘conspiracy theories’ and is less useful, or potentially harmful (Boltanski 2014)? The risk in taking the ‘wrong’ critical lens is to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’, and to repeat the same deconstructivist gesture that relates the current changes to social forces (neoliberalism, capitalism, etc.) accounting behind the scenes. Interesting attempts to renew the critique, and therefore to welcome a dialogue between the sociology of education and social studies of STS, are to be found in some reflections that tend to reconcile the critical sociology with the pragmatic sociology of critique (Boltanski 2011). These reflections start by considering that the exercise of critique requires the development of a thought experiment, that is, a protocol of investigation to construct a position of exteriority about an object – a social phenomenon, for instance. There are many ways to elaborate this position, and therefore to be critical. Critical sociology, for example, Bourdieusian sociology, has provided a valuable vocabulary to establish a critique of society, and to unveil the social mechanisms of domination. However, it was premised on three assumptions that have been severely criticized: (1) a too-broad definition of the dominant that led to the conflation of all the social relationships in the vertical dimension; (2) the principle of illusio that accounted for the relative inexperience, or not perceived experience of the domination by the allegedly dominated; and (3) the asymmetry between the sociologists and actors, where only the former are in the position to get to the truth, and the others are like the humans in Plato’s cave entrapped in the illusory visions of common sense. The pragmatic sociology of critique (Boltanski and Thevenot 1999) has instead explored how the actors in a situation can develop their criticism: (1) how actors are not completely dominated by an overarching framework working behind them; (2) how they can move as ‘naive sociologists’ in their field, trying to interpret the situation actively; and (3) how they often develop creative solutions to the disputes and uncertainties of their everyday activities.

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While in case of the critical sociology, the sociology is a model and a way out to nurture the critique and dynamics of the emancipation of the dominated, the pragmatic sociology of critique puts ‘in brackets’ this panoramic view, and looks in particular at the local conditions of the practice of critique. The shift is not by chance, and it has political implications. In following a pragmatic sociology of critique, there is a redistribution of agency, the renouncement of an all-encompassing point of view and the acceptance of the plurality of the actors’ points of view. Here, the normative position to develop a critical position is drawn by the moral sense of the actors in the situation. The critique is then based on analysing the gap between the social reality as is and as it should be to meet the actors’ expectations. It is not difficult to see how these two approaches can inform the research and ‘perform’ the digital governance of education in different ways. A critical sociology can be interested in relating it to the unifying paradigm of neoliberalism, or to the force of capitalism. A pragmatic sociology would focus more on exploring how digital governance is experienced to understand whether or not a reality is emerging by meeting the actor ideas, or is transforming the world of education in an unliveable world. Each version could contribute to deepening our understanding of the digital turn in education, and the search for reconciliation can probably be an end in itself for opening a permanent space of investigation and engagement with the emergent issues. There are, in fact, some important questions to analyse in the dynamics of digital governance. The increasing investment in algorithmic systems, and in the many forms of artificial intelligence in education policy and practice, for example, also fostered by the European Commission, asks to articulate a convincing reply from the critical studies of digital data and education. In this book, I opted for an empirical approach to the governance of education, by sharing the pragmatic sociology of critique. I do not provide overarching pictures, but only ‘sensitizing concepts’ to analyse the digital governance of education empirically in practice. The findings were then presented as cartographies that describe the immanent contradictions of the digitalization of education policy and practice. As cartographies, they offer a reality test to understand the conditions of the digital governance of education, its risks, potentialities and actual dilemmas. Of course, the same topic would have appeared differently had I assumed other critical orientations. There is, nonetheless, a need to study the current changes of space-time of education in detail to understand the chronicles of these transformations, and to understand whether or not they are heading towards liveable worlds of education.

