(Re)Considering the ‘Practical Value’ of Comparison

Abstract

Far from merely providing a benign means to learn from others, comparisons of schooling policy, practice and performance are increasingly central to contemporary modes of global educational governance. Within this current milieu of ‘looking around’ to others, my focus here is a novel school-level instrument for international benchmarking and policy learning: the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) PISA for Schools. PISA for Schools assesses school performance in reading, mathematics and science against the national (and subnational) schooling systems measured by the main PISA test. Schools are thus positioned within a global space of measurement and comparison, and are encouraged to learn from the policy expertise of ‘high-performing’ international schooling systems and the OECD. As I intend to show, this distinctive function enables PISA for Schools to open up new local schooling spaces to the direct influence of the OECD but with reduced mediation by the nation-state. If we wish to better understand the global governance of education and the role that organisations like the OECD play in these processes, we therefore must apprehend how global instruments like PISA for Schools help influence how schooling can be locally understood and practised.