The Rationalization of “Education for All”: The Worldwide

Rise of National Assessments, 1960–2011

JARED FURUTA

In a world characterized by a formal global consensus on norms of “Education for All,”

countries face growing social pressures to rationalize their educational institutions around a
global and standardized set of best practices. In this context, I argue that national assessments
are part of a more general set of organizational structures that measure and evaluate a
country’s progress toward achieving the goals of Education for All; however, they also spe-
cifically reflect commitments to expanded conceptions of student personhood that develop
from longer-term processes of rationalization around an ontology of liberal individualism.
Using an original data set of 132 countries, from 1960 to 2011, I show that national assessments
have expanded rapidly after 1990, especially at the primary-school level. Results from event
history analyses indicate that the adoption of a country’s first national assessment test is shaped
by its linkages to international nongovernmental organizations, the World Bank, and its ed-
ucation research output. Countries that maintain institutional structures that reflect older
logics of educational selection and stratification are less likely to adopt a national assessment.

Introduction

In a world characterized by a formal global consensus on norms of “Ed-

ucation for All,” countries face growing social pressures to rationalize their
educational institutions around a global and standardized set of best practices
(Chabbott 2003, 165). As education became increasingly linked to normative
values of equality and societal development, countries and international in-
stitutions have developed concrete formal goals that are linked to these more
abstract ideals. In order to pursue these goals successfully, a wide range of
organizational structures have been created that enable countries and in-
ternational organizations to formally frame, measure, and track their progress
toward achieving them (Meyer and Bromley 2013, 380).
In this context, national assessment tests reflect a country’s formal com-
mitments to rationalizing the process of pursuing these global ideals of Ed-
ucation for All. As institutions that have only developed after World War II,

I wish to thank John Meyer, Francisco Ramirez, Evan Schofer, Michelle Jackson, Patricia Bromley,
and members of Stanford’s Comparative Education workshop for valuable comments on the article.

Received May 12, 2020; revised May 30, 2021, and December 18, 2020; accepted June 1, 2021; elec-
tronically published April 1, 2022
Comparative Education Review, volume 66, number 2, May 2022.
q 2022 Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved. Published by The University of
Chicago Press for the Comparative and International Education Society. https://doi.org/10.1086/718829

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national assessments like the National Assessment of Educational Progress

(in the US) or the Sistema de Medicion de la Calidad de la Educacion (SIMCE,
in Chile) are generally designed to “describe the achievement of students in a
curriculum area . . . in the education system as a whole at a particular age or
grade level” (Greaney and Kellaghan 2008, 7). These institutions serve several
intended objectives that are linked to rationalized ideals of educational prog-
ress and equity, including: monitoring achievement trends; evaluating specific
educational policies; and holding schools/regions accountable for a given set
of learning outcomes (Lockheed 1995, 10–11; see also Greaney and Kellaghan
2008, 7–16). Over the past several decades, national assessments diffused ex-
plosively on a global basis: by 2015, 137 countries had administered a national
assessment test (UNESCO 2015).
Existing literature on national assessments typically falls into three cate-
gories: (a) studies that descriptively summarize the worldwide growth of na-
tional assessments over time without offering more theoretical explanations
for why this occurs (e.g., Kamens and Benavot 2011; Benavot and Koseleci
2015); (b) a more theoretical literature that explains the rise of national
assessments but does not test these explanations empirically (or only limits
their empirical analysis to a handful of case studies; e.g., Benveniste 2002;
Kamens and McNeely 2010; Smith 2016); and (c) policy-based analyses, guide-
lines, and references for implementing a national assessment that only indi-
rectly discuss the processes that shape the diffusion of national assessments on
a global basis (e.g., Murphy et al. 1996; Greaney and Kellaghan 2008). Despite
this burst of research, no studies have yet directly tested a more general the-
oretical explanation of the rise of national assessments over the past several
decades; as I discuss in more detail below, existing theoretical arguments have
also generally not been able to explain several more specific empirical charac-
teristics of the ongoing rise of national assessments.
This study therefore builds on this literature by offering a theoretical
explanation of the growth of national assessments over time that is empirically
tested. Drawing on neo-institutional theories of organizations and world so-
ciety, I argue that national assessments diffused rapidly around the world as
an organizational structure intended to formally rationalize the educational
process around an expanding ontology of equal individual personhood. As
part of a more general organizational process of rationalization, national
assessments are shaped by scientized conceptions of education in the global
institutional environment that enable countries to develop standardized and
universalistic notions of achievement and equity. These rationalized models of
education are both developed by, and diffuse through, a growing web of in-
ternational nongovernmental organizations (Meyer et al. 1997); they are also
strongly supported by economic resources from international institutions like
the World Bank, which contribute to the development of these scientized
models of educational monitoring and evaluation (Mundy and Verger 2016).

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This process of rationalization develops around an ontology of students’

equal individual personhood that underlies global ideals of “Education for
All”: the cultural assumption that education is a universal (and individual)
human right, that all students are capable of being educated, and that school-
ing should develop the capacities of students to act autonomously and agent-
ically (e.g., UNESCO 1994; Bromley et al. 2011). While this notion of equal
student personhood constitutes an underlying ontology that rationalized in-
stitutions develop around, it is also important to emphasize that rationalization,
as a cultural process, produces enlarged conceptions of individual personhood
itself (Meyer et al. 1987). A key theoretical contribution of this article is to
emphasize that the diffusion of national assessments is part of a longer term,
global dialectic between rationalization and the expanding cultural assumption
of equal individual personhood that has also shaped other educational insti-
tutions like “high stakes” exams and between-school tracking (Furuta 2020, 2021).
In particular, national assessments have expanded globally beginning from the
1990s: this followed the development of an explicit worldwide consensus on norms
of Education for All, as well as the decline of older institutions like high stakes
exams and between-school tracking at early ages of schooling during the post-
war period (which historically reflected conditions of less empowered and equal
conceptions of individual personhood; Furuta et al. 2021). As “low stakes” tests,
national assessments are fundamentally different from high stakes exams: na-
tional assessments evaluate organizations or countries on the quality of educa-
tion they offer, rather than stratifying individual students and restricting their
future educational opportunities as high stakes exams do (Ramirez et al. 2018).
My argument thus emphasizes that the global diffusion of national as-
sessments is part of a cultural process of rationalization that is composed of
both organizational and ontological dimensions, and that these global and
cultural processes links national assessments to other national educational
institutions like high stakes exams and tracking. To empirically examine this
argument, I use a newly constructed panel data set of 132–38 countries that
identifies how countries use national assessments, high stakes tests, and track-
ing (from 1960 to 2011). I examine global trends in the use of national assess-
ments using event history models, which identify when countries first adopt a
national assessment test as part of its formal organizational structure.

