The colonial governmentality of Cambridge Assessment International Education

Abstract

This study examines Cambridge Assessment International Education (CAIE) as a global assemblage that instrumentalizes colonial governmentality. CAIE is a department of the University of Cambridge that has governed schools in British colonies and former colonies since the mid-19th century. These schools constitute a Cambridge School system with approximately 1 million students around the world who take Cambridge examinations. CAIE invisibilizes its thousands of schools in the global South by enclosing them within privatized discursive spaces it terms “Cambridge School Communities.” CAIE simultaneously assembles and visibilizes an ecology of expertise by connecting a global array of researchers, consultants, businesses, organizations, publication outlets, and conferences. Rather than taking an interest in the “low-performing jurisdictions” of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, CAIE’s ecology of expertise positions British educational culture in relation to a pre-modern “East.” CAIE explains the East’s high performance in international comparative assessments with stereotypes in order to reassert the superiority of British-led international education. These technologies of colonial governmentality altogether enable CAIE’s global extraction of epistemic authority.

Introduction

International education most commonly involves partnerships between transnational education “provider institutions” in the global North and private schools in the global South (Bannier, 2016: 82). These institutions seek to expand their market share and revenue in the rapidly privatizing educational spaces of the global South, where low-cost international schools proliferate as a policy instrument that divests the neoliberal state of responsibility for educating the population, instead responsibilizing market actors and communities (Brighouse, 2004; Espindola, 2020; Peters, 2017; Tikly, 2001). In international education, neoliberalism is a “new form of colonialism” that employs development discourses to justify projects of “cultural imperialism” in the global South (Dei, 2019: 47). International schools are historically intertwined with extractive industries, sharing with them technologies and practices by which Northern development actors establish cosmopolitan enclaves in the global South (Bolay and Rey, 2021). Transnational education institutions headquartered in the UK often rely upon external examinations to legitimate their claims to understand and govern educational subjectivities in former British colonial territories (Golding, 2021; Kenway and Fahey, 2014; Omolewa, 2006). In a similar vein, governmentalities in international education sometimes subjectivate students and educators with racial hierarchies reflective of modernity and coloniality (Emenike and Plowright, 2017; Wynne-Hughes and Pswarayi, 2020). This subjectivation is often accomplished through the implementation of Eurocentric curricula (Golding and Kopsick, 2019; Tikly and Bond, 2013; van Oord, 2007). Many international schools also feature a racialized pay structure in which “expatriates” from the global North are better compensated than either expatriates from the global South or their “local” counterparts (Canterford, 2003; Tanu, 2016; Tarc and Mishra Tarc, 2015; Thompson, 2016). An expanding body of scholarship critiques the broader relationship between coloniality and race in the educational cultures and discourses that environ international schools (Gardner-McTaggart, 2021; Koh and Sin, 2022). Considering the prevalence of colonial power in international education, Takayama et al. (2017: S13) call for research on international education that traces the field’s “historical entanglement with modernity [and] coloniality—now recognized in postcolonial and decolonial scholarship as a constitutive component of modernity.” In response to this call, this study examines the governmentality and discourses that constitute the modernity of Cambridge Assessment International Education (CAIE), a colonial education institution that governs education in over 10,000 international schools, the majority of which are in the global South.

CAIE is the brand name of University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, a Cambridge University department that governs education for about 1 million students globally (Cambridge Assessment International Education, nda). Within a decade of its founding in 1858, CAIE began administering examinations for students in Britain’s colonial territories (Roach, 2011). The British Colonial Office helped CAIE extend the global reach of Cambridge examinations because “without the army of clerks who were recruited locally from those holding ‘the Cambridge certificate’, colonial rule would have been less secure” (Stockwell, 2012: 217). By the mid-20th century, CAIE had become “the most prominent body awarding school-leaving certificates in the colonies” with direct influence on government education departments across Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia (Stockwell, 2012: 203). African and Asian educators criticized the Eurocentric curricula that CAIE implemented in Britain’s colonial territories (Omolewa, 2006). CAIE’s expansion continued despite these critiques and other anti-colonial movements that led to the dissolution of the British Empire. CAIE began to seek “partnership” with education ministries in Britain’s former colonies because “in an era of decolonization, [CAIE] was more willing to accommodate the local state in order to preserve the cultural ties between Britain and its former territories and protect the imperial interests of London” (Wong and Apple, 2002: 204). For example, Singapore’s Ministry of Education was founded upon the country’s independence, and has since cooperated with CAIE in an “imperial linkage to assure the international recognition of local diplomas. This decision maintained the leverage of the imperial power on local school knowledge” (Wong and Apple, 2002: 201). CAIE has similar relationships with many government agencies across Africa and Asia, “particularly on programs of educational reform in developing countries, teacher support and training” (CAIE, ndf; see also University of Cambridge, nda, ndb). Today, CAIE (2020a) nets over £250m in annual revenue from Cambridge Schools and partnerships outside of the European Union and UK. In addition to revenue, CAIE extracts epistemic authority from its partnerships, as argued in this paper. CAIE uses this dispossessed authority to govern a Cambridge School system and ecology of expertise, which together form an assemblage that spans the colonial difference.

Theorizing CAIE as a modern/colonial assemblage

This study examines CAIE as a global assemblage whose machinic and enunciative components articulate with various technologies of colonial governmentality. It traces the relationships between the governmentality that legitimates CAIE’s claims to expertise on international education and the ecology of expertise that globally extends this epistemic authority across educational and discursive spaces. Governmentality consists of discursive and practical technologies that “conduct the conduct” of subjects, thus allowing the governing actor to “structure the field of possible action” for populations within its governable domain (Foucault, 1978: 9, cited in Elden, 2007: 67; Foucault, 1982: 790). Colonial governmentality is that which operates across the colonial difference to generate modernity. It is instrumental in structuring the “modern/colonial world system,” a term used by Mignolo (2002: 60) to indicate that “coloniality [is] constitutive of modernity.” This study seeks to understand the ways in which CAIE employs technologies of colonial governmentality to construct its own modernity. Colonial technologies often govern knowledge and discourse (Scott, 1995), numbers (Appadurai, 1996; Kalpagam, 2014), visibility (Legg, 2007), invisibility (Rayner, 2017), race and raciology (Erasmus, 2017; Hesse, 1997), educational assessment (D’Agnese, 2015; Shahjahan, 2011), extractive industries (Van Teijlingen, 2016; Watts, 2004), and development (Kooy and Bakker, 2008; Li, 2007). To account for this multifarity, we inspected CAIE’s ecology of expertise for a broad range of technologies of colonial governmentality, their modalities, and their points of intervention. Drawing from assemblage theory, Ong (2005: 339) defines an “ecology of expertise” as that which is configured through “the deliberate orchestration of technical flows and interactions between global and local institutions, actors, and values [which] engenders its own dynamism and intensity.” She theorizes how governmentalities conduct transnational flows of intellectual capital in Singapore, thereby assembling and dynamizing the country’s neoliberal knowledge economy or “ecosystem.” Due to the increasing importance of diverse nonstate actors in governance structures, neoliberal governmentality frequently operates through “mobile and ‘thixotropic’ associations [that] are established between a variety of agents, in which each seeks to enhance their powers by ‘translating’ the resources provided by the association so that they may function to their own advantage” (Rose and Miller, 1992). CAIE mobilizes a global network of actors such as educators, school administrators, regulatory officials, government ministries, multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, consultants, and researchers. CAIE’s technologies of governmentality assemble these actors into a distinctly modern/colonial ecology of expertise, as explored in this study.

