PISA, Policy and the OECD: Respatialising Global Educational Governance Through PISA for Schools [1st ed.] 9789811582844, 9789811582851

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xix
(Re)Considering the ‘Practical Value’ of Comparison (Steven Lewis)....Pages 1-11
The Evolving State of the OECD and PISA (Steven Lewis)....Pages 13-28
Topological Relations of Governance (Steven Lewis)....Pages 29-63
New Networks: Policy, Philanthropy and Profit (Steven Lewis)....Pages 65-95
New Cartographies: Relocating Schools in Topological Policy Spaces (Steven Lewis)....Pages 97-131
New Evidence: Governing Schooling Through ‘What Works’ (Steven Lewis)....Pages 133-170
New Topological Spaces and Relations of the OECD’s Global Educational Governance (Steven Lewis)....Pages 171-188
Back Matter ....Pages 189-192

Citation preview

Steven Lewis

PISA, Policy and the OECD Respatialising Global Educational Governance Through PISA for Schools

PISA, Policy and the OECD

Steven Lewis

PISA, Policy and the OECD Respatialising Global Educational Governance Through PISA for Schools

123

Steven Lewis Research for Educational Impact Centre Deakin University Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-981-15-8284-4 ISBN 978-981-15-8285-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8285-1

(eBook)

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Foreword

Steven Lewis’s book, PISA, Policy and the OECD: Respatialising Global Educational Governance Through PISA for Schools, is an important contribution to policy sociology in education and comparative education, for a number of cogent reasons. It is the first book length study of the OECD’s PISA for Schools and is based on empirical data, but within a sophisticated theorising of the new spatialities of globalisation, especially the topological. The empirical documents new practices of state craft and the export of some state work to private actors (e.g., philanthropic groups and edu-businesses) and to international organisations, such as the OECD. It is important in its development of a theoretical framework for understanding the topological, contributing to our deeper understanding of what Ball and Junemann (2012, p. 78) have called the new ‘topology of policy’ and to what Lewis refers to as a ‘topological policy sociology of education’. The book is also significant in its consideration of an appropriate methodology for researching education policy in the context of the new spaces of global educational governance, the networked or heterarchical mode of governance, and the new topological spatialities that accompany and express globalisation. The methodological stance of rejecting epistemological innocence and proffering research ‘findings’ as the best take on a situation at a particular moment, given the positionality of the researcher, the limits of data collection and of time are acknowledged. The use of T. S. Eliot’s lines from the last of his four quartets, ‘What we call the beginning is often the end’ plus ‘And to make an end is to make a beginning’, confirms this critical open-ended approach to educational research, indeed to social science research, and research ‘findings’. As Lewis notes, ‘each new certainty uncovers yet further new uncertainties’. This is the character of the best social science research, which is often neglected, and is the commendable stance of the research and ‘findings’ reported in this book. Steven Lewis’s, PISA, Policy and the OECD: Respatialising Global Educational Governance Through PISA for Schools, is thus a very impressive piece of educational research. It adds to the considerable research literature now on the OECD’s testing regime, instantiated from the late 1990s when the OECD became the central international organisation and ‘amplifer’ of ordinality, creating test rankings and metrics for the comparative performance of schooling systems around the globe v

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(Sorensen and Robertson 2020). It provides an impressive and essential baseline for any subsequent research on PISA for Schools. It makes, as noted above, theoretical and methodological contributions to policy sociology in education and the policy literature more broadly, as well as to how the local, national and global reach out and into each other. The analysis proffered confirms that the OECD is now an actor in its own right in respect of the global governance of education through the constitution of the globe as a commensurate space of measurement. However, it also notes that what we see in the OECD’s education work is not only a global manifestation of policy as numbers, but also ‘soft’ governing through decontextualized examples and through nominal descriptors of PISA poster children, which acknowledges to some extent at least the national and cultural specificities of different schooling systems. The analysis demonstrates unequivocally that education policy is now not simply any longer under the jurisdiction of national or subnational governments. The book shows how the nation-state now works in different ways in the context of globalisation, but remains nonetheless significant. Importantly then, Lewis’s study of PISA for Schools demonstrates not only local schools and subnational school systems reaching out to the OECD for the contribution of PISA for Schools, but also the OECD in a topological fashion reaching inside nations. This latter activity contradicts the OECD’s self-description of its education work as straightforwardly an expression of the policy desires and needs of member nations. A good academic research-based book is one that provokes thought and argumentation. It has so been for me with Steven Lewis’s book. I thus want to make some additional comments here in relation to the provocation that this book provides. The first simply relates to the extent of the OECD’s testing regime today and the ambitions for it. Lewis documents PISA for Schools as one new and significant component part of that expanding policy regime. There are others. So, for example, the scope, scale and explanatory power of the main PISA have been expanding (Sellar and Lingard 2014); that is, what is tested, the number of nations participating, and attempts to link the test results with other OECD data, namely, the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), to possibly offer classroom-based explanations for differential test performance, in addition to the OECD’s current system-based explanations. In addition to the main PISA, and PISA for Schools, there are now PISA for Development, the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) (PISA for 16– 64-year-olds), the International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS) (PISA for 5-year-olds), and the new PISA4U, a school improvement tool. The OECD has also been conducting a Study of Social and Emotional Skills (SSES), trialled in 2018, carried out in 2019 and reporting in 2020. This is linked to the OECD’s ambition to extend the scope of what PISA measures. Currently as well, the OECD has a Future of Knowledge and Skills 2030 project, which potentially extends the OECD’s education work into curriculum. This is an expansive and ambitious agenda and certainly indicates that the OECD, as well as being a node in a global network of relations, is also an education policy actor in its own right. It is to be hoped that other researchers conduct research on the elements

Foreword

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of that expansive agenda of the kind that Steven Lewis has carried out in relation to PISA for Schools. Steven Lewis’s study demonstrates clearly the complex spatialites and directionalities of education policy production today. We might see these as new cartographies of power and policymaking in education. The period post the end of the Cold War witnessed challenges to methodological nationalism in social science research, a challenge to the assumption of a homology between the social and the nation, a challenge in policy sociology to the assumption that education policy was the sole prerogative of the nation-state or subnational politics entities. Lewis’s analysis fits firmly within that challenge. Clarke (2019), the eminent policy theorist and researcher, has argued that we have come to a point of danger methodologically speaking, though, with the possibility now of what he refers to as ‘methodological globalism’ replacing methodological nationalism. I would argue that the ever-changing spatialities and scales of globalisation demand that we move beyond both methodological nationalism and methodological globalism (Lingard 2021b). The contemporary rise of nationalism and ethnonationalism, as evidenced in President Trump’s slogans of America First and Make America Great Again, is indicative of these right-wing backlashes against globalisation that rearticulate a national neoliberalism. They have manifested in the USA, in education policy terms, in the stinging critique of the OECD’s expanding testing regime by a senior policymaker in the federal department of education, regarding, inter alia, the impact on main PISA through the participation of more nations; the costs of participation; the linking of main PISA and PISA for Development scales; the failure to move to computer adaptive testing; and limited research base to the increased scope of what is tested by main PISA (Grek 2019). President Trump’s nationalism, ethnonationalism and anti-multilateralism have provided a policy space that has enabled these criticisms (Lingard 2021a) and which demand continuing focus on the changing policy role of the nation in the context of changing globalisation. The COVID-19 global pandemic has also strengthened the rise of nationalism and the role of edtech companies and new technologies in schooling. Lewis began this book by reference to Sadler’s 1900 question for comparative education about the practical value for educators of looking comparatively at other systems of schooling. Lewis returns to this in his conclusion by suggesting that his research on PISA for Schools in various parts of the USA (New York, Virginia, Wisconsin and Texas) suggests there is a possibility of teachers and schools, perhaps even systems, moving beyond anodyne talk of ‘best practice’ and ‘what works’, to productively and professionally utilise the data made available from this test to rethink in positive ways their practices through professional conversations interrogating the data as a beginning rather than as an ending. Lewis quotes Foucault favourably concerning his point that good analyses suggest some of the fragilities in the present and thus challenge ‘that which is’ by imagining ‘that which might be’. This exceedingly good book is written in that spirit. It makes an outstanding contribution not only to policy sociology in education, but also to comparative education rethought and revitalised by the realities of ever-changing globalisation and related spatialities and cartographies of policymaking.

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As a final thought, the analysis made me think how the more considered testing and policy work of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), and its TIMSS, PIRLS and other tests, demand the kind of research attention that has been given to the education and testing work of the OECD, and as exemplified in Steven Lewis’s PISA, Policy and the OECD: Respatialising Global Educational Governance through PISA for Schools. Bob Lingard Professorial Fellow The Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education Australian Catholic University Brisbane, Australia Emeritus Professor The University of Queensland Brisbane, Australia

References Ball, S. & Junemann, C. (2012). Networks, new governance and education. Bristol: Policy Press. Clarke, J. (2019). Foreword. In N. Papanastasiou. The politics of scale in policy: Scalecraft and education governance (pp. v–xii). Bristol: Policy Press. Grek, S. (2019). The rise of transnational education governance and the persistent centrality of the nation. International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 2, 268–273. Lingard, B. (2021a). Enactments and resistances to globalizing testing regimes and performance-based accountability in the USA. In S. Grek, C. Maroy, & A. Verger (Eds.), Accountability and datafication in the governance of education: World Yearbook of Education 2021. London: Routledge. Lingard, B. (2021b). Globalisation and education: Theorising and researching changing imbrications in education policy. In B. Lingard (Ed.), Globalisation and education. London: Routledge. Sellar, S. & Lingard, B. (2014). The OECD and the expansion of PISA: New global modes of governance in education. British Educational Research Journal, 40(6), 917–936. Sorensen, T. and Robertson, S. (2020). Ordinalization and the OECD’s governance of teachers. Comparative Education Review, 64(1), 21–45.

Acknowledgements

This book is the culmination of research and writing undertaken between 2013 and 2020. As with any project whose life spans such a considerable period of time, it has necessarily been enabled and supported by innumerable people in countless ways. However inadequate my efforts might be, I would like to take this opportunity and attempt to express my gratitude for their contributions. First and foremost, none of this would have been conceivable without the willingness and participation of the many teachers, school and district leaders, stateand national-level policymakers, and personnel at the many ‘partner organisations’ who worked on PISA for Schools. It goes without saying that your generosity of spirit and time made this work possible, as well as providing many hours of enjoyable and generative conversations. When describing my job to people I meet, it invariably goes something like this: I get paid to travel to interesting places, in order to speak with interesting people. So, to those many interesting people, my eternal thanks. The intervening years have granted me the privilege to encounter and work with some incredible colleagues. At The University of Queensland, where I completed my Ph.D., I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Ian Hardy, Sam Sellar and Bob Lingard. You have each provided such support and friendship throughout my doctoral studies and helped me safely navigate the often-turbulent waters of academia. I consider myself extremely lucky to have worked with such exemplary scholars and genuinely giving people. At Deakin University, I would like to particularly thank Julianne Moss and Jill Blackmore, as well as my colleagues at the School of Education, for your kind encouragement and institutional support. Special thanks are also in order for Kalervo Gulson and Glenn Savage—your friendship and mentoring have thankfully been a constant and much-valued fixture of my academic career. Elisa Di Gregorio, thank you for providing invaluable copy-editing support on the manuscript and for being an outstanding research assistant. To these people, and the many others who cannot be mentioned

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individually for reasons of space alone, thank you for helping to make this writer and this writing as good as they can be. Of course, all remaining shortcomings remain entirely my own. Finally, to Jessica, thank you. As with everything else, none of this would be possible without you.

Contents

1 (Re)Considering the ‘Practical Value’ of Comparison . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Purpose of the Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Research Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Significance of the Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structure of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2 The Evolving State of the OECD and PISA Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The OECD and Its Education Policy Work . . PISA for Schools: The Assessment . . . . . . . . PISA for Schools: The School Report . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3 Topological Relations of Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Government to Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Governing Through Heterarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topological Rationality and the ‘Becoming Topological’ of Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Scales and Spaces of Globalisation . . . . . . . . . . . . Power-Topologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Using Topology to Understand Educational Governance . Policy Sociology: Policy as Text and Discourse . . . . . . . Accounting for New Policies, People and Places . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4 New Networks: Policy, Philanthropy and Profit . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘We Want to Do PISA’: Responding to US School-Level Pressure Assembling the PISA for Schools Policy Network . . . . . . . . . . . . Counting the Cost of PISA for Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Funding and Delivering PISA for Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Bringing People Together’: The Role of America Achieves . . . . . ‘Treat This as a Product’: The Role of Edu-business in PISA for Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5 New Cartographies: Relocating Schools in Topological Policy Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Achieving School-Level Relevance Through New Audiences . . . ‘Reaching Out Farther’: Increasing the OECD’s Policy ‘Reach’ . Measure, then Improve: Determining the Data that Counts . . . . . Commensuration and Crises of Perception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Local School = International School System? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Constructing Isomorphism in PISA for Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Better Than Finland’: Promoting World-Class Status . . . . . . . . . Creating Difference Through Similarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PISA ‘Yet to Come’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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6 New Evidence: Governing Schooling Through ‘What Works’ . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Defining ‘What Works’ Through PISA for Schools . . . . . . . . . . The Power of the Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Proposing ‘Best Practice’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Problematising Best Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contesting Best Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Governing Schooling Through Communities of Practice . . . . . . . Fostering Data-Driven Dispositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A More Educative Appropriation of PISA for Schools? . . . . . . . ‘Talking Back’ Through PISA for Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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7 New Topological Spaces and Relations Educational Governance . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Empirical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Theoretical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Methodological . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (Re)Thinking Schooling Accountability . Implications for Policy and Practice . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

About the Author

Dr. Steven Lewis is an Australia Research Council (ARC) DECRA Fellow at the Research for Educational Impact (REDI) Centre of Deakin University. His current research interests are concerned with new data-driven modes of educational accountability; the education policy work of the OECD and other ‘non-state’ actors; and how these developments shape the understanding and practice of education and expertise, at the teacher-, school- and schooling system-levels. In 2019, Steven commenced an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellowship, entitled ‘Globalising School Reform Through Online Teacher Professional Learning’ (2019–2022), funded to the value of A$ 447,772. Through this work, Steven has helped develop the use of spatial, relational and mobility-informed thinking to generate new approaches to the study of global educational policymaking and governance. Steven has more than 14 years of experience as an educator, including 6 years as a high school mathematics and science teacher in Queensland, and 8 years as a university lecturer and researcher in Queensland, Kansas (USA) and Victoria. He has published more than 35 journal articles, book chapters and scholarly reports on how new global modes of standardised testing and data help reshape global education policymaking and governance, as well as local schooling practices and teachers’ work. These works have been published in leading journals within the field, such as the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Comparative Education, Critical Studies in Education and Journal of Education Policy. Steven has been an invited contributor to prestigious handbooks and encyclopaedias, including the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Sociology (Wiley-Blackwell), the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Education (OUP) and the Handbook of Human and Social Conditions in Assessment (Routledge). He also frequently participates in public debates around schooling policy and accountability, writing in outlets such as The Conversation, The Herald Sun and EduResearch Matters, as well as appearing live on Australian radio. Steven’s work has been acknowledged through a variety of esteemed awards and prizes. He has been the recipient of an ARC DECRA Fellowship (2019–2022) by the Australian Research Council (ARC) in 2019; the Outstanding Early-Career xv

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About the Author

Paper Award by the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) in 2018; the N.V. Varghese Award for Comparative Education by The University of Queensland in 2017; the Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellowship by Deakin University in 2017; and the Research in Educational Leadership and Management Award by the Australian Council for Educational Leaders (ACEL) in 2016.

Abbreviations

ACER AHELO CCSS CERI DEELSA DIF ECES GERM ICCS ICILS ICT IEA IELS INEE INES NAPLAN NATO NCES NCLB NFER NPM NSP OECD OEEC PGB PIAAC PIRLS PISA PWB

Australian Council for Educational Research Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes Common Core State Standards Centre for Research and Innovation Directorate for Education, Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Differential Item Functioning Early Childhood Education Study Global Educational Reform Movement International Civic and Citizenship Education Study International Computer and Information Literacy Study Information and Communications Technology International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study Instituto Nacional de Evaluación Educativa Indicators of Education Systems National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy North Atlantic Treaty Organisation National Centre for Education Statistics No Child Left Behind National Foundation for Educational Research New Public Management National Service Provider Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Organisation for European Economic Cooperation PISA Governing Board Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies Progress in International Reading Literacy Study Programme for International Student Assessment Programme of Work and Budget

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RTTT STP TALIS TIMSS

Abbreviations

Race To The Top Security, Territory, Population Teaching and Learning International Survey Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 2.3 Table 4.1 Table 6.1

PISA for schools test items by subject and response type . . . Possible combinations of subject clusters in the PISA for Schools test booklets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Comparing the OECD’s main PISA and PISA for schools . . The OECD’s ‘partner organisations’ for the US administration of PISA for Schools, 2012–2016 . . . . . . . . . . The OECD’s 17 examples of global best practice presented in the PISA for Schools report, 2012–2017 . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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21

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21 25

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73

. . 136

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Chapter 1

(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.

I am inclined to think that, on the subject which we are about to discuss, if we are quite frank with ourselves and with other people, we shall have to confess that we are not all of one mind. We are going to ask ourselves whether really there is anything of practical value to be got from studying foreign systems of Education. To that question, I suspect, we shall not all be disposed to give the same answer (Sadler in Comp Educ Rev 7(3):307–314, 1964, p. 307).

Introduction The passage above was originally printed on 1 December 1900. Notwithstanding the intervening twelve decades bearing witness to inexorable, unimaginable and unprecedented change, I would argue that the sentiments Sadler expresses here, of ‘whether really there is anything of practical value to be got from studying foreign © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Lewis, PISA, Policy and the OECD, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8285-1_1

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(Re)Considering the ‘Practical Value’ of Comparison

systems of Education’, more or less still underpin the broad expanse of comparative education scholarship. What’s more, we are still surely not all of one mind when it comes to providing a definitive answer, nor, for that matter, are the means at hand by which we might arrive at such an answer. However, while the prospect of different education stakeholders, such as teachers, students, researchers and policymakers, arriving at a common response to Sadler’s enduring question might still largely elude us, the inclination to study, borrow from, emulate, fear and compare ourselves to international benchmarks and systems appears undiminished. In fact, this predilection for examining ‘foreign systems of Education’ has arguably become something of a fetish, an overarching schooling meta-policy affecting curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, as well as the experiences of teachers and students alike (Lingard, Martino, & Rezai-Rashti, 2013). Far from merely providing a benign means to learn from others, comparisons of schooling policy, practice and performance, be it between schools or international systems, are increasingly central to contemporary modes of educational governance, in which schooling is subjected to the tandem glare of both national and global eyes (Nóvoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003). It is this current milieu of schools, schooling systems, educators and policymakers looking around to others—to the national, the international, the global—that prompts the research presented here. Specifically, I focus on the development of a school-level instrument for international benchmarking and policy learning: the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) PISA for Schools. In contrast to the triennial Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) undertaken by schooling systems, in which the nation-state is the usual unit of analysis, PISA for Schools instead 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 globally commensurate space of measurement and comparison, and are encouraged to engage with, and learn from, the policy expertise proffered by ‘high-performing’ international schooling systems and the OECD itself. In the context of an emergent global governance of education (Lewis & Lingard, 2015; Meyer & Benavot, 2013), this distinctive function enables PISA for Schools to open up new local schooling spaces to the direct influence of the OECD but without, or at least with reduced, political mediation by the nation-state. In this unique development, the global eye of PISA watches the national and the local, while the local eye of the school can now look around to the international schooling systems that were once considered far distant and irrelevant. PISA for Schools also provides one of the first instances where an intergovernmental organisation (the OECD) has collaborated with edu-businesses, not-for-profit agencies and philanthropic foundations to co-develop education policy. Interestingly, PISA for Schools has not targeted the OECD’s usual audience of politicians and policymakers, but is instead a response to calls from local US educators who wish to measure their school-level performance against international, PISA-informed benchmarks. In many ways, these collective developments reflect two emergent realities of education policymaking globally: (1) it is no longer the sole purview of national governments, involving instead a diverse, and

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ever-changing, array of actors and organisations from the public, private, intergovernmental and voluntary sectors, including edu-businesses; and (2) the policy cycle is no longer confined within the traditional territorial boundaries of the nation-state. PISA for Schools might therefore be an exemplar of non-State actors and agencies combining to create private educational ‘solutions’, addressing a social domain that has been construed, at least traditionally, as inherently public and national in orientation. To this end, my research provides valuable insights into contemporary modes of educational policymaking involving a diverse network of policy actors inside and outside of government, and shows how these ‘global’ discourses and processes can help to inform, enable and at times even constrain more ‘local’ schooling practices. While of course acknowledging the ability of local contexts and agents to inflect, appropriate or even resist such global flows, this new ‘topology of policy’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 78) nonetheless introduces additional complexities into how one might understand (and, for that matter, research) the emergent ways in which education is globally governed. In order to accommodate these changing empirical realities, the research here is informed by an eclectic variety of intellectual resources to help theorise new spaces and relations of global educational governance. These include thinking around networked (or ‘heterarchical’) modes of governance (Ball, 2012; Ball & Junemann, 2012), new topological spatialities and rationalities associated with globalisation (Allen, 2016; Allen & Cochrane, 2010; Amin, 2002; Lewis, Sellar, & Lingard, 2016; Lury, Parisi, & Terranova, 2012), and developments associated with governing by ‘hard’ numbers (Grek, 2009; Ozga, 2009; Rose, 1999) and ‘soft’ examples (Simons, 2015). In this instance, network governance involves the inclusion of horizontal relationships and new non-governmental actors into the work of the State, while heterarchy refers to the combination of these new horizontal and older vertical relationships, and modes of organisation, through which the State now functions. On the other hand, topological thinking helps us to understand spaces that are determined less by physical location (e.g., the nation-state) and more by the myriad relations, both material and discursive, that flow between individuals and organisations in the development and enactment of education policy. This conceptual framework structures the analysis that follows, enabling us to apprehend how PISA for Schools helps constitute new spaces and relations of educational governance, and how these developments affect the possibilities in which schooling can be locally understood and practised. Over the following chapters, I provide insights not only into emergent modes of educational governance, which I theorise here as governance by (1) heterarchy, (2) respatialisation and (3)‘best practice’, but also the ways in which educators and researchers can more meaningfully engage with PISA for Schools, and other such ‘global’ opportunities for policy learning and schooling accountability. In doing so, I hope to contribute something to Sadler’s long-standing argument around determining what is actually gained when we—as educators, researchers, policymakers or the informed public—turn our collective gazes afield.

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Purpose of the Research This book is the culmination of many years (2013–2018) spent researching the development, promotion and administration of PISA for Schools by the OECD and its partner organisations, and its subsequent take-up by schools and schooling districts to inform school-level policies and practices. During this time, I have sought to discern not only the processes by which a specific, and arguably unique, example of education policy—PISA for Schools—is constituted, but also how such ‘global’ forms of policy learning might contribute to the governance of local schooling. My specific purpose with this book is to bring these various insights together to show how educational governance is facilitated through the constitution of new relational policy spaces, in which the material and discursive elements of the OECD’s global policy ensemble are enfolded into local schooling contexts. In this way, I have attempted to answer three overarching research questions: 1. What were the conditions and policy opportunities, both for the OECD and its network of partner organisations, under which PISA for Schools was developed, promoted and administered? 2. How does PISA for Schools respatialise relations between the OECD and local schooling spaces, with respect to enabling the governance of schooling policy and practice? 3. How does the OECD use the concept of ‘best practice’ in PISA for Schools to help govern local education reform agendas? In order to address these questions, I have adopted what might broadly be described as a policy sociology approach (Ozga, 1987, 2019), but with an emphasis on topological spatiality, to examine the PISA for Schools policy network. This is not for the rather en vogue purpose of visually ‘mapping’ relations between organisations but, rather, to determine how these networks help to constitute new policy spaces that cut across traditional public/private, and for-profit/not-for-profit, domains and territorially bounded spaces, such as the nation-state. Given the array of actors and organisations associated with PISA for Schools, I have also been concerned with understanding the diverse, and at times competing, motives of the OECD and its partner organisations, as well as the local schools and districts that voluntarily seek to compare themselves with international schooling systems. Furthermore, and informed by the global-local connectivity that such comparisons enable, my research has focused on how PISA for Schools makes possible new relations, spatialities and modes of governance between the OECD and US schools and districts, particularly with respect to how such relations can influence local understandings of schooling. Lastly, I have sought to investigate the professional learning opportunities that have arisen around PISA for Schools and how these, arguably, help to normatively define ‘what works’ in education. However, at the same time as potentially constraining local opportunities for policy and practice, I

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have also explored how PISA for Schools might also foster collaboration and sharing between local educators, and provide spaces from which alternative possibilities for thinking and practising schooling can be articulated.

The Research Data This research is informed by empirical research conducted between October 2013 and November 2018, during which time I examined the development and administration of PISA for Schools by the OECD and its partner organisations, and its subsequent implementation in school districts within the US states of New York, Virginia, Wisconsin and Texas. Much of the following analyses draw upon semi-structured interviews undertaken with 36 key policy actors from organisations involved across the PISA for Schools policy cycle, with a particular focus on those who were active in the US deployment of the programme. These included the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills; the PISA Governing Board (PGB), a body composed of government representatives from PISA-participating countries that sets and oversees the policy objectives of PISA, including PISA for Schools; Australian and Spanish government officials who worked with the OECD on educational matters; US-based philanthropic foundations that funded the development and upkeep of PISA for Schools; US not-for-profit and private organisations (America Achieves, EdLeader21) that helped administer PISA for Schools in the U. S., including responsibilities around school recruitment, promotion and collaborative learning; the edu-business (CTB/McGraw-Hill) acting as the accredited provider of PISA for Schools in the U.S. during the period 2013–2015; and leaders from US school districts in New York, Virginia, Wisconsin and Texas who participated in PISA for Schools testing. Reflecting the ‘topological’ spatialities of contemporary policymaking processes and the geographically dispersed nature of the PISA for Schools policy network, these interviews were conducted across a diverse set of locations and using a variety of methods, including both face-to-face and electronically mediated formats (e.g., Skype and FaceTime). Most of the interviewees were purposefully recruited after extensive Internet searches to identify key stakeholders in the development and administration of PISA for Schools, so they could in turn provide significant insights into a newly developed, and, at the time, narrowly implemented, assessment programme. However, and demonstrating the highly relational (and more often collegial) nature of the PISA for Schools network, conversations with research participants were often serendipitously arranged with the voluntary assistance of prior interviewees. While such ‘opportunism’ in the selection and recruitment of knowledgeable participants was of considerable benefit to my research, it also raised interesting methodological questions around how such activities helped to shape the empirical data that underpin this study. Complementing these interviews is the analysis of relevant print documents, audio-visual materials and websites from organisations involved in the development

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and implementation of PISA for Schools. These documents include school-level reports received by PISA for Schools participants in the U.S.; other documents and technical reports related to PISA for Schools, and the OECD’s broader education policy work; promotional and administrative materials associated with the US implementation of the assessment; and various school- and district-based reports and stakeholder communications. These technical documents help to nuance the data collected during research interviews. Collectively, the various data analysed here help to reveal the diverse, and often conflicting, perspectives of the organisations and individuals associated with PISA for Schools, while also highlighting the frequent disparities between official institutional reports and the potentially more candid talk of policymakers themselves.

Significance of the Research This study and its findings are significant for many reasons. First, even though the OECD’s educational work has been the focus of considerable attention in the preceding years (see, for instance, Centeno, 2017; Mahon & McBride, 2008; Wiseman & Taylor, 2017; Ydesen, 2019), the research presented here is one of the few extended empirical investigations into PISA for Schools, and especially so if one only considers research conducted with a policy sociology approach. Perhaps in light of PISA for Schools’ recent emergence as a topic of study, the empirical basis for these analyses have so far been limited to sample school reports, and other information made publicly available by the OECD and partner organisations. While certainly drawing on these useful existing accounts, my work has sought to provide a more fulsome, and data- and theory-informed, analysis of how PISA for Schools has been developed and administered, while also examining the initial policy effects of its enactment at the school and district levels. This has provided valuable insights into the heterarchical nature of contemporary policymaking processes, especially since PISA for Schools has been developed and administered through the collaboration of the OECD, philanthropic foundations, not-for-profit agencies and edu-businesses, and largely (at least in the U.S.) without the input of national or subnational government authorities. Also, investigating how participating schools and districts are actually engaging with PISA for Schools, both individually and via the mediation of professional learning communities, has helped foreground the empirical within what have otherwise been largely theoretical studies. The unique nature of PISA for Schools, in which a school or district voluntarily purchases the testing and policy services of the OECD by way of a private accredited provider, also means that schools are, for the first time, able to interact directly with the policies and discourses of the OECD, but without the intervening presence of national- or state-level bureaucracy. Given the significant, and frequently documented, normative influences exerted by the main PISA and the OECD on national schooling systems (see, for example, Auld, Rappleye, & Morris, 2019; Breakspear, 2012; Carvalho & Costa, 2015; Dobbins & Martens, 2012;

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Fischman, Topper, Silova, Goebel, & Holloway, 2019; Gorur & Wu, 2015; Grek, 2009; Lingard & Sellar, 2014; Meyer & Benavot, 2013; Rautalin, Alasuutari, & Vento, 2019; Savage & Lewis, 2018; Sellar & Lingard, 2013a, 2013b; Takayama, 2010), it seems logical that PISA for Schools should warrant a similar level of critical scrutiny, particularly given its potential to extend the policy work of the OECD to a previously unavailable audience of school-level actors and spaces. As I intend to demonstrate, the performance comparisons enabled by PISA for Schools provide, arguably, one of the first instances where international data and policy learning have been used to catalyse school-level educational reform. 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. Finally, this book attempts to provide a coherent and definitive statement regarding how policy sociology might be conducted in a new globalised world characterised by issues of topological relations and connections, rather than concerning itself solely with physical location and State-centric understandings of political authority. As a fulsome reflection on my own experiences researching PISA for Schools, my efforts here hopefully progress how new topological thinking might be gainfully deployed in the service of understanding educational policymaking and governance, and suggest how we as researchers might better practice policy sociology within an ever-changing milieu of globalised relations and spaces.

