ABSTRACT
International organizations have responded to concerns about a global “data crisis” in education by making data more accessible for stakeholders, especially policymakers. In their efforts to provide up-to-date, “at-a-glance,” and “user friendly” representations of national education systems, data dashboards have emerged as a popular policy solution. In this chapter, we examine the World Bank’s Global Education Policy Dashboard and consider how it represents education systems. We argue that the dashboard relies on a range of World Bank instruments to translate the complexity of the education system into digestible, visualized facts. The tacit view of the low-income nation policymaker as unsophisticated and requiring outside expertise is epitomized by the GEPD dashboard, which, rather than building the capacity of policymakers, may contribute to disempowering them.
