Excerpts
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‘IELS’ stands for the ‘International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study’. It’s a cross-national assessment of 5-year-olds on four ‘early learning domains’ (emergent literacy and numeracy, self-regulation, and social and emotional skills of trust, empathy and pro social behaviours), based on ‘developmentally-appropriate, interactive stories and games delivered on a tablet device’ (OECD 2020, 96). This is supplemented by information (individual background, home-learning environment, early childhood education and care experience, children’s skills) from staff and parents using questionnaires.
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Through this expanding collection of international large-scale assessments, the OECD strives to establish itself as the global arbiter and governor of education – defining standards, measuring indicators, drawing comparisons and encouraging benchmarking, and offering prescriptions for improving performance. The OECD has no formal legal power over education. Instead, it exerts great influence by this growing use of comparisons, statistics and indicators. (Moss and Urban 2020, 169)
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But it is also hard not to see the IELS as a wasted opportunity for much needed comparative research into early childhood education. I have already noted the absence of rationale for the countries taking part (except their willingness to pay to participate) and of contextual information necessary to provide an interpretation of results. But the problem goes deeper.
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All of which is a reminder that education is not a technology, with universally agreed purposes, common understandings and agreed practices. It is, as Loris Malaguzzi reminds us, always cultural and always political, so that ‘our discourse inevitably is also always a political discourse whether we know it or not. It is about working with cultural choices, but it clearly also means working with political choices’ (Malaguzzi, cited in Cagliari et al., 267). We should have the confidence to embrace the diversity and complexity that culture entails and the dissensus and uncertainty that politics acknowledges; and to welcome the need to deliberate, confront and contest in the process of making cultural and political choices. Above all we should beware of powerful international organisations that come bearing promises to one and all of revealing the secret of ‘best practices’.