Pisa Under Examination

From the 23rd to 26th of November 2009 in La Palma island, in the Canaries, the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) organized an international symposium entitled PISA under Examination: Changing Knowledge, Changing Tests, and Changing Schools. During four days seventeen leading scholars of Europe and America presented their contributions to debate the different problematiques of the remarkable phenomenon represented by the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment or PISA. PISA is not merely an educational event. It is also a media circus which involves the public rehearsal for reasons for failure or success; and even, in some cases, public and political and academic explanations about why 'failure' was not really that, and why 'success' was not really that either. At the centre of all these indications, we find the growing influence of international agencies on education and schooling which is decisively contributing to a marketisation of the field of education, in the context of an increasingly multilevel and fragmented arena for educational governance based on the formulation, the regulation and the transnational coordination and convergence of policies, buttressed at the same time by the diffusion of persuasive discursive practice. Organized in four sections entitled The Comparative Challenges of the OCDE PISA Programme, PISA and School Knowledge, The Assessment of PISA, School Effectiveness and the Socio-cultural Dimension, PISA and the Immigrant Student Question, and Extreme Visions of PISA: Germany and Finland, the contributions of this book offers a comprehensive approach of all these challenging and significant issues written from different and distinct research and academic traditions.

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.

This is one of six volumes that present the results of the PISA 2018 survey, the seventh round of the triennial assessment. Volume I, What Students Know and Can Do, provides a detailed examination of student performance in reading, mathematics and science, and describes how performance has changed since previous PISA assessments.

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.

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.

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 research examines 17 international assessments over 60+ years highlighting the critical role that schooling plays around the world.

Education Policy Perils provides educators and those interested in the future of public education with research-based and practical analyses of some of the foremost issues facing public schools today. The collection, written by experienced scholar-practitioners, offers insights that include nuanced descriptions of various challenges facing educators and recommendations for overcoming them with an eye toward more successful policy and better implementation. The authors apply their expertise to a range of issues from international testing to policy challenges related to curriculum on the state and national levels. This volume positions ongoing debates within the wider context of an education landscape struggling to displace junk-science ideology with empirical research. The scope and sequence combined with the expertise of the contributors make this volume a vital resource for educators at all levels during a pivotal time of major changes in education policy.