Structure of the Book The research presented in this book is separated into seven chapters. Chapter 1 has provided an orientation by outlining the nature of my research, the purpose of the study and the empirical data that inform the following analyses. It has also briefly introduced the conceptual tools that frame how I have attempted to make sense of PISA for Schools, representing both an example of contemporary educational policymaking and new possibilities to ‘globally’ govern how schooling is locally practised. Chapter 2 positions PISA for Schools within the broader context of the OECD’s educational work and its increasing relevance as a global policy actor in its own right. It documents an organisational history of the OECD and, more recently, the increased significance of the Directorate for Education and Skills within the Organisation, before detailing the development and implementation of its flagship PISA assessment. Chapter 2 closes by providing a comprehensive description of the PISA for Schools assessment and report that provide the empirical basis for my research. Chapter 3 details the theoretical resources that have underpinned my attempts to understand how ‘global’ policy ensembles, such as PISA for Schools, can be enfolded into more local schooling spaces. Given the broad focus of my research

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around emergent modes, spaces and relations of policymaking and governance, and the influences these can exert upon local policy and practice, I have employed a rather eclectic array of thinking tools that draws upon new relational, or ‘topological’, ways of understanding spatial relations. These include thinking around the role of heterarchies in contemporary governance; the new topological spatialities, rationalities and power relations associated with processes of globalisation; and how these collectively facilitate new ways of knowing and acting in the world. Then, I discuss how these ways of theorising relations and spaces of power have implications for how one conducts critical policy research, that is, if the topology of policy has indeed changed, so too should the analytical tools and methods used to make sense of such developments. To this end, I outline a ‘topological’ policy sociology, which moves beyond the nation-state and government as the sole sites of policy production and distribution and, instead, attends to the diverse array of non-State, private and international agencies involved in PISA for Schools, as well as the schools and teachers who engage in such activities. After establishing the conceptual basis for my research, Chap. 4 provides the first of three analytical chapters. Using the example of PISA for Schools, I first examine the policy network of the OECD and its partner organisations, including philanthropic foundations, not-for-profits and edu-businesses, that helped fund, promote and administer PISA for Schools. Drawing on interviews and documentary evidence, I analyse how this arrangement positions the OECD as a single node within a broader network of relations, and suggest that this might reflect a ‘new way of working’ for the OECD as it seeks to maintain and expand its education policy influence. The chapter then focuses on the increased role and influence of private policy actors and agencies across the education policy cycle, and how PISA for Schools arguably help to open up new ‘profitable’ spaces, in both a material and discursive sense, within which these organisations can further their own policy agendas. I also seek to apprehend the varied, and sometimes conflicting, interests and motivations within and between members of the PISA for Schools policy networks. Finally, Chap. 4 gestures towards the heterarchical modes of educational governance made possible by PISA for Schools, in which horizontal networks of actors combine to provide private policy ‘solutions’ to local public schooling ‘problems’. Chapter 5, the second analytical chapter, investigates the changing spatial relations made possible by PISA for Schools, reflecting the increasingly ‘topological’ nature of contemporary social practices and domains, including education. I contend here that PISA for Schools assumes and constitutes a sense of PISA-mediated isomorphism, creating new relational continuities between participating educators and schools, and between the schools and international schooling systems to which they are compared (PISA for Schools). These similarities, in turn, form the basis for identifying difference, such as differences in student performance, pedagogical practices, policy settings and schooling evidence. It is this production of difference that drives new local imperatives to ‘look around’ at the global, encouraging changes to schooling practice on the basis that schools might become more like the ‘high-performing’ schooling systems (e.g., Shanghai-China, Finland)

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fêted by the OECD. This respatialisation of educational governance also extends the ‘lessons’ from the main PISA to schools themselves, constituting a form of ‘PISA to Schools’ that helps the OECD to ‘reach into’ local spaces and influence schooling agendas. I argue that this forms the basis for a new mode of global educational governance, which I theorise here as governing through time, difference and potential (Lewis, 2018). Chapter 6, the last of the analytical chapters, addresses the emergence of new ‘soft’ governing modalities associated with ‘best practice’ and other forms of schooling evidence. I examine how the OECD’s inclusion of ‘ready-to-go’ policies from ‘high-performing’ schooling systems (e.g., Shanghai-China, Singapore) within PISA for Schools creates a decontextualised set of ‘what works’ solutions. Besides creating a problematic causal link between certain ‘high-performing’ practices and desirable schooling outcomes, this suite of policies also provides a clear discursive limit to how education reform can be locally understood, constituting a global governance of local schooling through best practice. Chapter 6 also examines how the OECD’s determination of ‘what works’ is sustained and promoted through the professional learning networks, both virtual and face-to-face, established around PISA for Schools, and how these help to disseminate the OECD’s global policies amongst local schooling spaces. At the same time, I also contend that such professional learning communities might provide local educators and policymakers with spaces a for undertaking meaningful professional dialogue and collaboration. The chapter closes by suggesting how PISA for Schools may thus help to foster alternative policy spaces from which educators can ‘talk back’ to national and state authorities, and potentially promote more authentic understandings and renderings of schooling accountability. Chapter 7, the final chapter, summarises the overall findings of my research and outlines its contribution to the field, in terms of empirical, theoretical and methodological insights. The research reveals the complexity around contemporary processes of educational policymaking, and how PISA for Schools represents new relations, spatialities and modes of global educational governance, in which international discourses and processes are enfolded into school-level spaces and actors. In turn, this helps to influence, and potentially limit, the possibilities by how schooling might be locally understood and practised. I also discuss the implications of these findings, in terms of how local educators might more meaningfully engage with such global developments, and how a more nuanced form of policy sociology research might otherwise be conducted.

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Amin, A. (2002). Spatialities of globalisation. Environment and Planning A, 34(3), 385–399. https://doi.org/10.1068/a3439. Auld, E., Rappleye, J., & Morris, P. (2019). PISA for development: How the OECD and World Bank shaped education governance post-2015. Comparative Education, 55(2), 197–219. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2018.1538635. Ball, S. (2012). Global education inc.: New policy networks and the neo-liberal imaginary. New York: Routledge. Ball, S., & Junemann, C. (2012). Networks, new governance and education. Bristol: Policy Press. Breakspear, S. (2012). The policy impact of PISA: An exploration of the normative effects of international benchmarking in school system performance. OECD Education Working Papers, 71, 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1787/5k9fdfqffr28-en. Carvalho, L. M., & Costa, E. (2015). Seeing education with one’s own eyes and through PISA lenses: Considerations of the reception of PISA in European countries. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(5), 638–646. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2013. 871449. Centeno, V. (2017). The OECD’s educational agendas: Framed from above, fed from below, determined in an interaction: A study on the recurrent education agenda. New York, NY: Peter Lang GmbH. Dobbins, M., & Martens, K. (2012). Towards an education approach à la finlandaise? French education policy after PISA. Journal of Education Policy, 27(1), 23–43. https://doi.org/10. 1080/02680939.2011.622413. Fischman, G. E., Topper, A. M., Silova, I., Goebel, J., & Holloway, J. (2019). Examining the influence of international large-scale assessments on national education policies. Journal of Education Policy, 34(4), 470–499. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2018.1460493. Gorur, R., & Wu, M. (2015). Leaning too far? PISA, policy and Australia’s ‘top five’ ambitions. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(5), 647–664. https://doi.org/10. 1080/01596306.2014.930020. Grek, S. (2009). Governing by numbers: The PISA ‘effect’ in Europe. Journal of Education Policy, 24(1), 23–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930802412669. Lewis, S. (2018). PISA ‘Yet To Come’: Governing schooling through time, difference and potential. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 39(5), 683–697. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01425692.2017.1406338. Lewis, S., & Lingard, B. (2015). The multiple effects of international large-scale assessment on education policy and research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(5), 621–637. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2015.1039765. Lewis, S., Sellar, S., & Lingard, B. (2016). PISA for Schools: Topological rationality and new spaces of the OECD’s global educational governance. Comparative Education Review, 60(1), 27–57. https://doi.org/10.1086/684458. Lingard, B., Martino, W., & Rezai-Rashti, G. (2013). Testing regimes, accountabilities and education policy: Commensurate global and national developments. Journal of Education Policy, 28(5), 539–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2013.820042. Lingard, B., & Sellar, S. (2014). Representing for country: Scotland, PISA and new spatialities of educational governance. Scottish Educational Review, 46(1), 5–18. Retrieved from https:// www.scotedreview.org.uk/media/microsites/scottish-educational-review/documents/2014_461_May_02_Lingard.pdf. Lury, C., Parisi, L., & Terranova, T. (2012). Introduction: The becoming topological of culture. Theory, Culture & Society, 29(4–5), 3–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276412454552. Mahon, R., & McBride, S. (Eds.). (2008). The OECD and transnational governance. Vancouver: UBC Press. Meyer, H.-D., & Benavot, A. (Eds.). (2013). PISA, power and policy: The emergence of global educational governance. Oxford: Symposium Books. Nóvoa, A., & Yariv-Mashal, T. (2003). Comparative research in education: A mode of governance or a historical journey? Comparative Education, 39(4), 423–438. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 0305006032000162002.

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Ozga, J. (1987). Studying education through the lives of policy makers: An attempt to close the micro-macro gap. In S. Walker & L. Barton (Eds.), Changing policies, changing teachers: New directions for schooling? (pp. 138–150). Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Ozga, J. (2009). Governing education through data in England: From regulation to self-evaluation. Journal of Education Policy, 24(2), 149–162. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930902733121. Ozga, J. (2019). Problematising policy: The development of (critical) policy sociology. Critical Studies in Education, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2019.1697718. Rautalin, M., Alasuutari, P., & Vento, E. (2019). Globalisation of education policies: Does PISA have an effect? Journal of Education Policy, 34(4), 500–522. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 02680939.2018.1462890. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sadler, M. (1964). How far can we learn anything of practical value from the study of foreign systems of education? Comparative Education Review, 7(3), 307–314. Retrieved from http:// www.jstor.org/stable/1187111. Savage, G. C., & Lewis, S. (2018). The phantom national? Assembling national teaching standards in Australia’s federal system. Journal of Education Policy, 33(1), 118–142. https://doi.org/10. 1080/02680939.2017.1325518. Sellar, S., & Lingard, B. (2013a). Looking East: Shanghai, PISA 2009 and the reconstitution of reference societies in the global education policy field. Comparative Education, 49(4), 464– 485. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2013.770943. Sellar, S., & Lingard, B. (2013b). The OECD and global governance in education. Journal of Education Policy, 28(5), 710–725. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2013.779791. Simons, M. (2015). Governing education without reform: The power of the example. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(5), 712–731. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01596306.2014.892660. Takayama, K. (2010). Politics of externalisation in reflexive times: Reinventing Japanese educational reform discourse through ‘Finnish PISA success’. Comparative Education Review, 54(1), 51–75. https://doi.org/10.1086/644838. Wiseman, A., & Taylor, C. (Eds.). (2017). The impact of the OECD on education worldwide. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Ydesen, C. (Ed.). (2019). The OECD’s historical rise in education: The formation of a global governing complex. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 2

The Evolving State of the OECD and PISA

Abstract This chapter positions PISA for Schools in the context of the OECD’s broader educational policy work and the Organisation’s evolution into the global expert for education, albeit one with a decidedly economic underpinning. It provides a useful introduction to the empirical dimensions of my research, and the following contextualisation of PISA for Schools shows how the OECD has become an active education policy actor in its own right. This is significant if we understand PISA for Schools as helping to constitute new spaces and relations of global educational governance, in which the OECD’s already considerable policy ‘reach’ can be extended beyond national schooling systems to include the local schools that participate in the assessment. First, I document a brief history of the OECD, and the changing role and significance of education within the Organisation. I then discuss the main PISA assessment, and how PISA’s success has enabled the OECD to exert a more telling influence upon education discourses and policymaking processes. I close the chapter by providing a comprehensive description of both the assessment itself and the report received by participating schools.

Introduction This chapter positions PISA for Schools in the context of the OECD’s broader educational policy work and the Organisation’s evolution into the global expert, or éminence grise (Rinne, Kallo, & Hokka, 2004), for education, albeit one with a decidedly economic underpinning. Indeed, it is well worth pausing to consider that an organisation with historical roots in the reconstruction of a devastated post-war Europe has since become, through PISA and its associated policy work, arguably the world’s leading ‘centre of calculation’ (Latour, 1987) for schooling performance. This chapter provides a useful introduction to the empirical dimensions of my research, and the following contextualisation of PISA for Schools shows how the OECD has become an active education policy actor in its own right (see Henry,

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Lingard, Rizvi, & Taylor, 2001). This is significant if we understand PISA for Schools as helping to constitute new spaces and relations of global educational governance, in which the OECD’s already considerable policy ‘reach’ can be extended beyond national schooling systems to include the local schools that participate in the assessment. The chapter begins by first documenting a brief history of the OECD, and the changing role and significance of education within the Organisation more broadly. I then discuss the development of the main PISA assessment, and how the success of PISA has contributed to greater prominence for the Directorate for Education and Skills within the OECD, enabling the Organisation to exert a more telling influence upon global education discourses and policymaking processes. Given that PISA for Schools forms the empirical basis for my study, this chapter closes by providing a comprehensive description of both the assessment itself and the report received by participating schools.

The OECD and Its Education Policy Work Since transitioning in September 1961 from the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), a US Marshall Plan-funded intergovernmental body that sought to facilitate economic reconstruction in post-war Europe, the OECD has adopted many different forms and functions (Ydesen, 2019). Indeed, it has been variously described as ‘a geographic entity, an organisational structure, a policymaking forum, a network of policymakers, researchers and consultants, and a sphere of influence’ (Henry et al., 2001, p. 7). Despite these shifting attributions, the self-declared raison d’être of the OECD—formally an intergovernmental organisation of the world’s most developed nation-states—has always retained a decidedly economic orientation, helping governments to ‘foster prosperity and fight poverty through economic growth and financial stability’ (OECD, 2019a, np). For instance, Article One of the OECD Convention, the foundational document signed in 1960 to bring the Organisation into existence, stipulates that OECD members must adopt government policies that promote economic strength and prosperity, in order to (a) Achieve the highest sustainable economic growth and employment and a rising standard of living in Member countries, while maintaining financial stability, and thus to contribute to the development of the world economy; (b) Contribute to sound economic expansion in Member as well as non-member countries in the process of economic development; and (c) Contribute to the expansion of world trade on a multilateral, non-discriminatory basis in accordance with international obligations (OECD, 2019b, np). We can see here the OECD’s dominant economic focus and, in spite of more contemporary developments, the total omission of any initial reference to education.

The OECD and Its Education Policy Work

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It is perhaps telling that the terms ‘school’ and ‘education’ (and their derivatives) are absent from the OECD Convention, a document that establishes no educational priorities beyond a cursory commitment for its signatories to promote science and technology resources through ‘vocational training’ (OECD, 2019b). Unlike the exclusively European membership of its OEEC predecessor, the OECD has alternatively sought a geographically varied, and more recently global, participation.1 From 1961, at which time the U.S. and Canada were the sole non-European members, multiple non-European countries have since acceded to the OECD, including Japan (1964), Australia (1971), New Zealand (1973), Mexico (1994), Korea (1996), Chile and Israel (2010) and, most recently, Colombia (2020). 37 nation-states presently comprise the OECD membership, with additional ‘affiliated’ or non-member economies.2 Moreover, a programme of ‘enhanced engagement’ has been sought with the emerging economies of Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa (OECD, 2013), effecting a more ‘global’ OECD to better align with a ‘globalising’ world economy. Regardless of this recent spatial and cultural diversity, prospective members are still required to demonstrate an ideological stance that resonates with that promoted by the OECD, emphasising a commitment to the free market economy, pluralist democratic institutions and the guarantee of individual liberties (Henry et al., 2001). This was initially associated with geopolitical tensions between ‘Western’ countries and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, and the OECD in many respects was considered an ‘economic equivalent of NATO’ (Woodward, 2009, p. 63), that is, a bulwark of democratic and capitalist nations against possible encroachment by the communist ‘other’. However, the existence of a post-Cold War OECD, especially in the context of neoliberal globalisation, reveals a persisting collective ‘world view’ amongst member states that is underscored by a belief in democratic government and the free market, along with a commitment to human rights. This affinity has been described as a mode of ‘cognitive governance’ (Woodward, 2009), whereby the OECD engenders a ‘sense of identity and community amongst its members by engineering and propagating a sense of values, perspectives, expectations and discourses about their place, and that of the Organisation in the global polity’ (p. 63). One might therefore consider the OECD as an increasingly diverse community of nations, yet one that still shares a common belief in liberal democracy as the optimal means by which to achieve economic and social prosperity. 1

The original membership of the OEEC in 1948 included Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Western Germany (separated into the joint Anglo-American occupation zone and the French occupation zone). 2 As of June 2020, the 37 OECD members include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Korea, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK and the U.S. It is also interesting to note here the OECD’s interchangeable use of the terms ‘nations’ and ‘economies’ when describing political units, which further suggests the Organisation’s strong economic leaning.

16

2 The Evolving State of the OECD and PISA

Despite its ostensive economic focus, the OECD has also embraced education as a significant contributor to national, and indeed global, social and economic development. However, education has only more recently emerged as having a clearly defined location and purpose within the OECD, and it was originally only accorded an ‘inferred role’ (Papadopoulos, 1994) that derived from the ‘human capital’ linking of educational investment and economic productivity. The establishment of the Centre for Research and Innovation (CERI) in 1968 witnessed the first discrete unit for education within the OECD, followed by the reconstitution of the Committee for Scientific and Technical Personnel as the Education Committee in 1970. Such developments reflected a growing awareness that education could significantly influence economic growth and that education policy was, in turn, a legitimate policy focus for the OECD, albeit one with a decidedly economistic inflection. Although CERI and the Education Committee were initially positioned within the Directorate for Scientific Affairs, responsibility for education was transferred to the Directorate for Social Affairs, Manpower and Education in 1975, implying an enhanced concern for broader social issues in relation to education. Further structural and philosophical changes saw the unit for education renamed the Directorate for Education, Employment, Labour and Social Affairs (DEELSA). The constituent bodies of DEELSA sought to achieve concurrent but nonetheless distinct aims, with the Education Committee conducting thematic reviews and analyses of national education systems, while CERI was responsible for undertaking research over a broad range of educational issues. A separate Directorate of Education was only established in 2002, which acknowledged that education was now markedly more important to the policy agendas of the OECD and its member nations. In 2012, the Directorate was renamed the Directorate for Education and Skills in the context of launching a new cross-committee organisational strategy, the OECD Skills Strategy (OECD, 2012a). This pivot represented a new way of working across policy areas in which education played a central role, and was an attempt to ensure coherence across otherwise disparate policy domains. Significantly, the Skills Strategy’s explicit focus on enhancing workforce participation, and improving one’s readiness (at the level of government and the individual) to respond to the vagaries of a globalised labour market, arguably gestures towards a particularly economistic understanding of education policy, or what has been termed the ‘economisation’ of education (Sellar & Lingard, 2014; Spring, 2015). However, this ‘new’ strategy drew on a much longer lineage of the OECD perceiving education as the means to enhance economic productivity; indeed, the very first OECD conference on education, held in Washington, D.C. in October 1961 and entitled ‘Economic Growth and Investment in Education’, speaks precisely to this point. This economistic understanding of education has since had significant implications for the types of schooling systems required by national governments, in which the traditional purposes of education—namely, fostering intellectual, social and cultural development—are downplayed in favour of increasing productivity and economic growth. Noting that ‘[g]overnments will need more stress on upgrading human capital through promoting access to a range of skills, and

The OECD and Its Education Policy Work

17

especially the capacity to learn’ (OECD, 1996, p. 7), the OECD has since positioned education as a key economic policy lever that can help determine national success in the global ‘knowledge economy’ (see Kenway, Bullen, Fahey, & Robb, 2006; OECD, 1996). This is revealed in the Organisation’s work on the knowledge economy and lifelong learning (Carroll & Kellow, 2011; Martens & Jakobi, 2010), and via its proclamation that ‘skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies’ (OECD, 2012a, p. 10). Lingard and Sellar (2013), and Green (1999), also argue that the growing importance of education to national economic agendas coincides, somewhat paradoxically, with a weakening sovereignty over one’s own economy, so that education is increasingly perceived as one of the few remaining economic interventions available to individual countries. Such a linking of education with economic outcomes, and a presumed absence of ‘valid’ cross-national educational data (McGaw, 2008), led OECD members, and particularly the U.S. in the wake of A Nation At Risk (The National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), to increasingly call for objective or scientific measures of their national schooling systems. Although preceded by earlier initiatives, such as the Indicators of Educational Systems (INES) and its publication as the annual Education at a Glance report, a watershed moment came with the OECD’s creation of PISA, which enabled the direct measurement of national student performance within a framework of international comparison. First administered in 2000, and then every 3 years thereafter, PISA focuses on the abilities of 15-year-olds, the age at which students notionally complete their final year of compulsory schooling, across the domains of reading, mathematics and science, thereby serving as a proxy marker for schooling system ‘effectiveness’ and the production of ‘human capital’. PISA testing instruments are purposely designed to avoid any alignment with national curricula, concentrating instead on competencies that reflect the ‘important knowledge and skills needed in adult life’ (OECD, 1999, p. 8). The rationale for such a framework is twofold: first, to emphasise the ‘real-life’ application of the specific knowledge and general skills acquired in formal schooling; and second, so that the resulting data can be compared across participating nations, regardless of differences in national school curricula. More recently, PISA has also included optional assessments of ‘applied skills’, including creative problem-solving (2012), financial literacy (2012, 2015 and 2018) and collaborative problem-solving (2015), which demonstrates the continuing evolution of the PISA ‘product’ (see also Lewis, 2019, 2020). It should be noted here that PISA is not the only, nor even the first, international assessment to evaluate and compare national schooling system performance. Notable and long-standing alternatives include instruments designed by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), a Netherlands-based international organisation that has conducted numerous internationally comparative assessments of student ability since 1960. The IEA implemented the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 1995 and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) in 2001, with the most recent iterations of these assessments occurring via TIMSS 2019 and PIRLS 2016. These initiatives have been accompanied by other ongoing IEA

18

2 The Evolving State of the OECD and PISA

surveys, including the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), the International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) and the Early Childhood Education Study (ECES). These IEA assessments have contributed, along with PISA and related developments, to making the globe a commensurate space of measurement of education performance. However, I would suggest that the IEA is perhaps more careful than the OECD in terms of the policy inferences to be drawn from their performance data, insofar as the IEA was formed by academics interested in comparative national education performance instead of the explicit policy learning focus of the OECD. Moreover, IEA data are based on assessments conducted at the grade level (e.g., TIMSS measures student performance at grades 4 and 8), rather than PISA’s focus on age (i.e., 15-year-olds), which raises significant questions around the competing objectives and methods of the two approaches (for instance, see Prais, 2003, 2004). Since its inception, PISA has gone from strength to strength over the course of seven triennial surveys (2000–2018); some 79 countries and economies were surveyed in PISA 2018, with fewer OECD members (36) than non-members (43) participating, reflecting the expanding scope, scale and explanatory power of PISA assessments and data (Sellar & Lingard, 2014). PISA has also been successful in gaining extensive, if admittedly varied, global media coverage (see Andrews et al., 2015; Baroutsis & Lingard, 2017; Grey & Morris, 2018; Waldow, Takayama, & Sung, 2014). This capacity to influence national educational discourses has, in turn, helped ensure PISA’s prominence as a source of ‘objective’ evidence in policymaking processes globally (Fischman, Topper, Silova, Goebel, & Holloway, 2019; Lewis & Hogan, 2019; Lewis & Lingard, 2015; Rautalin, Alasuutari, & Vento, 2019), even if participants in such discussions are potentially limited by the discursive constraints of ‘seeing like PISA’ (Gorur, 2016). Importantly, the success of PISA has seen it become a prototype for the OECD’s development of a range of related educational testing initiatives. These include assessments of system-level performance, such as PISA for Development, the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO), the International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS), and the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), as well as more recent iterations that address school —(PISA for Schools) and teacher-level (PISA4U) performance and practice. Together with the more holistic competence framework under the OECD 2030 Learning Framework initiative (OECD, 2020), with its focus on developing student outcomes that are not currently measured by test instruments (e.g., exercising agency, taking responsibility and showing empathy), this broad family of PISA products arguably constitutes the central elements of the OECD’s global policy ensemble. Through this long, if admittedly contingent, trajectory, we can see the clear evolution of the OECD and its education work, until the Organisation has become, arguably, the world’s leading ‘centre of calculation’ (Latour, 1987) of comparative schooling performance and policy expertise.

PISA for Schools: The Assessment

19

PISA for Schools: The Assessment One of the programmes that best exemplifies the evolution of PISA is the OECD’s PISA for Schools.3 This instrument is similar in format and design to the main PISA, comprising a two-hour written test that assesses students’ ability to apply their acquired knowledge in reading, mathematics and science to ‘real-world’ situations. Unlike the triennial PISA test undertaken by national and subnational schooling systems, PISA for Schools is conducted on-demand by individual schools (up to a maximum of once per year) to assess their performance and compare themselves against schooling systems assessed by the main PISA.4 Furthermore, schools volunteer (and pay) to participate in the PISA for Schools assessment, whereas the relevant national (or subnational) educational authorities may mandate a school’s inclusion in the national sample for the main PISA. In addition to assessing student performance, the test contains student and principal questionnaires to generate contextual information about particular ‘in-school’ and ‘out-of-school’ factors that influence student learning. These are construed in terms of the student population, such as the socio-economic background of students, parental occupations, and student attitudes towards their learning of reading, mathematics and science; and the school environment, including school funding and resourcing, student enrolment, school type (e.g., public, private, Charter) and the organisation of school governance structures. When conducting PISA for Schools, eligible 15-year-old students at each participating school are randomly sampled to obtain an ideal testing cohort of between 45 and 85 students, although the test can be implemented in smaller schools with as few as 35 students if necessary (OECD, 2017, p. 30).5 All schools within a given

3

Until recently, the school-level test was officially referred to in OECD publications and websites as the ‘PISA-based Test for Schools’ or, alternatively in the U.S., ‘OECD Test for Schools (based on PISA)’. Arguably, the recent 2018 nomenclature shift to PISA for Schools aligns the school-level test to the naming pattern of other PISA-derived OECD programmes: PISA for [insert name]. These include PISA for Development (a system-level PISA for developing economies) and PISA4U (an online professional development and credentialing programme for individual teachers). We can also observe informal references within (and outside) the OECD to its Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) as ‘PISA for Adults’, and the International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS) as ‘PISA for Five-Year-Olds’. This naming pattern also suggests the OECD fully apprehends the power of PISA as a brand, and the presumed benefits for new products that invoke the long-established and globally recognised moniker. 4 For instance, a US school that participated in PISA for Schools in 2018 would have their performance benchmarked against 16 schooling systems: Australia, Brazil, B-S-J-G [Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Guangdong] (China), Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong (China), Ireland, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States. 5 For the purpose of PISA for Schools, ‘15-year-old students’ are considered to be those aged from 15 years and 3 completed months to 16 years and 2 completed months at the time of the assessment being administered, with a maximum permissible variance of 1 month (OECD, 2017, p. 28).