Rationalization, Organizational Structuration, and Equal Student Personhood

Rationalization and the Organizational Structuration of the Educational Process

The rationalization1 of national educational institutions around more gen-
eral goals of progress and equity has led to the development of more scientized

1
Rationalization, following Max Weber’s classic work on the topic, refers broadly to the ongoing
process of formally “systematiz[ing] social life around cultural schemes that explicitly differentiate and
then seek to link social means and social ends,” as well as “[formal] efforts to reconstruct all social

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conceptions of the educational process. Over the twentieth century, scientific

activity expanded in organization, professionalization, and research produc-
tion on a global basis, and science also came to be seen as capable of improving
a wide array of social problems (e.g., Schofer 1999). In the realm of education
and assessment testing, systematic scientific research creates a broader knowl-
edge system (e.g., education theories or technical knowledge) that enables
countries to develop and implement universal and standardized models of
achievement and equality (Drori et al. 2003). In other words, national assess-
ments would not be possible to either construct or implement without a shared
cultural understanding of student achievement as a measurable and unidimen-
sional characteristic of individuals that can then be compared across students
in the country; this would also not be possible without the technical and the-
oretical knowledge required to both construct these tests and systematically
analyze the results.
On a global basis, the construction and dissemination of these scientized
models is facilitated by the massive growth of international nongovernmental
organizations (INGOs) over time (Boli and Thomas 1999). As entities that
push the process of rationalization forward in a globalizing world, INGOs
contribute to a thickening institutional environment of standardized norms,
scripts, and frameworks that emphasizes rationalized approaches to providing
an equal education to all students (Mundy and Murphy 2001). For example,
INGOs like the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational
Achievement have been crucial for advancing the cultural assumption that
national assessments are universally important for advancing goals of edu-
cational justice and progress (Kamens and McNeely 2010).
Within this global institutional environment, the World Bank has been an
especially important international institution that both shapes and econom-
ically supports the diffusion of these scientized models of educational moni-
toring and evaluation (Mundy and Verger 2016). Economically, as the world’s
largest donor of education aid to developing countries around the world, its
investments in projects related to testing and evaluations increased from just
5 percent of all World Bank projects in 1975 to 38 percent by 1992 (Lockheed
1995, 136–39). Organizationally, it has also sponsored over 350 funding proj-
ects that create Education Management Information Systems (EMIS) around
the world; EMIS is an institution that is designed to facilitate the “collection,
maintenance, analysis, dissemination, and utilization of data in an education
system” (Abdul-Hamid et al. 2017, 1), and these centers are often integral for
providing countries with the scientific and technical capacities to administer
national assessments. Beyond this, the World Bank has also created a five-
volume series that explains how to create and administer a national assessment
(see World Bank 2018).

organization . . . as a means for the pursuit of collective purposes, these purposes themselves subject to
increasing simplification and systematization” ( Jepperson 2002, n. 6; see also Meyer et al. 1987).

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The explosive rise of international assessment tests administered through

organizations like the IEA or the OECD also reflects the broader development
of these scientized models of learning and student achievement in the global
institutional environment (Kijima 2013). As prior literature suggests, partic-
ipating in international assessments may provide countries with an effective
model to design and implement their own national assessments, while it also
allows countries to develop a curriculum that is aligned with international
academic standards (Kijima and Leer 2016). International assessments thus
play a substantial role in propagating the technical apparatus of assessment
testing on a worldwide basis, while they also reflect stronger commitments to
globalizing conceptions of measuring student learning in standardized ways.
Since the 1970s, international assessments have been administered in over
130 countries (Ramirez et al. 2018, 345).
The rise of national assessment tests is therefore a core part of the orga-
nizational structuration of national education systems. As technical structures
intended to formally evaluate a country’s progress toward achieving its goals
of educational equity, national assessments contribute to expanded formal or-
ganizational processes within a country’s education system; the institutional
models that legitimate their implementation diffuse through INGOs and par-
ticipation in international assessments, and they are economically supported
by the international institutions like the World Bank (see Drori et al. [2006] on
the general “properties of the contemporary organization”).
The foregoing discussion suggests three sets of empirical predictions.
First, countries with higher levels of education-related research output are
more likely to adopt a national assessment test. As implied above, social sci-
entific research on education creates both the technical/theoretical knowl-
edge and a scientized theoretical framework that, taken together, enable a
country to organize the schooling process through institutions like national
assessments (see Meyer and Bromley 2013). Second, countries with stronger
social ties to INGOs, as well as more extensive economic ties to the World
Bank, are more likely to adopt a national assessment. A country’s social ties
to INGOs is a standard indicator in world society research that reflects the
diffuse influence of rationalized global models of education on nation-states;
countries enact these models as part of a more global conception of legiti-
mate nation-state identity (Boli and Thomas 1999). Third, countries with
higher rates of participation in international assessment tests are more likely
to adopt a national assessment, given that participation both provides coun-
tries with the organizational capacity to conduct a national assessment and
reflects stronger commitments to the globalizing, scientized conceptions of
learning.

H1: Countries with higher levels of education-related research output more likely to
adopt a national assessment.

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H2: Countries with more linkages to INGOs are more likely to adopt a national
assessment.

H3: Countries with more projects funded by the World Bank are more likely to
adopt a national assessment test.

