Quality education through performativity. 'Learning crisis' and technology of quantification in Tanzania

Concerns over effective learning have been central to the post-2015 debates. This renewed emphasis on quality has prompted a search for international standardised definitions and measures of learning. Performativity - the production of performance through measurement devices, borrowed from the private sector, that induce new individual conducts and institutional organisations - is likely to constitute a prominent feature of the post-2015 education aid landscape. In Tanzania, that has been facing a learning crisis since the end of the 2000s, technologies of quantification have been deployed by aid agencies (within the budget support framework) and a local NGO, Twaweza (Uwezo studies, cash-on-delivery, performance-based teachers' salary and school funding, randomised-controlled trials) to address poor learning performances. This paper provides a critical analysis of this new public management technology and argues that they represent groundwork for a further stage in neoliberal education more certainly than for the promotion of a transformative education.