On the ‘life of numbers’ in governing Mexico’s education system: a multi-scalar account of the OECD’s PISA

ABSTRACT

There is now an extensive body of research concerning the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and its recent additions and variations. Despite this, we argue that there is a paucity of theory-informed empirical research on the ways in which the PISA results about a nation’s education system both circulate within, and are engaged by, educators and policymakers at different levels of the education system. This paper reports on a large multi-scalar, multi-method and multi-actor dataset on the Mexican education system, where we explore what actors located at different scales know about PISA, and whether and how they use it in education policy and practice decisions. From a set of different vantage points we show the highly contingent and unpredictable ‘life of numbers’ – from teachers in schools who barely know about and engage with PISA data, to politicians who use PISA to legitimate their own political purposes, or policymakers who draw upon much earlier renditions of PISA so that it now enters into Mexican education policymaking and shapes practices through a metaphoric back door. We reflect theoretically on these processes and practices, arguing for a more complex and nuanced reading of large-scale assessments like PISA.

KEYWORDS:

• Mexico
• PISA
• multi-scalar governance
• modalities of power
• numbers

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr Tore Sørensen, Dr Christian Ydesen and Dr Jeremy Rappleye for their enriching commentary on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor change. This change do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 On page 10 we presented the results of statistical testing. Such outcomes correspond to the following tests: One Pearson chi-square test of independence to assess whether the educational level in which participants worked was associated with their awareness of PISA, results show a significant association χ²(2, n = 319) =16.13, p = 0.00. A second Pearson chi-square test of independence was conducted to assess whether the subject that educators taught was associated with their awareness of PISA, χ² (4, n = 319) =21.98, p = 0.00. Prior post hoc testing based on residuals was conducted.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Cambridge Commonwealth, European and International Trust [grant number 10396974]; Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología [grant number 409270].