We analyze CAIE’s global school system and ecology of expertise as an assemblage with two interconnected components. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 90), within an assemblage “there is a primacy of the machinic assemblage of bodies over tools and goods, [and] a primacy of the collective assemblage of enunciation over language and words.” They understand the interoperation of these two assemblages as an “assemblage cycle or operation period.” CAIE’s machinic and enunciative assemblages together deterritorialize an expansive domain of educational spaces, most of which are in the global South, and reterritorialize them as “Cambridge Schools.” The Cambridge School system is a primarily machinic assemblage of institutions, places, bodies, and capital that are continually reconfigured according to the illocutionary designs of CAIE’s collective assemblage of enunciation, which primarily consists of its ecology of expertise. CAIE’s machinic assemblage extracts inscriptions from educational spaces, displaces them across the colonial difference, and accumulates them as intellectual capital. Latour (1987: 222, 241) describes the “accumulation cycles” by which inscriptions are collected within a “centre of calculation,” where they are arranged into “instruments, tallies, tables, equations . . . imposed by the necessity of mobilisation and action at a distance,” giving the example of colonial navies and their collection of information on indigenous territories and peoples. CAIE’s center of calculation provides its experts with statistical data on its examinations. This data legitimates the objectivist and universalist authority with which CAIE’s enunciative assemblage extends its discursive power over the machinic assemblage of Cambridge Schools. The machinic and collective assemblage can be understood as “one inside the other and both plugged into an immense outside” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 23), and therefore represent two functional components of a singular assemblage whose frontiers are continuously reshaped through de/reterritorialization. This study attempts to deconstruct this assemblage by understanding the convergences of its constituent technologies of governmentality, particularly as they operate across the colonial difference.

This research is based on a careful investigation of CAIE’s published material, which consists of a non-peer-reviewed academic periodical, a magazine, a newsletter and blog, international conferences, podcasts, hundreds of promotional videos across multiple YouTube channels, and research authored by the CAIE research team but published in peer-reviewed journals that are housed elsewhere. Much of this content was produced under CAIE’s prior branding of “Cambridge Assessment,” which merged into Cambridge University Press and Assessment (CUPA; see Bayley, 2021) in 2021. CAIE’s most substantial material is published in Research Matters, CAIE’s non-peer reviewed academic periodical that consists of original research papers authored exclusively by CAIE researchers, with the exception of one article (Green, 2006). We refer to these researchers as “CAIE’s research team.” Most of CAIE’s published material consists of a deterritorialized and universalist discourse on examinations, standardization, validity, and the statistical analysis of assessment. However, we paid particular attention to the publications in which CAIE reterritorializes its universalist expertise by way of geographically situated language. To identify such material, we used place-name searches to geoparse the corpora of CAIE’s publications, akin to the methodology used in Paterson and Gregory’s geographical text analysis of global poverty discourse, but without subsequent geotagging (Paterson and Gregory, 2015; see also Middleton et al., 2018). This involved Google search queries with CAIE websites as search operators and country names as keywords. Considering the diversity of material within CAIE’s ecology of expertise, we employed several methodologies of textual analysis including the spatial interpretation of built environment imagery (Schwarzer, 2004; Smith, 2010), the historicopolitical contextualization of speech acts (Barnett, 1999; Jay, 2011), discourse analysis (Rogers, 2011), and decolonial approaches to standpoint and universalism (De Lissovoy, 2008; Gouw, 1996). Within CAIE’s ecology of expertise, we considered each speech act as a part of a collective assemblage, bearing in mind that “there are no individual statements, there never are. Every statement is the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents of enunciation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 37). CAIE’s collective assemblage enunciates the governing rationalities that shape and direct its machinic assemblage, which is the Cambridge School system. Therefore, we begin by analyzing the machinic operation of Cambridge Schools and examinations in the next section. Then, in the section titled “CAIE’s modern/colonial ecology of expertise,” we examine the discourses within CAIE’s ecology of expertise as a collective enunciation.

Governing and invisibilizing the Cambridge School system

A primary function of CAIE’s machinic assemblage is the accumulation of inscriptions, namely examinations and their concurrent data, within CAIE’s center of calculation. The calculative center of CAIE largely consists of its “Informational Services Platform,” which includes a “data warehouse” to store “operational data sourced frequently and automatically from our examination processing system,” along with “statistical analyses and reporting tools . . . automation tools,” and a publishing platform (Raikes, 2012: 39). CAIE outlines the extent of its global data collection:

We know background information about most candidates, such as their date of birth, gender and school; we have their detailed marks and grades on the assessments they take with us; we know the questions they answered and who marked them; and we have their handwritten answers (as scanned digital images) and multiple-choice test responses. (Raikes, 2019: 16)

Examinations are CAIE’s principal technology of governmentality that renders education in the Cambridge School system countable, visible, and thus governable. Numbers, as Kalpagam (2014: 73) elucidates, are essential to “the colonial ‘imaginaire’ that makes it possible to govern at a distance, conferring a legitimacy to colonial governmentality, measuring its performance, establishing domains of objectivity, and constituting a new game of politics of calculation, opinion, and representation.” Cambridge examinations are the most salient of the enumerative technologies by which CAIE reterritorializes a global domain of Cambridge Schools and thus claims to know, represent, and act in the interests of students and educators.

The numbers produced through examinations and other technologies of data collection allow CAIE to, in Latour’s (1987: 223) terms, “act at a distance on unfamiliar events, places, and people . . . by inventing means that (a) render them mobile so they can be brought back; (b) keep them stable . . . and (c) are combinable so that whatever stuff they are made of, they can be cumulated, aggregated, or shuffled.” In a paper titled “The Cambridge Approach to Assessment,” CAIE (2017a: 14) specifies that “the reliability of an assessment relates to its stability, consistency and precision—how it can provide repeatable outcomes for candidates with comparable characteristics (knowledge, skill, understanding) at different times and/or places.” Since Cambridge examination papers traverse the colonial difference, their global mobility and comparability depends on their stability and consistency. CAIE’s examinations therefore fulfill the role of inscriptions that are accumulated within a center of calculation. CAIE’s center of calculation secures the stability, reliability, and validity of examination scores, rendering comparable the educational experiences of 1 million Cambridge students in 170 countries across various scales of time. To enhance the “reliability” and “stability” of its examinations, CAIE applies algorithms to the data they collect from the Cambridge School system. These algorithms monitor and flag examiners for inaccuracies while marking papers in real time, regulate automatic marking systems, and produce empirical evidence for use in CAIE’s research publications (Raikes, 2006, 2019). Rouvroy (2016: 9) contextualizes “algorithmic governmentality” within “a hypercompetitive society, including at the level of individuation and subjectivation.” Test scores provide a commensurable and mobile currency to the neoliberal culture of performance, measurement, and competition between human capitals, as illustrated in the next section of this paper.

