ABSTRACT
Standards have become integral to educative practices and in the process, both making certain effects possible and also excluding other possibilities. Through the assessment of students we set standards for them to achieve. These are sometimes based upon norms and sometimes upon outcomes. Standards are also used to assess individual performance, and the performance of organizations and systems more widely. In this chapter, we will explore the work of standards in translating and mobilizing certain educational practices. The purpose of standards is to achieve orderings of practice at a distance. Standards aspire to ensure consistency and comparability in the everyday conduct that occurs at diverse locations and across time, in which a whole constellation of relations meet and weave together in particular ways to constitute practice. For any idea, such as a standard for practice, to be ‘mobile, durable and capable of inciting action at a distance’ the idea must ‘have the form of a trace, an inscription, a representation’ (Bowers 1992: 117). Formal standards that attempt to define levels of competence across locations have taken a variety of trace forms in educational practices: curriculum documents stating standards of content and performances for classroom activities, assessment instruments and accountability systems determining standards of achievement for learners, and governmentmandated professional standards of practice for teachers and principals. Decades of educational research have examined and critiqued the processes of creating and applying universal standards to multiple and localized educational practice. We now have many studies and arguments showing the perspectives of ideologies and meanings at play, the power and politics invoked to perpetuate particular interests, influences on pedagogy and identities, inequities produced, and the tensions of multiple practices coping with more universal standards.