20

2 The Evolving State of the OECD and PISA

national or subnational jurisdiction are eligible to undertake the PISA for Schools test, provided that they meet the minimum sampling requirements in terms of student population size. The pool of eligible students is further stratified by gender (male, female) and school grade to ensure an adequately representative sample is included in PISA for Schools testing. However, individual schools are permitted to conduct within-school exclusions of certain students at their discretion, including students who have ‘a mental or emotional disability’; ‘functionally disabled students’ who are ‘permanently physically disabled’; and ‘students with insufficient assessment language experience’ (OECD, 2017, p. 29). Initially administered as a pencil-and-paper test, the OECD issued a call for tender in June 2015 that invited proposals for prospective accredited providers to develop an online version of PISA for Schools, which followed similar moves to develop an ICT delivery platform for the main PISA. Development of the programme began in 2010, with schools and districts invited by the OECD in late 2011 to participate in a pilot study. This was designed to equate the new school-based test with the main PISA so that direct comparisons could be made between school (PISA for Schools) and schooling system (main PISA) performance. PISA for Schools test items were developed according to the relevant PISA assessment frameworks for reading, mathematics and science (see OECD, 2013), and equated to the existing PISA scales (Level 1–Level 6) by simultaneously anchoring them with the main PISA ‘link items’ against a common PISA metric.6 This process enables PISA for Schools scores for reading, mathematics and science to be reported against the established PISA proficiency scales, and against the performance of schooling systems as measured by the main PISA. The pilot was conducted from May to October of 2012, including a total of 126 secondary schools across the U.S. (105 schools), the UK (18) and the Canadian province of Manitoba (3), with a later Spanish pilot of 225 schools that conducted during 2013. Following a successful field trial, PISA for Schools was officially launched in the US in April 2013, and made available to all eligible schools and districts throughout the country. Since this time, PISA for Schools has experienced a significant expansion in terms of its availability and administration. As of December 2020 PISA for Schools is available in 12 languages across 14 countries, and it has been cumulatively administered in more than 2200 schools globally (OECD, 2018b).7 6

The three domains of reading, mathematics and science are assessed in the main PISA and PISA for Schools via an ascending six-level PISA proficiency scale (Level 1–Level 6), with Level 2 considered to be equivalent to a baseline level of student proficiency in the given subject, whereas students at Levels 5 and 6 are notionally ‘top performers’ when compared with their global peers. Given the equating between PISA and PISA for Schools, these PISA proficiency levels and scores putatively provide a common framework for comparing student performance at the local (school) and international (schooling system) level. 7 PISA for Schools is now available in the following jurisdictions: Andorra, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, China (PRC), Colombia, Japan, Pakistan, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, the U.K. and the U.S. It is deliverable in the following languages: Arabic, Basque, Catalan, English, Galician, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai and Welsh.

PISA for Schools: The Assessment

21

Table 2.1 PISA for schools test items by subject and response type Total number of items by subject

Total number of items by response type Constructed response expert items

Constructed response manual items

Complex multiple-choice items

Simple multiple-choice items

Items that are not scored 1

Reading

47

17

4

7

18

Mathematics

40

7

19

3

11

0

Science

54

20

0

16

18

0

141

44

23

26

47

1

Total

Source OECD (2017, p. 15)

The OECD’s (2017) Technical Report reveals how the PISA for Schools reading, mathematics and science items are arranged in the question booklets received by students. The question booklets draw upon a pool of 141 possible test items (47 reading items, 40 mathematics items and 54 science items) developed by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), with items being of either a ‘selected response’ (e.g., simple/complex multiple-choice questions) or ‘constructed response’ (e.g., manual/expert short response) format (see Table 2.1). These 141 test items are then formed into different units aligned around a common theme or stimulus (e.g., text, graphs, tables and diagrams), with between one and five test items assigned per unit. In total, 13 units of reading assessment, 25 units of mathematics assessment and 25 units of science assessment comprise the PISA for Schools item pool. Finally, these units (and their items) are divided into seven possible item clusters—two each of solely reading (R1, R2), mathematics (M1, M2) and science (S1, S2) items, and one cluster composed of items compiling all three subjects (RSM)—that are arranged into seven different booklet configurations (see Table 2.2). Each of the three-cluster test booklets thus has a unique combination of the three subject clusters (reading, mathematics, science) and test items, with these seven possible booklets randomly assigned to the students selected as part of the school sample. This matrix sampling technique means that all of the 141 PISA for Schools Table 2.2 Possible combinations of subject clusters in the PISA for Schools test booklets Test booklet ID number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Source OECD (2017, p. 13)

Cluster one

Cluster two

Cluster three

R1 RSM M2 M1 S2 R2 S1

RSM M2 M1 S2 R2 S1 R1

M1 S2 R2 S1 R1 RSM M2

22

2 The Evolving State of the OECD and PISA

assessment items are completed across the breadth of the 85-student sample, although with each student answering far fewer questions in significantly less time (i.e., 2h of testing rather than 490 min to complete every item).

PISA for Schools: The School Report All schools participating in PISA for Schools receive a 160-page report from the national accredited provider containing analyses of their students’ performance and contextual data, 17 examples of best practices from high-performing international schooling systems (e.g., Shanghai-China, Finland, Singapore), and excerpts from the OECD’s broader educational policy research. The inclusion of these policies, practices and evidence is notionally to ‘encourage school staff and local educators to look beyond their classrooms in search of national and global excellence’ (OECD, 2012b, p. 4), and to help them identify ‘what works’ (OECD, 2013, p. 5). Regardless of the country in which PISA for Schools is implemented, the OECD retains the final authority over the structure and layout of the school reports, and the national accredited provider must agree to follow the authorised report template. However, and aside from graphs and tables representing a school’s specific data around student performance or local contextual factors, the remainder of the 160-page report is otherwise entirely identical for all participating schools within the same national jurisdiction (e.g., the U.S.). For instance, the 17 prominent ‘breakout boxes’ (i.e., physically distinct and highlighted sections of text within the PISA for Schools report) of best practice within the report, as well as the excerpts from other OECD research publications, are identical for all US schools, and there are no modifications to the report contents to acknowledge a school’s specific context (e.g., whether a school is high/low performing on PISA for Schools). Although the issue of ‘best practice’ will be addressed more substantively in Chap. 6, it is significant to note here that the same 17 best practice ‘breakout boxes’ are present in the reports received by participating schools in the U.S. and the UK (see Lewis, 2017a). This arguably promotes the logic that all schools—irrespective of their local context, including whether they are in the U.S. or the UK—require the same OECD policy lessons, simply by virtue of their having participated in PISA for Schools. Although the OECD has more recently sought to discourage teachers from identifying and importing ‘prefabricated solutions’,8 I would still argue that the very inclusion of these practices, let alone the encouragement to compare oneself against high-performing systems via PISA for Schools, incentivises schools to look around for, and presumably borrow, examples of effective policies. 8

For instance, a statement by Andreas Schleicher of the OECD in a 2018 brochure advertising the PISA for Schools notes that ‘this is not about copying prefabricated solutions from other places; it is about looking seriously and dispassionately at good practice in our own environment and elsewhere to become more knowledgeable about what works and in which contexts’ (OECD 2018a, p. 1; emphasis added).

PISA for Schools: The School Report

23

Moreover, any adaptations to the school report template, including translation into languages other than English or the modification of tables or figures, must first be submitted by the national accredited provider to the OECD for approval before being released to participating schools. This form of overseeing or control by the OECD reflects a significant development in its ‘ways of working’, given that PISA for Schools is the result of collaborations between the OECD and its various partner organisations, including philanthropic foundations, edu-businesses and various not-for-profit agencies. However, while such networked, or ‘heterarchical’ (Ball, 2012; Ball & Junemann, 2012) modes of policy-making position the OECD as but one node in a transnational policy network, the Organisation still arguably retains the dominant steering role, and ultimate control of message, amongst its partners (Lewis, 2017b). This is in terms of the OECD determining both how PISA for Schools is administered, and, perhaps more importantly in terms of governance implications, how schooling and performance are discursively constructed within the assessment and report. As such, all school report s in all countries and economies must adhere to the same general report structure: • • • •

Summary of your school’s results Reader’s guide Section 1: Introduction: Understanding your school’s results Section 2: What students at your school know and can do in reading, mathematics and science • Section 3: The learning environment and student engagement at your school • Section 4: Your school’s results in an international context • Section 5: Excellence and equity at your school (OECD, 2017, p. 93).

The first section of the report—Summary of your school’s results—provides an overview of local student performance in reading, mathematics and science as measured by PISA for Schools, with these data represented in a variety of ways. These include the school’s mean score (with standard error) for each subject; the distribution of the school’s students across the six PISA proficiency levels, divided into ‘below baseline level’ (Level 1 and below), ‘intermediate levels’ (Levels 2–4) and ‘top levels’ (Levels 5 and 6); and a comparison of the school’s mean performance score for reading, mathematics and science against the performance of different international schooling systems on PISA 2012. For instance, a US high school currently participating in PISA for Schools is compared against all of the schools in the US national sample, as well as against 11 other schooling systems assessed in PISA 2012. Importantly, all of these comparative schooling systems are designated as ‘strong performers’ or ‘successful reformers’ (OECD, 2012b) on the basis of their performance on the main PISA test.

24

2 The Evolving State of the OECD and PISA

These individual school-level results are further elaborated in subsequent sections of the PISA for Schools report to provide detailed comparisons of student performance, and student and school contextual factors (e.g., socio-economic background, student attitudes to learning), against similar measurements made of national schooling systems on the main PISA. The comparisons with international schooling systems contained within the PISA for Schools report have been notionally included to prompt educators and school leaders to initiate local school improvement agendas. Given that so many of the participating US schools to date are within affluent communities and are themselves (relatively) high performing, a key motivation to undertake PISA for Schools has arguably also been to emphasise these schools’ high levels of student (and hence school) performance. While these motivations and school-level responses are admittedly not my substantive focus here, it is still worth acknowledging the diverse motivations for schools to engage with PISA for Schools, ranging from being more reform-oriented and educative to, arguably, the more normative promotional intentions of some high-performing schools and districts. Despite the main PISA clearly informing the development of PISA for Schools, the two assessments still retain significant distinctions. Table 2.3 summarises the main similarities and differences between system and school-based PISA. Funding for the main PISA is from the contributions of participating member (and non-member) nations via the Part II OECD budget, while the development of PISA for Schools was exclusively paid for by US philanthropic foundations (also see Chap. 4). Furthermore, PISA for Schools participants must pay a fee to nationally accredited organisations (National Service Provider, or NSP) to administer the test, analyse the data and produce the school report. Although the main PISA is conducted regularly every 3 years, PISA for Schools can instead be timed at the discretion of individual schools and districts annually, so long as this does not interfere with their participation in PISA as part of a national sample. Although the OECD organises a globally choreographed release of performance data and rankings for the main PISA, known as ‘PISA Day’ in the U.S., PISA for Schools participants make their own decisions relating to the release (or otherwise) of their performance data. Moreover, the data generated by main PISA is intended to inform public discussions and debates around national schooling performance; on the other hand, PISA for Schools is much more locally focused, with school-level data largely intended to drive school-level reflection and reform processes. This means, in theory at least, that no school-level performance ‘league tables’ can be constructed and publicised from the assessment, which implies that PISA for Schools is less likely to be used to publicly shame schools and hold them to account.

sample

Randomly

selected from

suitable

‘low-performing’

national and

subnational

schooling systems

school participation

‘user pays’

(schools and

systems) at

$5000 (US) per

school to

provider

Philanthropic

funding to

85 students

will generally

be the sample

size for each

participating

school and no

fewer than 45

students in the

case of smaller

schools

‘high-performing’

schools and

districts

participation

and to subsidise

instruments,

replenish test

develop and

administration:

Ongoing

funding

philanthropic

decision-making

policy

local (school/district)

Implementation-level/

payment via

receive

providers

Accredited

organisations

not-for-profit

for-profit or

private

Mostly

the OECD

accredited by

sample

comparison

accountability for

and pilot: US

form of

representative

Schools

Providers

Potential reward

School-level

consortia

international

contracted

and

for

Scoping study

decision-making

‘Bottom-up’

School-level

economies

nations and

participating

payments from

voluntary

PISA

schools

national

representative

Secretariat

policy effects for

National policy

National comparison

OECD

funding:

OECD Part II

subnational)

Possible punitive

National (and

‘Top-down’

Analysis and

PISA

Purposes

Main

Funding reporting

Sample

accountability

Modes of

Table 2.3 Comparing the OECD’s main PISA and PISA for schools

indigenisation

and

Externalisation

and reputation

global standards

Establishing

temperature’;

required by the user

district users, provided there is

subsidise user

or economy

and reports

of school data

public release

mandate the

funding to

in their country

(international)

philanthropic

of the main PISA

participation

some

conditions of with the timing

or interference

NB. The

if chosen or

school and

no direct overlap

As determined

S.)

surveys)

science)

(reading, math,

three domains

represents all

Schools

PISA for

every 3 years,

‘major’ domain

on a different

principal PISA focuses

(student and

questionnaires

contextual

across the

purposes

comparative

equivalent for

Made

questionnaires

Contextual

While the main

levels

proficiency

PISA scales and

(e.g., ‘PISA Day’ in the U.

terms of the

purposes, in

comparative

equivalent for

Made

Tests

Public release

the OECD

determined by

global release

Coordinated

As desired by

the OECD

determined by

scheduling

Every 3 years;

of school-to-school

Future possibility

(international);

and subnational

School-to-national

(domestic)

‘Taking the school-level

and subnational

School-to-national

state and nation;

within district,

School-to-school

Canada)

(e.g., Australia,

within nations

comparisons

Some subnational

and subnational

Nation-to-nation

reports

Release of test

produced

Frequency data and

Performance comparisons

and reform;

decision-making

policy

School-level

Private

Externalisation

temperature’

national

‘Taking the

decision-making;

National policy

Public

Putative usage

PISA for Schools: The School Report 25

26

2 The Evolving State of the OECD and PISA

Conclusion This chapter has provided an overview of the OECD, and especially how it has more recently evolved to become a ‘global expert’ on matters of education policy and comparative assessment. It has documented the origins of PISA, its dominant positioning within education discourses and policymaking globally, and how PISA has become, in effect, a prototype for the development of other PISA-related products, including PISA for Schools. This has enabled the continuing evolution of PISA and the ‘PISA brand’, and the expansion of the OECD into new audiences and markets, both within and (importantly) beyond its traditional clientele of member states. Such developments have helped position the OECD as a dominant education policy actor in its own right, with PISA for Schools extending the OECD’s already considerable policy ‘reach’ to new school-level spaces and actors.

References Andrews, P., Atkinson, L., Ball, S., Barber, M., Becket, L., Beradi, J. … Zhao, Y. (2015, May 6). OECD and PISA tests are damaging education worldwide - academics. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/may/06/oecd-pisa-testsdamaging-education-academics. Access date: 19/01/2020. Ball, S. (2012). Global education inc.: New policy networks and the neo-liberal imaginary. New York: Routledge. Ball, S., & Junemann, C. (2012). Networks, new governance and education. Bristol: Policy Press. Baroutsis, A., & Lingard, B. (2017). Counting and comparing school performance: An analysis of media coverage of PISA in Australia, 2000-2014. Journal of Education Policy, 32(4), 432– 449. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2016.1252856. Carroll, P., & Kellow, A. J. (2011). The OECD: A study of organisational adaptation. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Fischman, G. E., Topper, A. M., Silova, I., Goebel, J., & Holloway, J. (2019). Examining the influence of international large-scale assessments on national education policies. Journal of Education Policy, 34(4), 470–499. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2018.1460493. Gorur, R. (2016). Seeing like PISA: A cautionary tale about the performativity of international assessments. European Educational Research Journal, 15(5), 598–616. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1474904116658299. Green, A. (1999). Education and globalisation in Europe and East Asia: Convergent and divergent trends. Journal of Education Policy, 14(1), 55–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/026809399286495. Grey, S., & Morris, P. (2018). PISA: Multiple ‘truths’ and mediatised global governance. Comparative Education, 54(2), 109–131. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2018.1425243. Henry, M., Lingard, B., Rizvi, F., & Taylor, S. (2001). The OECD, globalisation and education policy. Oxford: IAU Press. Kenway, J., Bullen, E., Fahey, J., & Robb, S. (2006). Haunting the knowledge economy. Oxon: Routledge. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lewis, S. (2017a). Governing schooling through ‘what works’: The OECD’s PISA for Schools. Journal of Education Policy, 32(3), 281–302. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2016.1252855 .

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Lewis, S. (2017b). Policy, philanthropy and profit: The OECD’s PISA for Schools and new modes of heterarchical educational governance. Comparative Education, 53(4), 518–537. https://doi. org/10.1080/03050068.2017.1327246. Lewis, S. (2019). Historicising new spaces and relations of the OECD’s global educational governance: PISA for Schools and PISA4U. In C. Ydesen (Ed.), The OECD’s historical rise in education: The formation of a global governing complex (pp. 269–289). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33799-5_13. Lewis, S. (2020). Providing a platform for ‘what works’: Platform-based governance and the reshaping of teacher learning through the OECD’s PISA4U. Comparative Education, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2020.1769926. Lewis, S., & Hogan, A. (2019). Reform first and ask questions later? The implications of (fast) schooling policy and ‘silver bullet’ solutions. Critical Studies in Education, 60(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2016.1219961. Lewis, S., & Lingard, B. (2015). The multiple effects of international large-scale assessment on education policy and research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(5), 621–637. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2015.1039765. Lingard, B., & Sellar, S. (2013). Globalisation, edu-business and network governance: The policy sociology of Stephen J. Ball and rethinking education policy analysis. London Review of Education, 11(3), 265–280. https://doi.org/10.1080/14748460.2013.840986. Martens, K., & Jakobi, A. (2010). Expanding and intensifying governance: The OECD in education policy. In K. Martens & A. Jakobi (Eds.), Mechanisms of OECD governance: International incentives for national policy-making? (pp. 163–179). Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGaw, B. (2008). The role of the OECD in international comparative studies of achievement. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 15(3), 223–243. https://doi.org/10. 1080/09695940802417384. OECD. (1996). The knowledge-based economy. Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD. (1999). Measuring student knowledge and skills: A new framework for assessment. Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD. (2012a). Better skills, better jobs, better lives: A strategic approach to skills policies. Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD. (2012b). How your school compares internationally: OECD Test for Schools (based on PISA) pilot trial [US version]. Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD. (2013). The OECD Test for Schools (based on PISA): Questions and answers (US version). Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD. (2017). PISA-based Test for Schools: Technical report 2016. Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD. (2018a). PISA for Schools brochure. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-forschools/PISA%20for%20Schools%20Brochure.pdf. Access date: 19/01/2020. OECD. (2018b). PISA-based Test for Schools: FAQs. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/pisa/ aboutpisa/pisa-based-test-for-schools-faq.htm. Access date: 19/01/2020. OECD. (2019a). 7th OECD roundtable of mayors and ministers. Retrieved from https://www.oecd. org/urban/roundtable/partners/. Access date: 19/01/2020. OECD. (2019b). Convention on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/general/conventionontheorganisationforeconomiccooperationanddevelopment.htm. Access date: 19/01/2020. OECD. (2020). OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/ education/2030-project/teaching-and-learning/learning/faq/. Access date: 04/06/2020. Papadopoulos, G. (1994). Education 1960-1990: The OECD perspective. Paris: OECD Publishing. Prais, S. J. (2003). Cautions on OECD’S recent educational survey (PISA). Oxford Review of Education, 29(2), 139–163. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305498032000080657. Prais, S. J. (2004). Cautions on OECD’s recent educational survey (PISA): Rejoinder to OECD’s response. Oxford Review of Education, 30(4), 569–573. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 030549804200030303017.

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Rautalin, M., Alasuutari, P., & Vento, E. (2019). Globalisation of education policies: Does PISA have an effect? Journal of Education Policy, 34(4), 500–522. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 02680939.2018.1462890. Rinne, R., Kallo, J., & Hokka, S. (2004). Too eager to comply? OECD education policy and the Finnish response. European Educational Research Journal, 3(2), 454–485. https://doi.org/10. 2304/eerj.2004.3.2.3. Sellar, S., & Lingard, B. (2014). The OECD and the expansion of PISA: New global modes of governance in education. British Educational Research Journal, 40(6), 917–936. https://doi. org/10.1002/berj.3120. Spring, J. (2015). Economisation of education: Human capital, global corporations, skills-based schooling. New York: Routledge. The National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html. Access date: 19/01/2020. Waldow, F., Takayama, K., & Sung, Y.-K. (2014). Rethinking the pattern of external policy referencing: Media discourses over the ‘Asian Tigers’ PISA success in Australia. Germany and South Korea. Comparative Education, 50(3), 302–321. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068. 2013.860704. Woodward, R. (2009). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Oxon: Routledge. Ydesen, C. (Ed.). (2019). The OECD’s historical rise in education: The formation of a global governing complex. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 3

Topological Relations of Governance

Abstract This chapter details the theoretical resources that have underpinned my attempts to understand how ‘global’ policy ensembles, such as PISA for Schools, can be enfolded into more local schooling spaces. Given the broad focus of my research around emergent modes, spaces and relations of policymaking and governance, and the influences these can exert upon local policy and practice, I deploy an eclectic array of thinking tools that draws upon new relational, or ‘topological’, ways of understanding spatial relations. These include thinking around the role of heterarchies in contemporary governance; the new topological spatialities, rationalities and power relations associated with processes of globalisation; and how these collectively facilitate new ways of knowing and acting in the world. Then, I discuss how these ways of theorising relations and spaces of power have implications for how one conducts critical policy research. To this end, I outline a ‘topological’ policy sociology, which moves beyond the nation-state and government as the sole sites of policy production and distribution and, instead, attends to the diverse array of non-State, private and international agencies involved in PISA for Schools, as well as the schools and teachers who engage in such activities.

Introduction This chapter outlines the theoretical approaches deployed to understand the development and administration of the OECD’s PISA for Schools, and its subsequent uptake by US schools and districts. In keeping with Ball’s (1993) long-standing call for policy sociology that employs a ‘toolbox of diverse concepts and theories’ (p. 10), I advocate here a framework informed by new thinking around This chapter is derived in part from an article published in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education; 8 July 2015; copyright Taylor & Francis; available online: https://www. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01596306.2015.1039765; Article https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01596306.2015.1039765. This chapter is derived in part from an article published in Comparative Education Review; 7 December 2015; copyright University of Chicago Press; available online: https://doi.org/10. 1086/684458: Article https://doi.org/10.1086/684458. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Lewis, PISA, Policy and the OECD, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8285-1_3

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the topological spaces and relations associated with globalisation (Amin, 2002), which are increasingly evident in contemporary education policymaking. The research also draws upon theorising around the ‘becoming topological’ of culture (Lury et al., 2012), in which a proliferation of ordering practices—including measurement, metrics, ranking and comparison—help to create new continuities and flows that can transcend physical distance. This makes possible new ways of acting in the world, as global tests, policies and discourses are folded into local spaces, thereby helping govern how schooling might be conceptualised and practised. Informed by such theorising, I outline how these topological respatialisations help us to better understand new modes of educational policymaking and governance, in which matters of relations require as much consideration as matters of location (Lewis, 2017a). Even while acknowledging that differences can (and do) exist between diverse theoretical resources, and these must not be merely glossed over, I would argue that investigating complex social phenomena like PISA for Schools makes it somewhat unavoidable, and perhaps even necessary, to use such an eclectic ‘toolbox’ approach. Notwithstanding the potential for difficulties, grappling with understanding a complex new phenomenon like PISA for Schools arguably requires one to bring to bear an array of critical theoretical resources, and outlining these resources is the purpose of this chapter. Linked to this proliferation of new relations and spaces of governance has been the rise of complex policy networks in education, which bring together diverse actors and agencies, inside and outside of government, into processes of policymaking. Acknowledging these insights, contemporary education policy analysis must look beyond the traditional territorial focus of the national, to now include the transnational and the global. Moreover, these analyses must look beyond the State as the single origin of education policy to also consider the influence of international organisations, such as the OECD, and a proliferating array of non-government agencies, including edu-businesses, not-for-profit associations and philanthropic foundations. Investigating PISA for Schools thus requires an expanded and nuanced approach to policy sociology, which addresses the new actors, spaces and relations involved in contemporary processes of educational policymaking and governance. The chapter begins with an explication of the conceptual resources—heterarchical modes of governance, topological rationalities, and topological understandings of space and power relations—that form the theoretical framework for the research, before turning to how these theoretical devices can inform the field of policy sociology.

From Government to Governance The means by which governments develop and enact public policy to deliver public services such as education—indeed, how society itself is now organised and governed—has changed markedly over the last few decades, and central to these

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developments has been the transition from government to governance. While the power of governing was previously, and in many respects solely, wielded by hierarchical government bureaucracies under the direction of elected politicians, recent transformations have produced significant changes to the structures and functions of governing the polity. As such, we can draw a distinction between government, where governing is undertaken via bureaucratic and hierarchical methods, and governance, which is alternatively ‘accomplished through the “informal authority” of diverse and flexible networks’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 3). In contrast to the concentrated political authority of central government, these networks bring together a diverse range of government and non-government actors in processes of policy production and enactment, including bureaucracies, markets and the not-for-profit sector. Rhodes (1997) describes several key characteristics of this rearticulation of governing, including the interdependence and resource exchange between the public, private and voluntary stakeholders to negotiate and achieve shared purposes; a considerable degree of autonomy from the ‘control’ of the nation-state; and interactions that are regulated by ‘rules of the game’ and trust, rather than official hierarchical arrangements. While this new arrangement sees government relinquish some of its privileged position, it must be recognised that the State does not ‘go away’ (Ozga, 2009), but rather still possesses the ability to ‘indirectly and imperfectly steer networks’ (Rhodes, 1997, p. 53). This steering may occur via such mechanisms as accountability regimes driven by government legislation (e.g., No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 in the U.S.); the provision of funding associated with performance targets established by government (e.g., Race To The Top in the U.S.); or the collection and management of performance data, such as Australia’s National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). Rather than precluding the involvement of elements, actors and methods from government, networked modes of governance are instead largely enabled through the generation and management of data flows and infrastructures, which are often at the direction of central governments. Consequently, what has occurred is not so much an absolute break with previous modes of hierarchical governing, but rather ‘a shift in the balance or mix between the different elements of government’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 5). Central decision-making has now been complemented, to a greater or lesser extent, by horizontal networks of actors from within and beyond government, thereby ‘blurring’ previous demarcations between society and the State. This shift in method reflects the complexities and challenges faced by those who govern in contemporary times, as well as those who seek to research and understand these processes. Indeed, proponents of such networked modes of governance argue that it provides the flexibility, innovation and external orientation necessary to respond to changing economic and social conditions, and in ways largely unavailable to top-down bureaucratic government (Eggers, 2008; Jessop, 1998; Scharpf, 1994). It is the flexibility afforded by networks, constituted by processes and interrelationships instead of an obvious fixed structure, which facilitates opportunities for new actors and agencies to influence the policy cycle.

