Policy, philanthropy and profit: the OECD’s PISA for Schools and new modes of heterarchical educational governance

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the development and administration of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Schools – a new testing instrument of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – to demonstrate the relevance of heterarchical processes to educational governance. Drawing suggestively across new ‘relational’ thinking around policy networks, and new spatialities associated with globalisation, the research shows how PISA for Schools helps constitute new spaces and relations of, and for, educational governance. Informed by policy documents and interviews conducted with 33 key actors across the PISA for Schools policy cycle, I show how PISA for Schools typifies contemporary educational policy-making and governance via the export of ‘statework’ to private actors and agencies, including intergovernmental organisations, philanthropic foundations and edu-businesses. I conclude by considering how treating PISA for Schools, and other similar education services, as a ‘product’ produces a potentially dangerous blurring of public and private benefits, with the potential that (private) profit might ultimately trump (public) education.

KEYWORDS:

• PISA for Schools
• OECD
• heterarchy
• governance
• edu-business
• philanthropy
• network

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Steven Lewis completed his Ph.D. in the School of Education at The University of Queensland, focusing on the development and effects of the OECD’s PISA for Schools programme, as well as emergent spaces and relations of educational governance more broadly. He has recently commenced as the Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2017–2019) at Deakin University, Australia, with his research focusing on how new global modes of standardised testing and data, and evidence around ‘what works’, help to reshape local schooling practices, teachers’ work and student learning in lower-SES communities. He has recently published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Comparative Education Review, Critical Studies in Education and Journal of Education Policy.

ORCID

Steven Lewis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8796-3939

Notes

1 The PGB comprises representatives from the OECD's 34 member countries and 1 PISA Associate (Brazil), with other PISA-participating countries and economies (36) invited to attend as non-voting observers. The PGB is responsible for determining key policy priorities and for overseeing the conduct of main PISA.

2 My interview participants have been coded in the following manner: PISA Governing Board member plus number – PGB-1; OECD Secretariat member plus number – OECD-1; US philanthropic foundation executive plus number – Phil-1; US School district A, B and C executive plus number – District A-1; America Achieves executive plus number – AA-1; CTB/McGraw-Hill analyst plus number – CTB-1. These interviews were all conducted between January 2013 and November 2014, and were personally transcribed by the researcher.

3 Funding for the OECD is derived from two sources: a Part I budget of mandated contributions from all members, proportional to the size of their economy, 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. Notwithstanding its obvious prevalence within international and national education policy discourses, main PISA may be considered a ‘non-core’ activity of the OECD, being funded by voluntary Part II contributions from participating countries and economies. It is also worth noting that it is the US federal Department of State that funds national participation in main PISA instead of the Department of Education, producing a discrepancy in the USA between who pays for PISA and who benefits from PISA.

4 Although constraints of space and relevance do not permit any further elaboration of the technical issues associated with the development of PISA for Schools, a detailed explanation of the scaling and equating undertaken during field trials and the pilot study is available in the OECD’s (2015) technical report. Further information is also available in the PISA for Schools technical reports produced by ACER (2012) and CTB/McGraw-Hill (2014).

5 During the 2014–2015 US school year, each US school paid CTB/McGraw-Hill US$11,500 to participate in PISA for Schools. The cost to participate in PISA for Schools under the administration of Northwest Evaluation Association is not publicly disclosed on their website, but it is expected that an online version of the assessment will significantly lower participation costs for schools.

6 PISA for Development, a variant of main PISA launched in 2013, was designed by the OECD to target low- and middle-income countries that wished to ‘build capacity’ around conducting large-scale testing and evidence-based decision-making. Although based on main PISA, PISA for Development ‘develops and differentiates the PISA data-collection instruments to produce results that better support evidence-based policy-making in middle- and low-income countries’ (OECD 2016, 2). In effect, this involves (a) developing assessment items that can provide a more fine-grained measure of student performance at lower PISA proficiency levels; (b) revising the contextual questionnaire to better reflect the ‘diverse situations’ in middle- and low-income countries and (c) establishing methodologies to better capture out-of-school youth who would otherwise be excluded from the main PISA sample (OECD 2016, 6).

7 The US not-for-profit organisation Northwest Evaluation Association was accredited as the provider of PISA for Schools in the USA for the 2015–2016 and, more recently, 2016–2017 US school year. The National Foundation for Educational Research, a UK not-for-profit organisation and registered charity, has been announced as the accredited provider of PISA for Schools in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) under Discovery Project [DP1094850], Schooling the Nation in an Age of Globalisation: National Curriculum, Accountabilities and their Effects.