Abstract
This chapter addresses how emerging modes, spaces and relations of educational governance are constituted by and through two recent and more locally focused instances of the OECD’s PISA survey of schooling system performance: (1) the school-focused PISA for Schools test and (2) the teacher-focused PISA4U online professional learning platform. Both programs have emerged alongside demands for increased accountability and transparency in public schooling, which have, in turn, produced new urgencies centered on finding evidence-informed solutions to putative problems of policy and practice. Drawing on a relational, or topological, theoretical framework to better understand processes of global educational governance, this study explores how PISA for Schools and PISA4U forge new relations between otherwise diverse schooling spaces and international actors while displacing more traditional, professionally grounded forms of teacher knowledge and expertise. I argue that PISA for Schools and PISA4U represent a thorough respatialization of PISA, insofar as they make PISA data and the education work and evidence of the OECD more generally accessible, relevant and usable to audiences of schools and educators without previous access. This chapter concludes by highlighting the danger of PISA for Schools and PISA4U becoming primarily a means of consolidating the seductive powers of PISA and the authoritative status of the OECD.
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- 1.
For instance, a US school that participates in PISA for Schools will have their performance benchmarked against the 16 schooling systems: Australia, Brazil, B-S-J-G [Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Guangdong] (China), Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong (China), Ireland, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, the UK and the US.
- 2.
For the purpose of PISA for Schools, ‘15-year-old students’ are considered to be those aged from 15 years and 3 completed months to 16 years and 2 completed months at the time of the assessment being administered, with a maximum permissible variance of 1 month (OECD 2017c, p. 28).
- 3.
The three domains of reading, mathematics and science are assessed in main PISA and PISA for Schools via an ascending six-level PISA proficiency scale (Level 1 to Level 6), with Level 2 considered to be equivalent to a baseline level of student proficiency in the given subject, whereas students at Levels 5 and 6 are notionally ‘top performers’ when compared with their global peers. Given the equating between PISA and PISA for Schools, these PISA proficiency levels and scores putatively provide a common framework for comparing student performance at the local (school) and international (schooling system) levels.
- 4.
PISA for Schools is now available in the following jurisdictions: Andorra, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, China (PRC), Colombia, Mexico, Moscow (Russia), Spain, the United Arab Emirates, the UK and the US. It is also deliverable in the following languages: Arabic, Basque, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), English, Galician, Portuguese, Russian and Welsh.
- 5.
For instance, a statement by Andreas Schleicher of the OECD in a 2018 brochure advertising the PISA for Schools notes that ‘this is not about copying prefabricated solutions from other places; it is about looking seriously and dispassionately at good practice in our own environment and elsewhere to become more knowledgeable about what works and in which contexts’ (OECD 2018b, p. 1; emphasis added).
- 6.
The five distinct phases and assessable elements of the PISA4U Programme are (1) identify your specific challenge; (2) understand the problem; (3) design a teaching resource; (4) put your resource to the test and (5) finalize your resource. The resources developed by PISA4U participants were then submitted to the OECD for overall assessment, and the two teams with the ‘best projects’ were invited to present their work to the OECD in Paris in August 2017.
- 7.
See https://www.pisa4u.org for access to the public resources.
- 8.
It is interesting to note precisely which countries are most represented in the PISA4U Network. As of March 2018, the top six countries by numbers of participants were: Romania (with 416 registered users), the US (346), the Philippines (334), India (294), Pakistan (161) and Nigeria (159). Of these six countries, five (i.e., excluding the US) are neither members of the OECD nor regular participants in the main PISA survey. This reflects a quite significant reach by the OECD into new markets for its PISA-based products.
- 9.
For instance, teachers who are interested in the PISA4U Network are also encouraged on the PISA4U website to consider several ‘companion products’. As noted by the OECD, participants in PISA4U ‘might benefit by also looking into’ the PISA for Schools test and the Global Learning Network, a professional learning community based on PISA for Schools that is jointly supported by the OECD and the US not-for-profit America Achieves.
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Lewis, S. (2019). Historicizing New Spaces and Relations of the OECD’s Global Educational Governance: PISA for Schools and PISA4U. In: Ydesen, C. (eds) The OECD’s Historical Rise in Education. Global Histories of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33799-5_13
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