Within its center of calculation, CAIE arranges vectors of visibility and invisibility to obscure the non-UK educational spaces that constitute the majority of the Cambridge School system. Development actors often use technologies of governmentality to invisibilize inequalities (Hammond, 2008; Rayner, 2017). Biehl (2005: 259) reasons that these “technologies of invisibility” transform subjects of governmentality into “absent things.” Similarly, CAIE governs its Cambridge Schools as an absent school system. The CAIE research team and their academic periodical have a near-exclusive focus on Cambridge examinations within the UK. For its UK schools, CAIE routinely publishes subject enrollment and progression statistics, geographical analyses of enrollment and attainment, and comparative data on enrollment statistics in relation to educational attainment and socioeconomic indicators of “school deprivation” (Gill, 2017, 2018, 2019; Sutch, 2017). CAIE does not visibilize the corresponding data for Cambridge Schools outside the UK, except for a simple breakdown of grade results by subject. For these schools, CAIE includes no geographical or socioeconomic data, which would likely reveal inequalities of access, resources, and performance. CAIE does take interest in its non-UK schools in one aperiodic 2018 study titled “Global Education Census.” The survey was distributed via social media to Cambridge School teachers and students in over 100 countries. The “Census” does not present information on socioeconomic inequalities or performance disparities across the Cambridge School system. However, it finds that “just 11% of [Cambridge School] teachers globally say they are well paid” (CAIE, 2018d). CAIE praises that “75% of [Cambridge] teachers [in Malaysia] who took part in the survey, run extra classes to help their students achieve good exam grades,” without taking concern that they may also be motivated by a desire or need to subsidize low teacher salaries (CAIE, 2018e; see also Bray and Lykins, 2012). The only other instance in which CAIE visibilizes data of substance about its schools in the global South is a Likert-based survey on teaching practices distributed among Cambridge School teachers in “five non-Western countries” (Shaw et al., 2013: 17). Cambridge examinations conducted outside the UK constitute a substantial portion of the data accumulated within CAIE’s center of calculation, yet the data visibilized by CAIE’s statistical and research publications almost exclusively pertain to its UK schools.

Invisibilization at the extractive periphery

CAIE’s publications provide few glimpses into Cambridge Schools in the global South, instead invisibilizing their extractive function within CAIE’s ecology of expertise and their general situatedness in the extractive peripheries of the neoliberal economy. Extractive industry firms and other transnational corporations often legitimate their operations in the global South by opening for-profit international schools, which allow them to embellish their motives with discourses of development and corporate social responsibility (Bolay and Rey, 2021; Verger et al., 2017). Consequently, some Cambridge Schools are material components of extractive industries and their developmental schemata. Cambridge Assessment’s Group Chief Executive states that Cambridge intends to “build up our export activity over the next decade” (CAIE, 2013b). He gives the example of CAIE’s partnership to:

reform the curriculum in Mongolia—absolutely critical to that country’s development because they’ve got huge numbers of companies coming in to exploit their natural resources. They don’t have enough educated people in the population to take advantage of it, so they have a real need. (CAIE, 2013b)

CAIE also accumulates revenue by conducting assessment for Rama Global School, a Cambridge School and subsidiary of Indorama Corporation. Indorama is a multinational textile producer that sources cotton in Uzbekistan and Indonesia, where Human Rights Watch (2017: 105) and other groups have raised “concerns about the existence of forced labor in Indorama’s supply chain,” along with a high likelihood of child labor. For CAIE, these extractive industries are opportunities. In 2016, Human Rights Watch discussed Sampoerna, an Indonesian subsidiary of US tobacco firm Phillip Morris, in its interview research with children who work at Indonesian tobacco plantations. The following year, CAIE (2017d) advertised its new partnership with the Sampoerna Foundation to promote “English-medium international education” amongst teachers in Indonesia. The Cambridge School system expands across the global South to capture revenue from extractive industries and forced labor.

CAIE’s (2015b) relationship to extractive industries is exemplified by its partnership with Educore, a for-profit Cambridge School network in Zambia that was founded by the Canadian mining firm First Quantum Minerals (FQM). FQM mines in Zambia have been criticized for degrading the quality of soil and water resources, displacing thousands of residents in the process (Jakobsson, 2019; Wanless et al., 2016). In this context, Educore operates six for-profit Cambridge Schools that are divided into two tiers. The first tier is composed of Trident schools, which are elite primary and secondary schools with US Dollar fees of $15,000 or more (Trident College, nd). The second tier consists of Sentinel schools with lower annual fees, which are advertised in Zambian kwacha and amount to approximately US$2,750 (Sentinel Kabitaka, nd). FQM (2014) initiated its Trident Project in 2012, for which it constructed the open-pit Sentinel Copper Mine and founded the nearby town of Kalumbila, Zambia. In Kalumbila, a Sentinel school is located next to a concrete batching plant (International New Town Institute, 2017). The education offered at this Cambridge School is advertised to represent “an African solution which reflects the culture of Zambia and the Southern African region” (Sentinel Kalumbila, nd). Adjacent to Kalumbila is Trident Woodlands Estate, FQM’s resort district in which the Trident Preparatory Kalumbila school sits next to the Trident Wellness Center and the golf course of the Trident Country Club (Trident College, nd). The two other Cambridge Schools in Zambia that bear Trident’s brand are also located next to golf courses, one of which being an “internationally recognized high school where most mining officials (often ex pats) send their children (some are children from wealthy Zambian families who arrive by ‘flying school bus’ from across the country)” (Johnston, 2021: 25). Some teachers employed by Educore emphasize that “the [S]entinel school which is attended by locals is just a smokescreen where parents are told that their children are following an international curriculum when the same people see to it that Zambian children do not get quality education” (Zambian Watchdog, 2016). They also critique the perceived racial disparities between Sentinel and Trident schools, a “racially biased pay structure” for their teachers, and the disproportionate employment of white “unqualified foreigners who call themselves expatriates” and are “highly paid not according to the qualifications but according to their skin colour.” These inequalities in Educore’s Cambridge Schools are concealed by CAIE’s invisibilization of the data, problematics, and discourses surrounding its schools in the global South.