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Methodological challenges The investigation of the digital governance of education is accompanied by methodological challenges that make the research more difficult, and that stimulate the articulation of new apparatuses of collection and analysis of data. It is increasingly clear that there is a need to update the classic methodology of sociology to follow the reality of policy instrumentations of the digital governance of education, digital life of schooling, the intersection between digital technologies and classical forms of schooling and how these transformations are experienced (Selwyn et al. 2016). Interviews, surveys and field notes appear insufficient to obtain the subtleties and dynamics of the postsocial relationships that unfold in complex sociomaterial assemblages, occur in increasingly high-density technological environments and are embedded in sophisticated imbrications of humans and nonhumans. The widespread diffusion of big data, and the reality of the social media network, on the other hand, have eroded the spaces for sociological inquiry, putting at risk its expertise in some methods, and paving the way for an empirical crisis of the discipline (Savage and Burrows 2007). Similarly, the ethnography of schooling is experimenting a rethinking driven by the restructuration of fieldwork, which problematizes the ‘here-and-now’ of the face-to-face interaction to assume a topological configuration in distributed networks of interactions that are technologically mediated. Inevitably, the changing field of research implies to update the expertise of the ethnographer interested in the description of the everyday life of the school (Landri 2013). There is a need, then, to engage creatively with protocols of inquiry to trace the digital governance of education in practice. In my investigation, I combined historical analysis, semiotic tools and multisite ethnographies to elaborate cartographies of digital governance. In this respect, however, there is further work to do, by exploring the same possibilities of digital technologies. Critical research, here, can benefit from the data offered by digital platforms, and by the affordances of digital technologies. School data infrastructures contain much information that is publicly available, and that permit having a first idea of the platform and its working. In their analysis on schooling, Giancola and Viteritti (2014), for example, started to use the data provided by the digital platform in advance to get into the ethnographical analysis of the schooling practice, so that distal and proximal visions of the education practice can be fruitfully composed. Additional chances are suggested by mobile methods (Bü scher, Urry and Witchger 2011), and by the cartography of controversies that make wide use of digital methods (Venturini

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2012). Increasing investment in the automatization of education policy and practice suggests, in particular, a focus on the study of algorithms (Beer 2017). As we have seen in Chapter 5, the investigation here can be particularly challenging for the same ontology of the algorithms, which are often covered by private ownership, and are sometimes elaborated in transnational networks of experts that are very complicated to access. 1 In his review of how to approach algorithms, Kitchin (2014) describes several ways of doing it: (1) examining the transformation of pseudo codes into source codes that concern how a solution to a task is analysed and translated into a machine-readable code; (2) reflexively producing code via an auto-ethnography on how to engage personally with the making of an algorithm and its writing in a code; (3) reverse engineering, which implies an understanding of the ‘how’ of an algorithm by trial, that is, by understanding through the input and the output the script that is inscribed in it (in my research, I made a brief experimentation of this type to comprehend the workings of SiC, and in particular, how it produces its output; more generally, I tried all the digital platforms I approached in order to get to know and understand their characteristics); (4) interviewing designers or conducting ethnography among the coding team; (5) unpacking all the assemblages of the algorithms by also understanding the institutional conditions of production; and (6) examining how algorithms function in the world. Kitchin’s strategies (2014) are useful suggestions for unveiling what is ‘inside’ the algorithm, and reconstructing the sociotechnical assemblages articulated around it. They have pros and cons; they invite the researcher/s to become familiar with the field, and also to get access to it. Sometimes the availability of open source projects may facilitate the collection of empirical documentation; on the contrary, access in the case of commercial projects can be more difficult where the presence of a researcher can be contested, and could be granted in the case of blended identity, as in a case of a programmer that serves both roles with the full agreement of the companies. In the latter case, the opacity of the algorithm is a defence against its public disclosure. Of course, the issue can be complicated in cases where the algorithm is developed in a public–private partnership, and where the task is public policy, and the general rule is the transparency of policy instrumentations. Other ‘hard questions’ relate to the widespread diffusion of educational software made available through the internet, such as Google Suite or Dropbox. Free use of the digital solution is premised on contract regulations that concern, in a particular way, the traceability of users who extract data from social interactions with the platform. There is some opacity concerning the

