What’s wrong with benchmarks? : answering the wrong questions with the wrong answers

Abstract

Calling on Foucault’s notions of the formation of objects this paper sets out to unpack the ambiguities evident in Australia’s approach to accountability through testing approach. The work speaks equally to other contexts where accountability, benchmarking, and standardised testing are being used to ‘fix’ education systems. The analysis suggests that the authority of the accountability through testing initiatives can be critiqued on at least four levels of ambiguity. These levels of ambiguity concern issues of the formation of benchmarks as entities, the unproblematic acceptance of essentiality, the identified subgroups used as categories to disaggregate and report data, and psychometric disparities in the testing and the public reporting of these benchmarks.