Although originally created for economic purposes, the Organisation for Economic Co‐Operation and Development (OECD) has increasingly gained weight in education policy in recent years and is now regarded as an international authority in the field, particularly through its ‘Programme for International Student Assessment’ (PISA), which was highly esteemed in many countries and enabled diverse domestic education reforms. OECD derived a variety of policy recommendations from the PISA results. However, which of these were implemented at the national level and how OECD was able to achieve an impact on its member states have not yet been analysed in sufficient depth. To answer these questions, we analyse which OECD recommendations were reflected in Switzerland and the US. As their reception differs across countries, we assess under which conditions policy convergence towards the OECD ‘model’ took place. Then we elaborate on the governance mechanisms that caused policy convergence. We show that in Switzerland PISA's platform for transnational communication enabled policy learning at the expert level, thus leading to a rather high degree of policy convergence. This was not the case in the US, where PISA was regarded only as one of many studies assessing the performance of education systems.

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Why do international comparisons have an impact on some countries while other countries do not respond? This article examines the power of international ratings and rankings (R&R) using the OECD's PISA study and its differential impact on education policymaking as a case study. It argues that international R&R have an impact when two conditions are simultaneously fulfilled: the evaluated topic is framed as crucial in the national discourse, and a substantial gap between national self-perception and the empirical results can be observed. After assessing the media impact of PISA on 21 OECD countries, the theoretical argument is illustrated by an evaluation of the differing reactions of two similarly poorly performing countries: Germany and the US. While the German system of secondary education was strongly affected by the international comparison, beginning with the first PISA study in 2000, and underwent comprehensive changes, the US first responded noticeably in the public and the political discourse only in 2010 to its below-average ranking.

In this article, we address whether international student comparisons have changed the dynamics of French secondary education policy. We focus on the increasingly significant impact of the Organization for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD)'s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) on France, a country previously known for its aversion to international comparisons and its turbulent relationship with the OECD. We argue that not only are transnational pressures -in our study the perception of PISA -crucial determinants for the fate of potential reform measures, but also the capacity of the state to transform its education system and take corrective measures. Along these lines, we also examine the role of historically embedded guiding principles of education, in the French case most notably that of equality (égalité). We focus, in particular, on efforts of French policy-makers to emulate elements of the recent 'PISA champion' Finland.

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