Resisting the seduction of the global education measurement industry: notes on the social psychology of PISA

Abstract

The question I raise in this paper is why measurement systems such as PISA have gained so much power in contemporary education policy and practice. I explore this question from the bottom up by asking what might contribute to the ways in which people invest in systems such as PISA, that is, what are the beliefs, assumptions and desires that lead people to actively lending support to the global education measurement industry or fall for its seduction. I discuss three aspects of what, in the paper, I refer to as the ‘social psychology’ of this dynamics, highlighting the seductive nature of numbers, measurement and comparison, the persistence of technological expectations about education and its workings and the reference to social justice as a key motivator for wanting to know how systems work and perform. I raise critical questions with regard to each of these aspects and, through this, suggest ways towards a more grown-up response to the difficult question of providing good education for everyone, rather than engaging in an unsustainable race for the top.

Keywords:

• PISA
• measurement
• social psychology
• education policy
• what works
• social justice

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the European Educational Research Association in Budapest, Hungary, September 2015. I would like to thank Pádraig Hogan for organizing the session in which the paper was presented and several members of the audience for helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This is, for example, the case in Europe where the European Union has no official say in education policy, although through its (in)famous ‘open method of coordination’ it does exert a significant influence on policy in the European member states – see, for example, de la Porte and Pochet (2012).

2. The OECD is the successor of the OEEC, the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, which was established in 1948 with the aim to contribute to administering the Marshall Plan, aimed at the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War. While the Marshall plan had a strong focus on rebuilding the economy, there was also a clear ideological focus towards rebuilding democracy across Europe (see, for example, Milward 1984).

3. To highlight that rhetoric requires active identification of those being addressed, is a key insight of what is known as ‘new rhetoric’ – see, for example, Rutten and Soetaert (2015).

4. The question ‘what it takes’ is important because I believe that to a very large extent, it is possible to reconstruct and control education systems so that they end up at the top of measurement systems such as PISA. But to do so may require very strong and problematic interventions – such as taking children away from their family environment if there were a concern that this was impacting negatively on their ‘performance’, or bribing students so that they work hard or focusing all the energy on training young people for the PISA tests, rather than providing them with a proper education.

5. See also Biesta (2015b).

6. The phrase ‘raising standards’ has always puzzled me, as a standard is simply an indicator used to assess the performance of something rather than that it refers to the performance itself. In this regard, just raising the standard is actually a rather pointless exercise.