ABSTRACT
This special issue has born from an international workshop held in June 2013 at the School of Education of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 1 Among different themes discussed during three intense days at the Mount Scopus around ‘International and comparative education’ three main topics appeared to attract the attention of scholars. The first was in regard to the ‘power of numbers’, meaning the way we imagine education systems (Rizvi 2006) through numbers (league tables of different sorts, national or international testing) also impacts upon our educational choices. Our vision of education by numbers shapes education policies in particular ways, in turn reinforcing their instrumental aspects as well as contributing to what recent research reveals: the development of an expanding global edu-business.
