ABSTRACT
Influential philanthropic foundations have played central roles in building and promoting the data systems that support performance-based accountability, especially in the United States. However, these philanthropies are now beginning to shift their emphasis from test-based forms of accountability to ‘personalized learning’ centred on the use of digital technologies in teaching, learning and assessment. The focus of this chapter is the Chan–Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) established by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. An analysis of CZI’s ‘Education Initiative’ reveals how it is: (1) ‘disrupting’ educational philanthropy as a for-profit mode of ‘impact investing’ and thereby introducing new ‘market accountabilities’ into education systems; (2) prioritizing the scientific measurement of learning and how to improve it through ‘learning engineering’; and (3) driving advanced technologies into schools to enable automated measurement and improvement through ‘personalized learning’. CZI is prototyping a novel infrastructure of accountability based less on test-based performance measurement and more on digital ‘big data’, new scientific methods of measuring learning, and automated interventions. CZI is leading efforts to re-engineer the infrastructure of performance-based accountability that has dominated US education policy since the 1990s, with potentially significant effects on the future of schools’ policy and practice.