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Displacing government as the sole provider and site of public policy production —a situation described as ‘one-way traffic from those governing to those governed’ (May, Cloke, & Johnston, 2005, p. 708)—builds upon the earlier principles of New Public Management (NPM) and its more recent developments, and the influence this has since exerted on public sector reform and governing (Hood, 1990). These processes of reform and modernisation have occurred with varying intensities in England and the U.S. from the late 1970s, and, more recently, in Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Jessop, 2002). In particular, controlling outputs, performance and efficiency are afforded much greater significance in NPM than focusing on inputs or processes, a feature endemic to more traditional bureaucracies and their practices. These new methods include devolving the responsibility for policy enactment to local actors and practitioners; the use of (largely quantitative) indicators to measure outputs and performance, and to hold sites accountable; a readiness to respond to ‘customer needs’; and a focus upon entrepreneurialism in organisational culture (Ball & Junemann, 2012). Adopting such sensibilities into governing helps to avoid the (alleged) ‘failings’ of bureaucracy, as power and responsibility are reallocated to a diverse range of policy actors and agencies putatively ‘better suited’ to the provision of public services, thus solving otherwise ‘intractable’ social problems (Ball, 2012; Mok, 2011; Olmedo, 2014). The adoption of such networked modes of governance, informed by earlier practices of NPM, has seen the emergence of ‘polycentric’ relationships between multiple partners, in which government often assumes the role of facilitator in order to generate new governing capacities (Ball, 2009b; Shamir, 2008). While NPM sees governments deploy market methods and sensibilities in pursuit of more efficient, and ‘value-adding’, governing practices, network governance develops this logic further still by the incorporation of diverse actors, agencies (public, private and not-for-profit) and spaces into horizontal policy networks that can deliver public services. These networks constitute a form of ‘connective tissue’ that coalesces, at least temporarily, otherwise ‘distant and fleeting forms of social interaction’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 12), providing a ‘strategic alliance’ (Jessop, 1998) between disparate policy actors to help attain common policy goals. This results in government being displaced as the sole provider and site of public policy production, enactment and evaluation, with education policy now effectively ‘being “thought”, influenced and done, locally and nationally, in many different sites by an increasing number and diverse set of actors and organisations’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 9). Moreover, each of these agencies brings their own idiosyncratic, and at times competing, interests and agendas to the policy cycle, albeit within a common neoliberal context. Of course, such significant transformations do not occur in an ideational vacuum, and many of these social, economic and political changes can be attributed to the pervasiveness of neoliberal ideologies and practices in public life. Economic neoliberalism developed out of the post-World War II writings of, inter alia, Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, who advocated a revival of classical economic liberalism through a commitment to free trade, open competition, laissez-faire markets and the centrality of the self-interested, economically rational individual

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(Olssen & Peters, 2005). The apparent similarities between classical liberalism and neoliberalism should not, however, obscure distinctions in both theory and practice, and especially the role of government in relation to the market and the individual. While classical liberal government is non-interventionist, concerned primarily with guaranteeing private property rights and civil liberties, and while social democratic government seeks to manage the economy and market in the equity interests of the entire population, neoliberal governance adopts a decidedly more active, and economistic, role. Since the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism has arguably become the dominant political ideology on a global scale, prioritising (a) the market over the State and (b) the individual over the common good, although admittedly these processes manifest themselves in different countries in context-dependent, or ‘vernacular’ (Appadurai, 1996), ways. Broadly speaking, this takes the form of market optimisation via the imposition of conditions, laws and institutions, and the creation of the individual as an ‘enterprising and competitive entrepreneur’ (Olssen & Peters, 2005, p. 315), that is, the ‘self-responsibilising individual’ (Rose, 1999), or neoliberal subject. Neoliberalism has thus seen government develop a somewhat paradoxical ‘big-small’ nature, with the withdrawal of service provision from the social sector accompanying an increasingly present regulatory stance, and with government effectively setting the rules of the (market) game. As individuals are positioned to take greater responsibility for their own economic and social development and wellbeing, the hand of government becomes less visible but arguably more palpable through indirect modes of steering, with education arguably taking on a central role in this move. In this sense, Gane (2014) perceives neoliberal government to be pursuing two concurrent aims: ‘the outright attack on the (welfare) state’ and, at the same time, the ‘mobilisation of new forms of governmental intervention that are designed to inject regulatory principles of competition into all forms of social life and culture’ (p. 22). Similar arguments are taken up by Peck and Tickell (2002), who contend neoliberal governance is achieved through destructive processes, or roll-back neoliberalism (deregulation, privatisation, devolution of State powers), as well as constructive processes, or roll-out neoliberalism (re-regulation and institution building). Consequently, one might suggest that neoliberal modes and rationalities of governance be understood as inherently contested, less the straightforward ‘antithesis of regulation’ and more a sort of ‘regulation-in-denial’ (Peck, 2010, p. xiii). Notwithstanding these contradictions, it is apparent that many contemporary governance discourses and practices, including NPM and (subsequently) networked governance, have emerged through this neoliberal redefining of the State upon market-oriented principles. These developments have led to the prevalence of what has been described as a ‘neoliberal imaginary’ (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010), in which social domains and practices are increasingly viewed through an economistic framework, leading to the ‘economisation’ of social life (Ball, 2012; Spring, 2015): in short, more market and less State; more individual responsibility and less welfare provision; and more focus on the individual and less on the common good. These neoliberal epistemologies largely elide any distinction between society and the market to produce, in turn, a

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‘neo-social’ (Rose, 1999), where corporate rationalities and logics are increasingly deployed to inform conduct in social relations and at the level of the individual. As Foucault (2008) astutely foresaw, the guiding rationale of neoliberalism is constructing: … a social fabric in which the basic units would have the form of the enterprise… In other words, what is involved is the generalisation of forms of ‘enterprise’ by diffusing and multiplying them as much as possible… I think this multiplication of the ‘enterprise’ form within the social body is what is at stake in neo-liberal policy. It is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, the formative power of society. (p. 148)

If one considers governance to be ‘the conduct of conduct’ (Foucault, 1991), then of particular interest is how neoliberalism discursively constructs the individual as self-governing, self-responsibilising and entrepreneurial, a Homo œconomicus (Foucault, 2008; Gane, 2014) who is wholly and solely accountable for their current, and future, performance. Hence, we are all positioned as economically rational actors whose conduct is managed and regulated through the prospect of continual self-improvement, and the improving of our personal stocks of ‘human capital’. Given that neoliberalism is about both minds and money (see Ball, 2012), the inclusion of such economic rationalities into governing practices can be seen as part of a broader reconstruction of the State on neoliberal lines and the consolidation of neoliberal modes of governance (Peck & Tickell, 2002).

Governing Through Heterarchy A central feature of the aforementioned developments has been the enhanced level of interdependence between a diverse network of autonomous policy actors and organisations, both inside and outside of government. Locating the locus of authority away from hierarchical bureaucracy does not imply a total loss of control for government, but it instead suggests a different kind of governing that acts ‘in the shadow of hierarchy’ (Jessop, 1998), where the State seeks to achieve its political objectives through horizontal partnerships and delegation to private providers. Indeed, this export of ‘state work’ is frequently evident in the contracting of services, performance monitoring and target setting (Ball, 2012). Recent policymaking activities have occurred in the context of moves towards such forms of governance in education, involving a range of non-government organisations combining to sponsor policy and provide services. This can be viewed as developing out of existing national- and state-level data infrastructures (Anagnostopoulos, Rutledge, & Jacobsen, 2013; Gulson & Sellar, 2019; Sellar, 2015; Sellar & Gulson, 2019), enabling schools and districts to respond to new accountability regimes driven by government legislation, such as Race To The Top in the U.S. (see Lingard & Lewis, 2017; Mintrop & Sunderman, 2013). Acknowledging this retention of hierarchical elements alongside non-governmental agents within processes of policy production and delivery, Ball

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and Junemann (2012) define such policy networks as a form of heterarchy: ‘an organisational form somewhere between hierarchy and network that draws upon diverse horizontal and vertical links that permit different elements of the policy process to cooperate (and/or compete)’ (p. 138). These combinations of new horizontal and older vertical relationships, and modes of organisation, enact a diverse, and often geographically dispersed, array of policy actors and organisations (Mok, 2011; Olmedo, 2014), which facilitate a variety of ‘flows’ between them—of ‘people, information and ideas, language, methods, values and culture’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 139) It is worth noting here, too, how these flows for education have increasingly come to encompass large amounts of data, in both schools and at the system level, for the purposes of measuring and governing performance. In the context of educational accountability and governance, these developments also reflect the relevance of numbers (Grek, 2009; Lingard, 2011) and data (Ozga, 2009; Selwyn, Henderson, & Chao, 2015), and a growing sense of policy and governance by numbers. These putatively ‘objective’, and frequently numerical, measurements are also used to legitimate and inform prospective policy decisions via what has been described as ‘evidence-based’ (Head, 2008)—or, perhaps more accurately, ‘evidence-informed’ (Head, 2016; Lingard, 2013)—policymaking. For instance, enumerations of education performance—notably PISA on a global scale but also with various national articulations—produce the means by which different schools and/or schooling systems can be putatively ‘known’, compared and evaluated by reference to a common metric. Wiseman (2010) similarly notes that these comparative performance data have created an international policy space that is bounded only to the extent of ‘the legitimated evidence used to support one decision or policy versus another’ (p. 18). I would suggest, however, that ‘evidence-based’ policymaking is never a purely objective or ‘scientific’ practice, as it is always mediated, more or less, by political judgements and prioritisation, as well as by professional values at the moments (and places) of enactment (see Head, 2008). Moreover, as policy has been constituted through numbers and metrics, non-State actors like edu-businesses, philanthropic foundations and not-for-profit agencies have also taken on an increasing role in educational governance and policymaking (Au & Ferrare, 2015; Ball, 2012; Verger, Lubienski, & Steiner-Khamsi, 2016), with these agencies offering services related to the collection, analysis and management of such schooling data. Collectively, these networked, or heterarchical, arrangements represent what have been described as ‘global infrastructures’ (Sassen, 2007) and the ‘cultural circuit[s] of capitalism’ (Thrift, 2005, p. 6), and the material and discursive flows they enable are a central characteristic of a globalised world. They not only provide the ‘configurations through which global forms of techno-science, economic rationalism and other expert systems gain significance’ (Collier, 2006, p. 400), but are also, importantly, instruments that produce dichotomous global knowledge: ‘knowledge about global forms and knowledge that strives to replace space, culture and society-bound categories’ (p. 400). This phenomenon is part of what has been called ‘knowing capitalism’ (Thrift, 2005), where capitalism, and particularly the

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data used to manage capitalist societies, has become a research project of itself. These global networks and flows help to bridge traditional public/private, and State/ non-State, divides by facilitating the formation of ‘epistemic communities’ (Haas, 1992) with shared values and norms, which in turn help to govern how education might be thought and practised: These networks contain flows of ideas as well as flows of people, and ideas are carried back and forth across the boundaries between the public and private sectors. These are discursive or epistemic communities… They structure, constrain and enable the circulation of ideas and give ‘institutional force’ to policy utterances, ensuring what can count as ‘sensible’ policy and limiting the possibilities of policy. (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 11)

As such, these discursive and material assemblages of education policy have the ability to normatively define ‘what counts’ by favouring particular policies, practices and values, while simultaneously marginalising, or even excluding, alternative discourses and possibilities for action. This privileging of certain policy ensembles is of particular significance given the presumptive ‘one-size-fits-all’ model of policy advocacy and implementation often embraced within a neoliberal framework (see Brenner & Theodore, 2002). The inter-organisational and relational nature of heterarchies enables the movement of ‘new forms of power, authority and subjectivity’ between actors and organisations, producing particular types of ‘governable domains and governable persons’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 138) predicated on continual self-improvement. Triantafillou (2004) adopts a similar understanding of heterarchical modes of governance, contending they are characterised by ‘the diverse governmental rationalities, technologies and norms that seek to govern by promoting the self-steering capacities of individuals and organisations’ (p. 11). Consequently, these material and discursive flows help to constitute, sustain and expand the very networks and epistemic communities through which these flows occur, and by which heterarchical modes of ‘soft power’ (Nye, 2004)—where actors are encouraged (rather than compelled) to comply—are enabled. We can see then how the epistemic communities and policy spaces constituted by such flows not only are the context in which heterarchical modes of governance are brought into being, but also are the means by which they are expressed and disseminated. They exist only through the complex and dynamic social relations between individuals, organisations and governments in the heterarchy, rather than comprising any defined administrative structure, evoking new spaces of educational policy and governance, and producing ‘a convergence of methods, sensibilities, values and forms of organisation’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 114). The concept of heterarchy is valuable precisely because it can help draw attention to, and analyse, the interdependent relationships between the OECD, not-for-profit organisations, philanthropic foundations, research institutions and private edu-businesses involved in the development and administration of PISA for Schools. Moreover, the presence of policy heterarchies means that educational policymaking and governance are no longer simply occurring within the prefigured boundaries of the nation-state, even if this now involves a diverse cast of new

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actors. I would emphasise that any attempt to understand contemporary processes of policymaking forces one to eschew ‘methodological territorialism’ (Jessop, Brenner, & Jones, 2008) or ‘methodological nationalism’ (Beck, 2000), and instead look to the new spaces and scales where influence is being brought to bear across the policy cycle, as well as where, and by whom, policy is actually being made. Ball and Junemann (2012) argue that the emergence of new policy heterarchies, specifically in education, has led to ‘the boundaries and spatial horizons and flows of influence and engagement around education … being stretched and reconfigured in a whole variety of ways’ (p. 25), effectively altering the ‘topology of policy’ (p. 78). As such, this research also draws upon the ‘topological turn’ (Lury et al., 2012) in cultural and social theory to help theorise the increasingly relational nature of social, political and economic life, and the associated emergence of new topological social spaces and relations of power. New global spatialities of governance are reflected in this topological turn.

Topological Rationality and the ‘Becoming Topological’ of Culture Topology was initially envisaged as a strictly mathematical heuristic, with the first steps in its development taken by Leonhard Euler in 1736 as a means of solving the Seven Bridges of Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad) problem, that is, whether a pedestrian could walk through the city and cross all seven bridges only once (see Shields, 2012).1 Nevertheless, the concept has exceeded its earlier perambulatory confines to emerge, in recent decades, as an increasingly influential conceptual device in social and cultural theory, and across disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, political science, economics, geography and, increasingly, policy sociology. Despite its broad application, the central principle of topology is the representation of space as relational instead of absolute, moving beyond Euclidean and Cartesian geometries ‘to introduce a new spatial thinking that identifies lines of relation, rather than discontinuous points and lines’ (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2012, p. 60). In short, a topological space is a space of flows, a ‘smooth space’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013) defined by relations between points (and actors), instead of solely considering the location of points. Consider, for example, the space represented by the iconic map of the London Underground. While the location of stations on the map does not necessarily correspond with the physical location of, or distances between, stations across the city of London, the map is useful precisely because it eschews this correspondence to physical location. Instead, it focuses on relations (i.e., train lines) between points

1

Aerial bombing during the Second World War, combined with modern urban redevelopment, means there are now only five bridges in Königsberg/Kaliningrad. However, the topological logics underpinning Euler’s original problem arguably still remain.

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(i.e., train stations), which are undoubtedly what matter most when attempting to navigate the network. As such, the use of this map—indeed, the very creation of such a map in the first place—requires one to adopt a form of topological rationality, or a mode of reasoning that considers relationships and continuities instead of solely physical location and space (Lewis, Sellar, & Lingard, 2016). Informed by the recent deployment of such topological thinking in the social sciences, or the so-called ‘topological turn’, Lury and colleagues (2012) argue that contemporary social life is increasingly marked by the growth of practices (the becoming topological of culture) that provide fertile ground for deploying the topological rationality described above as an analytical tool, both in everyday life and in social and cultural theory (cultural topology). In this sense, topology at once provides a new conceptual vocabulary (i.e., the analytical) while also gesturing towards a new empirical phenomenon (i.e., the descriptive); in other words, these topological practices shape and inform the cultural resources we have to describe these very practices, which recursively influences topological practices themselves. In fact, the two developments can be considered to be inherently linked, for arguing that culture has become topological first requires one to view social life with a topological rationality, and this ontology only befits a world where spatial relations are deemed as relevant as locations. It is therefore hard to avoid such circularity and entirely separate the descriptive (‘becoming topological’) from the analytical (‘cultural topology’). I would hasten to add here, in agreement with Lury and colleagues (2012), that this is undoubtedly a complex tension. I have primarily attempted to use these concepts analytically but, being a new phenomenon, there is a complex tension between the analytical and the descriptive. This ‘becoming topological’ is evident through the proliferation of dynamic ‘practices of ordering, modelling, networking and mapping that co-constitute culture, technology and science’ (Lury et al., 2012, p. 5), producing a spatiotemporal continuity and relationality across social domains that extends beyond the fixed rigidity of Euclidean spaces. For example, the generation of large data sets relating to the comparative performance of education systems (e.g., main PISA) enables modes of reasoning focused on the relationships between policy settings, despite such policies being deployed in vastly different and geographically distant schooling systems, each with their own contextually dependent modes of change and development. Even so, topological modes of culture emerge through processes of continuity and ordering, and significant advances in our computational capacities to collect, calculate and compare such data have enabled new kinds of ‘ordered-ness’: This ordering of continuity emerges, sometimes without explicit coordination, in practices of sorting, naming, numbering, comparing, listing, and calculating. The effect of these practices is both to introduce new continuities into a discontinuous world by establishing equivalences or similitudes, and to make and mark discontinuities through repeated contrasts. (Lury et al., 2012, p. 4)

We can see here how the emergence of continuities through ordering can also, somewhat ironically, facilitate the identification of discontinuities ‘through repeated

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contrasts’, thus establishing new rationalities and possibilities for local action. Returning to the example of PISA, this ‘ordering of continuity’ helps create a commensurate space of connectedness, and the means to differentiate between successful and unsuccessful system performance by way of a common PISA-informed reference. As such, a topological rationality frames time and space no longer as merely a priori coordinates, a fixed stage upon which events occur, but as something formed by the relations between actors and organisations, where ‘points (which might be entities or events) that are distant can also be proximal (categorically as well as spatially and temporally)’ (Michael & Rosengarten, 2012, p. 93). Topologically speaking, time and space are reshaped as a posteriori, that is, as emergent, contingent and dynamic (Lash, 2012). I should note here that ‘becoming topological’ refers not only to the relational nature of social domains and practices, but also to how such domains are identified and ‘made legible’. Rather than change positioned as something exceptional or externally imposed, Lury and colleagues (2012) suggest that, in the topological world, such dynamism is ‘constant, normal and immanent’ (p. 4). Given the immense expansion of the relations that characterise modern life, change is also considered to be a socially shared condition in which there is universal involvement. This unprecedented and continual level of topological change and relationality have led social domains to now be increasingly defined by their ability to change, rather than by other supposedly inherent features: [C]ulture is increasingly organised in terms of its capacities for change: tendencies for innovation, for inclusion and exclusion, for expression, emerge in culture as a field of connectedness, that is, of ordering by means of continuity, and not as a structure based on essential properties, such as archetypes, values or norms, or regional location. (Lury et al., 2012, p. 5)

In this sense, topological thinking about culture implies that change—brought about by various processes of ordering and continuity—is a central feature of modern life, and especially in the context of globalisation. It identifies new dynamic spaces and makes them ‘legible’ through their amenability to change, while downplaying the sole importance of other more external, a priori considerations such as geography or location. Change effectively becomes normalised, and this continuum of dynamic spaces is presented as the only possible context in which social innovation and decision-making can meaningfully occur, as ‘events are problematised all in terms of the potential they offer for change’ (Lury, Parisi, & Terranova, 2013, p. 1). Somewhat paradoxically, such a topological rearticulation of continuity and change implies a transformation in these two states and processes, moving from being notionally in opposition to being, by contrast, intimately related. Change thus occurs most readily in, and becomes a defining feature of, topological spaces established through connectedness and continuity, where constant change is the only constant. The becoming topological of culture, characterised by emergent continuities and the primacy of change, is constituted by and constitutive of a new relationality, connectedness and mutability in contemporary social practices. However, such

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developments should not be thought to have spontaneously appeared on their own. Technology and communication media, along with greatly enhanced computational capacities, play a central facilitative role, helping to create new continuities and relations through which flows of ideas, theories and data and practices can diffuse across and within these emergent topological spaces: [T]he becoming topological of culture is necessarily a concern with how the computational transformation of technical machines and media into systems of organisation, storage, transmission and control of information has led to a new form of culture defined by flows of data, and by the rules, procedures, [and] constraints through which they are ordered. (Lury et al., 2013, p. 2)

While this is not to suggest that a topological rationality has arisen simply in response to the ubiquity of technology in contemporary culture, the ability of technology to enable the ‘ordering of continuity’—such as locating individuals in ‘joined-up’ government databases or infrastructures of digital transaction data (see Grommé & Ruppert, 2019; Hartong, 2018; Prince, 2016; Ruppert, 2012)—is undoubtedly a key enabling feature of such topological dynamics. Further mediation of the ‘becoming topological’ is also evident in the ‘uncoordinated or rather not externally coordinated, activities, relationships and mobilities of multiple actors, infrastructural systems, and networks’ (Lury et al., 2012, p. 11), which establish a continuum of flows that links actors and organisations across existent scalar entities (e.g., the nation-state) and emergent topological spaces. This enhanced discursive and material mobility has obvious reverberations in terms of the relational spaces constituted through policy heterarchies, helping to create and disseminate new policy ‘solutions’ in connected spaces that frequently extend beyond the borders of the nation-state. However, these linkages and actors are themselves constantly changing, and so shifting the relational circuits and flows of the network, thereby ‘confound[ing] the distinction between inside and outside’ (Lury et al., 2012, p. 19). Heterarchies might thus also be described as a type of policymaking Möbius strip: a topological and dynamic surface embedded within the ambient Euclidean (or territorial) space, composed of (and by) actors and organisations that ‘challenge the rigidity of the distinction between inclusion and exclusion’ (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2012, p. 60). While not negating the influence of the nation-state, these policy networks and spaces—and their constitutive flows and relations—nonetheless clearly exist beyond the boundaries and vocabulary available to a purely Euclidean view of the social world and its relations. We can thus see how topological rationality changes the relationships between agents by establishing new relational spatialities and new ‘conditions of possibility’ (Foucault, 1994), including those directed at entities that may have previously been considered beyond (topographical) reach. Topological spaces exist as both mental objects and symbolic representations (returning to the previous example, as both mental and paper ‘maps’ of the London Underground), but these spaces are always woven into Euclidean spaces, insofar as they guide action in relation to other spaces and physical environments (e.g., catching a train in London from Hyde Park to Tower Hill). If one considers topological rationality vis-à-vis the processes of

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education policy production and enactment, then it is evident that even while policymaking occurs in emergent relational spaces forged through continuity and connectedness, the Euclidean fixed space of the nation-state still can—and frequently does—exert significant influence. As Hartong and Piattoeva (2019) have similarly suggested, it is perhaps even impossible to consider topological space-making without some kind of fixed topographical reference underpinning it. For instance, the measures and inducements to ‘change’ (i.e., policy settings and/or practice) at the heart of large-scale comparative assessments arguably contribute to the proliferation of topological rationalities, which are themselves linked to new modes and spaces of global educational governance. Informed by these understandings, the implications of the topological turn within the field of critical geography, and particularly its usefulness in explaining emergent spatialities and power-topologies associated with processes of globalisation, will now be addressed.

New Scales and Spaces of Globalisation Although at times somewhat nebulously defined within academic and popular literature, globalisation is arguably concerned with issues of spatiality and relationality, in which ‘meanings of place and space… and raised global connectivity’ (Amin, 2002, p. 385) have come to shape, and are recursively shaped by, social, economic and political exchanges. Indeed, a globalised world, including those processes concerned with education policy and governance, can be considered foremost a connected and dynamic world of ‘flows’ (of people, ideas, discourses and capital), as well as competing sites and sources of political authority: [G]lobalisation can be thought of as a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organisation of social relations and transactions – assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact – generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power. (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, & Perraton, 1999, p. 16)

Amongst the numerous theoretical consequences that such global connectivity and respatialisation entail, and given that strict state-centrism is now theoretically untenable in light of contemporary social, political and economic practices, a key consideration has been the need to reconceptualise the reductive ontological distinction between place and space, moving beyond something simply occurring ‘in here’ as opposed to ‘out there’ (Amin, 2002). There has since been a series of debates, primarily within the field of critical geography, concerning the spatial effects of globalisation and associated mechanisms of governance. One such conceptualisation that accommodates the effects of globalisation has been to theorise governance in terms of scalar relations, in which the nation-state is positioned alongside other supranational and subnational political entities (see Brenner, 2004; Jessop, 2008; Sassen, 2006). One need only consider the eminent rise of the ‘global city’ (e.g., London, New York and Hong Kong)

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supranational political institutions (e.g., the European Union) or the increasing role of intergovernmental organisations in processes of global governance (e.g., the OECD, United Nations and World Bank) to observe how the nation-state has conceivably become but one scale amongst many. The end result of this scalar reorganisation is a substantial ‘rescaling of territoriality’ (Brenner, 1999) or ‘rescaling of statehood’ (Brenner, 2004). Such a scalar understanding of globalisation also posits that ‘non-global’ spaces—the national and subnational—are frequently the very sites where the global is constituted and practised, despite these spaces being historically constructed and ‘national’ in character. The former ontological privileging of the nation-state is thus overcome through scalar ‘relativisation’, in which State power is rescaled downwards via devolution to subnational scales—turned ‘inside-out’—and, at the same time, rescaled upwards towards supranational institutions of regulation—turned ‘outside-in’ (Brenner, 1999, p. 442). However, it must be noted that this multi-scalar framing of globalisation, while accounting for the influence of spaces outside and within the nation, is still overlaid upon a preconceived territorial spatiality. Power is considered to ‘jump’ between scales, a view that, while maintaining the ‘integrity’ of a scalar spatiality, does not acknowledge the ability of actors to exert influence in a manner that transcends territorial distance or scale, rather than reflecting it via topological analysis (Allen, 2011). Such a scalar lens largely retains traditional notions of the nation-state, territory and borders, and does little to move beyond an interior/exterior binary of socio-spatial relations and hierarchies in which the nation-state retains ontological primacy. Acknowledging such limitations, and informed by the recent topological understanding of social spaces, other researchers in the field of critical geography (see Agnew, 1999; Amin, 2002; Massey, 1994; Thrift, 2006) have emphasised new relational spaces of globalisation that operate across pre-existing territories and scales. These are emergent topological spatialisations marked by ‘overlapping near-far relations and organisational connections that are not reducible to scalar spaces’ (Amin, 2002, p. 386), and which are constituted by ‘dynamic relations and mobilities that cannot be contained by scaled spatial entities’ (Lury et al., 2012, p. 5). By this topo-logic, place can no longer be simply defined as the ‘in here’ in prefigured territorial terms. Instead, it must be considered in non-territorial, relational and above all dynamic terms, emerging as ‘the site of situated practices’ (Amin, 2002, p. 391) between diverse and often geographically distant actors, and encompassing ‘the innumerable interactions between things and bodies which are placed at particular locations’ (Thrift, 1999, p. 312). Massey (1999) similarly construes ‘place’ as constituted by such networked practices and flows, noting that it ‘may be imagined as particular articulations of these social relations, including local relations “within” the place and those many connections which stretch beyond it’ (p. 22). In this way, distance and proximity come to be relationally defined through mutable social connections, eroding (to some extent) the ontological distinction

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between place and space, while also eliding reference to external territories, borders or scales: The topological approach thus draws attention to the spatial figures where insides and outsides are continuous, where borders of inclusion and exclusion do not coincide with the edges of a demarcated territory, and where it is the mutable quality of relations that determines distance and proximity, rather than a singular and absolute measure. (Harvey, 2012, p. 78)

A topological understanding of globalisation thus envisages social spaces as constituted through ‘folds, undulations and overlaps’ (Amin, 2002, p. 389), where topographical distance between actors can be elided by the global being ‘folded’ into local spaces (Allen, 2011). In effect, territorial distance—as measured in kilometres or miles—becomes less absolutely reflective of near and far than does the topological notion of ‘closeness’, expressed through relationality and connectedness. It is important to note here that these approaches need not necessarily exclude other scalar or territorial analyses in the context of globalisation (e.g., the continuing role of the nation-state or government bureaucracies), nor does it solely draw attention to different sets of spatial issues (e.g., the presence of new transnational actors across the policy cycle). Rather, topologically informed approaches provide a new way of thinking about existing spaces and scales (e.g., the role of the State in shaping the mobility of policy), as well as helping to complicate territorial, State-centric accounts of policymaking (see Bok & Coe, 2017). Despite Baker and Temenos (2015) noting that ‘researchers have long been aware that… politics and policy are never just local’ (p. 824), it is equally important to acknowledge here that neither do local spaces, nor local enactments of policy, ever entirely cease to retain their local-ness, despite the persistent presence and influence of global flows. As noted earlier, the continuing significance of national governments in matters of policy formation and governance, such as via policy heterarchies, would indicate that the scalar nation-state is still very much relevant in a globalised and hyper-connected world. Whilst cognisant of the insights afforded by alternative approaches, it is worth noting here the topological position of Amin (2002), who argues that globalisation produces: … an energised network space marked by, first, the intensification of mixture and connectivity as more and more things become interdependent (in associative links and exclusions); second, the combination of multiple spatialities of organisation and praxis as action and belonging at a distance become possible; and third, the erosion of the ontological distinction between place and space as ‘placement’ in multiple geographies of belonging becomes possible. (p. 395)

Emphasising connectedness, action-at-a-distance and simultaneous placement in multiple geographies highlights the need for thinking about how the spatialities of globalisation involve not only scalar layering, but also how the folding of topological space can connect previously distant points to enable placement and proximity in multiple spaces. To this end, Lury and colleagues (2012) suggest that

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this topological thinking ‘not only enacts the scalar entities of the “local”, the “national” and the “global”, but also puts them in multiple relations to each other’ (p. 13). Similarly, Michael and Rosengarten (2012) advocate that a topological framing of globalisation enables the ‘exploration of the relation between global and local without tacit recourse to an external framing or parametrisation of one by the other that is found in much social science’ (p. 94). This enables new ways of seeing the social world, both in everyday life and in more analytically reflective modes of thought. However, it is equally important not to conflate this topological proximity between the global and local with a totalising, or hegemonic, view of globalisation. This ‘determinist fallacy’ (de Sousa Santos, 2006) wrongfully positions globalisation as something spontaneous and irreversible, an ex nihilo process complete with its own inner logic that can be externally imposed ‘from above’ upon people and spaces. Rather, globalised policy discourses, such as the policy learning of the OECD or Sahlberg’s (2011) characterisation of the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM), are always, to a greater or lesser degree, locally inflected by the historical and political specificities of a given country or context. As de Sousa Santos (2006) notes, ‘There is no originally global position; what we call globalisation is always the successive globalisation of a particular localism’ (p. 396; emphasis added). One may thus regard developments such as GERM as a ‘globalised localism’ (de Sousa Santos, 2006), or, more specifically, as the progressive globalisation of an Anglo-American approach to accountability (i.e., test-based, evidence-based, top-down, marketised) (see Lingard & Lewis, 2016). Conversely, the take-up in various nations of this Anglo-American model might be seen as an example of ‘localised globalism’ (de Sousa Santos, 2006), that is, the local inflection of a ‘globalism’ that itself emerged from the globalisation of a more local, Anglo-American approach. Given that the features of GERM, and other similar ‘global’ developments, are always enacted in ‘vernacular’ (Appadurai, 1996) ways within different nation-states and schooling systems, in terms of being mediated by local histories, politics and cultures, one perhaps ought to speak of these policy ensembles as GERMs, rather than as an essentialised GERM. Although but one example, the emergence of Anglo-American-style accountabilities in various policy spaces demonstrates not only the topological nature of education policymaking, but also how seemingly ‘global’ flows are still very much contingent upon decidedly ‘local’ developments.

