Standards: normative, interpretative, and performative

International comparative mapping of literacy and numeracy has become a global feature of contemporary education, embraced by high and low income nations alike. But these now-routine comparative surveys were once considered impossible to carry out. Taming the diversity of nomenclatures, structures and arrangements in education systems in different countries to effect commensuration and comparison was very difficult. After decades of effort, a standard framework, the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), was developed, against which various levels and aspects of every country’s education system could be pegged. This chapter follows the development of ISCED, from the early desire for comparative information on school systems in the 1930s, through the many attempts at creating international comparative statistical tables, to the creation and adoption of ISCED by UNESCO in 1978 and its subsequent establishment and revisions. Using the theoretical and analytical resources of Science and Technology Studies, I follow the behind-the-scenes activities of ISCED-in-the-making to explore how such large-scale regulatory devices are crated. Eschewing divisions such as ‘internalist’ or ‘technical’ practices and ‘externalist’ or ‘political’ practices, I demonstrate that such comparisons, standardisation and classifications are socio-technical phenomena – technologies of visibility and legibility indispensable to statecraft. Using the analytical resources of Science and Technology Studies, I highlight two points – first, that such standardisations, classifications and enumerations are not merely descriptive but also interpretive. Second, I highlight the regulatory power of classification and standardisation and argue that they are also performative – they bring new worlds into being. I argue that these acts of interpretation and performativity make standardisation a deeply political practice involving highly consequential normative judgments. Given the authority assigned to statistical data in policy making today, I argue that it is important to acknowledge that such devices are not merely technical and objective, and to recover for statisticians the moral responsibility that is effaced by the myth of ‘objective’ science and the routinisation of standards.