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use of this data for commercial purposes and the privacy of users. While it is often difficult to gain access to the field, critical research may offer interesting accounts of the production of algorithmic systems and their uses. Finally, the cartographies of digital governance of education in practice could be enriched by intersecting qualitative research with digital methods. The description of the digitalization of schooling could be realized via trace ethnography, that is, the collection of data logs, version histories, documentation, conversations of programmers, users and so on to form a thick description of the interactions of teachers, head teachers, developers, users and so on with the digital formations (Geiger and Ribes 2011). Similarly, it is possible to draw on digital methods to detect the interaction between the human senses and digital technologies, by giving an aesthetic understanding of the entanglement of humans and nonhumans in the digitalization of schooling and challenging its dominant entrapment in the positivist enactment of big data, and in the automatism driven by systems of algorithms. Even methodologically, the challenge for critical research is to help understand how the respatializing of education is occurring, and whether it delivers a ‘reality’ that meets the expectations of those experiencing it.

Notes Chapter 1 1 Elsewhere, by drawing on Waldow (2015), I have tried to summarize this history in three waves to attract attention to the turning points in which the question of standards has been raised and has played a significant role in educational policymaking (Landri 2017). 2 The digital technologies are inscriptions that sustain the capacity to visualize and to produce knowledge (Latour 2011). Recently, they have also involved other senses, like touch.

Chapter 2 1 Here, ANT shares the critique for methodological nationalism and proposes to develop an understanding of the current cosmopolitics of education (Landri 2018). 2 In the following chapters, the semiotic analysis will refer to the original colors of the digital formations on the Internet. The figures of the book are, instead, presented in black and white. 3 The names of schools have been changed to allow the schools to remain unidentified.

Chapter 3 1 The semiotic analysis here refers to the display of ETM 2016 (http://ec.europa.eu/ education/policy/strategic-framework/et-monitor_en). 2 EPALE (https://ec.europa.eu/epale/en/home-page), Open Education Europa (https://www.openeducationeuropa.eu/en), eTwinning (https://www. etwinning.net/en/pub/index.htm), School Education Gateway (https://www. schooleducationgateway.eu/en/pub/index.htm).

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Chapter 6 1 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/priorities/digital-single-market_en. 2 The then European commissaire Nellie Kroes asked Italian parliament to quickly approve the digital agenda to align Italy with the European Plan. Her messages underlined the need to reach a consensus on a topic she considered bipartisan. 3 While the use of digital technologies by the Italian adult population is still lagging behind other European countries, according to the DESI, the use of the internet by the younger generation is not so different than in the rest of the OECD countries. It is understandable therefore that the plan identifies in the increase of the use of ICT in schools a top priority for the development and the consolidation of digital schooling in Italy. 4 GARR was founded in 1991 to harmonize the experiments on the internet carried out in diverse research organizations. Here, like in other countries, the development of the internet was accelerated by the research organization. GARR was the first Italian national network on the internet.

Chapter 7 1 There is a need to develop specific strategies for investigating their impact on the morphology of schooling, given the interests of corporate reform in education in the United States, for example, to sustain artificial intelligence projects (RobertsMahoney, Means and Garrison 2016).