H4: Countries with higher rates of participation in international assessment tests

are more likely to be able to administer their own national assessments.

Education for All and Expanding Conceptions of Equal Personhood

It is crucial to emphasize that the processes of rationalization described
above are structured around cultural conceptions of equal individual per-
sonhood. As prior literature has discussed, rationalization as a social process
requires an assumption about the underlying ontology of entities that a so-
ciety is comprised of (in this case, a liberal ontology of individuals; e.g., Meyer
et al. 1987); at the same time, the processes of rationalization that lead to the
growth of more formal institutional means and ends for achieving educational
equality among individuals also leads to expanded conceptions of the rights
and properties of these individuals themselves. This creates an ongoing dia-
lectic between these processes of rationalization and expanding conceptions
of equal student personhood: as educational institutions expand to encap-
sulate more elaborate and precise conceptions of equality, formal concep-
tions of the individual’s personhood also expand to encompass a wider set of
dimensions of the individual around which these processes of rationalization
should be specified (Frank and Meyer 2007, 300–301). For example, the ra-
tionalization of U.S. college admissions over the postwar period led to the rise
of standardized tests like the SAT; at the same time, however, it also generated
expanding conceptions of equal individual personhood, which eventually led
to the more recent growth of “test optional” admissions policies that admit
students based on more holistic conceptions of students’ talents and abilities
(Furuta 2017). More generally, these expanded conceptions of student per-
sonhood have also led strictly racial conceptions of equality to become con-
ceived as more generalized concerns about “diversity” (e.g., Ramirez et al.
2009), and binary conceptions of gender equality have also developed into
more multidimensional conceptions of gender (e.g, Schilt and Lagos 2017).
This theoretical perspective is essential for understanding how the rapid
diffusion of national assessments over the past several decades is embedded in
a longer term process of rationalizing educational institutions around the
individual (Lerch, Bromley, et al. 2017). Prior to World War II, educational
stratification was often institutionalized at early ages of the schooling process
and was typically shaped by a cultural assumption that an individual’s abilities
were fixed and less mutable through the process of schooling (Furuta 2020);
education was also primarily oriented around more nation-centric goals of
integrating citizens (Lerch, Russell, et al. 2017), and secondary education was

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typically reserved for socializing a small group of elites. This reflects an in-
stitutional context of limited individual personhood. In the post-World War II
era, however, these older logics of schooling were replaced by an underlying
assumption of the empowered personhood of students: the fundamental
ontological equality of individuals, both in terms of their basic human rights
and their ability to be educated and contribute to a nation’s human capital. In
this context, schooling became an important way to cultivate students’ agentic
capacities to act autonomously, and other goals of education developed
around this assumption (Mundy 2010, 336).2 The ongoing construction of
these norms and conceptions of individual personhood culminated in a series
of conferences on “Education for All” in the 1990s and formal agreements by
nearly every country in the world to commit to the educational goals estab-
lished there (Chabbott 2003).3 The first conference on Education for All in
1990 included explicit commitments to develop national assessments in order
to formally measure a country’s equality of educational opportunity (see ar-
ticle 4 of the World Declaration on Education for All).
These institutional developments therefore suggest that the explosive
growth of national assessments over time is closely related to the cultural
processes that also drive longer-term trends in other national educational
institutions like high stakes exams and tracking. The rise of national high
stakes exams in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflects the ra-
tionalization of educational stratification around formally “meritocratic” pro-
cesses of selection of individual students; between-school tracking was also
common in many education systems around the world during this period
(Furuta 2020). The use of high stakes exams and tracking at early stages of the
educational process reflects constricted conceptions of individual personhood.
During the postwar period, both high stakes exams and tracking have been
shown to decline at early stages of schooling in national education systems
around the world;4 this was a result of the aforementioned global expansion of
conceptions of equal personhood and the idea that all students are capable of
receiving an education (Furuta 2020, 2021). Thus, over time, students take

2
School textbooks around the world increasingly emphasized the empowered rights of equal in-
dividuals along several identities (e.g., children, women, minorities) and a variety of different types of
rights that these individuals possessed (e.g., educational, cultural, health rights); they also increasingly
incorporated a number of pedagogical approaches that facilitate learning in an empowered manner (e.g.,
open-ended questions, role-playing activities, and questions that encourage student to develop their own
opinions; Lerch, Bromley, et al. 2017).
3
During this period, enrollments expanded more rapidly in many countries around the world
(Schofer and Meyer 2005), former members of the Soviet Union were integrated into liberal world society
(Heyneman 2010), and international assessment tests like PISA and TIMSS were formally established by the
OECD and the IEA as part of the consolidation of a more global education regime (Ramirez et al. 2018).
4
In 1960, roughly 63 percent of countries in the world administered high stakes exams at the end
of the primary level of schooling; by 2010, only 43 percent of countries in the world did so at the level
(Furuta et al. 2021). Likewise, nearly 70 percent of countries in the world tracked students into different
school types at the junior secondary level in 1960; by 2010, however, fewer than 30 percent of countries
in the world did so (Furuta 2020).

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fewer high stakes exams at early ages (which prevent a large number of students
from moving on to higher levels of schooling,) and students are less likely to be
tracked into different types of schools that drastically limit their future
educational opportunities (Furuta et al. 2021). The rise of “low stakes” national
assessments reflects a further step in the rationalization of educational insti-
tutions around these expanding conceptions of equal personhood: in order to
promote educational equality at early ages among formally equal individuals,
assessment tests shift the locus of responsibility for a student’s educational
performance from the individual to the school or state and measures educa-
tional equality in formally standardized ways (Smith 2014, 6).
The foregoing discussion suggests two additional sets of hypotheses. First,
national assessments are expected to have increased on a global basis after
1990 (after the first Education for All conference in Jomtien, Thailand, took
place) and at the primary school level. The explicitly global consensus on
these norms of Education for All, formed in 1990, suggests that this has been a
global, rather than a regional or idiosyncratically national, trend (Chabbott
2003). In the context of the global Education for All movement, universal
basic education is prioritized as a fundamental human right, and national
assessments reflect a way to fulfill this vision of empowered personhood; these
universalistic conceptions of education at the primary level can be contrasted
with later stages of the educational process, where educational opportunities
continue to be allocated in more unequal ways (e.g., Furuta 2020).

