Globalisation of education policies: does PISA have an effect?

Abstract

The paper examines the role of PISA in the globalisation of education policies. It approaches the question by assessing the effects of PISA on the ways in which new legislation was debated in national contexts in the period 1994–2013. The study asks: Has there been an increase in the number of references to the international community in debates on education policy due to PISA, and, if so, is this change confined to debates on education policy? Our analysis shows that education policy debates feature an increasingly global discourse in which organisations such as the OECD have an authoritative role. Yet, our findings do not support the claim that PISA is the cause of a change in this respect. Debating national policies in a global context and utilising the same transnational discourses regardless of the policy issue area in question has long been with us, yet there is a global trend in which national policies are increasingly often debated through appeals to models and policy advice promulgated by international organisations.

Keywords:

• Comparative
• national policymaking
• International Organisations
• PISA
• authority

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the two anonymous referees for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We also thank members of the Tampere Research Group for Cultural and Political Sociology and those of the World Society mini-conference held in Seattle in August 2016, who gave us valuable feedback on the text.

Notes

1. PISA is a triennial international survey administered by the OECD aimed at evaluating education systems worldwide by testing 15-year-old schoolchildren’s knowledge and skills in core subjects: reading, mathematics, and science. More information about the survey is provided on the OECD’s Web site at http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/.

2. These developments, where national education policies are claimed to be increasingly informed by the international comparisons such as those the OECD produces and the reference societies thereby constructed are in the scholarly work often labelled as ‘rescaling’ of national education policies (Lingard and Rawolle 2011; Sellar and Lingard 2013a; Winstanley 2012) or ‘respatialisation’ of educational governance (Lingard and Sellar 2014; Ozga 2012).

3. The OECD draws as its members nation-states in which the political elite shares similar political interests (typically sympathy towards neoliberal thinking and free market ideas). The fact that the Organisation in its activity advances such interests is thus no wonder. This is the very basis of the OECD as of any IO; to produce information that can be used by its members. The OECD grew out of its predecessor, the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), which was founded in 1947 with the support of the United States and Canada to co-ordinate the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II. The OEEC served as an IO for co-operation in Europe, its mission being to help countries damaged by the War to make a new economic start. When by the end of the 1950s the standard of living and the economic activities of Western European countries had achieved or even surpassed the level preceding World War II, the European and the Northern American countries decided to establish a completely new organisation focusing primarily on economic cooperation. On 30 September 1961, the Convention on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) came into being, and so was born a unique forum in which the governments of 35 market democracies now work together to address the economic, social and governance challenges of contemporary societies. (for a history of the OECD, see e.g. Aubrey 1967; Pal 2012; Woodward 2009).

4. This also applies to the OECD’s country reviews. Throughout its history, the Organisation has been active in conducting country reviews in all areas on which it conducts research. In the field of education, the Organisation provides Member Countries with detailed country-specific evaluations (often referred to as country notes) of the status of their education systems. For example, in relation to PISA, the OECD publishes country-specific reports that discuss in more detail the status of a national system and proposes recommendations. Such country notes (which draw in part on the existing PISA data) seem to especially attract countries in which the central government does not publish its own national PISA report. Yet, as with all OECD country reports, these reviews are conducted at the request of the country concerned.

5. In the OECD research reports the unit of analysis is traditionally a nation-state and its overall performance. In recent years several sub-national entities such as municipalities and single schools have expressed their interest to be addressed individually in the OECD reviews. This has spawned a group of OECD assessments in which the units of comparison are not nation-states and their overall performances but national sub-systems and their performances, such as performances of individual regions or schools. The OECD PISA-based Test for Schools is one such assessment, the aim of which is to provide individual schools with information on their own pupils’ learning performances (OECD 2017). Although the decision to participate in such assessments in not taken at the national governmental level but at the municipal level or school level (depending on how basic education is organised in an individual nation-state), it does not mean that such new programmes arise and evolve contrary to domestic actors’ interests (cf. Rutkowski 2015). Quite the contrary; it seems that in countries with big geographical area and school-specific differences in learning outcomes, local decision-makers and, for instance, school principals have begun to campaign for region and school-specific review results. The PISA-based test for schools is an outcome of such political campaigning. After being institutionalised, the results achieved in such assessments can be used by different regional actors to advocate specific policy reforms at the nation-state level (for a discussion, see e.g. Lingard and Sellar 2014).

