ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the life and time of data, seeking to understand and theorise the current and possible futures of testing, both utopian and dystopian. It considers how new relations are constructed through data, such as those resulting from National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and international testing and how they reflect a topological move within culture. The introduction of national testing has affected a different kind of space in Australian education the space of media and public debate about the aims and outcomes of schooling. Indeed, new relationships between measurement and value are being reconfigured by the proliferation of social data in multiple sites of everyday life. This chapter has also shown that NAPLAN data in Australia have a life that extends to the reworking of political systems and educational structures, to the reconfiguration of what is valued in schools and to the potential integration of that data with other testing and assessment systems.