Cambridge School Communities as a technology of invisibility

While CAIE visibilizes its role in “shaping curricula and education systems around the world,” it atomizes and invisibilizes the Southern sectors of the Cambridge School system with an array of pluralistic euphemisms such as “Cambridge Schools,” “Cambridge Principals,” and “Cambridge School Communities” (CAIE, 2018a: 6, 2018c; CUPA, 2021) The school system represented by Cambridge School Communities (CSCs) spans much of the global South, including multiple regions of China, Saudi Arabia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and nearly 80 schools in India (CAIE, 2017c, 2017e, 2018f; New Spotlight Online, 2018). CSCs “form a collective voice to feed back issues to Cambridge International, including the views of parents and students; or to influence local governing bodies and higher education about the value of international education and Cambridge programs” (CAIE, 2018c: 30). CSCs thus encompass the discursive spaces of Southern educational communities to influence national policy. CAIE exemplifies neoliberal governmentality in that it governs “communities” as divested, self-responsibilized, post-democratic spaces (Rose, 1999). CSCs are “run by schools for schools” so that they can “raise concerns directly with a Cambridge representative, and come up with solutions to common issues” (CAIE, 2017c, 2018c: 30). CAIE does not publish or reference these discussions on its research and communications platforms. CSCs atomize the Cambridge School system, invisibilize its critical discursive spaces, responsibilize Cambridge Schools for their own performance, and absolve CAIE of responsibility for inequalities in its school system.

CSCs are a technology of invisibility that secures CAIE’s epistemic authority over educational discourse and practice in the global South. Scott (1995: 209) writes that in 19th-century Sri Lanka, Britain’s colonial governmentality arranged civil discourse as “a public sphere in which only certain kinds of knowledges and not others could circulate with any efficacy.” Yet CSCs are not national publics, as with earlier British colonial formations of civil society. Instead, CSCs instrumentalize neoliberal technologies of privatization, atomization, and invisibilization that enclose the critiques and concerns of educators within a proprietary discursive space operated by CAIE (Biehl, 2005; Cammaerts, 2015; Zermeño, 1990). We found only one example of interface between CSC discussions and CAIE’s visibilized ecology of expertise. Standing before the audience at CAIE’s 2014 conference in the UK, a Cambridge executive teleconferences with a “Cambridge School Community” of administrators from approximately 10 Cambridge Schools across India. The administrators summarize their concerns that “we are academic-oriented, mark-oriented, and competitive, and this comes as a big challenge, because learning does not happen then. It becomes only memorization for marks . . . we need to focus more on learning rather than performance” (Nassé, 2014). Similarly, one “Q&A” session in Malaysia depicts a rare amplification of a teacher’s voice at a Cambridge conference. When a highly experienced teacher at a Cambridge School in the country is handed a microphone, she uses it to critically resituate the conference’s assessment-centric discourses within the broader educational policy context:

I think the issue should be addressed first to decision-makers, societies, and maybe the labor market before we address schools . . . We need to make learning for life, but what about the labor market outside . . . it’s all about how many great students get [high] scores in the exam. This idea is backed by governments who give scholarships only to top students with as many As. (CAIE, 2013d)

Kennedy, an Australian conference panelist and professor in Hong Kong, responds with “the other side of the equation, [which] may sound like a copout.” His suggestion is that “rather than trying to convince them about school-based assessment, we ought to make sure that examinations are indeed fit for purpose,” which is “meritocratic selection in most societies.” Sitting beside him, CAIE’s (2013d) Regional Director of Education for Southeast Asia adds that people often see a “new idea as risky or dangerous, but simply we don’t understand,” gives examples for less than a minute, and immediately concludes the panel discussion by laconically announcing that “we need to think about how we’re going to have the best assessment to support the best education. Anyways, on that thought, coffee and tea are outside.” Critical discussion about what happens in the non-UK majority of the Cambridge School system is attributed to teacher ignorance and swiftly rerouted to CAIE’s primacy in assessment expertise. The next section of this paper further elaborates upon the technologies by which CAIE’s ecology of expertise is governed to reproduce inequalities of epistemic authority between its “international experts” and educators in the global South.

CAIE’s modern/colonial ecology of expertise

From the Cambridge School system, CAIE’s machinic assemblage extracts data and the educational authority it represents. The correlative accumulation cycle is effectuated when CAIE’s collective assemblage of enunciation exerts that dispossessed authority over Cambridge Schools, their circumjacent educational discourses, and education policy in the global South. The Cambridge School system operates across a terrain in which, according to CAIE’s research team, “global education partnerships can lead to an increased risk of privatisation of education; unequal distribution of resources, neo-colonial pressures and the erosion of indigenous culture” (Fitzsimons and Johnson, 2020: 25). CAIE does not see “indigenous culture” as a source of educational knowledge, instead recommending that in North-South public-private partnerships, experts are “respected for their higher epistemic status,” emphasizing that “an international education specialist may have a higher epistemic status when discussing international policy” (Fitzsimons and Johnson, 2020: 27–35). CAIE seeks to reinforce inequalities of respect and expertise because “effective communication takes epistemic status into account . . . with epistemic imbalance driving the interaction.” Teachers, administrators, officials, and other “national stakeholders can be seen as jurisdiction experts, working collaboratively with international experts” (Fitzsimons and Johnson, 2020: 30). This instantiates the “vertical encompassment” often employed in transnational relationships of neoliberal governmentality, by which Northern actors claim hegemony over the global as a “superordinate scalar level that encompasses nation-states” (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002: 990). Accordingly, CAIE does not envision any “epistemic status” for its “indigenous culture” imaginary. Given this “neo-colonial” situation, CAIE recommends that its “international experts” disseminate their expertise throughout each Southern “partner’s wider network leading to deeper understandings, sensitivities and awareness of different approaches to education, thus decreasing the dominance of post-colonial approaches” and bolstering “international education projects” (Fitzsimons and Johnson, 2020: 35–36). CAIE sees postcolonial approaches as resulting from a deficit of knowledge and awareness that can be corrected with the guidance of “international experts.” It is unsurprising that CAIE champions this affront to postcolonial understandings, since postcolonial approaches would likely critique “epistemic imbalance” not as something to be honored, but rather as an “epistemic dependency” that has been produced by extractive relationships over the course of centuries (Mignolo, 2002: 85). CAIE’s ecology of expertise employs discourses of modernity to rationalize its universalist authority and the epistemic extraction through which it is produced.

CAIE circulates its expertise to position itself as a globally encompassing and epistemically superior authority on “international education” whose universalist knowledge is applicable in every context. However, the pedagogically narrow scope of CAIE’s expertise is mostly confined to examination, standardization, and the statistical analysis of assessment. Classroom teaching is rarely discussed. Some promotional videos show classrooms, but CAIE’s gaze privileges the Northern educational spaces of the Cambridge School system and almost entirely ignores those in the global South. Cambridge Schools in the global North are exhibited throughout dozens of videos that portray pedagogical student-teacher interactions (2019b, 2020b, 2014e), segments of interviews with students and teachers, and the architecture of school facilities and classrooms (CAIE, 2011, 2014b, 2014c, 2020b). Cambridge classrooms in the global South are mostly absent from CAIE’s (2017b, 2018b, 2019a) visual multimedia, except for three videos filmed in Malaysia, Tanzania, and the Middle East. Unlike many of the videos depicting Northern classrooms in the Cambridge School system, these three videos offer only fleeting glances into Southern classrooms and silence the audio that would reveal any classroom pedagogy. The video filmed in Tanzania features no comprehensive shots of school architecture and is soundtracked entirely with music rather than the voices of students, teachers, or administrators. The remaining thousands of Cambridge Schools in the global South do not garner CAIE’s visual attention.

