The Primacy Of Pisa

Every three years the world awaits the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment or PISA, the rankings of school systems overseen by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Nations around the world look eagerly and apprehensively to see where their students rank on these tests of competence in, mainly, science, math and reading. This book provides a window into PISA and its power. What exactly is PISA? How are its tests developed? Who takes the test? What countries tend to outperform and which underperform? What do countries learn from PISA? Why is PISA both revered and feared? And, most importantly, does PISA improve education globally? The first PISA, in 2000, included 32 countries. In 2018, nearly eighty nations took part in PISA. That number is expected to double by 2030. This may mean that students in over 80% of the world’s countries will take the PISA exams. This scenario has made PISA more important than ever. This book probes topics and themes related to “the world’s most important exam” and why many view a high PISA ranking—rightly or wrongly—as global education’s seal of approval. Because of this, PISA has been called a disruptor, a test which can trigger major reform in school systems around the world. But is it the PISA rankings that are the real disruptor or the decisions countries make because of their rankings? These decisions often involve systemic changes in teaching and learning which can substantially alter how a country measures and prioritizes its education system.

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.

The eleventh to the early fourteenth centuries saw a great transformation in the political, cultural and economic life of the Italian peninsula, marked by the rise of the autonomous city-states in the north and centre, the expansion of international trade, and the creation of a wealthy southern kingdom which reached the peak of its power in this period, before fragmenting in two in the late thirteenth century. It was also the period in which the various dialects that we now call the Italian language came into being, and in which Tuscan in particular became the vehicle for impressive literary innovation. Presenting a rounded view of Italy at a time when it was the most dynamic region in western Europe, this book looks at Italy in its entirety, rather than concentrating largely on the north, as previous studies have done. It also includes expert coverage of topics such as the family and the Jewish, Greek, and Muslim minority communities, in addition to its coverage of developments in the cities, rural life, trade, the monarchy, papal Italy, and language and culture.

Heywood's 1921 history of Pisa is a valuable addition to the study of the historiography of medieval Italy.

This new interpretation of the reign of Calixtus II (1119-1124) challenges the conventional analysis explaining why this life-long opponent of the emperor, Henry V, agreed to compromise over imperial investitures of bishops in the Concordat of Worms of 1122.

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.