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With the advent of the fourth industrial revolution and the intelligent economy, this conceptual chapter explores the evolution of educational governance from one based on governing by numbers and evidence-based governance to one constituted around governance by data or data-based educational governance. With the rise of markets and networks in education, Big Data, machine data, high-dimension data, open data, and dark data have consequences for the governance of national educational systems. In doing so, it draws attention to the rise of the algorithmization and computerization of educational policy-making. The author uses the concept of “blitzscaling”, aided by the conceptual framing of assemblage theory, to suggest that we are witnessing the rise of a fragmented model of educational governance. I call this governance with a “big G” and governance with a “small g.” In short, I suggest that while globalization has led to the deterritorializing of the national state, data educational governance, an assemblage, is bringing about the reterritorialization of things as new material projects are being reconstituted.

This chapter reviews the changing contours of education governance in today’s global environment in which governments participate in different educational agreements across various levels (supranational and global) or what is identified as the rise of “educational multistakeholderism.” Methodologically it draws up discursive evidence from previous studies in the form of a content analysis to show how the expansion of international regimes (institutions) into new issue areas, such as education, creates an overlap between the elemental (core) regime and other regimes. In exploring how regime theory has been applied to comparative and international education, this chapter draws attention to how new regimes and institutions arise and coexist alongside two or more classes (civil society, nongovernmental, intergovernmental, businesses, and state) of actors and its consequences for education governance. It suggests that regime complex(es) in education, which aims to facilitate educational cooperation and are composed of assemblages from several other regimes, are responsible for governing, steering, and coordinating education governance activities through the use of agreements, treaties, global benchmarks, targets, and indicators. It concludes by suggesting that regimes and regime complex(es) in education are constituted by different types of multistakeholder governance.

Drawing on assemblage theory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; DeLanda, 2006), this conceptual chapter seeks to provide an analytical lens for examining the power and capacity of Big Data analytics to exercise territorializing and deterritorializing effects on compound polities and supranational organizations. More specifically, the modern massive agglomeration of data streams and the accelerated computational power available to sort and channel them in effecting actions, decisions, and reconfigurations in contemporary assemblages, necessitate new exploratory tools to examine the impact of such trends on educational phenomena from a comparative perspective. In the first part, the chapter builds an analytical instrumentarium useful in theoretically elucidating the effects of Big Data on complex assemblages and serves as a methodological extension in investigating the ramifications of these effects on educational systems, spaces, and policyscapes. The second part sets out to illustrate how assemblage theory can explain the tension between the formal use of large official statistical data sets as a type of “regulated” Big Data, and the informal use of social media, as a type of “unregulated” Big Data, to construct or deconstruct, respectively, interlacing/interlocking components of assemblages, such as supranational organizations or compound polities. The European Union (EU) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) are taken as examples of complex assemblages in which the long-standing utilization of EU’s Eurostat and CARICOM’s Regional Statistical Database have served as territorializing forces in consolidating policy logics and in legitimizing decision-making at the supranational level, while the emergence of “loose” social networking technologies appears to have deterritorializing effects when employed deliberately to delegitimize or subvert socio-political processes across supranational polities.

This chapter presents a very broad synopsis of the intensification of education governance. It opens by narrating the multifaceted nature of governance and in what way it has developed as the axiom for professed policy problems that national educational systems are experiencing. The chapter chronicles the amplification of education governance and it explicates the metamorphosis and myriad typographies that “governance” has taken in responding to perceived endogenous and exogenous policy problems. It explains how managerialism and neo-corporate reforms sought to destabilize the activities of education governance and the results. In making this argument, it suggests that new public management policy prescriptions in education were part of the earliest form of disruptive innovation in education. It advances that educational managerialism, in hollowing out national educational systems, has generated the perfect breeding ground for the rise of newer modus operandi (or modes, styles, and arrangements) that governs and regulates education systems through the use of different techniques and mechanisms. The second half of the chapter discusses five different modus operandi that are inchoate in the post-managerialist era and highlights that in education, we have progressed beyond the movement from government to governance across national education systems and these systems are now employing additional modes of governance (vertical and horizontal) across different scales. The chapter concludes by drawing on the concept of a “Wicked Problem” (an unsolvable or difficult problematic, that is, fluid, paradoxical, and unfinished) to insinuate that education governance is an example of a wicked problem that has been and continues to be shaped by the ideological contours of endogenous and exogenous policy influences.

Today, the global education market is one of the faster growing sectors, and it has attracted several new actors or what we call educational brokers who are now responsible for shaping national agendas. The newer actors in education are vastly different for the former players in that whereas previous actors engrossed national educational systems through the provision of technical assistance to meet international standards, best practices, and benchmarks, these newer players are for-profit entities that emphasize austerity, leanness, human resource maximization, performance targets, and competition. Therefore, in this new educational landscape, national governments are seen as “clients” who receive “expert” advice from “external consultants” that have an assortment of experiences across different sectors. Education governance is no longer a statist endowed but one that incubates in laborites of best practices resonates with existing case studies and results driven based on Big Date collected. We argue that educational brokers are responsible for the emergence of a hybrid form of education governance that use business and market techniques to reform strategies within the education sector. We conclude by suggesting that collectively educational brokers are using what we call “educational sub-prime mechanisms” – higher interest rates, reduced quality collateral, and less advantageous terms to counterweight higher credit risk – to manage educational portfolios and newer forms of educational risk.

Increasingly, groups external to educational systems are offering time, expertise and products, creating an intricate web of educational governance where entities outside of formal education contribute to state-funded education systems. While this involvement and its motivations have been considered in the literature, it has been less common to explore these interactions between school systems and outside organizations as they relate to the transition from the knowledge economy to the intelligent economy. Such research is important to understand the numerous inputs to education, which can then inform future decision-making. This study traces scripts around the commodification of knowledge, which connects education to individual employability or the economy and cyborg dialectic, or the mutual relationship between humans and technology. These scripts intersect to contribute to the perpetuation of data creation and usage as part of the educational intelligent economy. The scripts traced here originate from Battelle, a primarily a Ohio-based research and development organization, also focused on classroom teaching and learning, specifically in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Mapping scripts related to the commodification of knowledge and the cyborg dialectic indicates promotion of the intelligent economy broadly and individually for Battelle itself across Ohio and beyond, through investments in educators, students and policy-makers but also Battelle’s potential employees and collaborators. This data-focus creates an educational intelligence not only in students, teachers and policy-makers but also in Battelle itself, legitimating it as an actor in education.