Tracing “the transnational” in the nationalization of school policy

This chapter focuses on the transformation of standards-based school reform in the US, and its relation to (trans)nationalization. It shows how standards-based reform from the 1960s onwards emerged as a fragmented, multi-scalar distribution of activity, particularly around the collection of standardized school (performance) data. It then traces the gradual heterarchization and topologization of policy networks that over the following decades evoked shifting data-based representations of ‘the national’ and (later) ‘the transnational’. In sum, the presented findings suggest a need for further study of the role of the ‘national’ not (only) as opposing, but also as facilitating particular ‘representations’ (Dale & Robertson, 2009) within powerful processes of transnationalization.