Governing schooling through ‘what works’: the OECD’s PISA for Schools

Abstract

This paper explores Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Schools, a local variant of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD’s) influential PISA that not only assesses an individual school’s performance in reading, mathematics and science against international schooling systems, but also promotes 17 identical examples of ‘best practice’ from ‘world class’ schooling systems (e.g. Shanghai-China, Singapore). Informed by 33 semi-structured interviews with actors across the PISA for Schools policy cycle, and supplemented by the analysis of relevant documents, the paper provides an account of how these concrete examples of best practice are represented in the report received by participating schools. Drawing upon thinking around processes of commensuration and the notion of ‘governing by examples’, the paper argues that PISA for Schools discursively positions participating schools as somehow being commensurable with successful schooling systems, eliding any sense that certain cultural and historical factors – or ‘out of school’ factors – are inexorably linked to student performance. Beyond encouraging the problematic school-level borrowing of policies and practices from contextually distinct schooling systems, I argue that this positions the OECD as both the global expert on education policy and now, with PISA for Schools, the local expert on ‘what works’.

Keywords:

• PISA for Schools
• governing by examples
• commensuration
• evidence-based policy-making
• comparison
• OECD
• data

Notes

1. Funding for the OECD is predominantly derived from two sources. These are a Part I budget of mandated contributions from all members that fund ‘core’ activities (53% of total funding), and a Part II budget funding projects of interest to limited numbers of members that are not covered by Part I contributions (47% of total funding). In effect, Part II contributions can be considered as a ‘user pays’ model, with main PISA funded entirely by voluntary Part II contributions from participating countries and economies.

2. I am presently unable to comment on the exact nature of the ‘best practices’ highlighted to participating Spanish schools as the OECD has yet to publicly release an example of the Spanish PISA for Schools report.

3. The 12 schooling systems included in the US PISA for Schools reports for the purpose of comparison are Shanghai-China, Finland, Korea, Singapore, Canada, Japan, Germany, the UK, Poland, the USA, Mexico and Brazil. These schooling systems are those deemed to be either ‘high performing’ or which else have made significant recent improvements to their PISA performance.