Book Review: The sociology of assessment: Comparative and policy perspectives: The selected works of Patricia Broadfoot

Abstract

Education is an emancipatory force in society, and centralized testing offers an objective way to select talented pupils, identify performant schools within an educational system, and compare educational systems on a global scale. Such is the traditional view of educational assessment. This view, however, is rooted in 19th-century positivistic thinking, is naïve in its belief in objective measurement and agnostic toward evidence to the contrary, so argues educational sociologist Patricia Broadfoot in her book The Sociology of Assessment. A collection of essays, chapters, and articles that span the esteemed educational sociologist’s career, this book is a testament to her interest in sociology and in comparative education. The volume has two central themes that weave its four sections together. First, it is a defense of comparative policy analysis. Broadfoot contends that education is a cultural project first and foremost and shows herself to be a fierce opponent of educational policies that serve a neoliberal agenda. Because education is embedded in a specific culture, comparative analysis helps to identify which aspects of an educational policy are context-specific and which are relatively constant across contexts. In other words, identifying idiosyncratic educational policies provokes questions about practices that may seem self-evident for people within a certain educational culture, but are not universal. One aspect of education that comparative analysis shows to be rather constant across systems is the central role of standardized testing as a driver of education. Exploring and critiquing the use of such tests as a driver of educational policy is the second central theme and the backbone of the book. The first section is the most conceptual and philosophical one. It establishes the core concepts of Broadfoot’s thinking and outlines what she sees as the primary functions of assessment: attesting competence, regulating competition and selection, determining and shaping educational content, and controlling educational quality. She also explains how these functions are linked to Durkheim’s work and zooms in on Weber, Bernstein, Bourdieu, Gramsci, and Foucault to lay the foundation of an argument that recurs throughout the book. This argument positions standardized educational testing as a 1158554 LTJ0010.1177/02655322231158554Language TestingBook Review book-review2023