Power-Topologies We should note here that a topological understanding of globalisation has implications for re-theorising not just spatiality, but also modes of governance and relations of power. Harvey (2012) suggests that such a framework allows one to analyse how ‘particular spatial configurations facilitate the exercise of power’ (p. 77), especially in the context of emergent topological spaces and continuities

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between actors. In the same way that scalar spaces are unable to adequately account for all contemporary social domains and practices, there are similar limits to the explanatory ability of a strictly topographical conception of power based on territory and a ‘centred’ State authority (see Allen, 2009). To this end, a topological conception of power, or ‘power-topologies’ (Allen & Cochrane, 2010), has proved a useful heuristic to theorise how power is exercised across traditional scalar relations and political boundaries in contemporary governance processes. While Euclidean space provides the a priori backdrop against which power relations are situated and exerted, power-topologies instead constitute the very spaces in which their effects and influence are exerted: Power is not so much exercised over space or transmitted across it, as composed relationally through the interactions of the different actors involved. Reach, rather than something which implies the extension of powers over space, is exercised in a variety of intensive ways to dissolve the gap between ‘near’ and ‘far’. (Allen, 2009, p. 207)

By this reasoning, it can be argued that governing or steering ‘at a distance’ (Kickert, 1995; Rose, 1999) is in fact somewhat of a misnomer, an artefact from a strictly Euclidean mindset in which power has defined coordinates of both origin and extension. Instead, the topological folding of space brings relations of power into direct contact with those upon whom it acts, assembling new geographies of power and possibilities for action. In this sense, power relationships are ‘not so much positioned in space or extended across it, as they compose the spaces of which they are a part’ (Allen, 2011, p. 284). We can see the comparisons and commensurations enabled by PISA, and other large-scale international assessments, as a clear example of the productive capacities of such power-topologies, insofar as they create new relational spaces in which participating schools and schooling systems can be positioned. These spaces in turn make possible new ways of governing and practising education, as evidenced by the well-documented response of national governments to the release of global PISA rankings every 3 years (see Breakspear, 2012; Fischman, Topper, Silova, Goebel, & Holloway, 2019; Rautalin, Alasuutari, & Vento, 2019; Sellar & Lingard, 2013). In addition to constituting the very sites in which such power is exercised, power-topologies also express how policy actors are able to overcome physical distance to ‘make their presence felt in more or less powerful ways’ (Allen, 2011, p. 291). Given that topological space is constituted through situated relations and connections, it is perhaps not surprising that modern power relations and modes of governance can themselves be relationally construed in terms of spatial ‘reach’, establishing a direct presence with actors, organisations and localities through ‘mediated and distanciated forms of reach’ (Allen & Cochrane, 2010, p. 1082). Governing power can thus now no longer be conceived as emanating ‘outwards’ from its central origin to pervasively ‘fill’ the territory of the nation-state, nor as being coextensive within fixed national boundaries. Rather, it is forged through dynamic processes of connection and negotiation between people and places.

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It is the enfolding of (topographically) distant points into (topological) proximity, not unlike folding together the opposite corners of a handkerchief, which brings into existence new geographies of power, and new spaces and relations of governance: The articulation of political demands has less to do with ‘jumping scale’ or formalising extensive network connections, but rather more to do with the ability to reach directly into a more ‘centralised’ politics where proximity and reach play across one another in particular ways. (Allen & Cochrane, 2010, p. 1087; emphasis added)

Such a topological framework is particularly relevant when analysing contemporary modes of governance, especially in terms of the abilities of organisations and individuals to ‘reach into’ local spaces to effect policy influence, or to make possible certain actions. Such influence can be achieved by actors ‘reaching into the politics of regions and localities in an attempt to steer and constrain agendas’; actors ‘drawing within close reach those that are able to broker and influence decisions’; and ‘other forms of mediated interaction [that] reach out beyond the region or locality to shape events within’ (Allen & Cochrane, 2010, p. 1075; emphasis original). As such, we can clearly distinguish between a scalar understanding of space and governance that retains the ontological primacy of the nation-state (i.e., subnational, supranational), and a topological approach that foregrounds the importance of relations between actors and organisations. Rather than considering political spaces to be a hierarchical series of scales, topology enables us to understand new relational spaces associated with globalisation that cut across, and which cannot be contained by, pre-existing territories, scales and political borders. It also helps us to interrogate how the topological folding of space can bring otherwise ‘distant’ power relations into close proximity with local actors, thereby assembling new geographies of power and possibilities for action. Although a traditional view of power would present this process as decidedly one-way—from those who govern to those being governed—it is worth noting too that this same reach may also, somewhat ironically, open new horizons of possibilities for local actors and organisations to influence those in power. These notions of ‘reach’ and power are thus especially useful for explaining the topological continuities enabled by performance comparisons of schools and schooling systems, and emergent mechanisms of governance that involve reaching through, into and out of different schooling spaces. In the context of how power is topologically exercised upon subjects and spaces, I would like to take a brief excursus to revisit Foucault’s (1991) concept of governmentality. This is to understand how such theorising can be deployed within a broader topological framework, and to interrogate the relations of power and modes of governance that instruments such as PISA for Schools make possible. Of specific interest here is Stephen Collier’s (2009) re-examination of the later Foucauldian oeuvre, especially the 1978 Collège de France lectures, Security, territory, population (hereafter STP) (Foucault, 2007). Here, Foucault considers modern forms of power in arguably less totalising and epochal terms than in Discipline and punish (1977), or The history of sexuality (1978), instead rendering ‘power’ as mutable and

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contingent formations of heterogeneous elements that address particular problems in a given context. This reinterpretation distances itself from earlier work that saw certain technologies of power (e.g., sovereignty, discipline) as wholly representative of given temporalities (e.g., the classical age, modernity), and where the emergence of later technologies was construed as successive developments of the former. Furthermore, and significantly in terms of locating governmentality within a topological approach, this does not presuppose any overarching logic or telos to the ‘whole’ that emerges. Rather, it reflects the ‘topological’ rearrangement and redeployment of existing techniques and technologies of power into new and diverse assemblages. As Collier (2009) notes: … it suggests a configurational principle that determines how heterogeneous elements— techniques, institutional arrangements, material forms and other technologies of power— are taken up and recombined. This configuration of elements, and the principle through which they are related to each other, is what Foucault calls a ‘system of correlation’. It would be preferable, perhaps, to call it a topology of power. (p. 89; emphasis added)

By framing power as a ‘system of correlation between juridico-legal mechanisms, disciplinary mechanisms and mechanisms of security’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 8), technologies and relations of power are seen through a decidedly topological prism: contingent, dynamic but, ultimately, unchanging, as this reconfiguration implies that there is no explicit disjuncture between discrete moments or methods. The emergence of these ‘new’ heterogeneous assemblages, comprising material and discursive techniques, can thus be considered, topologically speaking, as a form of homeomorphic deformation, where modes of power are subjected to ‘stretching, squeezing or folding’, but not ‘tearing or breaking’ (see Connor, 2004).2 It is important to recognise this topological quality of power when analysing PISA for Schools as an instrument for governing education, particularly in terms of understanding how such diverse techniques are compiled and assembled, and the antecedents from which these ‘new’ modes have emerged. In addition to making the argument for combining late Foucauldian governmentality with a topological analysis, Collier (2009) also highlights a significant, if indirect, analytical shift associated with the move from a totalising understanding of power that is increasingly evident during the STP lectures. While ‘regulatory power’, or biopower, (Foucault, 1978) was construed as the redeployment of discipline and processes of normalisation from the individual to the population more broadly (two poles on the same methodological axis), the ‘security’ technology of power that emerges in STP is something far more nuanced altogether:

2

The archetypal example of a homeomorphic deformation, or a transformation that preserves all of the topological properties of a given space, is the transformation of a coffee cup into a doughnut (torus). Being homeomorphic, these two shapes can be formed from one another without ‘tearing’ (i.e., breaking the shape) or ‘gluing’ (i.e., attaching two or more separate parts together).

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3 Topological Relations of Governance [Population] is a field that precisely does not admit to control, that cannot be ‘possessed’ by the state, and that must be left alone to its own mechanisms and processes. In this respect… population is ‘discovered’ not as a target of state control but as a new ‘principle of limitation’ on state activity. (Collier, 2009, p. 87)

By this rendering, population is both an object of governmental power and, and at the same time, a limit to the exercise of this same power. It is this reading of power relations, eschewing any reference to totalising power, which allows one to consider the potential ‘cracks’ and ‘fissures’ within a regime of governance, and which makes possible practices of freedom and resistance. These spaces of resistance are especially relevant when considering how teachers might potentially ‘talk back’ to, and even resist, the policy lessons promulgated in the PISA for Schools reports, an issue that I take up further in Chap. 6.

Using Topology to Understand Educational Governance My research deploys these conceptual devices to provide a coherent theoretical framework to understand the new spaces and relations of global educational governance enabled by PISA for Schools. It is informed by thinking around heterarchical forms of governance and new spatial relations produced by globalisation, with these spaces and connections increasingly evident in contemporary processes of policy production and enactment (see Carney, 2009; Decuypere & Simons, 2016; Gulson et al., 2017; Gulson & Sellar, 2019; Larsen & Beech, 2014; Thompson & Cook, 2015). Put simply, education policy and associated mechanisms of governance are being realised in topological spaces not defined by the prefigured territorial spaces of the nation-state, are developed by actors and organisations not necessarily situated in government bureaucracies and traditional sites of policy formation, and judging by their global reach, transfer and take-up, are in constant states of movement and transformation. Centralised forms of authority are instead replaced by what Ball and Junemann (2012) describe as ‘a complex web of social and political and business relationships that join up finance capital with philanthropy, think-tanks and various bits of government and diverse politicians and political actors, across party divides, nationally and internationally’ (p. 85). This ‘complex web’ is constructed through social processes that are inherently relational and dynamic: by actors and organisations geographically distant and yet topologically near; through mobilities and flows that constitute the very spaces in which these processes occur; and via power relations that do not reach across space so much as they reach into space. In this context, the analysis of education policy—in terms of its development, enactment and effects—must necessarily incorporate conceptual devices that acknowledge these realities. Given that PISA for Schools has involved the collaboration of diverse policy actors (the OECD, philanthropic foundations, not-for-profit organisations and private edu-businesses) across vast geographic distances, a theoretical toolkit incorporating heterarchies, topological rationalities and power-topologies is

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a befitting analytical aid to understand the PISA for Schools instrument, and explore the implications such instruments might have for future modes of educational governance (see Lewis, 2017b, 2020a). I would also consider the employment of such a relational and spatial analytical framework as necessary to help overcome the ‘false dichotomies’ of place/space, and global/local, within the comparative study of education (see Amin, 2002; Larsen & Beech, 2014). Rather, we should emphasise the relational and productive capacities of space, in which topological spaces are constituted through the flows between networked agents and organisations, and where space is in a state of ‘always becoming’. While comparative education has traditionally, although not exclusively, focused on the nation-state as its unit of analysis, more recent forays in the field (see Ball, 2012, 2016; Beech & Artopoulos, 2016; Gulson & Symes, 2007; Takayama, Lewis, Gulson, & Hursh, 2017) have sought to employ space ‘not simply as an object of concern but as a conceptual tool for analysis’ (Larsen & Beech, 2014, p. 201). Indeed, Robertson (2010) contends that such a critical engagement with, and reconceptualisation of, spatiality will help bring to light the multiple complex processes at play in the constitution of ‘educational space’, and the manner in which space is ‘deeply implicated in power, production and social relations’ (p. 15). In this way, the central premise of comparative education research—that is, ‘looking elsewhere to learn’ (Sadler, 1964)—can move beyond fixed territories and boundaries, and might instead examine the material and discursive connections through which education policy is produced and enacted. I would also see my research as acknowledging both the ‘top-down’ (global) and ‘bottom-up’ (local) processes inherent within the governance of schooling, with concepts from topology providing a productive way of thinking about these new spatialities in education globally. The application of such a topological and relational framework serves a clearly analytical purpose, as it will be deployed to help make sense of the collected empirical data. At an even more fundamental level, this topological thinking also informs the methodological approach—policy sociology—by which the research is undertaken, inextricably grounding theory in the practice of research (and vice versa), and helping to avoid the extreme positions of both ‘empiricism’ and ‘theoreticism’ (see Lingard, 2006; Rawolle & Lingard, 2013). As Lingard and Sellar (2013) note: … a policy sociology, utilising topological analytics, would offer the possibility of theorising ever-changing and polymorphous processes of policy production and practices, while sustaining attention on those agents and agencies that remain a durable presence in these processes, including nations and transnational actors like the OECD. (p. 277)

The methodology I deploy here assumes the imbrication of the theoretical and the empirical, using a topological theorising of space and power relations to inform a policy sociology approach that will help understand how PISA for Schools might enable new modes of educational governance. While Chap. 2 has so far sought to outline the theoretical underpinnings of the research, the following sections will be directed at exploring how such theorising can be deployed in a policy sociology approach.

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Policy Sociology: Policy as Text and Discourse As a research approach, policy sociology—‘rooted in the social science tradition, historically informed and drawing on qualitative and illuminative techniques’ (Ozga, 1987, p. 144)—sought to move beyond the technical, evaluative and applied nature of policy research that typified the 1970s and 1980s. Until then, policies were understood as concrete entities, employed by rational actors to solve known problems with clearly definable outcomes, and policy research was most concerned with contributing towards effective policy development and implementation. By contrast, Ozga (1987) sought to reframe policy less as an obvious solution, but rather more as the ‘means by which power and control operated’ (Ozga, 2019, p. 10), meaning that policy sociology research should draw attention to the power relations that manifest in policy and the policymaking process. A guiding rationale of policy sociology remains understanding the distribution of power across policy cycles, and contesting the dominant forms of knowledge, authority and discourse in policymaking, thereby attending to ‘how a contemporary problem is defined, [and] how mechanisms of power and knowledge production are mobilised in particular forms of defining problems and finding their solutions’ (Ozga, 2019, p. 6). While these core logics have persisted in critical policy research, the tools and conceptual vocabularies available to policy sociologists have evolved and adapted in response to the various celebrated ‘turns’ in the social sciences. These have included, for instance, affective (Clough & Halley, 2007), governance (Ball, 2009a), data (Ozga, 2009), numbers (Grek, 2009), topological (Lewis, Sellar, & Lingard, 2016), digital (Williamson, 2016), assemblage (Savage, 2019) and mobilities (Urry, 2007) turns. As Ozga (2019) has prudently noted, policy sociology is required to constantly accommodate these diverse theoretical resources and acknowledge how they impact upon processes of knowledge production. In the more than three decades since Ozga’s (1987) foundational contribution, a central element in the development of policy sociology was the characterisation of policy as multifaceted, or what Ball (1993) describes as policy as text and policy as discourse. This framework provides a more nuanced conceptualisation of policy by encompassing processes and outcomes, influencing in turn how policy can be researched and how findings might be interpreted. Specifically, policy as ‘text’ implies that education policies are not objectively imposed upon institutions, but are rather interpreted and differentially enacted by actors within subjective local contexts: something that ‘is both contested and changing, always in a state of “becoming”, of “was” and “never was” and “not quite”’ (Ball, 1993, p. 11). We can see policy moving from being something linear and hierarchical in nature— delineated by a centred State authority and implemented perfectly by compliant actors—to something imbued with compromise and ad hocery (Ball, 1993), contextualised by individuals in unique local settings to produce a dynamic and vernacular form of ‘enactment’ (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012). Consequently, a methodological approach that embraces such considerations must reflect the relational and contested nature of policy, both in its development and enactment, and

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avoid the reductive assumption that policy is something developed ‘up there’ for precise implementation ‘down here’. By contrast, Ball (1993) uses a Foucauldian framing of policy as ‘discourse’ to emphasise the constraining influence of the discourses inherent within a given social domain (e.g., education), and the ways these mediate how such a domain might be represented, known and governed through policy interventions. The discursive character of policy stresses how dominant discourses frame and problematise social domains, limiting the manner in which potential policy responses may be conceived and implemented, and restricting what can be said and by whom. This constraining influence has been described as a ‘moving discursive frame’, insofar as one ‘may only be able to conceive of the possibilities of response in and through the language, concepts and vocabulary which the discourse makes available to us’ (Ball, 1993, pp. 14-15). Discourse thus becomes not merely a signifier of objects but, rather, constitutes the very objects it describes: We do not speak a discourse, it speaks us. We are the subjectivities, the voices, the knowledge, the power relations that a discourse constructs and allows. We do not ‘know’ what we say, we ‘are’ what we say and do. In these terms we are spoken by policies, we take up the positions constructed for us within policies. (Ball, 1993, p. 14; emphasis original)

This dual rendering of policy as text and discourse foregrounds the contingent nature of policy, despite the frequently taken-for-granted manner in which policy, and the putative social problems that it intends to solve, is presented. It is discourse that determines how a social domain is constituted and problematised, and which frames the policy solutions that are (or can be) implemented in response, and it is the analysis of these discursive processes and effects that have since become a significant focus within the policy sociology approach. The work of Ozga, Ball and colleagues arguably established the ‘foundational canon’ for contemporary policy sociology in education, and their contributions have since influenced the numerous iterations of methodological frameworks. Bowe, Ball and Gold (1992) outlined an initial policy approach with three primary policy contexts (influence, policy text production, practice). This highlighted the recursive and non-linear relationships across the policy cycle in numerous ‘arenas of action’, enabling policy formulations, and their attendant contestations, to be traced from development to implementation and back again. However, these early elaborations of policy sociology focused on the nation-state, and specifically England, as the sole site of policy development. Refinements were subsequently made to this three-contexts model in the form of ‘first-order’ and ‘second-order’ policy effects (Ball, 1994). These new analytical dimensions sought to evaluate policy outcomes in terms of the stated internal goals of the policy (‘first-order’), and by addressing how these changes could influence patterns of social justice, access and opportunity (‘second-order’). Such amendments, particularly the latter, demonstrate the emancipatory rationale undergirding policy sociology, in which relations and processes of power are not merely described but also contested. This is

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via a critical advocacy towards both society and policy (Simons, Olssen, & Peters, 2009), and by challenging oppressive structures and practices (Lingard, 2009). Taylor and colleagues (1997) suggested further changes to this methodological framework, positing that a critical approach must acknowledge the ‘multi-levelled character of policy processes’ (p. 44). In a similar vein to the three-contexts model described above, vis-à-vis the relational and multidimensional nature of policy, analysis was conceived of in terms of contexts, texts and consequences. This ‘trajectory’ approach sought to emphasise: … the many layered nature of policy making and the importance of exploring the linkages between the various levels of the policy process with an emphasis on highlighting power relations. In other words, we need to think about the three aspects [of policy]… contexts, texts and consequences. Policy texts need to be analysed within their context and also in relation to their impact on policy arenas in the broadest sense. (Taylor, 1997, pp. 32–33; emphasis original)

The initial focus of such an approach is the social, economic, political and cultural contexts that influence the production of a policy text, with such documents understood to be ‘ideological texts’ developed in very particular and contingent contexts (Codd, 1988). Investigating the historical and discursive context in which policies are developed thus reveals how social domains are problematised to necessitate the deployment of ‘self-evident’ policy solutions. By contrast, the textual dimension of critical policy analysis examines the actual documents and materials that are produced, in order to interrogate the stated aims of the policy and the discursive devices used to frame various issues. In short, the textual dimension of policy analysis seeks to understand ‘how language works in policy texts’ (Taylor, 2004, p. 444; emphasis original), and how it ‘serves a political purpose [by] constructing particular meanings and signs’ (Codd, 1988, p. 237). Finally, the analysis of policy consequences helps understand the ensuing long- and short-term effects of a given policy, including both intended and unintended consequences. Taken as a whole, this methodological approach provides a comprehensive understanding of the broad process of policymaking, from its initial conception to final implementation. Furthermore, it affords a structure to examine the factors that influence how policies are interpreted, negotiated and enacted at the various levels of the policymaking process, and the consequences arising from their implementation. However, while providing an unquestionably rich understanding of policy production and enactment, such State-centric approaches are arguably somewhat limited in their ability to explain contemporary policymaking processes, especially given that much policy increasingly originates from beyond the authority or space of traditional ‘national’ governments, as argued in earlier sections of the chapter. From a methodological perspective, Ball (1998) notes the increasing influence of dominant global discourses and new non-governmental actors—such as the OECD and edu-businesses—in national processes of policy production and enactment, and particularly the ability of non-State actors to frame contemporary educational ‘problems’. Such a reframing of our objects and modes of research is especially relevant when one considers how contemporary education policies are made, move

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and mutate. These are characterised by the rise of complex policy networks, which bring together diverse actors and agencies, inside and outside of government, into processes of policymaking. Acknowledging these changing empirical conditions, policy research must look beyond the traditional territorial focus of the local and the national to consider new relational spaces, as well as new policy actors outside of government and the nation-state. Given the engagement of diverse actors from the public, private and voluntary sectors across the education policy cycle (e.g., funding, development, administration and promotion), and via dynamic, relational and spatially diverse policy networks, it is self-evident that any analysis of education policy ‘can no longer sensibly be limited to within the nation-state’ (Ball, 2012, p. 93). In other words, we must not be content to simply look for the presence of new actors in traditional, territorially defined spaces, but must instead examine how these spaces are constituted by and through these very social relations and movements. As Cochrane and Ward (2012) have concluded, the days of locating the politics of public policy within the static bounded territory of the nation-state, or even within a series of nested hierarchies (e.g., the international, national and subnational), are well and truly behind us. While not discounting the insights afforded by earlier policy sociology frameworks, more recent renderings of policy sociology have sought to overcome this inherent ‘methodological territorialism’ (Jessop et al., 2008) by incorporating a more topologically informed analysis, which recognises the significance of new policy spaces, relations and actors.

Accounting for New Policies, People and Places Acknowledging the role of numerous non-State actors and sites in formulating and delivering education policy, policy sociology has since refocused its analyses onto explicating the new spaces, relationships, actors and agencies that now influence the policy cycle. We can thus see the necessary reshaping of both ‘the objects of its inquiries and the methodologies for research’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 208), which forces us to consider how ‘our very modes of “knowing” [are] being transformed by the very “mobile” processes that we wish to study’ (p. 212). If we are to consider spaces associated with globalisation as dynamic and emerging in context through social relations and interactions, then the study of social spaces and relations must necessarily be directed towards where these practices are actually occurring. Moreover, we as researchers must adopt a similarly ‘spatial’ research disposition, making policy sociology a profoundly geographical enterprise (Cochrane & Ward, 2012). Indeed, movement across such spaces seems to be a defining characteristic of the contemporary policy cycle: from the circulation of global ‘what works’ discourses (Lewis, 2017a); to the increasingly seamless transfer of data across and between vast technical infrastructures (Gulson & Sellar, 2019; Williamson & Piattoeva, 2019); to the peripatetic consultants and gurus who promote ‘off-the-shelf’

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solutions to all manner of problems facing schooling policy and practice (McKnight & Whitburn, 2018; Peck & Theodore, 2015). Topologically informed approaches to policy sociology must thus emphasise both the dynamic movement (or flows) of policy and, at the same time, the contextual embeddedness of its uptake, contestation and enactment (frictions) by people and places. Our challenge, then, to topological concepts to policy sociology requires multiple considerations: (1) accounting for the new relational spaces of the policy cycle; (2) observing how these policies move within and across, and simultaneously reconfigure, these spaces, including the social-technical practices that enables these movements; and 3) how these interactions and movements through space, as well as local processes of implementation, reshape the policies in question. Acknowledging these considerations, Ball (2012) suggests that contemporary modes of education policymaking and delivery are being radically transformed, involving not only ‘traditional’ international actors such as the OECD but also, significantly, a diverse array of edu-businesses, not-for-profit organisations and philanthropic foundations. As such, policy sociology needs to extend its analytical focus beyond the State to address the private and frequently commercial nature of the education policy cycle: [T]he private sector now occupies a range of roles and relationships within the state and educational state in particular, as sponsors and benefactors, as well as working as contractors, consultants, advisors, researchers, service providers and so on, and both sponsoring innovations (by philanthropic actions) and selling policy solutions and services to the state, sometimes in related ways. (Ball, 2012, p. 112)

In contrast to a ‘policy-as-government’ paradigm, this approach examines the places and people where policy work is actually done, producing a policy sociology that accounts for the nation-state relinquishing some—but certainly not all—of its sovereignty over education. Rather than confining the contexts of influence, text production and practice to national spaces in which government is the origin, designer and distributor of policy, a rescaled analysis urges awareness for how international organisations, edu-businesses and philanthropic bodies help to steer the policymaking process. This guidance may take the form of direct involvement in the development and enactment of policy, such as sponsoring programme development, administering tests or conducting data analysis, or more tacitly, via the promotion of particular discourses and meta-narratives (e.g., ‘human capital’ understandings of education). Irrespective of the exact mechanisms involved, contemporary policy sociology must engage in analyses of power relations and policy production ‘without necessary recourse to the state as locus, origin or outcome’ (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 20). Indeed, employing a traditional nation-centric approach would arguably obscure these more ‘private’ elements of the policy cycle or those that lie beyond national boundaries. However, capturing these heterogeneous assemblages of policy actors and agencies requires not only a change in empirical focus, but also a reorientation in analytical method. To this end, Ball and Junemann (2012) develop what they describe, after Howard (2002), as ‘network ethnography’, in order to help delineate

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the types of relations that constitute contemporary education policy heterarchies and spaces. This enables a policy sociology that can ‘start to map out the multiple centres of calculation and authority that traverse and link up personal, social and economic life’ (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 20), and thus help address the topological nature of the policy cycle. In this sense, network is deployed as ‘a method, a technique for looking at, thinking about and representing the structure of policy communities and their social relationships’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 14), capturing—albeit in an artificially stable form—the ‘fleeting, fragile and experimental’ (p. 15) networks that develop and enact policy. We can see then how education policymaking and modes of governance, and the conduct of research into these very processes, are imbued with a distinctly topological rationality, driven as they are by relational social networks rather than emanating from within any fixed policymaking structure. Far from focusing on the rigid government hierarchies from which policy was previously developed, these topologically informed approaches instead provide a window into the ever-changing arrays of actors and organisations whose presence is felt across all contexts of the policy cycle. Ball and Junemann (2012) focus on these mutable networks to explicate the emergent topological spaces and continuities in which policymaking occurs, noting that they ‘see network structures as flowing from transactions rather than vice versa’ (p. 13). In addition to addressing the networked nature of education policymaking, a topological analysis also hopes to capture the respatialised and relational nature of contemporary policy processes, particularly the ‘stretching’ and ‘joining-up’ of education policy spaces, and the ‘reach’ exercised by multiple policy actors. Ball and Junemann (2012) employ such a topological rationality to reveal how topographically distant, and yet topologically near, individuals and agencies are still able to exert influence over schooling policy, and how decidedly global processes, discourses and measurements are folded into local policy decisions. This is arguably evident in the manner policy actors seek ‘placement’ within multiple policy spaces across social domains, creating a complex web of relationships that are characterised by hybridities, blurrings, crossings, clusterings, density and relays (Ball & Junemann, 2012). Methodologically, this highlights the importance of identifying not only ‘nodes’ but also, after Williams (2002), ‘boundary-spanners’. These are individuals (and organisations) who can move between, and exert influence across, traditional boundaries, be they political, sectoral (e.g., government, business and philanthropy) or ideational, such as the blending of profit and philanthropy in ‘philanthrocapitalism’ (see Bishop & Green, 2008). Such a methodological reorientation reflects the global and networked empirical reality of contemporary policy processes, while also embracing the range of analytical and explanatory tools available, thereby making visible ‘different aspects and relations of policy making’ (Lingard & Sellar, 2013, p. 277). Addressing these points, it is clear that the need for policy sociology to look beyond territorial spaces and consider global flows cannot be at the expense of considering how local people and places shape how policy is taken up and implemented. Indeed, all policy arguably moves through phases of re/de/ contextualisation—or, alternatively, re/dis/assemblage (Savage & Lewis, 2018;

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Youdell & McGimpsey, 2015)—in ways that require us to be attuned to both the movement of policy and, at the same time, the context-specific politics of place. As Peck and Theodore (2012) note, contemporary policy sociology requires ‘a methodological approach sensitive both to movement (for instance, trans-nationalising policy models, peripatetic modes of expertise) and to those variable experiences of embedding and transformation underway in “downstream” sites of adoption/emulation’ (p. 24). Similarly, Baker and Temenos (2015) agree that such an approach must explore ‘the processes, practices and resources brought together to construct, mobilise and territorialise policy knowledge’ (p. 825; emphasis added). Policies, therefore, are never transferred ‘fully formed’ from afar into new spaces, but are instead (re)made and enacted through these processes of re/ de/contextualisation (or re/dis/assembly), and are directly shaped by unique local arrangements of people, practices and places. Within these traditions, we can then see the continuing salience of place, which should lead us to adopt a policy sociology that acknowledges this dialectic of context and flow: an analysis that is both global and local, and always close to practice (McCann & Ward, 2015). Taken together, one can then appreciate how even apparently hegemonic ‘global’ policies—e.g., the OECD’s PISA—cannot affect the myriad people and places they encounter without themselves being affected by these same people and places, experienced both in transit and at destination. In short, a key focus of a topology-informed sociology is that policies don’t merely circulate; rather, they are ‘made-up’ locally (Robinson, 2015), whereby parts of elsewhere (Allen & Cochrane, 2007) are rendered near and relevant to a variety of specific here(s). As such, researching policy requires one to consider the various contributing actors, processes and places that contribute towards this ‘making-up’ of policy.