H5a: The use of national assessments increases on a global basis, especially after
1990.

H5b: National assessments are especially likely to be administered at the primary

cycle of the educational process.

Second, countries that continue to use high stakes exams and between-
school tracking to select and stratify students at early ages of the educational
process are less likely to adopt a national assessment. Tracking at early ages
and a higher number of high stakes exams reflect the retention of older and
more relentless logics of sorting and selecting children into unequal oppor-
tunities within a country’s educational institutions: national assessments there-
fore exist on one end of the spectrum of expanded conceptions of student
personhood, while educational tracking at the junior secondary level and a
greater number of high stakes exams in the schooling process exist on the op-
posite end (Furuta 2020, 2021).

H6a: Countries that have a higher number of high stakes examinations are less
likely to adopt a national assessment.

H6b: Countries that track students into different types of schools at lower levels
of the educational process are less likely to adopt a national assessment.

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FIG. 1.—Summary of the argument

Figure 1 summarizes the aforementioned argument. The organizational

and ontological dimensions of rationalization are both theoretically important
for understanding how the process of rationalization shapes the rise of na-
tional assessment tests. An argument about rationalization that only empha-
sizes the ongoing organizational expansion of society would not be able to
explain why countries do not simply continue to use high stakes exams;5 they
would also not be able to explain why assessment tests are mostly administered
at the primary level, rather than more evenly at all levels of schooling. An
argument that only emphasizes the ongoing dialectics between rationalization
and the ontology of equal student personhood, by contrast, would not be able
to explain the mechanisms that allow national assessments to diffuse around
the world and the elaborate set of organizational structures that typically ac-
company them.

Alternative Explanations

My argument emphasizes the importance of macro-level, cultural pro-

cesses for creating the institutional conditions that both legitimate national
assessments and enable them to diffuse around the world. Existing alternative
arguments, while noteworthy, are less able to explain the conspicuous amount
of global isomorphism that characterizes the recent growth of national as-
sessments. Rational-functionalist arguments, for example, emphasize that na-
tional assessments are adopted because they effectively address a societal need
to improve the quality of education in a given country. As Verger et al. (2018,
18) note about this approach, however, national assessments are effusively
adopted around the world in spite of the fact that evidence of their effectiveness

5
In theory, high stakes exams measure student knowledge or academic skills in a standardized way
like assessment tests do; unlike assessment tests, however, they stratify and select individual students, and
they also restrict access to future educational opportunities.

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on education quality is inconclusive and often contradictory. Furthermore, case-

specific arguments are valuable and important for understanding the partic-
ular pathways individual countries take to adopt national assessments (e.g.,
Benveniste 2002; Diaz Rios 2020), but they are less able to account for the more
global patterns discussed in this article.
In the analyses below, I control for several other national-level measures
that may affect whether a country conducts a national assessment; these ar-
guments primarily emphasize the importance of a country’s domestic institu-
tional capacity.
First, a country’s level of economic development may reflect greater
economic and infrastructural capacities to create a national assessment test.
Countries with higher levels of economic development are also likely to have
more resources to invest in their education systems; less developed countries,
by contrast, may perceive a national assessment to be more of a luxury when
compared with other more basic investments like hiring teachers or building
schools.
Second, a country’s primary enrollment ratio may reflect the degree to
which national assessments are an institutional priority. As a policy issue,
assessing the quality of learning in a given country may be less of an immediate
and urgent priority in countries where larger proportions of the population
do not have access to mass schooling. After all, the idea of Education for All
presupposes that children are able to enroll in school in the first place;
equality in formal learning outcomes is difficult to achieve if there are no
children who attend school.
Third, more democratic countries may be more likely to administer na-
tional assessment tests. Democratic forms of government are more account-
able to the public, which is comprised of politically equal individuals. These
governments may face greater demands from their constituents to demon-
strate that access to educational opportunities is provided on an equal basis.
National assessments, in this case, may be one approach to providing trans-
parency to the public on these issues of educational equality.

Data

Dependent Variable
To identify the first year in which a country adopted a national assessment,
I relied on data from UNESCO’s EFA Monitoring Report (2015, 304–11),
which provides the most comprehensive cross-national and historical infor-
mation on the use of national assessments to date; these data were collected
from a variety of sources, including “printed material, websites, experts,
contacts through UNESCO regional offices” (UNESCO 2015, 304). The data
set includes the year, grade level, name, and subjects of every national as-
sessment conducted over the period identified. For each country listed in the
source, I identified the first year in which a country is listed as administering a

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national assessment. For example, the Bahamas conducted an assessment

called the “Grade Level Achievement Test” annually from 1984 to 2014, which
was administered to children in grades 3 and 6 and included subjects like
language, mathematics, sciences, and social studies (UNESCO 2015, 306); the
year of adoption for the Bahamas is therefore coded as 1984.
It is important to note that the UNESCO EFA Monitoring Report formally
states that the data were collected to identify national assessments from 1995
to 2013. As the analyses below show, however, the data are in fact not limited
to this time period; they include several national assessments in many coun-
tries that were conducted before 1995 (e.g., in Western countries like the US,
Ireland, or the Netherlands, or in Latin American countries like Chile, Co-
lombia, or Panama). Much existing literature, furthermore, suggests that na-
tional assessments were much less common before the 1990s (e.g., Murphy
et al. 1996), and that testing during this time period was instead much more
focused on high stakes exams for selection and certification (Furuta et al.
2021). Thus, while it is possible that a few countries may have earlier dates of
adoption than those listed in the source, these are likely minimal concerns,
and no better sources of data currently exist. A full list of start dates for the
countries in the analyses is included in table A1.6
As part of the analysis of how countries use national assessment tests, I also
manually coded every national assessment test in the data set to identify if it
was administered at the primary, junior secondary, or senior secondary level,
using several primary sources that describe the structure of the educational
process around the world (discussed below). In the coding process, I treated
every national assessment test administered at a single grade-level as a distinct
test, given that national assessment tests with the same name are often ad-
ministered to multiple grade levels across different cycles of the educational
process. Using the example given above, the Bahamas was coded as having two
assessment tests at the primary level from 1984 to 2014.

