PISA ‘Yet To Come’: governing schooling through time, difference and potential

Abstract

This article examines emerging techniques of educational governance – based on time, difference and potential – enabled by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s PISA-based Test for Schools (‘PISA for Schools’). I show how PISA for Schools facilitates the production of difference through comparative test data, allowing educators to imagine, and bring about, different potential futures. Drawing on Deleuze’s thinking around forms of difference, and the governance function of potentiality, and informed by interviews with key PISA for Schools policy actors, I illustrate how the visualisation of difference produces a local desire amongst schools and educators to become other than they currently are across multiple temporalities, and how this ‘impetus to action’ makes new actions and futures possible. This constitutes what I theorise as ‘governing through difference and potential’, where the underlying logic is for teachers to work on themselves in the present to continually improve the future.

Keywords:

• PISA for Schools
• difference
• potential
• time
• data
• Deleuze

Notes

1. ‘When we define difference as conceptual difference, we believe we have done enough to specify the concept of difference as such. Nevertheless, here again we have no idea of difference, no concept of difference as such … In reality, so long as we inscribe difference in the concept in general we have no singular Idea of difference, we remain only with a difference already mediated by representation’ (Deleuze 1994, 27).

2. ‘“I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come,” said Scrooge.

The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand.

“You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us”, Scrooge pursued. “Is that so, Spirit?”’ (Dickens 2008, 39).