Conclusion I have argued in this chapter for a policy sociology underpinned by a topological sensibility, in order to critically understand the development, promotion and administration of PISA for Schools, and its subsequent effects vis-à-vis global educational governance and policymaking. These diverse conceptual tools— drawing together insights from heterarchy, the becoming-topological of culture and power-topologies—are combined in tandem to help understand the new spaces and relations that are evident in contemporary education, and especially across the PISA for Schools policy cycle. Given the geographically dispersed nature of the PISA for Schools policy cycle, and the inadequacy of solely territorially framed understandings of space and power, the ability to research (let alone understand) contemporary policymaking arguably requires theoretical tools that are ontologically aligned to the contingent, context-specific and emergent nature of policy processes. Rather than privileging the nation-state as a spatially static backdrop upon which

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events unfold, employing a topological framework can instead help us attend to the spaces and relations where policymaking is actually occurring, as well as emphasise how global flows (like PISA for Schools) are always mediated by local ensembles of people and places.

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Chapter 4

New Networks: Policy, Philanthropy and Profit

Abstract This chapter provides the first of three analytical chapters. I first examine the policy network of the OECD and its partner organisations, including philanthropic foundations, not-for-profits and edu-businesses, that helped fund, promote and administer PISA for Schools. Drawing on interviews and documentary evidence, I analyse how this arrangement positions the OECD as a single node within a broader network of relations, and suggest this might reflect a ‘new way of working’ for the OECD as it seeks to maintain and expand its education policy influence. The chapter then focuses on the increased role and influence of private policy actors and agencies across the education policy cycle, and how PISA for Schools arguably help to open up new ‘profitable’ space within which these organisations can further their own policy agendas. I also seek to apprehend the varied, and sometimes conflicting, interests and motivations within and between members of the PISA for Schools policy networks. Finally, this chapter gestures towards the heterarchical modes of educational governance made possible by PISA for Schools, in which horizontal networks of actors combine to provide private policy ‘solutions’ to local public schooling ‘problems’.

Introduction This chapter analyses the initial development of PISA for Schools to demonstrate the relevance of networks to heterarchical processes of educational policymaking and governance. In light of what has been described as the changing ‘topology of policy’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 78), and the broad transition from government to governance (Rhodes, 1997), my analyses address the diverse array of networked actors, organisations and spaces—inside and outside of government—in which PISA for Schools has been, and continues to be, constituted and enacted. While the development of PISA for Schools is itself significant for bringing new policy actors This chapter is derived in part from an article published in Comparative Education; 23 May, 2017; copyright Taylor & Francis; available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10. 1080/03050068.2017.1327246; Article https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2017.1327246. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Lewis, PISA, Policy and the OECD, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8285-1_4

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into contact with local schooling spaces, it is the ‘flows’ (Appadurai, 1996) made possible by such connections that are of especial interest here, insofar as they enable new opportunities to influence how education is locally thought and practised. I draw upon contemporary theorising around policy networks to suggest how they help constitute ‘virtual’ policy spaces, which are themselves productive of new heterarchical modes of educational governance and policymaking. This chapter explicates the network of actors and organisations involved with the development and administration of PISA for Schools, and the structure of the chapter reflects this accordingly. First, I detail how PISA for Schools was conceived by the OECD as a response to demands from US educators and policymakers for a school-level equivalent of the influential main PISA. I then explain how circumstance compelled the OECD to ‘reach out’ (Allen & Cochrane, 2010) to diverse ‘partner organisations’ that could fund (philanthropies), promote (not-for-profits) and administer (edu-businesses) the new ‘local’ PISA variant. This situation arguably represents a new way of working for the OECD in the conduct of its education policy work, where the Organisation is but one ‘node’ in a diverse and spatially dispersed transnational policy network, and where the intended audiences of PISA for Schools are school-level actors instead of national governments. However, the OECD still arguably retains the dominant influence over how PISA for Schools is developed and enacted, even when these activities are the nominal responsibility of its partner organisations. While such policy networks provide the architecture necessary to implement PISA for Schools, they also facilitate the expansion and consolidation of the epistemic communities through which the OECD disseminates its discursive construction of schooling. Indeed, I would suggest that the OECD ‘reaching out’ to partner organisations, through soft modes of power that co-opt rather than coerce (Nye Jr., 2004), enhances its ability to ‘reach into’ local education spaces, an issue that will be addressed more fully in Chap. 5. The remaining section of this chapter turns its attention to the increased role and influence of edu-business in the PISA for Schools policy cycle, reflecting the quasi-privatisation of education (Au & Ferrare, 2015; Ball, 2012; Verger, Lubienski, & Steiner-Khamsi, 2016) and the growing provision of private ‘solutions’ to putatively public ‘problems’. Given that, at the time of this research, PISA for Schools was administered in the U.S. by an international edu-business (CTB/ McGraw-Hill), and that schools must pay US$11,500 each to participate, one can see here a significant blurring of public and private interests, and the opening up of new profitable spaces and opportunities for edu-businesses in the governance of education. In the context of the US implementation of PISA for Schools, I would argue that the willingness of the OECD’s partner organisations is based, at least partially, on their apprehension of the test as a means to further their own agendas. Collectively, these themes suggest how the networked development and enactment of PISA for Schools facilitates the dissemination of the OECD’s discursive construction of schooling, while also affording new opportunities and spaces in which edu-businesses, not-for-profits and philanthropies can influence local education policy and practice.

‘We Want to Do PISA’: Responding to US School-Level Pressure

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‘We Want to Do PISA’: Responding to US School-Level Pressure The OECD first conceived of PISA for Schools in 2010, when the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), which at the time led the consortium responsible for the main PISA, was contracted by the PISA Governing Board (PGB) to develop assessment items for a new school-level assessment based on the main PISA.1 This move was largely in response to increasing demands for access to the PISA items, not only from the OECD’s usual clientele of researchers and national policymakers but also, significantly, from school and district leaders. In light of broader moves towards evidence-informed modes of educational policymaking (Head, 2008; Lingard, 2013) and the OECD’s position as the global education policy ‘expert’ (Grek, 2013), PISA for Schools emerged from the demands of local educators for PISA-based measurements and evidence of ‘what works’. To this end, a national representative to the PGB revealed how: … we were definitely getting requests from schools. We didn’t have requests from [philanthropic] associations or foundations to do this; we were getting it from schools and school districts. What we were getting from schools and school districts was this ‘we want to do PISA’ question. They didn’t know that there would be a PISA-based Test for Schools – that arose out of the demand for wanting to do PISA. (Emphasis added)

An executive of a large US philanthropic foundation, which would later fund the development and maintenance of the PISA for Schools, similarly indicated that the programme was greatly driven by schools petitioning the OECD to be part of the national PISA sample, and the OECD—or, more specifically, key personnel within the OECD (e.g., Director for the Directorate of Education and Skills, Andreas Schleicher)—responding in kind: I had been in conversation with Andreas Schleicher, who is, of course, the ‘father of PISA’, a few years ago… Andreas mentioned somewhere in there that he gets all these letters from [school-level] people saying, ‘I’d love to take the PISA test’… So, from that, somehow or other, he concocted the idea that we should create a PISA test for schools that they could use and that would be useful in their context. And so, we funded the OECD’s development of the test. (Emphasis added)

There are several key points to be derived from this statement. First, it reiterates that, at the outset, PISA for Schools was conceived predominantly, if not exclusively, in response to school-level interest in PISA-based comparisons of local performance, with the involvement of philanthropic foundations, as well as other private partner organisations, only sought and obtained afterwards.

1

The PISA Governing Board (PGB) comprises representatives from the OECD’s 37 member countries and 1 PISA Associate (Brazil), with other PISA-participating countries and economies invited to attend as non-voting observers. The PGB is responsible for determining key policy priorities and for overseeing the conduct of the main PISA (OECD, 2020).

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Perhaps of even greater significance, however, are the implications for the location of agency within the Organisation. The OECD is an intergovernmental organisation—that is, constituted by and for the governments of its sovereign member States—rather than an international organisation, which instead does not necessarily require government representation (e.g., not-for-profit agencies such as Médecins sans Frontièrs). As such, the OECD must account for the diverse (and sometimes contested) interests, motives and dispositions of its constitutive members (government representatives) and Secretariat (OECD employees). Notwithstanding the intergovernmental nature of the OECD, such agency around the development of PISA for Schools appears to be concentrated more in the hands of key Secretariat members like Andreas Schleicher (‘he concocted the idea’; ‘the father of PISA’). Instead of reifying the OECD as a single univocal entity, it is important to consider its multifaceted nature and thus where (and indeed from whom) such seemingly ‘institutional’ policy discourses emanate. Worth highlighting also is how it was US pressure, albeit from school-level educators and policymakers, that was instrumental in encouraging the OECD to develop PISA for Schools. This situation is largely analogous to the US federal government’s petitioning of the OECD several decades earlier, following the ‘crisis’ discourses of A Nation at Risk to develop international comparative measures of national school system performance (Lewis, 2019; Takayama, 2007). From this original prompting emerged the Organisation’s Indicators of Education Systems (INES) and, ultimately, the main PISA programmes. We can see here the OECD’s ability to ‘carve out niches’ (Woodward, 2009) and spaces of expertise in response to the particular policy needs of its ‘clients’, be they national governments, or schools and districts. Moreover, and building on the notion of agency, it would suggest that policy influence is not only concentrated in specific individuals within the OECD Secretariat but also in certain member countries, particularly those—like the U.S.—that are substantially financial contributors to the OECD’s operating budget.2 PISA for Schools thus marks an important evolution in the history of PISA and, more broadly, the education work of the OECD. With the notable exception of some OECD teacher-focused publications connected to the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) (OECD, 2014) and the teaching of Physics (OECD, 1965), PISA for Schools arguably provides one of the first examples of the OECD directly addressing school-level policy spaces and actors, rather than its usual audience of national politicians and policymakers. I would also suggest that the particular desire amongst local US educators for school-level PISA emerged from what has been described as the ‘Anglo-American approach to accountability’ (Lingard & Lewis, 2016), in which top-down,

2 Of the OECD’s €386 million operating budget in 2019, the largest national contribution (20.5%) was made by America via the US Department of State. At the time, the other 35 OECD member countries provided the remaining funding for the Organisation (OECD, 2019).

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high-stakes, test-based modes of accountability are a dominant paradigm in US education (see Anagnostopoulos, Rutledge, & Jacobsen, 2013; Hursh, 2013; Taubman, 2009). While such test-driven modes of educational accountability can often lead to ‘perverse effects’ (Lingard & Sellar, 2013) like ‘teaching to the test’ (Amrein-Beardsley & Holloway, 2019; de Wolf & Janssens, 2007; Hursh, 2013; Nichols & Berliner, 2007; Walsh, 2006), a national PGB representative remarked how this was, in fact, a significant driver of local US demand for school-based PISA, providing the opportunity to improve student performance by teaching to a ‘better’ test: Testing is quite big in the U.S. … We had people saying, ‘We know teachers are teaching to the test. We’d rather they’re teaching to the PISA test than teaching to whatever local tests they were using’. (Emphasis added)

Such an approach is problematic in terms of its potentially narrowing effects on curricula and pedagogy (see Berliner, 2011; Comber, 2012; Ravitch, 2010; Supovitz, 2009), where what are measured become what matters. However, it does reveal the central position afforded to testing, and test data, in the U.S. as a means of accounting for school performance outcomes, which helps explain the especial interest amongst US educators in PISA for Schools. Interestingly, these views were prevalent not only amongst local educators but also the US charitable sector, a point exemplified by an executive of a large philanthropic foundation that helped fund the development of PISA for Schools: There’s very good evidence that teachers teach to these assessments. There’s a lot of concern about that in the U.S. but there’s also a more pragmatic view: let’s try to improve the tests if they’re going to be so central to what actually happens in classrooms. (Emphasis added)

Although the perversity of such logic is arguably apparent, there is also something interesting here around the desire for testing to exert a more educative (and positive?) influence upon classroom pedagogy. While not in any way excusing or condoning the problematic practices that may frequently arise from ‘teaching to the test’, it is interesting nonetheless to see how PISA for Schools—despite clearly being ‘yet another test’—was positioned as a possible way for US educators to improve teaching and (presumably) student learning. However, it is perhaps telling that US educators ‘teaching to the test’ has not resulted in a more nuanced local engagement with test-driven accountabilities but, rather, has created a demand for ‘improving’ the tests to which teachers are allegedly teaching. Evident here then is the assumption that testing, ipso facto, improves student learning and performance (Linn, 2000), despite the fact that an emphasis on testing generally only improves student test-taking and strengthens teaching to the test (Berliner, 2011; Nichols & Berliner, 2007).

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Assembling the PISA for Schools Policy Network In addition to the apparent alignment between the prominence of testing in US education and the OECD’s desire to satisfy school-level demands for a local iteration of PISA, several large American philanthropic foundations indicated how funding the development of PISA for Schools also helped to fulfil their own institutional policy agendas. One such philanthropy has a particular focus on promoting ‘deeper learning’, a diverse set of personal dispositions and interpersonal abilities that are often referred to as ‘21st-century skills’. To this end, a foundation executive for education indicated how their initial interest in PISA for Schools originated largely from their desire to measure, and quantify, whether students could acquire and exercise such ‘21st-century skills’: One of the challenges we’ve got with these [21st-century] skills is that they’re hard to define and measure. They exist, and people want them in theory and ask for them – businesses ask for them all the time – but it’s been hard to actually know whether or not students possess them because we’ve done a poor job of measurement. And a big focus of what we’re doing is, how do you measure these skills? … That’s sort of how we ended up getting into the OECD-PISA world. So, we had become interested in PISA when we started asking around, ‘Where are good innovative assessments that attempt to measure these [21st-century] skills?’ The PISA test was the first that kind of came up. (Emphasis added)

I would argue this suggests a direct connection between the policy objectives of a private funding body and the OECD around education policy, in which each organisation sees in the other the means to further their own objectives, be it the ability to quantify ‘21st-century skills’ or obtaining the funding necessary to support the development of PISA for Schools. Interestingly, both the OECD and the philanthropic foundation in question position improvement to educational outcomes as being predicated on measurement. In this respect, we can see what Ball and Junemann (2012) describe as ‘a convergence of methods’ (p. 114) or, alternatively, a ‘policy convergence’ (Ball, 2009), in which similar discursive constructions and processes manifest not only across territorial or geographic boundaries, but also, importantly, traditional public-private sector divides. Similarly, another US foundation involved with funding PISA for Schools saw an opportunity to translate financial support for the programme into a means for promoting their own policy agenda around ‘dramatising’ the (purported) decline in American students’ academic performance, and especially in relation to their international ‘competition’. On this point, an executive from this philanthropy noted how: … if you look at the state assessments, many of those schools may look like they’re doing very well. So, you take a suburban high school; 90% of the children are proficient and meet state standards in mathematics at the eleventh grade. Wonderful, we’re doing fine here. But, if you put those students up against their true competition, which is international – as a spot at university or jobs – we suspect the comparison isn’t so favourable. In fact, we know from the national [PISA] data that it’s not… So, we began to try to figure out, how do we dramatise that issue? How do we personalise that issue? We wanted a school-level

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comparison that would create urgency among parents, policymakers and educators. (Emphasis added)

Again, we can see evidence of partner organisations becoming involved in PISA for Schools not only to advance the OECD’s policy objectives but also, and quite unequivocally, to promote their own institutional agendas. This reflects the increasing importance of private actors—including edu-businesses, philanthropies and the ‘third sector’—in networked modes of educational policymaking and governance (Ball, 2012; Ball & Junemann, 2012; Williamson, 2012). While this may apparently lessen the ‘authority’ of the OECD apropos of their partner agencies, with the Organisation becoming but one voice and node within the larger policy network, I would assert that these potentially ‘competing’ objectives are still largely aligned with, and therefore help to promote, the policy goals of the OECD around PISA for Schools. Indeed, the excerpt above clearly suggests that the foundation’s perception of US performance decline is informed predominantly by national PISA data (‘we know from the national data’). Consequently, the development and dissemination of PISA for Schools to local US educators, even while requiring partner organisations, help maintain the primacy of the OECD’s policy agenda. However, the enthusiasm displayed for school-based PISA amongst local US educators and the philanthropic sector was less than overwhelming amongst national representatives to the PGB, with one PGB delegate noting how ‘there were a number of PISA Governing Board members who saw only difficulties with this’. In fact, this reticence meant that the majority of OECD member countries were unwilling to make additional Part II, or voluntary, financial contributions to fund the development of a school-level assessment, predominantly for fear of tarnishing what they perceived to be the highly esteemed PISA ‘brand’.3 As another PGB national representative indicated, this reluctance on the part of OECD member countries was a significant impediment to obtaining government funding for PISA for Schools: I think that if they [the OECD Secretariat] asked the [member] countries, the countries would probably say no. Countries aren’t even sure it’s [PISA for Schools] a good idea, so to fund it would have been, you know. I can’t imagine the countries wanting to fund it… I mean, just not enough countries saw it as something that was valuable.

3

Funding for the OECD is derived from two sources: a Part I budget of mandated contributions from all members, proportional to the size of their economy, that fund ‘core’ activities (52% of total funding); and a Part II budget funding projects of interest to limited numbers of members that are not covered by Part I contributions (48% of total funding) (OECD, 2019). In effect, Part II contributions can be considered as a ‘user pays’ model. Notwithstanding PISA’s obvious prevalence within international and national education policy discourses, it could still be considered a ‘non-core’ activity of the OECD, on account of its funding by voluntary Part II contributions from participating countries and economies. It is also worth noting that it is the US federal Department of State that funds national participation in the main PISA instead of the Department of Education, producing a discrepancy in the U.S. between who pays for PISA and who benefits from PISA.

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Subsequently, alternative non-governmental sources of funding were required to support the development of PISA for Schools, which the OECD obtained through donations from nine major US philanthropic foundations. These included, amongst others, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Kern Family Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York (see Table 4.1).4 This funding has supported all aspects of PISA for Schools’ development, including the initial creation of test items by ACER during 2010–2011; in situ field trials and equating studies (to the main PISA assessment) for these test items (in Australia, Ireland, the UK and the U.S.) during 2011–2012; and a 2012 pilot trial to test and validate the implementation process with invited schools and networks, in the UK, the U.S. and Canada (see ACER, 2012, pp. 11–30).5 Since the development of the instrument, US philanthropic backing has also funded the various recruitment, promotional and administrative activities of other OECD partner organisations (e.g., the US not-for-profit America Achieves), and has subsidised participation for less-advantaged schools and districts wishing to partake in PISA for Schools in the U.S. Significantly, these funding entities are all positioned entirely outside of government. This reflects not only the increasing role of the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors across the education policy cycle (Au & Ferrare, 2015; Ball, 2012; Mahony, Hextall, & Menter, 2004), but also the broad range of different privatisations occurring ‘of’, ‘in’ and ‘through’ contemporary education policymaking (Ball, 2007, Ball & Youdell, 2008). The diverse, and geographically dispersed, ensemble of philanthropic foundations funding PISA for Schools is also evidence of how such policy networks have evoked new relational and spatial proximities associated with globalisation (Amin, 2002), ‘blurring the boundaries between sectors’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 114) and polities, at least as they are territorially understood. Indeed, an executive at the US professional learning community EdLeader21 noted how the policy networks involved in developing PISA for Schools, and US education policy more generally, frequently include a diverse range of agencies from across the public/private, and for-profit/not-for-profit, sectors:

4

As noted in-text, this table only addresses the partner organisations associated with PISA for Schools for the period 2012–2016. More recent developments have consolidated PISA for Schools services in the hands of a few key organisations. Janison Education Group (‘Janison’), an Australian for-profit education technology company, was announced in 2019 as the global provider of the software platform on which the online version of PISA for Schools is delivered. Since then, it has signed agreements with the National Service Providers (NSPs) of Brazil (June 2019) and the Russian Federation (September 2019). In October 2019, Janison announced that it was also accredited to be the sole NSP for all U.S. schools. 5 Although constraints of space and relevance do not permit any further elaboration of the technical issues associated with the development of PISA for Schools, a detailed explanation of the scaling and equating undertaken during field trials and the pilot study is available in the OECD’s (2017) technical report. Further information is also available in the PISA for Schools technical reports produced by ACER (2012) and CTB/McGraw-Hill (2014).

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Table 4.1 The OECD’s ‘partner organisations’ for the US administration of PISA for Schools, 2012–2016 Organisation

Major roles and responsibilities

Funding relationships

Alliance for Excellent Education (U.S.) America Achieves (U.S.)

Hosted a PISA for Schools promotional webinar (16 May 2013) School recruitment in the U.S. (pilot and full implementation); liaison between the OECD and US philanthropic funding bodies; development and coordination of the global learning network professional development community (see Chap. 6) Secondary data analysis and aggregation of US PISA for Schools data (2012–2014) Initial PISA for Schools item development and field testing; equating study with the main PISA instruments to ensure comparability and domain coverage; production of pilot assessment Financial support for the 2012 PISA for Schools pilot trial Financial support for the development and maintenance of PISA for Schools instruments, and for the 2012 pilot trial Financial support for the development and maintenance of PISA for Schools instruments, and for the 2012 pilot trial Financial support for the 2012 PISA for Schools pilot trial

Webinar funded by William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

American Institutes for Research (U.S.) Australian Council for Educational Research (Australia)

Bechtel Group Foundation (U.S.) Bloomberg Philanthropies (U. S.) Carnegie Corporation of New York (U.S.) Craig and Barbara Barrett Foundation (U.S.) CTB/McGraw-Hill (U.S.)

EdLeader21 (U.S.)

Hanover Research (U.S.)

Administered 2012 PISA for Schools pilot study in the U.S.; accredited provider of PISA for Schools in the U.S. (2012–2015) Feedback on PISA for Schools report content to the OECD; development of the PISA for Schools ‘Implementation Toolkit’ Secondary data analysis and aggregation of US PISA for Schools data (2014–2015)

Funded by numerous US philanthropic foundations, including Bloomberg Philanthropies, Kern Family Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Secondary analyses funded by America Achieves Item development and pilot study funded by numerous US philanthropic foundations, including Bloomberg Philanthropies, Kern Family Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Funding destination and type not disclosed Funding to the OECD and America Achieves

Funding to the OECD

Funding destination and type not disclosed Payment (US$11,500) received from PISA for Schools participants (US schools and districts) Funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to develop the ‘Implementation Toolkit’

Secondary analyses funded by America Achieves (continued)

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Table 4.1 (continued) Organisation

Major roles and responsibilities

Funding relationships

Kern Family Foundation (U.S.)

Financial support for the development and maintenance of PISA for Schools instruments, and for the 2012 pilot trial Financial support for the 2012 PISA for Schools pilot trial

Funding to the OECD and America Achieves

Financial support for the 2012 PISA for Schools pilot trial

Funding destination and type not disclosed

Financial support for the 2012 PISA for Schools pilot trial Financial support for the development and maintenance of PISA for Schools instruments, and for the 2012 pilot trial

Funding to America Achieves

National Public Education Support Fund (U.S.) Rodel Charitable Foundation of Arizona (U.S.) Stuart Foundation (U.S.) William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (U.S.)

Funding destination and type not disclosed

Funding to the OECD and America Achieves

I wouldn’t describe it as unusual in my experience. It’s often national level [policy] work gets done, in the United States, through an innovative mix of foundations, private sector support, non-profit, and local education and education institutions. At least in my experience, this is not highly unusual.

Within these new relational, or topological, global policy spaces are also innumerable ‘flows’—of ‘people, information and ideas, language, methods, values and culture’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 139)—that help constitute what Urry (2007) describes as ‘network capital’, or the capacity to foster productive social relations within a given social network. I would contend that it is these social relations that have been of especial importance to the development of PISA for Schools, as they facilitate further connections and movements of capital, discourses and ideas. We can see here the presence of the ‘topological turn’ (Lury, Parisi, & Terranova, 2012), in which new spatial continuities and relations are introduced between otherwise distant actors and organisations, constituting and supporting new social and policy spaces. Moreover, these relations are useful precisely because they enable the linking up of disparate policy actors and organisations, or the topological ‘folding in’ (Allen, 2011) of global entities into local processes and practices, both materially and discursively. This elision of physical distance between networks of organisations and actors creates, in turn, the relational proximity required to drive their desired policy agendas: What are key are the social consequences of such mobilities, namely, to be able to engender and sustain social relations with those people (and to visit specific places) who are mostly not physically proximate, that is, to form and sustain networks often at-a-distance. (Urry, 2007, p. 196; emphasis added)

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Speaking specifically to this point, an executive of EdLeader21 openly acknowledged the centrality of social connectedness between the OECD and its partner organisations, and indeed amongst the partner organisations themselves, to the successful development and implementation of PISA for Schools in the U.S.: We all sort of work in the same circles so we’re all professional colleagues. We’ve known Andreas Schleicher for years. And we are also very close colleagues with most of the people on the staff of the Hewlett Foundation and they were early backers, financial backers, of the development of this instrument… We knew about PISA for Schools very early on in the process. I’m sure we learned about it through a combination of [the] Hewlett [Foundation] as well as our relationship with Andreas [Schleicher] and his team at the OECD… [Also,] a lot of the foundations that came together to fund the development of the instrument all have been working in this field for some one or another for many years. And they all know each other, right? So, if you go down the list, they’ve all been in these kinds of initiatives before. (Emphasis added)

We can see here the importance of social relationships and professional familiarity (‘we’re all professional colleagues’; ‘they all know each other’) to the establishment of productive, and durable, policy networks that can drive projects like PISA for Schools, and how such relational proximity between network partners necessarily precedes financial or other administrative support.

Counting the Cost of PISA for Schools This also emphasises the pivotal ‘boundary spanner’ (Williams, 2002) role that is played by key policy actors, or ‘policy entrepreneurs’ (Mintrom, 1997). Such key persons help secure initial and ongoing support for specific policy agendas by building, and sustaining, social relationships across institutional, and public/private, boundaries, particularly when policy networks involve a diverse array of actors and agencies. For instance, Andreas Schleicher sits on the External Advisory Board of the US not-for-profit America Achieves, a private organisation that plays a significant role in the promotion of PISA for Schools in the U.S., and the recruitment of local US schools and districts. He also has current or historical associations with many other PISA for Schools partner agencies, including the Alliance for Excellent Education, CTB/McGraw-Hill, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, EdLeader21, the Kern Family Foundation and McGraw-Hill Financial Research Foundation, a philanthropic wing of the McGraw-Hill Companies that includes CTB/McGraw-Hill. This would again suggest that the locus of agency within the policy network is largely focused on certain key individuals, rather than it being more or less equally distributed. Given the increasingly collaborative and networked nature of contemporary educational policymaking, the ability to draw upon such personal relationships, imbued with familiarity, trust and shared values and norms, appears particularly useful when constituting policy networks in the first instance, and for subsequently producing policy outcomes like PISA for Schools from within such networks.