Independent Variables
A country’s linkages to the international community is measured as its total
number of memberships in international nongovernmental organizations
(INGOs) in a given year (logged, to account for the variable’s right-skewed

6
One change was made to the data from UNESCO (2015), based on information available in the
literature on testing: Singapore’s Primary School Leaving Exam, as well as the O-Level and A-Level
exams, were not considered “national assessments.” As high stakes exams, these tests have substantial
effects on stratification and individual educational opportunities in the schooling process (see Ramirez
et al. 2018). These exams are also part of the Cambridge Overseas Examination Syndicate, which are
used by many other countries around the world. Given that these exams were only reported as assess-
ment tests by Singapore, they were omitted in order to apply a consistent definition across the sample. All
other assessments in the data, to the author’s knowledge, were not high stakes exams.

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distribution), using data from the UIA Yearbook of Organizations (1950–

2014; Boli and Thomas 1999).7
A country’s production of education research is coded as the number of
education publications produced by a given country over the previous 5-year
period (logged). These data were collected manually using a systematic search
of the Web of Science’s online core collection of articles, books, and book
chapters.8 I first searched the collection’s publications for any study specifically
categorized as “Education and Educational Research” in the Web of Science’s
subject categories for every country (identified by the author’s address) and
year available in the online database; then I manually recorded the number of
publications listed for each country and year that resulted from the search. The
Web of Science provides data on this measure for most countries beginning
from the year 1966; in the analyses below, I assume that zero publications were
produced before 1966 for all countries.9
A country’s cumulative number of education-related projects funded by
the World Bank up to a given year was coded using the World Bank complete
list of funded projects from 1947 to 2011 (available online; see World Bank
2017). To identify projects that were specifically related to education, I
manually coded each project on the list by its title. For example, the Republic
of Sudan received funding for three separate projects titled “Education
Project” over the course of this time period (in 1968, 1975, and 1984), and a
fourth project titled “Basic Education Project” in 2009; the total number of a
country’s education projects funded up to a given year was then added to-
gether to create this variable (e.g., for the Republic of Sudan, this variable is
coded as 0 for 1960–67, 1 for 1968–74, 2 for 1975–83, 3 for 1984–2008, and
4 for 2009–11).
A country’s use of high stakes exams is coded at the primary, junior sec-
ondary, and senior secondary levels, to identify the total number of high stakes
exams administered to students across these cycles of the educational process
(for a minimum of zero exams and a maximum of three exams). Following
prior literature, high stakes exams are defined as “exams that all students in a
given country or track take to determine: (a) whether a student is promoted to
the next level in the educational process, or (b) which sharply differentiated
track a student is sorted into” (Furuta et al. 2021). Tracking at the junior
secondary level of a country’s educational process, finally, is coded as a

7
The UIA’s Yearbook of Organizations identifies a wide range of organizations from many societal
domains. In the literature on world society theory, INGO memberships are intentionally measured in
order to include a diffuse array of organizations, because this reflects the more general principles of
universalism and rationalism that structure institutional models at the world level (Boli and Thomas
1999).
8
See Clarivate Analytics (2018), “Web of Science Databases.” https://clarivate.com/products/web
-of-science/databases/.
9
Additional analyses, not shown here, yield identical results when observations before 1966 were
excluded from the analyses.

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dichotomous variable, where 1 indicates that students are tracked at this level,
and 0 indicates that students are not tracked at this level; given extensive cross-
national variation in the severity of tracking in the educational process, this
variable identifies “between school” tracking (e.g., academic schools versus
technical or vocational schools), rather than “within school” tracking by courses
(Furuta 2020). Both of these variables were coded manually using a wide range
of primary sources that describe the structure of educational institutions from
1960 to 2011 (e.g., UNESCO reports, international encyclopedias, interna-
tional conference reports; see Furuta 2020 for a more extended discussion).
Given that these measures reflect a similar underlying concept, they are mildly
correlated with each other (r p 0:28).
Finally, I include a variable, measured at the global level, that identifies
the cumulative number of countries that have conducted a national assess-
ment up to a given year. This measure captures the global institutionalization
of national assessments: neo-institutional theories of diffusion emphasize that
countries experience greater social pressures to adopt an innovation as other
countries increasingly adopt it (e.g., Hironaka 2014). As expected, this vari-
able is also highly correlated with linear time (r p 0:87) and captures the
dramatic growth of national assessments over the time period of this study.
Control Variables
A country’s GDP per 10,000 capita (logged) is a standard measure of
economic development and is coded using data on real GDP from the Penn
World Table (Feenstra et al. 2015).
A country’s primary enrollment ratio is coded as the gross proportion of
students at the primary school age-level that are enrolled in a given year;
this variable is coded using several data sources, including the World Devel-
opment Indicators (World Bank 2013) and other sources described more fully
in Meyer et al. (1992) and Benavot and Riddle (1988). Given the large num-
ber of overage students who are enrolled in mass schooling in many devel-
oping countries over the time period of this study, this variable is top-coded at
a value of 100 to avoid potential interpretive issues this may present in the
analyses.
A country’s level of democratization is coded using standard data from the
Polity IV project, which measures the degree to which a country’s political
system enables political participation and civil liberties, has institutionalized
checks and balances on the executive power, and allows citizens to choose
freely between alternative policies and leader (Marshall et al. 2014); a score
of 210 indicates a completely autocratic government, and a 10 indicates a
completely democratic government.
A country’s participation in international assessment tests (e.g., TIMSS,
PISA, PIRLS) is coded as the cumulative number of international assessment
tests it has participated in up to a given year (starting from 1960), using data

