The education sustainable development goal and the generative power of failing metrics

Abstract

The article traces the development of the epistemic infrastructure of the education sustainable development goal (SDG) in order to examine the ways that the incremental buildup of the discourse, technical expertise, and necessary—although always fragile—alliances facilitated a paradigmatic policy shift in the field of education: This is the move from the measurement of schooling to the measurement of learning. Through an analytical lens that examines the entanglement of the material, semiotic, and political and temporal/spatial elements of the infrastructure, the article shows how the sustainable development goal 4 (SDG4) as an epistemic infrastructure enabled a fundamental reorientation in the field of global education governance. The article discusses the ways that quantification, despite—and often thanks to—its failings, folded contested discourses, decision-making, politics, and ideas into its processes. Thus, the paper argues that the making of the SDG4 represents a paradigmatic policy shift; one that is not only to be traced in the move from schooling to the policy prioritization of learning outcomes but also in the very production of global public policy through the work of the SDGs as epistemic infrastructures.