Showing papers by "Thomas S. Popkewitz published in 2020"

The paradoxes of practical research: The good intentions of inclusion that exclude and abject:

Abstract: There is an alluring, daunting, and haunting desire for practical knowledge in the contemporary social and education sciences about school change. This desire is not new: it haunts the turn of 20th...

Statistics Reasoning and Its “Acting” in Educational Policy

Abstract: In an important book about numbers and social affairs, Theodore Porter (1995) begins by asking: “How are we to account for the prestige and power of quantitative methods in the modern world? How is it that what was used for studying stars, molecules and cells would have attraction for human societies?” To consider these questions, Porter continues that only a small proportion of numbers or quantitative expressions have any pretence of describing laws of nature or “even of providing complete and accurate descriptions of the eternal world” (Porter 1995: viii–ix). Numbers, he argues, are parts of systems of communication whose technologies create distances from phenomena by appearing to summarize complex events and transactions. The objectivity of numbers appears as mechanical, following a priori rules that project fairness and impartiality, numbers are seen as excluding judgment and mitigating subjectivity.

International Assessments of Student Performance: The Paradoxes of Benchmarks and Empirical Evidence for National Policy

Abstract: There is a “commonsense” in the contemporary policy that moves across Europe and North America. That commonsense is the use of benchmarks in welfare state reform to assure the proper articulation of goals that enable their measurement and attainment. The corollary of the benchmark statements is that research identifies the empirical evidence that testifies about what works to secure the desired changes. The putting together of benchmarks and the call for “scientific evident” entails the faith that the correct mixture of research and policy will provide the pathways for effective social and educational improvement.