6. The Assessment of Learning Outcomes in Higher Education (AHELO) is one example of the OECD-driven research programmes that did not, despite Member States’ initial interest in the programme, materialise. The main purpose of AHELO was to provide data for national governments and higher education institutions on what students at the end of their first bachelor’s level degrees know and are able to do. All in all, 17 countries participated in the AHELO feasibility study. However, by the end of the feasibility study, in 2013, the OECD Education Policy Committee decided to discontinue the programme. This was because the costs of the study for participating countries had increased more than expected. Further, the creators of AHELO lacked the adequate knowledge capacity to build the generic skills component of the assessment framework and faced several challenges in constructing the instrument. Due to these problems, among others, related to AHELO’s preparatory work, it has been claimed that the study did not resonate sufficiently among the Members States. Consequently, the programme was abandoned (for a discussion, see e.g. Altbach 2015; Morgan and Shahjahan 2014).

7. The increasing adoption of international learning assessments as part of national education policy-making has been explained, for instance, by the fact that in world society there is a shared belief that one can discover scientific methods to improve student achievement in different subjects and that these techniques are valid across educational systems (Kamens and McNeely 2010; see also Smith 2016). Yet, the theory emphasises, the global adoption of educational testing would not have occurred without IOs actively promoting such a testing culture. According to the theory, the OECD, the World Bank and UNESCO in particular serve as the main carriers of international testing and assessment culture in the modern world (Chabbott 2013; McNeely and Cha 1994).

8. This categorisation is indebted to the work of Weber (1978) and to the scheme proposed by (Avant, Finnemore, and Sell 2010), with five bases of authority for global governors – institutional, delegated, expert, principled and capacity-based authority. Avant et al., however, deal with individuals and treat organisations as one single basis for authority, so their classification scheme makes it difficult to ‘unpack’ organisations as authorities.

9. The data-set was compiled by the Tampere Research Group on Cultural and Political Sociology. For a more detailed discussion on how the data was collected, the criteria guiding data collection and some external differences among the data collected, see the Appendix 1. For earlier studies based on the data used here, see (Alasuutari 2014, 2016; Tiaynen-Qadir, Qadir, and Alasuutari 2018).

10. The per-capita gross domestic product of each of the selected countries in 2012, in international dollars, was $44,298 for Australia, $42,612 for Canada, $30,666 for Trinidad and Tobago, $37,286 for the UK, $1,839 for Uganda, and $51,384 for the USA (World Economic Outlook 2016).

11. For countries that have participated in PISA, see http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/pisaparticipants.htm.

12. Civic policy is not included in this figure since the debate related to civic policy in our sample made no reference to the OECD.

13. For the data-set, the body of parliamentary discussions on education policy consists of 57. Of these discussions, 36 are from the years 2001–2013 and 21 are from the years 1994–2000.

14. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss when referencing other countries and their policies started in national parliamentary rhetoric or what factors potentially underlie the intensification of such referencing. It is obvious that invoking the global community in national parliamentary rhetoric has been with us for a long time. For example, our earlier study examining the references made to the global community in the British Hansards during 1803–2005 showed that in the British Hansard data, references made to other countries and their policies were already very common at the beginning of eighteenth century (in fact, more common than ever after). On the other hand, the same study showed that referencing concrete policy models in the national parliamentary rhetoric began to increase from the 1950s onward (Alasuutari, Rautalin, & Tyrkkö, in process).