What PISA Knows and Can Do: Studying the Role of National Actors in the Making of PISA

Abstract

This article builds on previous research which has emphasised the role of comparisons of educational performance in creating visibility and borderlessness, and moves the argument a point further. The article claims that apart from increased visibility, what the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has brought to education systems in Europe is interdependence. This is because one of the often ignored or too obvious effects of comparison is that, first, it creates representations of educational realities (the first level of the construction of the story) and, second, it takes those previously separate and disparate pieces and brings them together into a whole, into one single entity — in the case of PISA, the league table, the report, the speech and so on. PISA has created such interdependence among education systems in Europe and beyond, and has simultaneously created the dependence of this new reality on the continuous production of PISA data. This is precisely how PISA has secured its existence. Although the PISA ‘spectacle’ may have become slightly banal, nevertheless PISA is the sine qua non of education policy-making in Europe. This is certainly the case for the European Commission and its use of the PISA data to govern. Following the constructed imaginaries of economic globalisation, which see nations and societies as mutually dependent, PISA has substantially contributed towards a fiscalisation of the thinking behind reforming education systems and the narratives and imaginaries that construct this thinking. If economies are now globally exposed, so is education (or so it has to be).