CAIE’s ecology of expertise sometimes regards Southern educational spaces with an abstract developmental gaze. One CAIE video features an interview with Namibia’s Minister of Education, where CAIE has a major role in governing secondary education (CAIE, 2015a; see also Gardner et al., 2018). It portrays, in shots with no clear relation to education, Windhoek’s periurban landscapes of shantytowns constructed from salvaged wood, corrugated metal, and barbed wire. They are interspersed with cinematography depicting two Namibian government schools, situating Namibian educational spaces within an underdeveloped periphery beyond the reach of the Cambridge School system. The video does not visibilize or mention the country’s seven or more Cambridge Schools, most of which are also in Windhoek (CAIE, ndb). Instead, CAIE depicts the country’s educational spaces as abstract technical problems to be solved by partnerships between the Namibian government and Northern institutions, “international best practices” and expertise, and other “private sector” actors. A similar video on CAIE’s partnership with the Maldivian Ministry of Education examines two non-Cambridge schools, while ignoring the schools in the country that are within the Cambridge School system (CAIE, 2017f; Ahmadhiyya International School, nd; Billabong High International School, nd; Brightway International School, nd; Ghiyasuddin International School, nd). Other featured partnerships include those in which Cambridge Assessment seeks to “transfer knowledge and skills from Cambridge English to the Ministry of Education” in Malaysia and to “align the national education system of Mongolia to Cambridge international education standards” (CAIE, 2012b: 5; Greene, nd). CAIE obscures the predominance of Southern schools in the Cambridge School system. It depicts its presence in the global South as a benevolent effort to ameliorate the developmental deficiencies of Southern governments by way of technical transfer.

CAIE celebrates its historical and ongoing colonization of education systems throughout the world. With Eurocentric language, CAIE (ndc) belauds its early-20th century colonial education and “safe delivery of exam papers to Mauritius, Bermuda, Belize and other far-flung places.” CAIE (2007) also extols their role in New Zealand’s colonial education, which began in 1877. Crisp (2014: 36), a member of CAIE’s research team, enthuses that “one of the effects of European colonization was that in the 1830s many Māori converted to Christianity and consequently learnt to read and write.” Subsequent colonial education in New Zealand was beneficial in that “whilst there was later dissatisfaction with this Eurocentrism and demand for equal recognition of Māori culture (which occurred in time), these historical factors may have influenced current high performance in literacy.” The “equal recognition of Māori culture” is apparently concordant with New Zealand’s settler-colonial socioeconomic system in which “Māori and other Polynesians tend to earn less and have a lower standard of living and less education” (Crisp, 2014: 36). The rationalization of developmental inequalities is an essential function of CAIE’s ecology of expertise, particularly since CAIE’s colonial mission has remained unchanged since its establishment. Referencing its founding in 1858, CAIE (nde) states that “the ethos that sparked the creation of our organisation still drives our work today; we continue to strive for the ongoing improvement to assessment systems and methodologies used around the world.” Thus, CAIE (2012a) historicizes itself as “a trusted education partner in Asia Pacific for over 130 years. The first Cambridge center opened in Singapore in 1891.” For CAIE, colonialism and partnership are one and the same.

The framing of colonialism as partnership is crucial for the modernization discourse that justifies CAIE’s developmental interventions. CAIE sees partnerships as instruments by which the Cambridge School system encompasses and extracts revenue from Southern educational spaces: “Currently, 389 schools in India are affiliated with Cambridge International Examinations. Over the next five years, the number will rise to 500, as we expect 25 schools to sign up with us every year” (O’Sullivan, 2016). Rather than taking concern for the infrastructure and conditions in Cambridge Schools in the global South, CAIE seeks partners who acknowledge their own deficiency. CAIE does not:

expect schools to develop dazzling infrastructure. Except for requirements about the security of exams and the safety of labs, we are flexible about infrastructure norms. It’s a school’s capacity to offer quality education and desire to do better which matters most to us. (O’Sullivan, 2016)

This “desire to do better” is an iteration of “the will to improve,” the modernizing discourse that has long been invoked by Northern development actors to legitimate their colonial governmentalities (Li, 2007). CAIE’s Head of Corporate Affairs trumpets “the growing recognition that a UK-style international education broadens horizons, creates opportunities for study and work around the world, and prepares students for the challenges of modern life” (Parker, 2016). After visiting a Cambridge School in Beijing, CAIE’s Chief Executive, writes: “for all this western orientation, the newly built campus is rich in traditional Chinese architectural features, and a well-proportioned statue of Confucius dominates the central court. East meets west and ancient meets modern” (O’Sullivan, nd). This usage of “east” and “west” indicates a disparity that is simultaneously geographical and temporal. The backwardness of non-Western cultures is reiterated by Cambridge Assessment’s Group Chief Executive when he remarks that “health and safety is not yet an important part of Vietnamese life” (Lebus, nd). One CAIE promotional video interviews Tooley, a British professor who is the co-founder of for-profit schools in India, Honduras, and Ghana that likely exacerbate educational inequalities (Espindola, 2020). In “developing countries,” he attests:

The curricula and assessment system that is used in these countries is the one that was brought in circa 1900, plus or minus twenty years, by the British, typically. They haven’t been able to bring their curricula and assessment system up to date for the modern, interconnected world. (CAIE, 2014d)

From this standpoint, education systems in “developing countries” cannot modernize without the colonizer’s guidance toward “international education” in the English medium. A similar approach surfaces in a panel discussion at a CAIE (2013d) conference in Malaysia, in which Kennedy poses the question, “do examinations prepare the best students for the best outcomes?” His response is in the affirmative for “every education system that has been modeled along the British style.” In his research, Kennedy exalts “the real achievements of colonial education policy” and that “many post-colonial societies have continued to look to the West for models that will assist them to reengineer their universities in the quest for creating world class institutions” (Kennedy, 2011: 205; Kennedy et al., 2004: 535). In CAIE’s modern/colonial ecology of expertise, its developmental projects are frequently aggrandized by referencing the continuity of modernization between colonial education projects and neoliberal North-South educational partnerships.

CAIE strives to maintain colonial inequalities in the Cambridge School system and surrounding educational culture. At the 2013 Conservative Party Conference in the UK, Cambridge Assessment’s Group Chief Executive, Lebus, heralds the supremacy of British educational culture: “there is something in the English education system that people value, not just because of the subject expertise and the individual learning, but because of the skillset and the social experience” (CAIE, 2013b). He continues with an anecdote: “I got embroiled in a dispute in Pakistan because there are about 40 regional exam boards there and they don’t like us coming because they perceive us as a great big international behemoth that’s operating and displacing them.” Lebus concludes the narrative by declaring, “the fact that our exams are so widely taken” engenders “a very profound cultural impact, and actually it’s a good thing that we do in the world and that we can be proud of.” CAIE’s displacement of educational cultures and epistemic authority is fundamental to Cambridge’s branding and expansion. He touts CAIE’s:

projects in Kazakhstan, helping the teacher training and development, and helping people develop their English language skills, again an actual critical development need. So lots of emerging economies need this sort of support, and they turn naturally to established education leaders like Britain for help, and I think we need to be proud of that. We need to take advantage of it. (CAIE, 2013b)

Accordingly, at a Cambridge conference in the UK, a Kazakhstani consultant for CAIE reports that “all the British values, all the international values are being imposed and are working very well in Kazakhstan” (CAIE, 2014a). CAIE characterizes “Eastern” education systems as pre-modern and underdeveloped, a deficiency that is rectified when they are displaced by the colonial governmentality of the Cambridge School system. For CAIE, only British schooling in the English medium can inculcate the entrepreneurial and neoliberal subjectivities required for the “modern” world.

