Panic and stoicism: Media, PISA and the construction of truth

Abstract

In December 2019, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released the latest results of its triennial Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) testing. What followed was a flurry of media reports in the participant countries about the 2018 PISA results that were interpretive rather than descriptive. Whilst there is a considerable body of literature describing PISA’s impact on education policies, there are fewer studies that examine how PISA data is presented to the public by the media and how this contributes to the construction of policy truths. As part of a broader study of policy landscapes in the Asia Pacific region, this paper provides a critical analysis of the mediatisation of the 2018 PISA results in Australia and Singapore. It will be demonstrated that in Australia, much of the reporting was characterised by panic, whereas in Singapore the reporting was much more measured, exhibiting a stoicism. Drawing on a corpus of articles published in Australian and Singaporean newspapers in December 2019, and informed by the work of Michel Foucault, the analysis will make visible how dominant discourses used by the media operated as regimes of truth to advance neoliberal imperatives.