Pisa Power And Policy

Over the past ten years the PISA assessment has risen to strategic prominence in the international education policy discourse. Sponsored, organized and administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), PISA seems well on its way to being institutionalized as the main engine in the global accountability regime. The goal of this book is to problematize this development and PISA as an institution-building force in global education. It scrutinizes the role of PISA in the emerging regime of global educational governance and questions the presumption that the quality of a nation’s school system can be evaluated through a standardized assessment that is insensitive to the world’s vast cultural and institutional diversity. The book raises the question of whether PISA’s dominance in the global educational discourse runs the risk of engendering an unprecedented process of worldwide educational standardization for the sake of hitching schools more tightly to the bandwagon of economic efficiency, while sacrificing their role to prepare students for independent thinking and civic participation.

This book explores new modes, spaces and relations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)'s global educational governance associated with the PISA for Schools test. Adopting a theoretically-rich policy sociology approach, with an emphasis on topological understandings of spatiality and power, the book examines the entire PISA for Schools policy cycle, from its initial development, to its administration and promotion in the U.S., and its local enactment by schools and teachers. It demonstrates how PISA for Schools helps to steer how schooling is locally understood and practised through separate and yet overlapping techniques: governing by (1) heterarchy, (2) respatialisation and (3) 'best practice'. The book reveals the specific effects of PISA for Schools as an exemplar of how global educational governance is increasingly enfolded within contemporary schooling, as well as discussing how we might practise a policy sociology in which the local is acknowledged as a relevant space of concern.

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international achievement measure that assesses 15-year-old student performance in the areas of reading, mathematics, and science literacy in over 70 countries and economies triennially. By presenting an in-depth examination of PISA’s role in education governance and policy discourses, this book provides the reader with a critical analysis of the educational change process within our increasingly global educational policy environment. Exploring the prominent socio-political drivers of large-scale educational reform across the globe, chapter authors examine PISA’s national and global implications from a diverse range of regional contexts. Through the presentation of cross-disciplinary viewpoints and topical issues related to the PISA international survey, this volume explains the degree to which PISA-focused research is linked to national educational policy discourses and international education agendas.

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examines what students know in reading, mathematics and science, and what they can do with what they know. his is one of six volumes that present the results of the PISA 2018 survey, the seventh round of the triennial assessment. Volume V, Effective Policies, Successful Schools, analyses schools and school systems and their relationship with education outcomes more generally.

Understanding PISA's Attractiveness examines how policy makers and the media interpret the results of PISA league-leaders, losers, and slippers in ways that suit their own reform agendas. As a result, a myriad of explanations exist as to why an educational system is high or low performing. The chapters, written by leading scholars from Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the UK and the USA, provide a fascinating account of why results from PISA and other international large-scale assessments are interpreted and translated differently in the various countries. The analyses in this book bring to light the wide array of idiosyncratic projections into these international tests. In some countries, these tests are also used to scandalise one's own educational system and to generate quasi-external reform pressure. Compiled by two leading scholars in comparative education, Florian Waldow and Gita Steiner-Khamsi, this book offers a truly global perspective on the uses and abuses of PISA and will be of great interest to students and academics working in educational policy, comparative education and political science and those working on large-scale data sets.

PISA and Global Education Policy: Understanding Finland's Success and Influenceprovides an in-depth investigation for the reasons behind Finland's success in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Finland's high performances in every administration of PISA since 2000 have captured worldwide attention. This volume offers a comprehensive exploration into the context of Finland, uncovering its historical, cultural, political, and societal nuances. Furthermore, it delves into the history of Finnish education, providing a strong foundation from which to view the system that produced so much success in PISA. The book analyses empirical data from Finnish professors of education, ministers of education, head teachers, and teachers for the reasons behind Finland's consistently high outcomes in the survey. It includes viewpoints from OECD officers with direct responsibility for PISA. In addition, it uncovers the impact of Finnish influence on education policy worldwide. Thus, the text presents an analysis of the growing politicisation of international achievement studies such as PISA. The increasingly globalised educational context surrounding PISA calls for an analysis of policy transfer and the already-apparent uncritical policy borrowing of Finnish education policy within the UK context.

This open access handbook brings together the latest research from a wide range of internationally influential scholars to analyze educational policy research from international, historical and interdisciplinary perspectives. By effectively breaking through the boundaries between countries and disciplines, it presents new theories, techniques and methods for contemporary education policy, and illustrates the educational policies and educational reform practices that various countries have introduced to meet the challenges of continuous change. This volume focuses on policies and changes in schools and classrooms. The studies on school changes present the differences in the policies and challenges of K-12 schools and universities in different countries and regions, and in connection with the contradictions and conflicts between tradition and modernization, as well as the changing roles of various stakeholders, especially that of teachers. In terms of curriculum and instruction, many countries have undertaken experiments and introduced changes based on two major themes: “what to teach” and “how to teach”. International education assessments represented by PISA not only promote the improvement and extensive application of educational assessment and testing techniques, but have also had far-reaching impacts on education policies and education reforms in many countries. Focusing on the changes in educational policies at the micro level, this volume comprehensively reveals the complex interactions between school organizations, teachers, curricula, teaching and learning, evaluation and other elements within the education system, as well as the latest related reforms worldwide.