ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that what becomes visible after the end of the Cold War is less the emergence of something new—brainchild of a neoliberal ideology of globalization, for instance—but more a materialized expression of a Cold War grid of thinking. It identifies three stages in the development of international education indicators in the 1960s—namely, first, the idea and vision of forecasting and second, under the catchwords of development and growth, the commitment to planning with regard to defined benchmarks. Third, the idea of management, meaning fundamentally changing the whole school systems on all levels, foremost its quality, leading eventually to a quantification of school quality, and by that contributing to overall attempts at social engineering, based upon defined indicators. The controlling of performance was to be handled by indicators that today are present in the Education at a Glance: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Indicators reports.