Southern teachers as deficient in human capital

Like other neoliberal actors, CAIE renders Southern students and teachers as underdeveloped “human capitals” that require Northern guidance. As Attick (2017: 38) summarizes, “neoliberalism does not see a teacher and students, but rather, forms of human capital. Each teacher and each student is an economic actor, governable via the metrics of the market, each serving primarily her own self-interests.” CAIE researchers and conference invitees frequently employ human capital discourse in discussions of education in Asia and the global South (CAIE, 2014d, 2016, 2017b; Bin Mahmud, 2013; Oates, 2013). CAIE does not invite speakers like Adriany and Saefullah (2015: 172–175), who analyze early childhood education in Indonesia to argue that “human capital discourse promotes a version of childhood that is derived from developmentalism and favors a Western, middle-class vision of childhood.” Adriany and Saefullah continue that “human capital rhetoric increases the discrepancy between privileged and underprivileged children” and “perpetuates the inequality between the North and the South.” The quantification of students and teachers as human capitals is an enumerative technology of governmentality that measures inequalities in economic value across populations. In much transnational education discourse, the global South’s deficit in human capital is to be addressed through the benevolent developmentalism of Northern institutions (Lönnqvist et al., 2018).

In CAIE’s ecology of expertise, Cambridge School teachers in the global South are discussed as especially deficient. CAIE’s research team argues that “when considering non-western contexts . . . the ambitions of educators to engage with [Assessment for Learning] principles might be hindered by factors such as teacher competency levels or the promotion of conflicting theories of learning,” and thus suggests “different ways of working with teachers in different countries. For example, Indian teachers might be helped to analyse their practice” (Shaw et al., 2013: 17–24). In an invited speech at a CAIE conference in the UK, international education magnate Varkey (2014) contends that Cambridge School teachers should be disposed of if they are deficient in value or are otherwise misaligned with private sector educational objectives. Varkey is the CEO of Global Education Management Systems (GEMS, nd), his family-owned business which operates dozens of for-profit Cambridge Schools in countries such as UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Kenya, Malaysia, and India. Varkey (2014) gives a hypothetical example of “children who may be sitting in a classroom but the teacher is absent, forcing school administrators to put together class sizes that are 70, 80, or 100.” This reflects the CEO’s self-identified “private-sector principles” in that teachers, rather than policymakers and profiteers, are responsibilized for large class sizes. Varkey also recommends that:

Teachers are held to incredibly high standards of accountability by providers, investors, and their parents. If teachers fail to meet the high standards, of course we help them improve, but if that is not successful, we also manage their exit. This is done at speed. (Varkey, 2014)

CAIE’s ecology of expertise proffers many discourses that delegitimate Southern teachers and rationalize their deskilling (see Giroux, 1985). One CAIE (ndg) blog post locates Kenya “amidst the gloom about the ‘learning crisis’ that we know the world faces,” which is underpinned by a “teaching crisis.” The post links to a CAIE-sponsored study which suggests that teachers in the “developing world” need “scripted lesson plans” and “regular visits from coaches,” and that teacher pay should not be increased (Center for Education Economics, 2018: 3). At the aforementioned CAIE conference in Malaysia, Kennedy (2013) characterizes Hong Kong educators with “an old view, it’s a different view.” He calls into question “the credibility of the judgements made by teachers,” decreeing that “they’ve got to be trained! They’ve got to come assessment-ready into our schools.” CAIE’s ecology of expertise deskills teachers to justify its developmental intervention and low teacher pay in many Cambridge Schools.

CAIE’s deskilling of Cambridge teachers rationalizes the reterritorialization of Cambridge School classrooms as lucrative spaces of data extraction. At a CAIE conference titled “Schools in the Cloud,” CAIE (2013c) invites the audience to “imagine an education without schools, without classrooms, learning without teachers.” A subdued version of this vision is presented by CAIE’s Senior Assessment Advisor, who calls for a Cambridge School system in which:

technology is involved in actually providing the feedback to the learner, in acting as some sort of mediator or go-between between the teacher and the learner. It might be that the technology has a role in setting new actions, in showing the learner where their next steps are in relation to progressing in the subject area. (Bateman, 2019)

This mediatory role for teachers is also recommended by an Australian professor, who at a CAIE conference in Malaysia gives a keynote address stressing that effective teaching is “when teachers use the assessment data to inform their students of what actions or decisions they need to take to improve their learning, and when they use that data, to motivate their students to take action” (Klenowski, 2016). At a CAIE conference in the UK, a British professor, Luckin (2019), expatiates on artificial intelligence in education and assures the audience that “it won’t be that we’ll replace educators with technology, or it won’t be if we get it right.” She shows a slide that proclaims “data is the new oil” alongside a cross-section diagram of a petroleum pumpjack lifting Boolean data from an underground reserve. Artificial intelligence is required to “process the data we collect about educational interactions” and thereby “extract value” from classrooms (Luckin, 2019). The imagery is replicated in CAIE’s announcement that data produced in educational spaces is the “new oil” (Raikes, 2019). This extractive approach to educational revenue generation is nonmetaphorical in Cambridge Assessment’s partnership with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, which similarly reflects CAIE’s multifarious interest in extractive developmentalism (CUPA, nd). The diminishment of teachers’ pedagogical role and their replacement by data-driven solutions increase CAIE’s revenues and its ability to govern for-profit educational spaces at a distance. Like Cambridge examinations, the collection of interactive classroom data is seen as an accumulation cycle by which CAIE can extract value and authority from Cambridge Schools.

International comparative assessments as colonial governmentality

International comparative assessments are another enumerative technology of governmentality with which CAIE structures its modern/colonial ecology of expertise. International comparative assessments, most notably Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), “are supposed to be a measure of the quality of a nation’s human capital” (Spring, 2015: 46). CAIE’s research team uses PISA and TIMSS rankings to define “high performing jurisdictions,” thereby rationalizing CAIE’s almost exclusive focus on those countries and simultaneous invisibilization of Southern educational spaces (Elliott, 2016). In one study, CAIE (2013a: 1) analyzes “the education systems of other jurisdictions in order to evaluate alternate approaches, and to explore innovative ideas” from these 22 jurisdictions, 21 of which are in the global North. Elsewhere, CAIE further narrows its focus by identifying “a smaller number of the highest performing jurisdictions,” which it abbreviates as H*PJs (Elliott, 2016). For Cambridge Assessment’s Group Director of Assessment Research & Development, “international benchmarking” studies such as “PISA, PIRLS, and TIMSS” reflect “a trend of assessment being the hub of control and comparison, as well as supporting more traditional functions associated with learning and progression. This is a heavy weight to carry” (Oates, 2008: 38). The conceptualization of assessment as a nexus of global governmentality, and therefore a “heavy weight to carry” for the technocrats who instrumentalize it, resonates with longstanding notions of imperial power as an ethical burden (see Kipling, 1903). International comparative assessments inform the hierarchical classification of the world’s education systems, and thus determine which are worthy of discussion.