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 WORLDWIDE RISE OF NATIONAL ASSESSMENTS, 1960–2011

TABLE 1
DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS OF DEPENDENT ANDINDEPENDENT VARIABLES (ALL YEARS POOLED)

Standard
Variable Observation Mean Deviation Minimum Maximum
Primary enrollment 4,202 84.92 22.85 2.80 100.00
GDP per 10,000 capita (log) 4,202 3.57 1.18 .43 6.72
Democracy score 4,202 .16 7.59 210.00 10.00
Number of high stakes exams 3,614 2.05 1.03 .00 3.00
Tracking, junior secondary level (d ) 4,202 .46 .50 .00 1.00
Cumulative number of international
assessments 4,202 1.07 2.32 .00 15.00
Cumulative countries ever conducted
national assessment 4,202 21.74 34.19 1.00 137.00
INGO memberships (log) 4,190 5.81 1.08 1.91 8.23
Educational publications per capita
(5-year intervals, log) 4,202 27.29 3.24 210.79 2.07
Cumulative World Bank educational
projects funded (log) 4,202 2.55 1.72 22.30 3.47

coded by Kijima (2013). Table 1 provides descriptive statistics of the inde-

pendent and control variables included in the models below.

Method

To test the argument presented above, I use event history models that
identify the rate at which countries adopt its first national assessment. Event
history models are a standard statistical approach for measuring a country’s
risk of adopting a particular policy over time (e.g., Allison 2014). These
models measure the duration until an event takes place and its relationship
with other time-varying explanatory variables. In the analyses below, I follow
previous literature and present constant-rate models, which assume that the
baseline hazard rate is constant in the absence of other independent and
control variables included in the analyses (e.g., Frank et al. 2000; Longhofer
and Schofer 2010). The models presented below draw on data from 1960 to
2011, which are structured as country-year observations, and the estimates are
presented as untransformed coefficients (rather than hazard ratios). The first
event occurs in 1969 (when the US adopts the National Assessment of Edu-
cational Progress). All independent and control variables are lagged by 1 year
to ensure that these characteristics precede the event’s occurrence.

Results

Figure 2 presents Nelson-Aalen estimates of the cumulative hazard rate of

national assessment adoption across the sample of countries from 1960 to
2011, which measures the probability that a country has adopted a national
assessment up to a given point in time. As the shape of the trend shows, a few

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FIG. 2.—Cumulative hazard estimates of national assessments, 1960–2011

countries adopt national assessment tests from 1960 to 1990, but the cumu-
lative hazard of the adoption of national assessments explodes especially after
1990 and the first World Education for All conference in Jomtien, Thailand.
When the adoption rates of national assessments are disaggregated across
different world regions (fig. 3), a clear finding emerges that assessments dif-
fuse at a near uniform rate across regions after 1990. As this figure shows, at
least half of all countries in every region have adopted a national assessment by
2011; furthermore, in most regions, at least 60–80 percent of countries have
done so by the end of the time period of the study. These descriptive findings
provide evidence that support hypothesis 5a of my argument that the rise of
national assessments is a worldwide phenomenon that grows from the con-
solidation of global norms of Education for All in the 1990s.
The argument of this article emphasizes the striking amount of global
isomorphism that shapes the rise of national assessments. Within this more
global view of these trends over time, however, some more specific inter-
regional patterns are worth noting. The pace of diffusion in South/Central
America, for example, accelerates earlier and more rapidly than the other
regions but then slows after this; as Kamens and McNeely (2010, n15) note,
the early acceleration in this region may be attributable to support from
nongovernmental organizations. Central/Eastern Europe also sees a burst of
national assessments in the early 2000s, as a result of the rapid dismantling of

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 WORLDWIDE RISE OF NATIONAL ASSESSMENTS, 1960–2011

FIG. 3.—Adoption of first national assessment by region, 1960–2011. NOTE.—n p 31 (West), n p 28

(Central/Eastern Europe), n p 25 (Asia), n p 20 (Middle East), n p 39 (South/Central America), n p 47
(Sub-Saharan Africa) A color version of this figure is available online.

Soviet institutions that were replaced with liberal standards and curricula
(e.g., Bethell and Mihael 2005). Finally, it is notable that Sub-Saharan Africa
has a slightly lower proportion of countries that adopt national assessments by
2010; as other studies have shown, this region of the world is by far the most
dependent on high stakes exams at all ages of schooling (Furuta 2021).
Figure 4 presents descriptive evidence of the specific grade levels in which
national assessments are administered; as noted above, each single grade level
for each national assessment in the data set is treated as a distinct test. These
findings are striking, and also support the argument advanced above (hy-
pothesis 5b): over 60 percent of the tests administered over the period from
1960 to 2011 are administered at the primary level (which typically comprises
the first 6–7 grades of the educational process); national assessment tests are
rarely administered at the senior secondary cycle (the last cycle of schooling
before higher education, typically around grades 9–12). Thus, in conjunction
with findings from prior research (Furuta et al. 2021), it is clear that low-stakes
national assessments that emphasize the importance of expanded access and
equality to education have emerged to replace high stakes exams that sort and
stratify students at the primary level.
Table 2 depicts a series of constant rate event history models that examine
the factors that predict the hazard rate of national assessment adoption. Given

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FIG. 4.—All national assessments by school level, 1960–2011 (pooled). NOTE.—National assess-
ments were coded by name and grade-level for a given country and year; a national assessment that
was administered at several different grade-levels in a given year was coded as a distinct test for each
grade level within that year, for a total of 3,221 national assessments from 1960 to 2011.

