The OECD and the expansion of PISA: new global modes of governance in education

Abstract

This paper examines the expansion of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and associated growth in the influence of the OECD's education work. PISA has become one of the OECD's most successful 'products' and has both strengthened the role of the Directorate for Education within the organization and enhanced the significance of the organization in education globally. We provide an overview of the OECD, including organizational changes in response to globalization and the changing place of the Directorate for Education within the organization, particularly with the development of PISA in the late 1990s. We show how the OECD is expanding PISA by broadening the scope of what is measured; increasing the scale of the assessment to cover more countries, systems and schools; and enhancing its explanatory power to provide policymakers with better information. The OECD has also developed the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and PISA-based Tests for Schools, which draw on the PISA template to extend the influence of its education work to new sites. The paper draws on data from 33 interviews with past and present personnel from the OECD, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and the English and Australian education systems, as well as analysis of relevant OECD documents. We argue that PISA, and the OECD's education work more broadly, has facilitated new epistemological and infrastructural modes of global governance for the OECD in education.

A comparative analysis of national media responses to the OECD Survey of Adult Skills: policy making from the global to the local?

“…The specific psychometric methodology developed to measure these skills determines which aspects of adult activities are accountable and noteworthy, within a framework that postulates universal (i.e. transnational) skills (Sellar and Lingard 2014;Tsatsaroni and Evans 2013). Thus the predominant interpretations of proficiencies in the PIAAC survey within the media appear to reflect a decontextualized skills-based approach rather than one that sees them as part of situated social and cultural practices (cf.…”

Communities of practice and PISA for Schools: Comparative learning or a mode of educational governance?

“…In this constraining of local actions, we can see clear resonances with what Ball (1993) describes as a 'moving discursive frame' (p. 15) of policy, in which possible ways of understanding and practicing education are limited to those made available by the language of the dominant (read: PISA) discourse. As the America Achieves interviewee noted above, there is little apparent concern for how the discursive permeates and 'performs' practice, and here we can see how epistemological modes of governing are central to the OECD's global governance of education (see Sellar & Lingard, 2014;Woodward, 2009). …”

“…These school-level performance data and examples of 'best practice' are made available to participating schools via a 160-page report. With the development of PISA for Schools, and the emergent relevance of the OECD within local schooling spaces, we can see evidence of what Sellar and Lingard (2014) describe as the enhanced scale, scope and explanatory power of the Organization's education policy work.…”

PISA for Schools: Topological Rationality and New Spaces of the OECD’s Global Educational Governance

“…Indeed, as Nye (2008) usefully notes of soft power in relation to the writings of Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu, "a leader is best not when people obey his [sic] commands, but when they barely know he [sic] exists" (ix). Building on Woodward's (2009) conception of the OECD's normative and cognitive modes of governance, we would further emphasize the largely "soft" epistemological nature of the organization's global influence in education (Carroll and Kellow 2011;Sellar and Lingard 2014). This enables the OECD to exert considerable influence over which policy discoursesnamely those that are evidence based (Head 2008;Wiseman 2010), reformist/ameliorative (Kaloyannaki and Kazamias 2009), and scientistic/positivist (Lingard et al 2015)-and which representations of student, school, and system performance (namely, PISA referenced) are most valued, thus determining (and restricting) what can count as "sensible policy" (Ball and Junemann 2012, 11) for local educators and policy makers.…”