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Index Accademia della Crusca 90 accountability 6, 7, 13, 32 regime 7, 29, 36, 39, 94, 96, 99, 102, 103, 114, 120, 121, 133, 135, 136 actor-network theory (ANT) 14, 19–26, 27, 28, 32, 42, 142 agency of nonhumans 22–3 critique to 25–6 as infralanguage 21 meeting with educational research 26–32 network and network effects 25–6 relational thinking 20 and semiotics 34 as sensibility 20 as sociology of translation 23 symmetry 21–2 translation 24–5, 41–2 AHELO. See Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes algorithm 5, 6, 7, 13, 29, 80, 83–4, 101–2 agential capacity 85 investigating 85–6 investment in 101–2 ontology 86 politics 102 secrecy 86 algorithmic system 16, 35, 36, 87–93, 130–33, 132, 135, 139–40 and the dependency grammar 91 and the digital governance 84, 101 Anagnostopoulos, Dorothea 14, 62, 82 analogue technologies 5 ANDIS (National Association of Educational Managers) 36, 92 ANT. See actor-network Theory anthropotechnics 11, 16, 139 Arcum School 37, 114–21, 123–4, 139 as assemblage of technological, organizational, and professional items 116

ARGO 118 Armano, Emiliana 132 artefact 5. See also technologies of the production and consumption of data digital 34 assemblage 24, 25 of elements 25 forming 22 humans and nonhumans 21, 32, 61, 142 infrastructure 62 as notion 32 people, technologies, and policies 62, 63, 79–81, 128 policy assemblages 32–7 policy knowledge 114, 122 socio-technical 146 transnational 15, 40 Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) 10 association of humans and nonhumans 11. See assemblage Astra 36, 94, 97–8, 103 Ball, Stephen 33, 85, 133 becoming topological of culture 106. See school becoming topological Beer, David 13, 85, 142, 146 Beneito-Montagut, Roser 6, 7, 87, 102, 136 Bennett, Sue 139 Biesta, Gert 140 Blaise 30 Bologna Process 47–8 Boltanski, Luc 16, 127, 140, 143 Bowker, Geoffrey 8, 61, 62 Braidotti, Rosi 2, 17, 32, 127 Braun, Annette 85, 87 Brøgger, Katja 55, 57, 130 Brunsson, Nils 8–9 Busch, Lawrence 8

166 Cabitza, Federico 33, 34, 52 Callon, Michel 20, 24 cartography 2, 127. See also digital governance of education controversies 145 Carvalho, Luis Miguel 10 Christensen, Lars Thøger 12, 13, 140 Coburn, Cynthia 86 code 5, 29, 40, 128. See also algorithm, and algorithmic system coders 85 instructions 83 lines 85, 87, 91, 101 ready-made 77 Cook, Ian 26, 106, 137 corporal relations 34, 65, 66 Costa, Estela 10 critique 16–17 sociology 142–4 type 142–4 cyberflaunerie 34 Dashboard. See also algorithmic system 35, 100–2, 130–1, 135, 140 history 88–93, data collecting, packaging and analysing 5–6 datafication of education 1, 6–7, 39–40, 50, 60, 62, 63, 83–4, 133 digital 5, 14, 84 displaying 6 governance by 50 sorting and retrieving 6–7 technologies of the production and consumption 5–7 data-based school governance 83, 86, 94–100, 102–3 enactment 94–100, 135–6 as managerialism 135 Decuypere, Mathias 20, 28, 30, 31, 57 De Landa, Manuel 32, 106 Deleuze, Giles 32, 106 dependency grammar and valency theory 90–1 DESI. See Digital Economy and Society Index deterritorialization 106

Index Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) 109, 122 digital-era governance 3–4 effects 4 digital formation 10, 14, 23, 59, 88, 90, 91, 100, 106, 117, 123–5, 128–9, 131–2, 133, 135–6, 139, 139–40, 141, 147 as permanent exhibition 57–8 as policy instrumentation 60 proliferation 58 semiotics 33–4 digital governance of education 1, 4–5 ANT studies 26–32 cartographies 2, 14, 33, 37, 128–42 effects 10–13, 137–41 methodological challenges 145–7 risks 10–13, 137–41 school participation in 102–3 sociologies of 1, 14, 20 sociomaterialities of 2, 5–7, 128–33 digitalization of education 2, 7, 33, 72, 109, 115, 141 digital schooling 137–8 as an assemblage 108, 122 digitally confident and supportive students 108 digitally confident and supportive teachers 108 digitally equipped 108, personalization 12 policy 107–21 sociomateriality 123–4 Digital Single Market Strategy (DSM) 33, 44, 107, 122, 133 digital systems 5 digital technologies 1 accountability 7 affordances 7, 117 analogue technologies 5 becoming topological 121 critical studies 23, 146 datafication 83, 84, 87 for displaying data 6 and educational governance 4 end of the school 106 entanglement with 33 European space of education 39 fabrication of ‘human kinds’ 139 fluidity 137–8