that the independent variables for both hypotheses 1–4 and hypothesis 6
reflect similar underlying concepts, these variables are tested separately in
models 1–6. As expected by the argument presented above (hypotheses 2 and
3), a country’s memberships in international nongovernmental organizations
in a given year positively shapes its hazard rate of adopting a national assess-
ment (p < :05 in all models), while a country’s cumulative number of edu-
cation projects funded by the World Bank also positively and significantly in-
fluences its adoption of a national assessment (p < :01 in all models). At the
same time, a country’s commitments to more scientized conceptions of the
educational process is also positively associated with its likelihood of adopting a
national assessment test (hypothesis 1), although this variable is only signifi-
cant at the 10 percent level in model 5. Furthermore, as neo-institutional
theories of diffusion would expect, it is not surprising that the global number
of countries that have conducted a national assessment is positively and sig-
nificantly related with a country’s hazard rate of national assessment adoption
(p < :001 in all models).
Surprisingly, the effect of a country’s cumulative number of interna-
tional assessments on the hazard rate of national assessment adoption is not
statistically significant (hypothesis 4). When alternative specifications of this

244 May 2022

 TABLE 2
CONSTANT-RATE EVENT HISTORY MODELS OF FIRST YEAR A COUNTRY HAS ADOPTED NATIONAL ASSESSMENT , 1960–2011

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Control variable:
Primary enrollmenta .00 .00 .00 .01 .01 .01 .01 .01
(.01) (.01) (.01) (.01) (.01) (.01) (.01) (.01)
GDP per 10,000 capita (log) 2.25∗ 2.27∗ .18 2.17 2.14 2.221 .241 2.08
(.13) (.13) (.14) (.13) (.11) (.12) (.13) (.12)
Democracy score .03∗ .02 .04∗ .031 .04∗∗ .031 .04∗∗ .04∗
(.02) (.02) (.02) (.02) (.02) (.02) (.02) (.02)
Independent variable:
Cumulative number of countries ever conducted .02∗∗∗ .02∗∗∗ .02∗∗∗ .02∗∗∗ .02∗∗∗ .02∗∗∗ .02∗∗∗ .02∗∗∗
national assessment (.00) (.00) (.00) (.00) (.00) (.00) (.00) (.00)
Number of high stakes examinations 2.34∗∗ 2.31∗∗ 2.39∗∗∗ 2.34∗∗
(.11) (.12) (.12) (.11)
J. sec tracking (d) 2.67∗∗ 2.67∗∗ 2.64∗∗ 2.69∗∗
(.24) (.24) (.23) (.24)
Educational publications per capita (5-year intervals log) .09∗ .081
(.04) (.04)
INGO memberships (log) .42∗ .50∗∗
(.19) (.17)
Cumulative World Bank educational projects funded (log) .31∗∗∗ .25∗∗
(.09) (.09)
Cumulative number of international assessment tests .04 .04
(.04) (.04)
Constant 22.72∗∗ 25.72∗∗∗ 24.56∗∗∗ 23.87∗∗∗ 23.83∗∗∗ 26.93∗∗∗ 25.56∗∗∗ 24.74∗∗∗
(.92) (1.07) (.81) (.72) (.79) (.93) (.70) (.63)
N 3,216 3,216 3,216 3,216 3,683 3,683 3,683 3,683
Countries 131 131 131 131 137 137 137 137
Number of failures 94 94 94 94 105 105 105 105
l2 172.33 163.42 171.01 158.84 170.73 154.81 130.55 150.68
df 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6
NOTE Robust standard errors in parentheses. All independent and control variables lagged 1 year.
a
Variable capped at 100% enrollment ratio.
1
p ! .10.
∗
p !.05.
∗∗
p ! .01.
∗∗∗
p ! .001.
 FURUTA

variable are tested (e.g., a dichotomous variable that indicates whether an in-
ternational assessment has ever been conducted, or a variable that captures
the number of years since an international assessment was first adopted) this
coefficient’s significance does not change. This variable strongly predicts a
country’s use of high stakes exams at the primary level and tracking at the junior
secondary level (Furuta 2020), although the magnitude of its correlation with
these variables is relatively weak (r p 20:29 for number of high stakes exams,
r p 20:21 for tracking at the junior secondary level); it is also moderately
correlated with the variable that identifies the cumulative number of countries
that have adopted a national assessment (r p 0:41). These results may suggest
that international assessments do not provide countries with as much of an
institutional infrastructure to conduct their own national assessments on its own
(see Kijima and Leer 2016), or it may also suggest that countries that participate
in international assessments have less of an incentive to create their own nation-
specific assessment system (see Kamens and McNeely 2010, n. 7).
My emphasis on the importance of expanded conceptions of student per-
sonhood in the educational process, which is reflected in a country’s educational
institutions like high stakes exams and tracking, is also supported by these results
(hypotheses 6a and 6b): the number of high stakes exams in a country’s edu-
cation system is negatively and significantly associated with a country’s likeli-
hood of adopting a national assessment (p < :01 in all models), and tracking at
the junior secondary level is also negatively and significantly associated with a
nation’s likelihood of adopting an assessment (p < :01 in all models).
By and large, the control variables in the models yield few significant
results: the coefficients for primary enrollments and democratization are
mostly insignificant, and the coefficient of a country’s level of economic de-
velopment is only weakly significant in some cases. The lack of consistently
significant results for these control variables suggests that a country’s do-
mestic institutional capacity to conduct a national assessment does not
strongly shape its adoption of one, when the independent variables are in-
cluded in the models; instead, the social processes that shape the adoption of
national assessments are more global.

Discussion

My argument has emphasized how the organizational and ontological

dimensions of rationalization both shape the structural features of contem-
porary national education systems; the macro-level, cultural argument ad-
vanced here emphasizes the importance of these processes in legitimating the
rise of national assessments over time. The findings of this article, using
analyses from a global sample of 132–38 countries from 1960 to 2011, show
support for most of the hypotheses discussed above. In particular, the
adoption of national assessments takes off on a global basis especially after

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 WORLDWIDE RISE OF NATIONAL ASSESSMENTS, 1960–2011

