Observing local dynamics of ILSA projections in federal systems: a comparison between Germany and the United States

ABSTRACT

By comparing two federal education systems, namely Germany and the U.S., and their reactions to PISA we show how international, large-scale student assessments (ILSA) have been used by national stakeholders to gain leverage for legitimising or de-legitimising policy reforms in education. From a neo-institutionalist perspective we argue that country-specific path-dependencies and policy legacies, such as different systems of power devolution, testing traditions and also non-governmental actor influence, additionally moderate the impact of ILSA.

KEYWORDS:

• OECD
• PISA
• neo-institutionalism
• Germany
• U.S
• path-dependency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For example, if ILSA reform impulses starkly conflict with traditional perspectives on education policy, ILSA either lack the necessary legitimacy which is required to be considered a source of projection at all, or the projection to other countries serves as a means of reform de-legitimation.

2 To date (2012), only 8% of public school funding is provided by the federal level, compared to 48% from the state, and 44% from the local level (CEP 2012, 31).

3 See http://www.achieve.org/adp-network, accessed February 11, 2017. The America Diploma Project is a network of states that, under the guidance of different intermediary actors (such as Achieve, Inc.), align their school diplomas to a standardised benchmark of ‘college and career readiness’.

4 See http://www.corestandards.org/, accessed February 11, 2017.

5 See www.achieve.org.

6 For more information on TIMSS and its sponsoring organization, International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), see https://timssandpirls.bc.edu/, accessed February 11, 2017.

7 E.g., ‘Young Chinese, Indians, and Poles are not racing us to the bottom. […] They do not want to work for us; they don’t even want to be us. They want to dominate us ˗ in the sense that they want to be creating the companies of the future’ (NGA/CCSSO/Achieve 2008, 14).

8 Only the Länder Hesse and Schleswig-Holstein participated in FIMS (Klein and Hüchtermann 2003). This also underscores the minor role ILSA used to play in Germany.

9 In the discourse on PISA also TIMSS was rediscovered since it revealed almost the same deficits as PISA and highlighted almost the same underlying structural problems (high correlation between socio-economic background of students/pupils and academic success and deficits in MINT-disciplines).

10 To meet the demands for measuring education outcomes, several university institutions were established in Germany to provide knowledge on how education performance has developed and which policy measures were proven successful in causing a positive effect on the outcome (Radtke 2003; Zapp and Powell 2016).

11 For instance, the teachers union GEW stated that the good German PISA results overshadow the deep-rooted problem of persistent social inequity caused by the German education system (see https://www.gew.de/aktuelles/detailseite/neuigkeiten/soziale-auslese-ist-bremsklotz-des-deutschen-bildungssystems/, accessed February 11, 2017).