Index as gatekeepers 77 as hidden managers 11 human senses 147 in self-evaluation 36 for sorting and retrieving data 6 new anthropotechnics 11 post-social relationship 142 power 2, 79, 81–2 re-spatialization of education 137 school data use 86 transparency 62 Directorate-General for Education and Culture (DG_EAC) 48 Dolphijn, Rick 32 DSM. See Digital Single Market Strategy Dunleavy, Patrick 3, 4 Education and Training Monitor 2016 (ETM) 35, 44, 51, 128 corporal level 51–2, 65, 66 as digital formation 51 plastic configuration 34, 51, 54, 65, 79 scripts 51, 52, 53, 54 Educational Vanguards 107, 115 Education and Training 2020 strategy (ET 2020) 39, 49 Eduscopio 7 Edwards, Richard 5, 14, 19, 20, 21, 26, 27, 142 EERJ. See European Educational Research Journal EFQ. See European Framework Qualification Electronic Platform for Adult Education Learning in enactment of data-based school governance 135–6 alignment 94–6, 135 muddling-through 96–7, 136 fabrication 97–8, 136 enactment of school data infrastructure 83–4 entanglements 29 sociomaterial 28 transnational and intra-national spaces 32 entanglements of humans and nonhumans 22, 28, 108

167

aesthetic understanding 147 as condition for stability 22 positive 139 EPALE. See Electronic Platform for Adult Education Learning in epistemology of seeing 13, 140 Equitas 36, 95–6, 102, 103 ETM. See Education and Training Monitor eTwinning 58, 137 EU. See European Union Europe 58, 137 Europe 2020 40, 49, 51 European Educational Research Journal (EERJ) 4 European Framework Qualification (EFQ) 120 Europeanization of education 14–15, 35, 40, 44–50, 59, 121, 128–30, 137, 140 as digitalization of schooling 107–9, 124, 125 enactment 58, 120, 135 European Schoolnet 33 European Space of Education 9, 33, 39, 45 construction and fabrication 14–15, 35, 44–50 reassemblage of education systems 139 as space of commensuration 44, 49, 55, 58 visualization 41, 50–6 European Space of Higher education 48 European Union (EU) 14, 16, 40, 107, 127 Eurostat 9 exhibits exibitionary practices 41, 42 international 41–3, 52, 57, 58, 115, 130 Federation of Knowledge Workers – General Italian Confederation of Labour, (FLC-CGIL) 36, 78 Fenwick, Tara 5, 14, 19, 20, 21, 26, 142 figurative sphere 34 FLC-CGIL. See Federation of Knowledge Workers – General Italian Confederation of Labour

168

Index

fluid 26, 43, 54, 137 Flyverbom, Mikkel 12, 13, 140 Gale, Trevor 33 GARR 116 Geiger, R. Stuart 147 GERM. See global education reform movement Gherardi, Silvia 22, 32 Giancola, Orazio 145 global education reform movement (GERM) 7, 133 Gorur, Radhika 7, 10, 14, 21, 26, 28, 32, 61, 140 governance by numbers 50 Grek, Sotiria 14, 48, 49, 50, 59, 142 Grimaldi, Emiliano 25, 59, 74, 110 Guattari, Felix 32, 106 Gunther, Helen 89