CAIE uses international comparative assessments to map the global educational landscape according to raciological groupings. Raciology is the modernist “lore that brings the virtual realities of ‘race’ to dismal and destructive life” and constructs “racial typologies” with which to categorize and compare colonized populations (Gilroy, 2000: 11, 19). In educational research, the data produced by international comparative assessments are frequently referenced to typologize the global educational landscape according to modern/colonial racial hierarchies (Takayama, 2018). Appadurai (1996: 120–130) outlines the power of “colonial numerology,” for which “numbers permitted comparison between kinds of places and people that were otherwise different” and were thus instrumental in “the essentializing and taxonomizing gaze of early orientalism.” International comparative assessments are a technology of colonial governmentality that “intends to expropriate subjects of their culture and knowledge” by replacing them with a numerocentric culture of performance, competitiveness, and league tables (D’Agnese, 2015: 68). Likewise, the enumerations of international comparative assessments lend an objective and natural appearance to the global topologies of educational jurisdictions that are mapped by transnational education institutions like CAIE. Using this authority over jurisdictional delineation, such institutions descend “from above” to encompass, localize, and contextually delimit educational populations and the scope of their relevance to educational discourses (see Ferguson and Gupta, 2002: 982; Takayama, 2018). As Sellar and Lingard (2013: 468) indicate, “PISA performance is now constituting new reference societies” and has impelled US, British, and Australian educators to begin “looking East.” This expert gaze renders African and Latin American countries as peripheral observers to educational discourse production who should engage with their “high performing” superiors through mimesis rather than dialog. CAIE’s research team uses TIMSS data to demarcate five country groupings that are simultaneously pedagogical and raciological, according to shared “geographical, historical, societal, and/or cultural factors” (Zanini and Benton, 2015: 38). This essentialist taxonomy consists of “mainly Nordic” countries that engage in “simplified” teaching styles, “East Asian and Former Soviet” countries which teach through “learn, repeat, and check,” the “English-Speaking” countries characterized by a teaching style of “routine independence,” a “mainly other European” category that teaches with “restrained diversity,” and a group of mostly Middle Eastern “scattered geographical regions” whose teaching consists of “test-centric diversity.” Despite the proliferation of Cambridge Schools in Sub-Saharan African, South Asian, and Latin American countries, those regions do not register on CAIE’s pedagogical world map. This geopolitical ordering reflects “performance” disparities that are enumerated by PISA and TIMSS. CAIE’s Chief Executive explains:

The Asia Pacific region is one of the most important educational regions in the world. If you look at the countries within the region, you’ve got some of the world’s top performers, you’ve got some of the world’s fastest growing countries, and in all of those education matters. We want to understand what’s important educationally in a local context. (CAIE, 2012a)

CAIE (ndd) uses PISA and TIMSS to arrange Asian countries along a timeline of modernization, delineating inequalities between “high performing jurisdictions like Hong Kong trying to maintain their lead, countries like Malaysia seeking to catch up or late-comers like Mongolia determined to drive their way up the league table.” CAIE orders reference societies according to inequalities that are concurrently performative and temporal. International comparative assessments are thus an enumerative technology of colonial governmentality by which CAIE constructs its modernity and universalist expertise.

CAIE’s ecology of expertise uses stereotyping to denigrate the perceived success of the “East” in international comparative assessments, thereby reinforcing the stereotypes of backwardness and deficiency that have been previously discussed in this section (CAIE, ndd; Lebus, nd; O’Sullivan, nd; Shaw et al., 2013). Takayama argues that:

The deep-seated residual power of colonial hierarchy of difference not only shapes the point of reference against which Asian countries and cities make sense of where they are in the linear historical progression—but also sets limits on what Asian PISA success can signify for Anglo-American countries such as Australia. PISA has hardly altered this broader structure of feeling developed over a few hundred years of Western imperial geopolitics of difference. (Takayama, 2018: 620)

The inferior positioning of Asian countries is achieved through ‘the negative and dismissive characterisation of East Asian PISA success—or its constitution as a “negative reference society’” (Takayama, 2018: 610; see also Waldow, 2017). CAIE’s modern/colonial ecology of expertise is rife with examples of negative reference discourse. At the 2013 Conservative Party Conference in the UK, CAIE’s Group Chief Executive relates:

There’s a lot of talk about high-performing jurisdictions, and why can’t we be more like the Singaporeans, or why can’t we do maths more like the Chinese. But when you get to China or Singapore, they sit there lamenting the fact that their pupils don’t have the fierce entrepreneurial individualism that the English school system seems to generate. (CAIE, 2013b)

In CAIE’s academic periodical, Crisp (2014: 39) cautions that “the cultural and societal contexts of jurisdictions must be taken into account before any simplistic ‘borrowing’ of policy.” Since CAIE views British educational culture as superior, this contextualization generally diminishes the value of non-Western educational spaces. Takayama (2018: 620) locates “the highly dismissive and derogatory representation of Asian societies within the universalist discussion of the central role of ‘context’ in shaping the pattern of policy referencing and projection.” While describing these contexts, Crisp (2014: 30) repeatedly refers to Confucius in her reductive argument that “‘education’ as a term in China is synonymous with ‘exam preparation’.” The section of her paper that analyzes Shanghai concludes with a block quotation which asserts that Asian “education systems are steeped in discipline, rote learning and obsessive test preparation,” and therefore “many educators say China’s strength in education is also a weakness. The nation’s education system is too test-oriented, schools here stifle creativity and parental pressures often deprive children of the joys of childhood” (Barboza, 2010, cited in Crisp, 2014: 32). Similarly, while giving a CAIE seminar in the UK, a British educational consultant invokes “Confucian culture” to support her analysis that:

I don’t think England will ever get to the stage where we are performing in PISA as Singapore does, nor would we want to, because the amount of work children have to put in. I think, ‘I wouldn’t want to send my children there,’ honestly. I think there’s a lot to learn from them, there’s a lot of really excellent teaching, but the pressure that comes from the cultural aspect and part of the system, as I mentioned earlier, I think is too much. (Crehan, 2017)

At another CAIE conference in the UK, a British school administrator praises “Rome and Greece” as having an “international approach to culture and education” before equating the “Confucian model” with “the taking of notes, the concentrating, and perhaps the regurgitation at the end of the day by the Eastern approach” (Spurr, 2014). In CAIE’s ecology of expertise, discussions of education in Asian countries almost uniformly advert to Confucius in order to position “Eastern” education as culturally inferior.