1990 and in every region of the world (hypothesis 5a), and these assessment
tests are predominately administered at the primary level (hypothesis 5b). A
country’s level of education-related research output (hypothesis 1), social ties to
international nongovernmental organizations (hypothesis 2), and eco-
nomic ties to World Bank funding for education projects all significantly
predict the adoption of a national assessment (hypothesis 3), while countries
that implement more high stakes exams or track students at the junior sec-
ondary level are much less likely to adopt one (hypotheses 6a and 6b). A
country’s participation in international assessments, however, does not
strongly predict when a national assessment test is adopted (hypothesis 4).
These results are observed net of several variables that capture a country’s
internal institutional capacity to conduct a national assessment, which gen-
erally have minimal effects on whether a national assessment is adopted.
The cultural processes emphasized in my argument are crucial because
they create the institutional conditions that enable and legitimate the remark-
able growth of national assessments over the past few decades. What policy-
related themes of monitoring and evaluation, accountability, and standards-
based reform have in common is that they are all part of this more general
process of rationalization that sweeps through formal institutions around the
world (Meyer et al. 1997). International institutions like the World Bank create
relationships of coercion and economic dependence, as power-dependence
arguments emphasize, but in doing so they enact a particular institutional model.
An alternative set of institutional conditions, legitimated by different cultural
principles, would lead to a different set of policy prescriptions: an institutional
model that emphasizes scientized conceptions of achievement and learning
without expanded conceptions of individual personhood, for example, could
legitimate a more extensive use of high stakes exams instead of assessment tests
(see n. 5; Kellaghan 1996). These more general cultural principles of equal in-
dividual personhood also shape long-term global trends in other crucial ed-
ucational institutions like high stakes exams and tracking (e.g., Furuta et al.
2021); in drawing attention to this point, my argument has emphasized how
global trends in these educational institutions are linked through an under-
lying cultural process, rather than shaped by entirely separate processes.
The macro-level, cultural perspective advanced in this article also implies
a distinctive framework for understanding the role of national assessments in
shaping educational change. In a world where formal policies and institutions
are often loosely coupled from practice and implementation, social change is
often not directly produced by a single policy or institution that delivers im-
mediate results; from this perspective, it is not surprising that existing studies
have shown limited or conflicting evidence of the effectiveness of national
assessments on a variety of normative outcomes (e.g., Ramirez et al. 2018).
However, national assessments are only one dimension of a more general
attempt to structure schooling around more rationalized processes: they reflect

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a broader set of changing global norms and institutional structures, newly

legitimated types of actors, and new ways to frame the cultural meanings of
social problems. When taken together, the cumulative and aggregate effects
of these cultural changes contribute to an institutional context that gradually
produces social change (Hironaka 2014), even if national assessments on
their own have few direct effects: these broader cultural changes produce
stronger external pressures for countries and organizations to act in certain
ways, for example, and they empower new types of actors to advocate for
educational causes. National assessments are thus part of the development
and consolidation of a more global education regime that is shaped by in-
ternational organizations, professionals, and institutional frameworks that
collectively define and enact broader ideals of educational progress and jus-
tice. If the cultural assumption of empowered individual personhood starts
to weaken on a global basis, however, these trends may not continue.

Appendix

TABLE A1
YEAR OF A COUNTRY’S ADOPTION OF A NATIONAL ASSESSMENT TEST

Year Country Year Country

1969 United States 1996 Iceland
1980 Colombia 1996 Lao PDR
1984 The Bahamas 1996 Nicaragua
1985 Panama 1996 Nigeria
1986 Costa Rica 1996 Paraguay
1986 Hungary 1996 Peru
1987 Netherlands 1996 Samoa
1988 Chile 1996 Senegal
1988 Ireland 1996 Uganda
1989 France 1996 Uruguay
1990 Honduras 1997 Bolivia
1990 Israel 1997 El Salvador
1991 United Kingdom 1997 Estonia
1992 Dominican Republic 1997 Guatemala
1992 Ghana 1998 Finland
1992 Namibia 1998 Italy
1993 Argentina 1998 Madagascar
1993 Canada 1998 Venezuela
1993 Lesotho 1999 Botswana
1994 Belgium 1999 Eritrea
1994 Democratic Republic of the Congo 1999 Guinea
1994 Lebanon 1999 Iran
1994 Malawi 1999 Jamaica
1994 Mexico 1999 Kazakhstan
1994 Oman 1999 Malta
1995 Brazil 1999 Morocco
1995 Mauritius 1999 Nepal
1995 New Zealand 1999 Niger
1995 Romania 1999 Portugal
1995 Spain 1999 South Africa
1995 Sweden 1999 St. Kitts and Nevis
1996 Cuba 1999 Tunisia
1996 Ecuador 1999 Zambia

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 WORLDWIDE RISE OF NATIONAL ASSESSMENTS, 1960–2011

TABLE A1 (Continued )
Year Country Year Country
2000 Belize 2004 Qatar
2000 Ethiopia 2005 Barbados
2000 Jordan 2005 Cambodia
2000 Korea 2005 Montenegro
2000 Luxembourg 2005 Solomon Islands
2000 Mongolia 2006 Azerbaijan
2000 Mozambique 2006 Denmark
2000 Slovak Republic 2006 Egypt
2000 Slovenia 2006 Norway
2000 Trinidad and Tobago 2007 Bulgaria
2001 Burkina Faso 2007 China
2001 Comoros 2007 Croatia
2001 Kyrgyz Republic 2007 Cyprus
2001 Macedonia 2007 Fiji
2001 Mauritania 2007 Japan
2001 Vietnam 2007 Mali
2002 Albania 2007 Myanmar
2002 Algeria 2007 Russia
2002 India 2007 Vanuatu
2002 Poland 2008 Latvia
2002 Tajikistan 2008 Maldives
2002 Turkey 2008 The Gambia
2002 Yemen 2008 Uzbekistan
2003 Australia 2009 Bahrain
2003 Bhutan 2009 Lithuania
2003 Bosnia and Herzegovina 2009 Seychelles
2003 Germany 2009 Sudan
2003 Guyana 2010 Armenia
2003 Pakistan 2010 Kenya
2003 Sri Lanka 2010 Tanzania
2003 Thailand 2010 United Arab Emirates
2004 Bangladesh 2011 Benin
2004 Georgia 2011 Cameroon
2004 Kiribati 2011 Rwanda
2004 Philippines 2011 Tonga

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