INVALSI. See Institute for the Evaluation of Education System Italy 14–16, 59, 109–14, 130–33 system of evaluation 73–7 Jacobsen, Rebecca 14, 62 Juncker’s Commission 44 Junemann 33, 133 Kitchin, Rob 85, 146 Knorr Cetina, Karin 16, 131 Koyama, Jill 142

Hansen, Hans Krause 12, 13, 140 heterarchies 132–3 Hewlett-Packard (HP) 72, 80, 88, 91, 102 historical analysis 14 policy historiography 33, 34 Holford, John 49, 50 HP. See Hewlett-Packard

Landri, Paolo 5, 9, 16, 34, 35, 59, 128, 145 large-scale assessments 10 Latour, Bruno 16, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 127, 143 Law, John 2, 17, 20, 21, 25, 26, 34, 42, 43, 142 Lawn, Martin 14, 19, 40, 41, 48, 57, 59, 142 Lisbon Agenda. See also Lisbon Strategy Lisbon Strategy 39, 45, 48–9, 50, 56, 57, 58, 135 Lundahl, Christian 57, 130 Lupton, Deborah 142 Lury, Celia 26, 106

INDIRE. See Institute for the Documentation, Innovation and Educational Research infrastructural inversion 61 inscriptions 42 Institute for the Documentation, Innovation and Educational Research (INDIRE) 36, 37, 76, 115, 131 Institute for the Evaluation of Education System (INVALSI) 35, 36, 74, 76, 79, 80, 89, 91, 94, 102, 115, 132 tests 74, 116 report for self-evaluation 74 interactive whiteboards (IWBs) 110–11 intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) 9 International exhibits 41 International Standard of Classification of Education System (ISCED) 9

Margetts, Helen 3, 4 Massa, Riccardo 106 Masschelein, Jan 11, 26, 105 Mattozzi, Alvise 33, 34, 51, 52, 65 Maulini, Olivier 105, 106 Meyer, Heinz-Dieter 140 Migrantes 36, 96–7, 103 mimetic desire 57, 130 Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR) 35, 79, 100, 111, 115, 118, 131, 132 morphology of school 11, 37, 105–6, 115, 124, 125, 128, 132, 136 Mulcahy, Dianne 17, 27 multi-sited ethnographies 14, 16, 33, 35, 94, 127 Murgia, Annalisa 132 mutual surveillance 10, 13 MySchool 7

Index National Plan Digital School 37, 109–14. See also Piano Nazionale Scuola Digitale as an assemblage of policy knowledge 114 neo-liberal agenda in education 1, 9, 27, 132 Nespor, Jan 26 network 21, 25–6 network ethnography 33 network of expertise 9, 45 network of practice 28, 80 network ontology 25, 26 Neumann, Eszter 128 New Public Management (NPM) 1, 3, 59, 60 Ninno, Domenico 86 Normand, Romuald 49 NPM. See New Public Management OECD. See Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development O’Keefe, Cormac 30 ontological politics 17, 26, 127 opacity 13, 63, 101–2, 141 Open Education Europa 58 Open Method of Coordination 48, 50, 56 opting-out 98–100, 136 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 1, 6, 9–10, 28, 29, 49, 61, 108, 109, 111, 122, 142 OECD as centre of calculation 30 Ozga, Jennifer 50, 142 Parisi, Luciana 26, 106 Pépin, Luce 45 Perrenoud, Phillippe 105, 106 Perrotta, Carlo 11, 139 personalization of education 6, 12 PIAAC. See Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies Piano Nazionale Scuola Digitale 16 Piattoeva, Nelli 14, 20, 28 PISA. See Programme for International Student Assessment plastic qualities 34. See also plastic configuration