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While undoubtedly prompted on one level by pragmatism and the need to secure non-government funding, this ‘reaching out’ by the OECD to geographically distant, and yet relationally proximal, US foundations also reflects the growing presence of philanthropy, or ‘philanthrocapitalism’ (Bishop & Green, 2008), in education policymaking (Ball, 2012; Ball & Olmedo, 2011; Kretchmar, Sondel, & Ferrare, 2014; Olmedo, 2014). Above all, this brings new arrays of networked actors and organisations, often with ‘market-based’ sensibilities, purposes and methods, into the policymaking fold, leading to the promotion of ‘market-based’ solutions to otherwise ‘intractable’ social problems. Reflecting the ‘economisation’ of social life, the US philanthropies funding PISA for Schools arguably perceives education, and education reform agendas, largely through the lens of improving business growth and workforce participation. To this end, a US foundation executive suggested how: … we want students to leave high school as critical thinkers and problem solvers… It’s these critical student outcomes that are most important for the business world right now, the information world. Businesses have been clamouring for these kinds of skills for some time now and saying that they’re not finding them in the workforce. (Emphasis added)

While there is a clear, and laudable, enthusiasm here for students to develop skills around critical thinking and problem-solving, this appears to be positioned more as a means to drive economic development for business (‘most important for the business world right now’; ‘the workforce’), and less a genuine enthusiasm for meaningful student growth and learning. This economistic framing of schooling, and its focus on the accumulation of individual and collective human capital, reveals what is clearly a ‘market-based’ sensibility. Indeed, the very notion of PISA for Schools is predicated on schools and districts seeking to purchase the policy insights of the OECD and PISA, as if meaningful professional development and school reform were mere commodities to be readily bought and traded, and unproblematically implemented regardless of context. This approach very often favours the adoption of generic and scalable solutions—‘magic bullets’ (Kamens, 2013) or ‘what works’ (Lewis, 2017)—that are focused primarily on efficiency and economy, obscuring issues relating to ‘which way, why, for whom and who says’ in preference of addressing ‘how much, how fast and when’ (Brooks, Leach, Lucas, & Millstone, 2009, p. 7). Arguably, this reorientation also provides opportunities for philanthropies to exert significant policy pressure on public education but without necessarily being held accountable to the public. This constitutes a form of ‘philanthropic governance’ (Ball & Olmedo, 2011; Olmedo, 2014), where private actors and organisations can help steer, and at times even determine, education policy agendas. For example, a consultant working with EdLeader21 keenly noted the recurring philanthropic presence in US education policymaking, expressing that ‘a lot of roads go back to the [William and Flora] Hewlett Foundation’. This wholly private organisation bequeathed approximately US$33.5 million in grants to US education projects in 2013, including PISA for Schools, from a total asset pool that stands at US$9.8 billion (The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2020). While purposefully

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rejecting the crude moral binary between public and private spheres, or even questioning the underlying altruism of those making philanthropic donations, I would still draw attention to the potential democratic deficit that arises from the quasi-privatisation of education policy, where unelected private interests and motives can intrude into what is ultimately, with education, a public concern. It is worthwhile here illustrating how such philanthropic ‘social capitalism’ (Ball, 2012) produces specific policy effects in relation to PISA for Schools. In addition to funding the development and maintenance of the PISA for Schools assessment items, an important role of philanthropic support has been subsidising the considerable participation costs for schools in less-advantaged communities.6 The rationale behind such subsidies is to remove the financial impediment to participation and thus increase accessibility for all US schools, rather than have the programme become—in the words of one philanthropic foundation executive —‘something that wealthy, well-off, high-performing districts use to get even better and exacerbate the inequity gap that’s already very significant in the country’. However, sometimes a condition of foundation funding is the full public disclosure by schools of their performance data, as a philanthropic executive explained: A condition of our [participation subsidy] funding was that schools would make their results public. Certainly, there is valuable information that the test reports provide to schools to improve curriculum, instruction and so on – leadership, culture – but we didn’t think that was enough. We think there needs to be some public knowledge held by stakeholders – parents, students, policymakers – and that schools wouldn’t naturally be predisposed to say, ‘Well, here’s how we did. We’re competitive with a low country that everyone thinks is pretty low performing’. So, we said, as a condition of the funding, ‘You must release your scores’. (Emphasis added)

There are several problems that arise from the sentiment expressed here. First, such insistences are entirely contrary to the OECD’s intention for school data to remain confidential, and that there be no obligation whatsoever upon participating schools to disclose their results (see OECD, 2013a, p. 10, 2013c, pp. 12–13). Instead, improvement in student performance is seemingly positioned as possible only if schools are subjected to the global and national ‘eye’ of comparison (Nóvoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003). This constructs local reform agendas as being driven primarily through normative comparison, as if the ‘valuable information’ provided to school and district leaders around curriculum, instruction, leadership and culture can produce little benefit, or local imperative to act, without the prospect of being exposed to the withering glare of the public. Arguably more problematic, however, is that these stipulations to publish (‘you must release your scores’) are only applied to the schools from disadvantaged communities that require financial support to participate in PISA for Schools. This 6

At the time of this research, US$11,500 was the cost paid by each school to CTB/McGraw-Hill to participate in PISA for Schools. More recently, Engel and Rutkowski (2018) provided additional insights into the costs of PISA and PISA for Schools in the U.S. As of June 2020, with Janison as the accredited NSP for the U.S., schools pay US$5,000 to participate in the online version PISA for Schools.

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capacity to pay affords some (affluent) schools the right to secrecy and non-disclosure, while other less-advantaged schools must release their results and be exposed to a national, or even global, panoptic critique. Given the strong connection between socio-economic background and student performance on PISA for Schools that the OECD itself acknowledges (see OECD, 2012b, p. 70), this forced publicity may well discourage the participation of schools from more disadvantaged communities, in case their potential poor performance be the cause of negative public attention. Demonstrating this point precisely, an executive from a large US urban school district in Texas noted the fear to publish amongst the superintendent and other members of the district leadership upon receiving their PISA for Schools results: I then brought the [PISA for Schools] results to the superintendent and I will tell you that the reaction I got is one of caution, concern and fear. The reason is that some of our schools… performed in ways that, when compared to levels of performance in other countries, challenged our self-perception. And so, I have been in a month-long dialogue with the chief of staff about whether or not we are to publicise the results, or even our participation. (Emphasis added).

Somewhat ironically, those schools and students with possibly the most to gain from PISA for Schools (i.e., those with a low-performance base or with significant socio-economic disadvantage) are also those potentially least likely to participate, either due to the prohibitive cost of the assessment itself or the likely public rebuke when their results are mandatorily disclosed. While this is but one example, it does nevertheless illustrate how the economistic processes and products of private philanthrocapitalism, like PISA for Schools, can (and often do) marginalise more public social justice considerations, such as ensuring support is given to those students (and communities) most at-risk of disadvantage or low schooling outcomes (see Lingard, Sellar, & Savage, 2014; Savage, 2013).

Funding and Delivering PISA for Schools Despite such potential concerns surrounding the involvement of philanthropic interests in education policy, this did not apparently diminish enthusiasm for privately funding PISA for Schools. Rather, a national PGB representative openly acknowledged the OECD’s desire to establish sources of non-government funding that could drive the development of PISA for Schools and other innovative PISA ‘products’, especially in the context of post-Global Financial Crisis economic ‘belt-tightening’ by member governments: I am intensely relaxed about philanthropic organisations putting money in in this way… Yes, up until now, [main] PISA has been funded by governments. PISA will continue to be funded by governments. But those developmental areas [like PISA for Schools] – I think it’s really important that we get money in from other sources, otherwise nothing will happen. We are in a world of shrinking resources. Governments will only be able to pay – may not even be able to pay – for those ‘core elements’ of PISA. They are not going to

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want to put money into ‘blue-sky’ developmental projects with lots of risk attached to them that might fail. So, that’s why I think it’s really important that we leverage much external funding from philanthropic organisations, philanthropic arms of companies, Microsoft, et cetera. I have no problem with that at all. (Emphasis added)

We can see here the possible emergence of new ways of working for the OECD, where private entities fund riskier ‘blue-sky’ projects (such as PISA for Schools) while governments continue to support the core elements of the traditional PISA programme. What this translates to, in effect, is that the development of ‘innovative’ OECD products requires a constant input of commensurably ‘innovative’ funding solutions—like philanthropy—to sustain the future progress of PISA, creating the need for ‘almost permanent institutional and organisation innovation’ (Jessop, 2002, p. 242) within the OECD. Demonstrating this point, the OECD has seemingly used the funding experience of PISA for Schools to inform a similarly philanthropic-based funding model for PISA for Development, a new OECD instrument that measures the performance of students in developing countries. An OECD official expressed their desire to establish around PISA for Development ‘a consortium of development partners, including philanthropic foundations, to prepare a trust fund or larger sum [of funding] to get to scale much faster’.7 Given that the OECD is largely a ‘lean and mean’ organisation in terms of its available discretionary funding and personnel, it is debatable whether programmes such as PISA for Schools or PISA for Development could be developed without substantial funding and administrative assistance from non-government entities. An executive from America Achieves drew similar conclusions about the OECD’s need for external, non-governmental funding sources to undertake innovative projects like PISA for Schools: The heavy lifting, the majority of the funding, went to the development of the [PISA for Schools] assessment, testing the items, the item development – giving them the resources and the bandwidth to do it. So, I don’t think they [the OECD] could have done it without the [philanthropic] dollars. They needed that. And right now, we’re helping them raise money to replenish the items, to have another set for the next round. They need resources to get this done. (Emphasis added)

Of course, the presence of diverse funding partners is itself not an unknown phenomenon in the OECD’s education policy work, with the main PISA supported entirely through voluntary Part II contributions. However, the reliance on private agencies, exclusive of government, to fund ‘innovative’ projects like PISA for Schools is (largely) unprecedented, reflecting how education policy is now increasingly privatised, networked and occurring outside of traditional policy spaces. While such funding models are clearly new in relation to PISA for Schools, we should still acknowledge the OECD’s historical, albeit brief, use of philanthropic

7

A similar philanthropy-based funding model was also used to develop and administer the OECD’s PISA-based teacher online professional development platform, PISA4U (see Lewis, 2019, 2020).

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partnerships in its previous education work. Papadopoulos (1994) notes how the OECD’s Centre for Research and Innovation (CERI)—the first discrete unit within the Organisation that focused on education—was initially supported in the late 1960s by America’s Ford Foundation and, later, by Royal Dutch Shell, with government funding of CERI only commencing from 1971. Thus, PISA for Schools marks the reinstatement by the OECD of such horizontal funding relationships, with the OECD occupying the role of ‘facilitator’ (Shamir, 2008)—being dependent on a diverse network of private organisations to fund, administer and promote the programme—instead of being an ‘autarkic doer’ (Wanna, 2008). An interesting corollary of this philanthropic funding model is perhaps a greater flexibility and motivation to undertake innovative projects utilising non-government funding into the future, as demonstrated by the OECD’s reliance on private donations to develop PISA for Schools (as well as PISA for Development and PISA4U). Aligning programmes like PISA for Schools with seemingly more contingent private funding sources allows ‘core’ PISA activities to be maintained while simultaneously enabling PISA’s expansion into growth areas, anticipating the needs of the OECD’s present and, importantly, future ‘clients’ (e.g., governments, schools and districts). The need to constantly innovate and to stay ‘ahead of the curve’ is particularly important when considering that the OECD’s influence in education—through PISA and its associated policy work—is ultimately tied to its capacity to remain useful to the ‘end users’ for whom such data are produced. One should also see this process in terms of the OECD seeking to expand PISA’s scope, scale and explanatory power (Sellar & Lingard, 2014), and hence its relevance, to a greater number of policy spaces and audiences, including non-OECD member economies, subnational polities (states, provinces, municipalities) and local schools and districts (Engel & Frizzell, 2015; Lewis, Sellar, & Lingard, 2016). This requires not only the constant evolution of the main PISA itself but also, importantly, the development of new variants like PISA for Schools, encouraging the OECD to find new and innovative sources of financial support, and shifting the ‘centre of gravity’ (Jessop, 1998, p. 32) around which policy development and enactment revolve. Additionally, as Barnett and Finnemore (2004) note, the OECD is very much ‘an authority’, rather than being ‘in authority’, insofar as it lacks the ability of other international organisations—such as the World Bank or International Monetary Fund—to enforce sanctions or withhold financial assistance (see Mahon & McBride, 2008; Woodward, 2009). Such limitations, and the largely epistemic nature of the OECD’s influence (Carroll & Kellow, 2011), imply that the OECD’s sway over education can thus only be maintained by continually producing new and relevant policy tools like PISA for Schools, which, as noted above, requires the adoption of market-based, networked and innovative approaches to funding. Of course, the presence of such alternative funding models or ways of working should also not suggest the total absence of government in the development and enactment of PISA for Schools. Rather than the wholesale replacement of the ‘vertical’ for the ‘horizontal’, I would suggest instead that government retains a significant, albeit decidedly subtler, influence over PISA for Schools. This is reflected in the way that representatives to the PGB, who are themselves often

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senior national policymakers or bureaucrats, must seek the political approval of their government before PISA for Schools is authorised for use in their country, and how these self-same PGB representatives retain effective oversight over the programme. The following excerpt from the OECD’s General Guidelines for the availability and use of PISA for Schools demonstrates how, ultimately, the representatives of the PGB—and, by extension, the national education authorities that they represent—still exercise considerable authority over who can participate in PISA for Schools, and the manner in which they participate: The decision to make the PISA-based test for schools [PISA for Schools] assessment available in a particular country is made by national educational authorities for that country. The OECD Secretariat will provide the PGB with periodic updates on the adoption of the assessment by countries so that the PGB can monitor the uses and availability of these options to ensure maintenance of the integrity of the main PISA. The development and maintenance of the PISA-based Test for Schools has been and will continue to be funded through voluntary contributions, and the OECD Secretariat will provide the PGB with periodic financial overviews of the project. (OECD, 2013b, p. 3)

Even while PISA for Schools opens up education policy spaces to the OECD and other non-governmental organisations (philanthropies, not-for-profits, edu-businesses), the availability of such alternative ‘horizontal’ influences ultimately, if somewhat paradoxically, requires the approval of ‘vertical’ government. Here, we can see the operation of heterarchical modes of governance that combine hierarchical and networked elements, with national government retaining, directly or indirectly, a form of ‘gate-keeper’ status. This reflects the continuing influence of central governments in networked forms of education policymaking and governance, in which the State, although occupying a different role, never entirely ‘goes away’ (Ozga, 2009). Further gesturing towards the continuing influence of the State in relation to PISA for Schools, the desire of local educators and policymakers for such PISA-referenced performance data can be seen to emerge, at least partially, from existing ‘data infrastructures’ (Sellar, 2015) associated with government legislation and policy settings (see Anagnostopoulos et al., 2013). For instance, Engel and Frizzell (2015) draw attention to how Florida’s participation in PISA 2012, the first instance of state-level US involvement in the main PISA, was financially supported by the Race To The Top (RTTT) initiative of the Obama Presidency, a federal grant scheme that competitively funds the development and implementation of state-devised projects to drive schooling innovation and reform. One can thus see subnational participation in such international testing—and here I include both PISA for Schools and the main PISA—being facilitated by existing vertical policy mechanisms, such as regulations and inducements to school accountability (Mintrop & Sunderman, 2013). In spite of the presence of additional horizontal policy actors and organisations (e.g., the OECD and edu-businesses), the State exercises and retains considerable influence, with PISA for Schools representing a complex mixture of ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ processes, rather than being exercised solely through either hierarchies or networks.

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‘Bringing People Together’: The Role of America Achieves It is also worthwhile turning our attention to some of the private organisations that have assisted with the implementation of PISA for Schools, and particularly deserving of focus is the US not-for-profit America Achieves. This agency—supported by many of the same philanthropic foundations that fund PISA for Schools (see Table 4.1)—provides extensive administrative support around PISA for Schools by liaising between the OECD and its other partner organisations, and it has taken the leading role for marketing the test to US schools and districts. While the promotion of PISA for Schools is to the obvious benefit of the OECD, the often-shared norms and values of such ‘epistemic communities’ (Kallo, 2009) would suggest that these OECD policy goals are also substantively aligned with the objectives of its partner organisations. Illustrating this point, a central concern of America Achieves, and hence (presumably) a primary motivation for their involvement in the programme, is to enable US schools to learn from the ‘best practices’ of ‘high-performing’ international systems; or, in the words of an America Achieves executive, ‘really promoting policies on “what works” in education’. One can readily note the clear similarities between the rationale undergirding the involvement of America Achieves in PISA for Schools and the OECD’s stated purpose for the school-level assessment: The OECD Test for Schools [PISA for Schools] can provide important peer-to-peer learning opportunities – locally, nationally and internationally – as well as the opportunity to share good practices to help identify ‘what works’ to improve and make useful change. (OECD, 2013c, p. 13)

America Achieves thus plays a significant mediating role in relation to PISA for Schools, a mode of ‘palliative governance’ in which ‘hidden hands massage the wider processes of global governance’ (Woodward, 2009, p. 75). This not only links and coordinates the various parties involved in PISA for Schools but also, importantly, enables the promotion of common discourses and values amongst the varied members of the policy network, including the local schools and districts that will enact the test. An America Achieves executive similarly acknowledged their organisation’s primary purpose around PISA for Schools was to ‘bring people together’: [W]e want to be kind of a coalition builder and bring people together, and so this project [PISA for Schools] offered a great opportunity… There was the OECD, who really wanted to develop a school-level instrument; there were US-based funders who were interested in funding it. But just like anything, there needed to be an entity to coordinate the whole thing, to shepherd it along, to understand what the US goals would be. So, we stepped in and took on the project. (Emphasis added)

This highlights the significance of social connections to facilitate material and discursive flows amongst networked partners, and to thus make new actions possible.

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In an interesting parallel to the location of agency at the OECD being with certain key individuals at the Secretariat (e.g., Andreas Schleicher), it is also worth noting how Jon Schnur, the Executive Chairman and co-founder of America Achieves, has played a central role in steering the policy agenda of the not-for-profit agency. For instance, the following introductory remarks at a convening of PISA for Schools participants organised by America Achieves suggests that Schnur—as an effective ‘boundary spanner’ (Williams, 2002) in US education policy circles— can draw upon extensive ‘network capital’ in the promotion of PISA for Schools and, by extension, America Achieves: It’s a pleasure to introduce Jon Schnur. Jon is the Executive Chairman and co-founder of America Achieves, where he plays a major role in shaping the organisation’s overall strategy and work. He is a board member of ‘New Leaders’ [http://www.newleaders.org], as well as ‘Be the Change’ [http://www.bethechangeinc.org] and [the] Opportunity Nation [http://opportunitynation.org] initiative to increase the economic mobility in America. He also advises philanthropies seeking to improve education, including Bloomberg Philanthropy. Jon has served as a senior advisor to President Obama’s transition team and to US Secretary [of Education] Arne Duncan. (America Achieves, 2014, np; emphasis added)

It is especially interesting how certain, and particularly prominent, individuals like Schnur have played multiple key roles in relation to PISA for Schools, serving as Chairman to the organisation that promotes the school-level test in the U.S. (America Achieves), as well as being an advisor to one of the key foundations (Bloomberg Philanthropies) that funded both the development of the test and, importantly, America Achieves itself. We can thus see the OECD attracting and co-opting like-minded partner agencies into promoting PISA for Schools, and, at the same time, the emergence of policy actors and organisations that apprehend possibilities for using PISA for Schools to further their own agendas. As Ball and Junemann (2012) note, the constitution of such education policy networks effectively creates ‘new sites and “opportunities” for influence on the policy process’ (p. 78), and this influence is increasingly wielded by a diverse array of actors and organisations. However, while a policy network, such as that for PISA for Schools, may superficially appear uniform and of a single purpose, it is still important to acknowledge the contingent, and often contested, manner by which such apparent policy agreement is reached. Despite the involvement of a diverse array of policy actors and partners, it is evident that these commercial, not-for-profit and philanthropic organisations are very much facilitators of a policy position developed by, and largely for the benefit of, the OECD, rather than their being equal (or even active) participants in its construction. To this end, an OECD policy analyst noted the arguably ‘imbalanced’ situation between the OECD and its partner organisations around PISA for Schools: It’s not like these organisations are helping us [by] promoting this. It’s actually more us helping the schools and the organisations in these countries use the instrument, I would rather say, because, as such, it’s not a product that we are selling. For the moment, we are not, the OECD is not, getting anything out of this. (Emphasis added)

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The OECD’s discursive construction of schooling and ‘best practice’ in the main PISA is thus clearly retained and advanced within PISA for Schools, despite the OECD relying upon a variety of supporting agencies to develop, administer and fund the programme. Supporting this assertion, a PGB national representative similarly suggested that the OECD considered ‘groups like America Achieves as, in part, “clients” and, in part, “out-reach” arms to involve more schools’ in the PISA for Schools programme, and—by association—the OECD’s broader education policy influence. As Ball (2003) argues, ‘[t]he issue of who controls the field of judgement is critical’ (p. 216), and here the OECD preserves, at least in the U.S., the primary steering role for PISA for Schools, with this influence exercised by the Organisation ‘co-opting’ the services of its partner agencies. While the OECD admittedly does not receive any financial benefit from the provision of the school-based assessment (‘the OECD is not getting anything out of this’), such statements belie the Organisation’s ability to use such networks to extend its policy relevance into new, and previously unavailable, local education spaces at the school and district level. We can see then how partner organisations, like America Achieves and philanthropic foundations, help constitute the very epistemic communities through which the OECD exercises its epistemological global educational governance over how schooling is locally understood and practised. Instead of being merely primus inter pares, perhaps a more appropriate description for the OECD’s dominant position within the PISA for Schools policy network would be George Orwell’s (1987) now famous maxim: ‘All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others’ (p. 90).

‘Treat This as a Product’: The Role of Edu-business in PISA for Schools It is not only the not-for-profit and philanthropic sectors that influence the development and enactment of education policy. Edu-businesses, for whom education is primarily a financial concern, are now also taking an increasingly prominent role in policy production and service delivery. This situation is typified by Pearson—the world’s largest edu-business—accruing approximately US$8 billion in global sales during 2014 (Tampio, 2015) and administering over 9 million high-stakes tests to American K-12 students in the first half of 2014 (Harrer, 2015). Moreover, the Centre for Media and Democracy in Wisconsin has noted how the four organisations with the largest share of student testing in the U.S.—the edu-businesses Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and CTB/McGraw-Hill, and the not-for-profit Educational Testing Service—expended over US$20 million during the period 2009–2014 lobbying state and federal governments on the need for mandated student assessments (Harrer, 2015). It is in this context that Mahony and colleagues (2004) speak of the actual ‘privatisation of policy’, and of the policymaking community. I would further suggest that the networked modes of governance

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described above actually help to open up new, ‘profitable’, spaces for edu-business involvement across the policy cycle, including agenda setting, policy production, enactment, evaluation and the production of support materials. This is especially so with the move to standardised, data-driven modes of accountability (Lingard & Lewis, 2016; Lingard, Martino, & Rezai-Rashti, 2013) and associated data infrastructures (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2013; Sellar, 2015), which provide edu-businesses with myriad opportunities, across multiple jurisdictions and scales, to construct and/or implement tools for diagnosis and intervention. Speaking to precisely this point, an analyst from CTB/McGraw-Hill, the for-profit company involved in the American administration of PISA for Schools (2012– 2015), noted the recent proliferation of edu-businesses in the U.S. following the ready availability of philanthropic funding: There has been a very large explosion – and I think ‘explosion’ is not a dramatic word in this case – of organisations out there that are involved in education in the United States, and that involvement ranges. But probably they’re most influential simply because a lot of money is going into funding innovations through the foundations. So, places like the Bloomberg Foundation [Bloomberg Philanthropies], the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Microsoft also [Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation]. All three are very active on the educational scene. (Emphasis added)

PISA for Schools is clearly an example of one such ‘innovation’ being funded through foundations at the policy interface of the OECD, philanthropic foundations and edu-business, and reflecting the increasing relevance of such non-government agencies across the policymaking cycle. I would also suggest that this ‘explosion’ of private education service providers is tied not only to the funding made available by philanthropic foundation but also, arguably, by the opportunity for profit. This enhanced private sector involvement in education policy is also reflected in the OECD’s accreditation of CTB/McGraw-Hill, the American publisher and testing provider, as the exclusive US administrator of PISA for Schools until 2015. CTB/McGraw-Hill, one of the four largest providers of standardised testing in the U.S., was first announced as the US accredited provider of PISA for Schools in December 2013, having previously administered the American element of the 2012 PISA for Schools pilot study that validated student sampling, administration and analysis methods. As the US accredited provider until 2015, CTB/McGraw-Hill was responsible for delivering all elements of the PISA for Schools assessment, including test administration, data collection and analysis, and the production and delivery of reports to participating schools. Under the then-current agreement, the OECD reserves the right to maintain limited numbers of service providers within each participating country, particularly during the early stages of implementation, allowing the Organisation to exercise a ‘high degree of oversight’ over the administration of PISA for Schools and the relevant partner organisations (OECD, 2013b, p. 10). In most respects, the OECD maintains significant influence over how PISA for Schools is locally enacted, with detailed measures that curtail the actions of the service provider. The following excerpts from the accreditation agreement provide some rather telling examples of the OECD’s control:

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It is expected that accredited service providers will provide the OECD with a quarterly summary report outlining the activities conducted and plans for administering the assessment. The accredited service provider(s) must also be prepared to provide up-to-date status reports (e.g., school participation, testing dates) within 24 h of a request from the OECD. (OECD, 2013b, p. 13; emphasis added) The Accredited Service Provider will strictly follow the OECD’s requirements on the final quality of the OECD e-books [PISA for Schools reports], including but not limited to the following input from OECD: (i) OECD files and templates for producing the reports; (ii) OECD figures and charts templates; and (iii) documentation on the e-book text describing the static text and describing the customised [school-specific] text. The OECD will have the option to review each school e-book and provide its written approval before CTB may provide the final version to participating schools. (OECD, 2013a, p. 13; emphasis added)

In spite of the heterarchical and ‘polyvalent’ modes of policymaking undertaken in relation to PISA for Schools, the OECD retains its dominant position as the principal ‘node’ in the network (Eccleston, 2011), devolving many operational responsibilities to the accredited provider while retaining extensive administrative oversight. Far from producing any ‘institutional void’ (Hajer, 2003) or ‘hollowing out’ (Rhodes, 1994) of the OECD’s authority through its reliance on partner organisations, the Organisation maintains a significant coordinating and steering presence over PISA for Schools through the normative regulations of the accreditation agreement. In this way, the OECD retains effective control over which discourses of education reform underline both PISA for Schools and, importantly, its policy network of partner organisations. This helps to constitute an epistemic community of shared values and norms (Kallo, 2009), influencing how education is understood not only in local spaces but also amongst edu-businesses, not-for-profits and the philanthropic sector. However, and somewhat interestingly given the appearance of such stringent oversight, the OECD and accredited provider sign no contract nor exchange any money, with financial obligations only existing between the accredited provider and the participating schools. As an OECD policy analyst described: … everything that is paid here is paid directly from the schools to the service provider. So, we don’t pay the service provider; the service provider doesn’t pay us. We just accredit them, so we don’t actually have a contract with them; we have an agreement with them. The actual contract is between the school and the service provider. (Emphasis added)

We can see here then the distinction between the contractual agreements associated with the local administration of the test, signed between the school and the National Service Provider (NSP); the contractual agreements made between the OECD and its various vendors in the initial development of the test (see ACER, 2012, p. 6; CTB/McGraw-Hill, 2014, p. 9); and the binding but non-contractual agreements signed between the OECD and the NSP for the administration of the test (see OECD, 2013a, p. 13; OECD, 2013b, p. 13). The diversity of such arrangements arguably reflects the diverse actors and organisations involved in the development and administration of PISA for Schools, as well as the diverse services offered by the various vendors involved in the programme.

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While there is the outward appearance of what Ball and Junemann (2012) describe as ‘tight-coupling’ to produce compliance amongst its network of partner organisations, I would argue instead that the OECD’s oversight in relation to the NSP—their ‘agreement’—is decidedly more de facto than de jure, relying largely on the service provider ‘self-adhering’ to the terms of their accreditation. This exemplifies the fundamentally ‘soft power’ (Nye Jr., 2004) approach of the OECD, in which its partner organisations are attracted and co-opted, rather than coerced, to ‘get the outcomes one wants’ (p. 2). In a similar fashion, Woodward (2009) has described the OECD’s ‘soft’ global governance in terms of cognitive governance, driven by ‘the values the members hold sacrosanct and which stitch them together as a community’ (p. 6), and normative governance, which represents the OECD ‘challenging and changing the mindsets of the people involved’ (p. 8). Thus, even while the OECD is compelled (for reasons of funding and personnel capacity) to enact PISA for Schools via its network of partner organisations, this spatial ‘recalibration’ (Jessop, 2002) also provides new opportunities to project and secure its policy objectives. This extends the Organisation’s policy influence into local schooling spaces to build, rather than in any way diminish, its capacity for educational governance. However, the somewhat abstract nature of the OECD’s benefit should also not eschew the significant financial gain, presently US$5,000 per school, which the accredited provider does receive from administering PISA for Schools in the U.S.8 One could therefore say that the accredited provider stands to gain financially as the OECD gains local policy influence, and there is a clear financial interest for the accredited provider to encourage the local uptake of PISA for Schools and, by association, the OECD’s discourses around schooling policy and performance. This reflects the numerous privatisations occurring across the education policy cycle, in which the public provision of education can be viewed (amongst other things) as an opportunity for private profit, and where external providers can exercise considerable influence over local measures of school accountability and reform (Ball, 2012; Hogan, 2016a, 2016b). The financial nature of such considerations is clearly evident in the comments of a CTB/McGraw-Hill analyst when they reflected on the relationship between themselves and the OECD: One of the ‘value-adds’ in setting up a relationship like this, whether it’s the one that the OECD has with us [CTB/McGraw-Hill] or the relationship that they have in the UK or Spain as this continues to roll-out, [is that] it basically allows the service provider to treat this as a product in the sense of sustaining it financially. (Emphasis added)

8

As noted in the press announcement that the edu-business Janison made to the Australian Stock Exchange, the roughly 32,000 secondary schools in the U.S. (i.e., those schools eligible to sit PISA for Schools) represent a potential US$160 million annual market if all eligible schools participate (Janison, 2019). In the same press release, Janison notes that it expects ‘further significant growth’ (p. 1) in coming years as additional schools are signed to participate in PISA for Schools.