The most striking case of negative reference in CAIE’s ecology of expertise is a seminar titled “What can our education system really learn from the East?,” which was delivered in the UK by Nisbet (2012), CAIE’s Regional Director of Education for Southeast Asia. Takayama (2018: 610) notes that when British educators discuss East Asian PISA success, “positive appraisals are often quickly countered by dismissive and derogatory stereotypes.” In the seminar, Nisbet (2012) warns that PISA and TIMSS paint a “very, very mixed picture” of “the East” in terms of performance. She posits that the UK underperforms in international comparative assessments because:

We are the only ones that do the tests properly. The other countries all cheat. And they cheat by putting their best students in for the so-called random samples, we’re told. And you hear people who have met people in conferences who say, ‘oh, we’re the Korean government bit that chooses the random sample.’ (Nisbet, 2012)

Her vague evidence is that “you all have heard those” stories. She analyzes that they reflect “usually an iota of cultural truth” rooted in “different traditions about what it means to select a sample for these, and there’s a history there in some of the Chinese countries.” The word “Chinese” here is an ethnocultural, rather than national, signifier. The argument appears to rely on the ethnoculturally essentialist stereotype of Asian people as prone to academic misconduct (Lei and Hu, 2015; Martin et al., 2011). Nisbet (2012) reflects on “Chinese-related traditions that memorization is a source of deep learning” which are often “taken to extremes,” clarifying that:

We don’t want people like that coming out of our systems. And that’s summed up, a little bit crudely in that way. Uncritical zombies, they won’t question authority. They’ll write down what the teacher says. They’ll memorize it and trot it out. We don’t want these types of people in our creative industries. (Nisbet, 2012)

Nisbet’s designation of East Asian graduates as “zombies” dehumanizes them to render them unfit for the British labor force. This instantiates Shah’s (2019: 674–676) observation that educational discourses often reproduce “racial representations of Asians as technical but not creative” to ensure that “the type and (excessive) quantity of intelligence granted to Asian people only serve to further dehumanize them.” Nisbet (2012) then muses about “all the Nobel Prizes that the Japanese have screwed up because they can’t get [what] we’ve got: Our outstanding creative industries, film and music and media.” Later in her seminar, she provokes laughter from the audience by imitating, in a yellowfaced accent, a television advertisement produced by Singapore’s Ministry of Education (see Neff, 2017; Rogers, 2014). CAIE’s modern/colonial ecology of expertise makes frequent use of stereotypes to assign a subordinate position to Asian educational cultures. Stereotyping and othering extend from CAIE’s discourses of modernization, development, human capital, and international comparative assessments. These technologies of governmentality altogether construct the universalist authority with which CAIE presides over the Cambridge School system and its modern/colonial ecology of expertise.

Conclusion

CAIE is a modern/colonial assemblage whose machinic and enunciative components actuate global cycles of accumulation. Examinations enumerate a governable population of students in the global South, while CAIE’s machinic assemblage reterritorializes their educational spaces as Cambridge Schools. Examinations are the “immutable and combinable mobiles” by which CAIE’s machinic assemblage extracts inscriptions from educational spaces and accumulates them within its center of calculation (see Latour, 1987: 227). The student, examiner, and assessment data accumulated in the center of calculation vitalize its enumerative technologies of governmentality, which include standardized marking algorithms and statistical analysis tools. Yet the center of calculation’s governmentality operates not through the visibilization of educational conduct, but through its obfuscation. The overwhelming majority of numbers in CAIE’s center of calculation are unavailable and thus uncontestable, primarily serving to imbue CAIE’s enunciative assemblage with a universalist and objectivist veneer. Appadurai (1996: 317) notes that “colonial policies of quantification” mobilize “countable abstractions” to project an “illusion of bureaucratic control.” CAIE’s center of calculation is the obscured nexus that articulates between the governable domain of the Cambridge School system and the ecology of expertise throughout which the governing actor’s authority is collectively enunciated.

CAIE’s ecology of expertise is a primarily enunciative assemblage in which technologies of colonial governmentality structure inequalities of authority and respect between Cambridge’s “international experts” and Southern educators, including those within its absent school system. By ennobling themselves with “higher epistemic status,” CAIE sidelines the critiques and concerns of Malaysian teachers, Indian school administrators, Pakistani examination boards, and other voices that CAIE subordinates under the designation of “jurisdiction experts” (Fitzsimons and Johnson, 2020: 27). CAIE’s (2013a) ecology of expertise locates modernity within the cultural supremacy of British colonial education, employs essentialist stereotypes and othering to negatively reference East Asian educational spaces, and invisibilizes thousands of Cambridge Schools in the “low performing jurisdictions” of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. CAIE governs Southern educational spaces and discourses with the aim of “decreasing the dominance of post-colonial approaches” to education, thereby maintaining the “epistemic imbalance” of CAIE’s modern/colonial ecology of expertise (Fitzsimons and Johnson, 2020: 35–36). Spivak (1988: 280–281) indicates that “the clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other.” CAIE mostly obscures its Other behind spectacles of modernity, development, performance, and competitiveness. Nevertheless, CAIE is constituted by its Other. CAIE’s expertise on “international education” is fabricated by the technologies of governmentality that extract revenue and epistemic authority from its colonial subjects within the Cambridge School system. Like other colonial education institutions, CAIE reproduces the colonizer’s “higher epistemic status” by governing, at a distance, the assessment of students around the world. CAIE’s privatized sphere of “Cambridge School Communities” is a systemization of epistemic violence that encloses the voices, discourses, and knowledges of Southern educators in the Cambridge School system. With this dispossessed authority, CAIE speaks for its Other in the modernizing language of universalist expertise. Further research should investigate CAIE’s invisibilization of and epistemic extraction from Southern educational spaces, some with possible connections to forced and child labor on plantations, extractive industries, and meager or racially determined pay structures for Cambridge School teachers. These signal a broader need for studies on colonial governmentality that are conducted by and for educators at transnational education institutions in the global South.

Northern development actors, international education providers, and other transnational institutions often use technologies of colonial and neoliberal governmentality to govern spaces, institutions, and populations across the colonial difference. For CAIE, these technologies include international comparative assessments, algorithmic performance metrics, human capital measurements, the vertical encompassment of localized spaces, and the privatization, invisibilization, and self-responsibilization of communities. Such neoliberal technologies of governmentality are colonial in the sense that they constitute the governing actor’s modernity by reproducing economic and epistemic inequalities in the modern/colonial world system. The extraction of epistemic authority is produced by a machinic assemblage that governs the circulation and accumulation of inscriptions and capital, and an enunciative assemblage that extends the governing actor’s expertise and authority over its governable domain and circumambient discursive spaces. Research on the global knowledge economy should attend to the enumerative and inscriptive technologies of governmentality by which a governable domain and its population are reterritorialized, along with the concomitant deterritorialization of those numbers and inscriptions as they are transmuted into universalist expertise. To decolonize research on international education, epistemic extraction and its resultant inequalities of authority must be addressed not merely in the abstract, but rather as assembled by a multiplicity of sociohistorically situated technologies of governmentality.