Demonstrating how numbers serve as ‘rationales’ to shape and fashion social issues, this text opens new avenues for thinking about institutional and epistemological factors that produce and shape educational policy, research, and schooling in transnational contexts.

1. Getting the Numbers Right: An Introduction, Sverker Lindblad, Daniel Pettersson, and Thomas S. PopkewitzSECTION I Numbers: A History of a Style of Reasoning2. Politics by the Numbers, Theodore M. Porter3. On the Contest of Lists and Their Governing Capacities: How ‘Tax Havens’ Became ‘Secrecy Jurisdictions’, Hans Krause Hansen and Anne Vestergaard4. Time, Drawing, Testing: The Making Up of the Developmental Child and the Measuring of the Nation’s Development, Catarina S. Martins5. And the World Has Finally Been Made to Measure, Barbara CzarniawskaSECTION II The Field of Making of Data: Problematics of Assessment6. Producing the ‘Right Kind of People’: The OECD Education Indicators in the 1960s, Regula Bürgi and Daniel Tröhler7. Standards: Normative, Interpretative, and Performative, Radhika Gorur8. International Assessments and Its Expertise Fabricating Expert Knowledge for Policy, Luis Miguel Carvalho9. The Implications of Understanding That PISA Is Simply Another Standardized Achievement Test, David C. BerlinerSECTION III Large-Scale Assessment as the Production of Numbers10. PISA as a Social Media Event: Powering the ‘Logics of Competition’, Miguel A. Pereyra, Antonio Luzón, Mónica Torres, and Daniel Torres-Salinas11. Who Governs the Numbers?: The Framing of Educational Knowledge by TIMSS Research, Christina Elde Mølstad and Daniel Pettersson12. OECD as a Site of Coproduction: The European Education Governance and the New Politics of ‘Policy Mobilization’, Sotiria GrekSECTION IV The Dissolution of the Science/Society Distinction13. Statistics Reasoning, Governing Education and Making Differences as Kinds of People, Thomas S. Popkewitz and Sverker Lindblad14. Anticipating the Future Society: The Cultural Inscription of Numbers and International Large-Scale Assessment, Thomas S. Popkewitz