169

policy instrumentations 5–7, 34, 94, 103, 127, 145, 146 policy trail 34, 94 Popkewitz, Tom 11, 137 Postma, Dirk 160 post-social relationships 16, 131–2, 142 digitally confident and supportive teachers 108 digitally confident and supportive students 108 digitally equipped schools 108 POU (operational uniform platform) 76, 80 presence of the ethnographer 34 private companies 6, 85, 132 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 6, 9–10, 27, 56 seeing like PISA 140 Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) 10, 29–30 public-private partnerships 62, 132 RAV. See school self-evaluation report regime of visibility 79, 81, 82–3 region 26 Renzi government 63, 73, 110, 112–14 reterritorialization 106 Ribes, David 147 Ruppert, Evelyn 142 Rutledge, Stacey A. 14, 62 Sahlberg, Pasi 7 Saltman, Kenneth 132 Santori, Diego 133 Savage, Glenn 32, 142 Savage, Mike 142, 145 school becoming topological 16, 26, 106, 107, 114–25, 137, 139 as houses of glass 15, 60, 63–5, 79, 130 plan for improvement 64 professional knowledge repertoire 136–7 self-evaluation report (RAV) 64, 74–8, 88, 94 as socio-spatial assemblage 123

170 school data infrastructure 5, 9, 15–16 fabrication 61–3 power 81–2 use 83–103 School Education Gateway 58, 137 School Finder 7 screen 30–2 scripts 20, 23, 34 Scuola in Chiaro (SiC) 7, 15, 35, 36, 63–82, 130–1, 135 as an assemblage 64, 65, 73, 79–81 history 67–79 scripts 65, 66 semiotics 65–7 territorialization 69 Sellar, Sam 10, 12, 61 Selwyn, Neil 135, 141–2, 145 semiotic analysis 14, 33, 34, 57, 127 semiotics of configurations 34, 51 Serpieri, Roberto 35, 59, 74, 89, 110 SiC. See Scuola in Chiaro SIDI (Information System of the Ministry) 80 Simons, Maarten 11, 20, 26, 28, 30, 31, 105 singolarity of the schools 103 Sloterdijk, Peter 11, 139 Sobe, Noah 41, 57 sociology 32 critical 142–3 dialogue with social studies of science and technology 143 digital 14, 141–2 mobile 128 organization 25 political 14, 141 pragmatic 143–4 translation 23–5 soft law 9 Sørensen, Estrid 26, 31 Souto-Otero, Manuel 5, 6, 7, 87, 102, 136 spaces commensuration 10, 40, 49 comparison 63, exercise 63 guidance 63 transnational and intra-national 32 Spartacus 36, 98–100, 103 Srnicek, Nick 132

Index standard 8 based reform 133 definition 8 fluidity 28 as immutable mobile 27 investment in 42 local universality 28 as matter of fact vs matter of concern 27 recipes for reality 8 space of prescription and space of negotiation 28 teaching 27–8 and uniformity 28 standardization of education 7–10 ANT studies 26–32 flexible 57, 135 fluid 57 and neo-liberal agenda 27 school data and information 81–2 standardized differentiation of education, of the European space of eduction 56 Star, Susan Leigh 8, 23, 61, 62 structured oligopoly 9 TAMS Analyzer 37 Teli, Maurizio 132 Terranova, Tiziana 26, 106 Thevenot, Laurent 140, 143 Thompson, Greg 26, 137 topologies of education 63, 79, 82. See also morphology of school school 16 Totaro, Paolo 86 trails left by 141–42 transparency 10, 12–14, 60, 63–4, 101 mediated 140 responsibility 63–4, 74, 82, 89, 93, 136 shades 63, 77–8 Treaty of Maastricht 47, 49 Treaty of Rome 15, 39, 44, 45–6, 47, 49 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) 27 Turner, Erica 86 UNESCO. See United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organizations

Index

171

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organizations (UNESCO) 9

Viteritti, Assunta 145 vocationalism 49, 58, 140 von Davier, Matthias 62

van der Tuin, Iris 32 Venturini, Tommaso 14, 145–6 Video surveillance technology 28–9 visualization of education systems 41–4, 57

Williamson, Ben 132

1, 4, 5, 7, 14, 19, 61,

Youdell, Deborah

32

Ziewitz, Malte

85