PISA for sale? Creating profitable policy spaces through the OECD’s PISA for Schools

Abstract

Our chapter focuses on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD’s) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Schools, an instrument designed to assess individual school performance in reading, mathematics, and science against the national (and subnational) schooling systems measured by the main PISA test. Such an extension of PISA to new local schooling spaces typifies the increasing presence and complexity of the role now played by ‘external’ actors in education policy and policymaking processes. First, we provide a brief outline of the OECD’s education agenda, focusing on its testing regime with main PISA as the prototype for the development of a broader range of tests, including PISA for Schools. We then consider how power-topologies, as well as networked and heterarchical governance, provide a generative theoretical lens through which to better understand these emergent processes. This is followed by the empirical focus of the chapter, in which we account for the changing management of PISA for Schools, the involvement of an Australian for profit edu-business in the management of the test, and the various ways this exemplifies third-party involvement in the work of the OECD. We conclude by suggesting PISA for Schools now works as an example of networked or heterarchical governance, but one that is stretched globally.