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The considerable financial benefits to CTB/McGraw-Hill, or any other prospective service provider, that come from treating PISA for Schools ‘as a product’ reflect the growing commodification, and commercialisation, of education services (Ball, 2012) and teachers’ learning (Hardy, 2015; Lewis, 2020). Indeed, Luke (2004) suggests that this positions schools and teachers as ‘commodity fetishists’, in which they adopt the disposition of ‘lacking, wanting and desiring consumers’ (p. 1435), a situation that arguably has the potential to be of far greater benefit to the providers of such services than to the recipient schools and districts, if they even benefit at all. Although the CTB/McGraw-Hill analyst quoted here did also address the perceived educational benefits associated with PISA for Schools, rather than presenting the assessment in a solely economic light, the clear evidence of such fiscal considerations (‘treat this as a product in the sense of sustaining it financially’) suggests that PISA for Schools is positioned largely as an instrument of profit. Furthermore, I would suggest that PISA for Schools enables CTB/McGraw-Hill —a private edu-business—to encourage its client schools and districts to purchase their other proffered educational products. While the advertorial targeting of PISA for Schools participants is admittedly not the ‘official’ policy of CTB/McGraw-Hill, it is conceivable that ‘poor’ performance on PISA for Schools might provide the impetus for local educators and policymakers to consider the ‘school improvement’ services offered by such a commercial entity. Reflecting the identification of policy ‘problems’ for which edu-businesses can sell putative policy ‘solutions’, the same CTB/McGraw-Hill analyst suggested that other products and services are ‘certainly available’ to schools that partake in the OECD assessment: CTB does have products and services that could support school responses to the information provided in the [PISA for Schools] eBook report. [Although] we are not specifically targeting participating schools with offers or sales of these products or services…our formative [tests], and other products and services, are certainly available to schools taking the OECD Test, should they choose to engage us beyond our OECD Test services or should they already be our customers when they sign up for the OECD Test. (Emphasis added)

Significantly, the on-selling of other education products and services by the accredited provider of PISA for Schools is neither prohibited under the accreditation agreement with the OECD, or even considered to be an unlikely scenario, with an OECD analyst suggesting that such a strategy ‘would make perfect sense’. While there is no compulsion for local educators or policymakers to commission these ‘other products and services’, we can clearly see how the embedding of private interests—what Cutler (2008) deems ‘private authority’—in the education policy cycle provides considerable opportunity for edu-businesses to shape new, and potentially profitable, policy discourses and reform agendas. This also demonstrates how different organisations (e.g., intergovernmental organisations, for-profit businesses, not-for-profits) can all seek to ‘profit’ from contributing to programmes such as PISA for Schools, even if that profit need not necessarily be of a financial nature. I should note again that my intent in drawing attention to the role of CTB/ McGraw-Hill in administering PISA for Schools is not to critique the company

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itself or its employees per se. Rather, it is to emphasise the dangers inherent in any private interest being involved in the delivery of public education, especially when profit motives are so palpably present, as it arguably the case in PISA for Schools.

Conclusion We have seen how PISA for Schools provides an archetypal example of contemporary educational policymaking and governance via the export of ‘state work’ to a variety of private actors and agencies, including intergovernmental organisations, not-for-profits, philanthropic foundations and commercial edu-businesses. While such methods of networked policymaking are by no means unique, my research reveals how PISA for Schools is unique insofar as it was developed, almost exclusively, in response to school-level demands for PISA-driven comparisons of local performance, rather than being at the behest of national governments or bureaucracies. We can see then how the networks developed around and through PISA for Schools help further the ability of the OECD and its partner organisations to speak directly to schools without the intervention of government, instead of such networks and methods primarily enabling the policy goals of the State itself. Importantly, this reflects a thorough rearticulation of how local US schools and educators are positioned in relation to competing sites of policy expertise and production, and how (for that matter) schools voluntarily engage this expertise to further their own local policy agendas. However, while such heterarchical modes of policymaking position the OECD as but one ‘node’ amongst many, the Organisation still arguably retains an overwhelming influence by co-opting partner organisations to pursue its own policy goals. Even as PISA for Schools seemingly affirms the increased relevance of heterarchies in the creation and delivery of education policy, it also underscores how these horizontal networks are constitutive of, and constituted by, asymmetric power relations, in which ‘all animals [or policy actors] are equal but some are more equal than others’. Although we must guard against reifying the OECD as somehow being a homogeneous and univocal organisation, and thus recognise the presence of individual agency and opinions amongst its employees, my analyses provide further evidence—in support of others before me (see Henry, Lingard, Rizvi, & Taylor, 2001; Sellar & Lingard, 2014)—that the OECD is increasingly operating as a global education policy actor in its own right. PISA for Schools also represents a distinctly new way for the OECD to pursue its education policy agendas, demonstrating the largely epistemic nature of the OECD’s policy influence, and its need to remain ‘ahead of the curve’ in the provision of relevant and useful data to the end users of its policy advice, both current and prospective. We can see here PISA for Schools, and speaking directly to local educators rather than national policymakers, as a clear example of this constant innovation, and part of the expanding education policy work of the OECD.

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However, the ‘blue-sky’ nature of PISA for Schools requires a similarly innovative funding model. Rather than relying on the limited voluntary Part II contributions of countries and economies (as is the case for the main PISA), the OECD has sought and obtained financial support from US philanthropic foundations to develop PISA for Schools, and such private funding has since been used to support the development of other innovative PISA ‘products’, including PISA for Development and PISA4U. These developments suggest an innovative ‘blueprint’ for the OECD to financially support the expansion of its policy influence to an even greater number of spaces and audiences, amongst new and existing users of its data, including non-OECD member economies and local schools and districts. The increased relevance of non-government actors is not simply limited to imaginative funding models, and the accreditation of CTB/McGraw-Hill as the US PISA for Schools administrator (2013–2015) shows how private motives (including profit) have been thoroughly embedded within the education policy cycle. Indeed, it is perhaps inconceivable that the organisations involved in the development and administration of PISA for Schools, including the OECD itself, would do so without apprehending opportunities to further their own policy agendas. However, and whatever else PISA for Schools does, it raises the prospect of education stakeholders (teachers, students, parents and local communities) being discursively constructed in particular ways through private involvement, which potentially limit their options for how schooling reform can be thought and practised. Ultimately, treating PISA for Schools and other similar education services ‘as a product’ produces a potentially ‘dangerous’ (Foucault, 1983) blurring of public and private benefits, with the potential that (private) profit will ultimately trump (public) education.

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Chapter 5

New Cartographies: Relocating Schools in Topological Policy Spaces

Abstract This chapter, the second analytical chapter, investigates the changing spatial relations made possible by PISA for Schools, reflecting the increasingly ‘topological’ nature of contemporary social practices and domains, including education. I contend here that PISA for Schools assumes and constitutes a sense of PISA-mediated isomorphism, creating new relational continuities between participating educators and schools, and between the schools and international schooling systems to which they are compared (PISA for Schools). These similarities, in turn, form the basis for identifying difference, such as differences in student performance, pedagogical practices, policy settings or schooling evidence. It is this production of difference that drives new local imperatives to ‘look around’ at the global, encouraging changes to schooling practice on the basis that schools might become more like the ‘high performing’ schooling systems (e.g., Shanghai-China, Finland) fêted by the OECD. This respatialisation of educational governance also extends the ‘lessons’ from main PISA to schools themselves, constituting a form of ‘PISA to Schools’ that helps the OECD to ‘reach into’ local spaces and influence schooling agendas. I argue this forms the basis for a new mode of global educational governance, which I theorise here as governing through time, difference and potential.

Introduction This chapter examines how PISA for Schools—both the testing instrument and the school report—helps to constitute new global spaces and relations of education policymaking. In particular, it addresses how these emergent relational, or ‘topological’, spatialities enable the OECD to exert its global governance of education in schools and districts. PISA for Schools is analysed here in light of related theorising around the new spatialities associated with globalisation (Amin, 2002), the ‘beThis chapter is derived in part from an article published in British Journal of Sociology of Education; 26 November, 2017; copyright Taylor & Francis; available online: https://www. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2017.1406338; Article https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01425692.2017.1406338. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Lewis, PISA, Policy and the OECD, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8285-1_5

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coming topological’ of culture (Lury et al., 2012) and the associated emergence of ‘power-topologies’ (Allen, 2016). These new topological spatialisations are useful in determining how PISA for Schools helps establish new continuities and equivalences through processes of commensuration, while marking discontinuities and difference through measurement and comparison. The governing modalities associated with PISA for Schools are also considered in the context of the overarching significance of numbers, data and comparison to new modes of educational governance, as well as evidence-based, or ‘evidence-informed’, policymaking. Specifically, this chapter reveals the particular techniques of governance enabled through PISA for Schools and the structure of the chapter reflects this accordingly. The first section demonstrates how PISA for Schools helps the OECD to ‘speak’ directly with the schools and districts that participate in the programme, overcoming a perceived disconnect for local educators between national performances on main PISA and school-level policies. Increasing the relevance of PISA data and comparisons, and the broader policy lessons derived from PISA, is a key mechanism of the OECD’s educational governance, which opens up new possibilities for the OECD to topologically ‘reach into’ local spaces, and for schools to ‘reach out’ to the OECD to inform their own local practice (see Allen & Cochrane, 2010). As such, I argue that PISA for Schools could perhaps be more accurately represented as PISA to Schools, insofar as it provides the OECD with the means to influence how schooling is practised at the level of policy implementation, while limiting mediation by national and/or subnational politics. The remaining section of the chapter details how PISA for Schools reshapes how schools and schooling districts are located within a global space of measurement. I address how PISA for Schools enables commensuration between schools and national, or subnational (e.g., Shanghai-China), schooling systems, and how this elision of contextual difference renders schools and systems exclusively in light of their comparative PISA performance. This provokes an ‘impetus to action’, a future-oriented affective response based on difference, among participating schools, legitimating local policy decisions and making new actions possible through processes of externalisation (Schriewer, 1990; Steiner-Khamsi, 2010), and involving schools and schooling systems using comparative test performance to justify educational reform. I argue here that this represents an evolution of governing through numbers, constituting what I theorise as a mode of governing through time, difference and potential. However, these reforms are often prefigured and (potentially) already underway, meaning that externalisation processes provide a means of obtaining local political legitimation, rather than necessarily informing relevant, and contextually aware, policy learning. This contributes to the development of new spaces and relations of educational governance, which can lead to the marginalisation of alternative, non-PISA renderings of education.

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Achieving School-Level Relevance Through New Audiences As we have seen in the previous chapter, PISA for Schools was developed in the context of main PISA, and its focus on national schooling systems, being of limited value to local educators and policymakers. This is, especially applicable in decentralised schooling systems such as the U.S., where—despite the presence of federal and state education departments—local authorities at the implementation level (schools and school districts) maintain considerable control over policy settings and decision-making (see Lingard & Lewis, 2017). Indeed, a US superintendent who volunteered their district to participate in PISA for Schools suggested this devolved responsibility allowed school and district leaders to be ‘incredibly entrepreneurial’, and largely independent of government intervention: The United States [in terms of education] has been so very decentralised. For a school superintendent in the United States, if you’re in a community that supports you and you are so inclined, you can be incredibly entrepreneurial. You can go out; you can make decisions; you can change curricula enormously. There’s nobody above you who has to approve what you’re doing. I mean, there are laws and regulations that we have to abide by, but I have way more latitude than my counterparts in most of the world.

Of particular relevance here is that the U.S., unlike other federal polities, does not mandate oversampling on main PISA, which means that disaggregated comparisons of national PISA data cannot be made at subnational levels, such as between states (Australia), provinces (Canada) or autonomous communities (Spain).1 State-based US participation in main PISA has been limited to Massachusetts, Connecticut and Florida on PISA 2012, and Massachusetts and North Carolina on PISA 2015. This might be seen as a partial response to this situation, but there are presently no significant moves to initiate a more comprehensive or systematic state-level sampling in the US (Engel & Frizzell, 2015), reflected by no US state electing to participate in PISA 2018, separately from the national sample. It should also be noted here that US states have paid for the privilege of being included 1

In mainland China, several provinces other than Shanghai participated in PISA 2009 and 2012, but the Chinese government only mandated the public release of Shanghai’s results, long desiring Shanghai to be considered a synecdoche for all of China. Additional Chinese city-based jurisdictions participated in PISA 2015, as ‘B-S-J-G (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Guangdong) and PISA 2018, as ‘Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang (China)’. However, this still equates overall Chinese ‘national’ performance on PISA with a small number of eastern metropolitan cities and provinces. In the UK, its constituent parts also pay for oversampling, exemplified by Scotland paying for additional sampling to enable disaggregation from the UK results, and by its separate observer status and representation at PISA Governing Board meetings (see Lingard & Sellar, 2014). Spain has also been an enthusiastic supporter of PISA testing and has historically oversampled to obtain subnational-level results for its autonomous communities (the subnational political unit in Spain), reflecting the devolved responsibility for education. Significantly, this devolved status has been considered in the development of a Spanish variant of PISA for Schools, with the reports modified to permit performance comparisons between schools and their respective autonomous community.

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separately from the national PISA sample, with Florida using funds awarded under the Obama Presidency’s federal Race To The Top (RTTT) initiative to fund their 2012, participation. This historical absence of oversampling and subnational disaggregation of PISA data has thus prevented any ‘local’ differentiation within the broader national performance of the U.S. Furthermore, the intergovernmental character of the OECD, particularly in terms of its funding providers (for instance, the US Department of State) and its committee structure (generally peopled by federal government officials and representatives), has arguably encouraged a readier association between the OECD and national governments. These constraints have limited the extent to which PISA, and the OECD’s education policy work more broadly, can be discussed as an object of policy learning or performance reference within subnational US education spaces, and especially at the school and district level. The collection of main PISA data in the U.S. has thus been of limited use to teachers and administrators working within schools and districts, both for its limited ability to provide local policymakers with ‘actionable’ data and for the difficulty in apportioning responsibility (and blame?) to individual schools for national performance. A US superintendent remarked on the considerable concern amongst ‘local’ educators about the potential utility of ‘national’ PISA: It’s great or it’s not so great that your country does ‘X’ [its performance on main PISA], but how do you know where you as a school district or you as a state or you as a province stand? And until you have something that can come down to a local level, it’s difficult to have it be useable for policymakers who would actually change instructional programmes.

In terms of encouraging the development of PISA for Schools in the US context, these misgivings were not confined to schools and districts, but were also expressed by their professional networks and learning communities. A representative of EdLeader21, a professional learning community comprising 220 member-districts in 32 US states (many of which, it should be noted, have since participated in PISA for Schools), similarly suggested that there was little benefit for its members to participate in main PISA or to even give much consideration to the US national results: One of our complaints about the main PISA was that it gave us some country-level information about key measures of problem-solving in US education, and US student performance on problem-solving and things like that, but it didn’t really lend itself to any kind of district or school-level change. It was only an instrument that could affect things on a [national] policy level. (Emphasis added)

The perceived irrelevance of main PISA for schools and districts was a key impediment to the OECD exercising any significant influence over how schooling might be locally practised, both in terms of how individual schools contribute to the national performance or, for that matter, how insights from PISA might be best appropriated to inform local reform initiatives. Somewhat paradoxically, we can see an apparent de-coupling between the OECD’s practice of measuring aggregated school performance at the system level via main PISA, and the inability of such measurement to ‘lend itself to any kind of

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district or school-level change’. Schooling system performance on main PISA clearly reflects the performance of its constituent schools, and yet national PISA results have historically provided little, if any, impetus to reform policies and practices at the local level, where most policymaking authority in the U.S. is still retained. Given the extensive and well-documented normative effects of main PISA on national policymaking processes (Breakspear, 2012; Fischman, Topper, Silova, Goebel, & Holloway, 2019; Rautalin, Alasuutari, & Vento, 2019), and its prevalence in global media discussions of school system performance and reform (Baroutsis & Lingard, 2017; Martens & Niemann, 2013; Waldow, Takayama, & Sung, 2014), there was a clear incentive for the OECD to encourage the local uptake of PISA; or, to achieve what one OECD policy analyst described as ‘democratising PISA’. However, this process of ‘democratisation’ arguably also provides the OECD with the capacity to increase its own influence beyond the national ‘policy level’, to now include the ‘implementation level’ of schools and districts. As such, a central rationale for the OECD in developing PISA for Schools was to broaden the relevance of PISA data to local educators and policymakers, providing a direct connection between the OECD and participating schools to make PISA, and its policy implications, accessible to a ‘wider audience’ (see OECD, 2013b, p. 2). These developments reflect what Sellar and Lingard (2014), describe as the rescaling of the PISA assessment, where the OECD has sought to expand who (systems, schools) is measured by PISA beyond the current complement of national (and subnational) spaces. An OECD policy analyst explained how PISA for Schools represents an opportunity to increase the potential uptake of the school-level assessment beyond the OECD membership, extending, in turn, its own policy influence: Some of the countries that are interested [in PISA for Schools] are non-OECD countries and for the moment we have, the PISA Governing Board has set, a policy for this test to only use it in OECD countries. But there are – at the last PGB meeting there were – discussions about opening it up to non-OECD countries… The programme would be a lot more valuable once we have more countries.2 (Emphasis added)

We can see PISA for Schools as a clear manifestation of the OECD’s desire to expand what PISA measures to new local and national sites outside of current OECD members, enabling the OECD to influence schooling policy and practice in a larger number of spaces. Arguably, this expansion of the programme makes PISA for Schools ‘a lot more valuable’ for the OECD, rather than necessarily benefitting participating schools and districts. For instance, the development of a Castilian-Spanish version of PISA for Schools presents an interesting opportunity for the OECD to extend its

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Of the 11 jurisdictions where PISA for Schools is currently available, only four (Mexico, Spain, UK, U.S.) are OECD members. The remaining seven non-member countries (Andorra, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, mainland China, Colombia, Russia and the United Arab Emirates) would suggest the strategy of expanding PISA for Schools has been successful.

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education policy influence and relevance into the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America.3 A senior official at the Instituto Nacional de Evaluación Educativa (INEE), the federal agency responsible for PISA and PISA for Schools within Spain’s Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, openly spoke of the potential importance of these developments for the programme’s future expansion into new ‘markets’: The pilot test of PISA for Schools in Spain, and the subsequent development of materials and technical procedures, has a special significance because the version in the Castilian language will facilitate the adoption of the PISA for Schools assessment by Spanish-speaking countries – [that is,] Mexico, Central and South American countries.

In light of these comments, developing a school-level complement to the main PISA study, and making it accessible to countries beyond the OECD, might encourage non-member countries participating in main PISA to undertake PISA for Schools, opening up further local policy spaces to the influence of the OECD. Given that the original cohort of participants in PISA 2000 (28 OECD members and 4 non-members), has since expanded to all OECD countries and some 43 additional non-member economies in PISA 2018, it is plausible that the OECD would follow a similar path and make PISA for Schools available to as many non-member countries as possible. This would enable the OECD to exert a more extensive (i.e., more national spaces) and, at the same time, more intensive (i.e., more local spaces) level of education policy influence and relevance. Such an elision of traditional territorial borders and spaces provides a clear articulation of the ‘becoming topological’ (Lury et al., 2012) in contemporary culture, where relational continuities between the OECD and schools can overcome the apparent discontinuities of geography and distance.

‘Reaching Out Farther’: Increasing the OECD’s Policy ‘Reach’ Further to increasing PISA’s relevance to local educators, another key governing modality of PISA for Schools is its ability to bypass the traditional education authorities of national policy spaces, enabling the OECD to ‘speak’ directly with schools and districts. In the context of the devolved responsibility for education in the U.S., PISA for Schools represents a somewhat unique opportunity for the OECD to provide its policy advice directly to local educators, where it can arguably have the greatest influence on school-level practices. This contrasts starkly with the largely mediated uptake of main PISA by national (and sometimes state level) In Spain, PISA for Schools has been developed and piloted in the four official ‘national’ languages—Castilian, Catalan, Galician and Basque—so students can receive PISA for Schools in the language of instruction for their Autonomous Community. This process mirrors that undertaken for preparing the main PISA study in Spain.

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politics, in which the ‘lessons from PISA’ are inflected before reaching, and thus influencing, the local. Such a vernacular process (Appadurai, 1996) modifies the OECD’s policy message according to local circumstances, thereby reducing its ‘as intended’ uptake by, and influence on, schools and local educators. For example, the historically apathetic response of US policymakers at the national and state level could be seen as a possible reason why main PISA, and the broader educational policy work of the OECD, has yet to trickle down impactfully to local schooling spaces. Despite the relative increase in attention paid to PISA by the U.S., since the unprecedented (and unexpected) stellar performance of Shanghai-China in 2009, which President Obama described as a contemporary ‘Sputnik moment’ (Sellar & Lingard, 2013), an executive of a US philanthropic foundation funding PISA for Schools explained how: … in the US, there was almost no attention paid to it [main PISA] in the national media, and certainly not regional or local media. It was just ‘off the radar’ from our perspective. In 2009, there was a front-page story in the New York Times about Shanghai, about how they’d never taken it and all of a sudden, they were at the top. That was about the extent of it. We thought, there’s clearly respect for the OECD, respect for PISA, but not wide knowledge about it among the public or even policymakers. So, we thought there was an opportunity there.

This lack of concerted US political and media focus, particularly at the national level, meant that PISA was largely inconsequential, or ‘off the radar’, for many local educators, limiting the OECD’s ability to influence school and district-level policymaking. However, there is no such intervening political or media prism to distort the policy message of the OECD with PISA for Schools, as the performance data and analyses are delivered directly, and confidentially, to an individual school. Consequently, the OECD can disseminate its policy message and influence to the school site, and exert considerable influence on local policymaking and practice with minimal political interference. PISA for Schools thus serves as an effective conduit of the OECD’s policy messages to local schooling spaces precisely because it makes PISA, and the OECD, relationally proximal and relevant. This reconfiguration of educational discourses and policies at one space (the OECD) help effect a similar reconfiguration at another (schools and districts) (Lewis & Lingard, 2015; Thompson & Cook, 2015). Another philanthropic executive whose foundation co-funded PISA for Schools invoked this same topological reasoning when they suggested PISA’s increased local policy relevance brought the OECD directly into the policymaking activities of schools and districts, making PISA for Schools an effective catalyst for driving local reform agendas: The [main] PISA results, writ broadly at the national level, were something that wake us up, and we all get mad about it or happy about it depending on how we do, but they feel very abstract and disconnected [at the school level]. It’s something you can just kind of let roll off: ‘It doesn’t really affect me; it’s not my school; my school’s great!’… So, if you get that same result at the same time in your own school, that’s much more of a ‘wake-up call’. It just brings it home. It makes it concrete.

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Providing such an affective local response, a concrete ‘wake-up call’, through targeted school-level data and comparisons enables the OECD, through PISA for Schools, to influence education policy and practice in a way not previously possible with the abstract and ‘disconnected’ national measurements of main PISA. Drawing together these threads of analysis, I would argue that PISA for Schools should perhaps be more appropriately named PISA to Schools. PISA to Schools suggests how the instrument provides the OECD with the means to directly insert the ‘lessons from PISA’ within the local policy spaces of schools and districts. The concept of PISA to Schools also captures how the OECD, via PISA, is prepositioned as the universal and magisterial arbiter of ‘what counts’, in terms of knowing how education is best understood and practised, implying schools must react to the one-way traffic of the OECD’s performance measures and policy lessons. Moreover, PISA for Schools suggests a passivity on behalf of the OECD, insofar as the Organisation is merely offering a school-based version for local educators to use, whereas PISA to Schools arguably invokes a more purposeful, and intentional, extension of PISA into local schooling spaces. In this sense, the OECD can also work as a dominant policy actor, despite only being a single node in a network of relationships. Regardless of the preposition ultimately used to describe school-level PISA, these emergent relationships between the global and the local position otherwise distant schools ‘close-at-hand’ to the OECD, and alongside national and subnational systems, within a commensurate education field constituted by PISA measurements and comparisons (Lingard & Rawolle, 2011). This invokes the notion of ‘power-topologies’ (Allen, 2011) and their ability to topologically enfold the global (the OECD and PISA) into the local (schools and teachers), permitting the OECD to ‘reach into’ school-level spaces in an attempt to ‘steer and constrain agendas’ (Allen & Cochrane, 2010, p. 1075). For example, a PGB interviewee noted that PISA for Schools was an ideal opportunity for the OECD to ‘reach out farther’ in order to proselytise their schooling policies to a wider audience of local educators: My perception is that they’re [the OECD] still really wanting to be the ones who are doing the analysis and saying, ‘This is what we think is the right policy for countries and schools to be doing’. They’re just wanting to reach out farther, is my guess, in the promulgation of their own policies… I think these [schools] are all audiences, really, for them. (Emphasis added)

The expansion of the OECD’s policy work through PISA for Schools—building its ability to ‘reach out farther’—reflects how such large-scale assessments and international comparisons enable what Thompson and Cook (2014), describe as ‘ever-increasing data-capture’. This is in terms of the ‘capture of data’, with PISA being undertaken at more locations and different scales, and ‘capture through data’, where such measurements increasingly influence and determine how schooling is practised. I would argue that this reach, and the forming of new topological relations with local schooling sites, facilitates the formation of epistemic communities with shared values and norms (Kallo, 2009), establishing a platform from which the OECD can

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promote ‘authorised’ narratives and vocabularies around education policy. These epistemic communities are a key technique of educational governance, where ‘the diffusion of new ideas and information can lead to new patterns of behaviour’ (Haas, 1992, p. 3), and PISA for Schools arguably helps provide the requisite ‘new ideas and information’ from the OECD to schools and districts. Significantly, it is this positioning of the OECD’s policy lessons directly to schools that makes possible ‘new patterns of behaviour’, where international comparisons and ‘lessons from PISA’ can inform new local ways of thinking and practising schooling. These epistemic communities, created through PISA and extended through PISA for Schools, help the OECD to determine what Foucault (1994), describes as ‘conditions of possibility’; that is, the characteristics that define a system of scientific knowledge through ‘its domain of objects, to the type of language it uses, to the concepts it has at its disposal or it is seeking to establish’ (p. 526). Such communities enable the OECD to discursively define ‘schooling’ and ‘performance’, and to disseminate these constructions, via PISA for Schools, to a presumably receptive audience (after all, PISA for Schools is voluntary), while at the same time excluding other non-OECD possibilities. As such, PISA is positioned to local educators as the data that can best ‘perform’ (Lyotard, 1984), to improve schooling outcomes. We can also note here Rose’s (1999), salient point about how data, and especially numerical data, can be used to ‘black box’ complex decisions, which renders such judgements invisible and incontestable.

Measure, then Improve: Determining the Data that Counts It is also worthwhile elaborating here on the ‘voluntary’ nature of PISA for Schools, and how US schools are under no obligation from national or state education authorities, or (for that matter) the OECD, to participate in the assessment. PISA for Schools is discursively positioned as something valid and necessary for schools to willingness seek, in which the OECD helps encourage the concept of international benchmarking, rather than the product of PISA for Schools (or PISA) itself. Indeed, a senior OECD official went to great lengths to suggest that the Organisation maintains an extremely passive role around ‘offering’ PISA, and by extension PISA for Schools, to prospective schools and systems: PISA is an offer. It has not so much to do with the OECD because, actually, PISA has twice as many members as the OECD. I think it’s an offer, and I think there is clearly in many countries [and schools] the sense that ‘we need to see ourselves on a global picture’, so I expect take-up to increase further… You know, we have never – I actually should say this – we have never written a letter to any country [or school] saying, ‘Please participate in PISA’. (Emphasis added)

Such statements clearly demonstrate the ‘soft power’ (Nye, 2004), approach of the OECD, with schools and systems encouraged (rather than coerced) into adopting certain PISA policy lessons, and more generally, the concept of

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international benchmarking and comparative performance data. Prospective PISA participants—those who ‘need to see [themselves] on a global picture’—are self-prompted to approach the OECD without the OECD having to explicitly invite prospective schools and systems. I see this aligning with Foucault’s (1983), thesis that the exercise of power relations, the ‘conduct of conduct’, can only occur when the subject is free to determine their own conduct. Freedom is thus not the polar opposite of power, but rather, its precondition, whereby ‘power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free’ (p. 221). Undoubtedly, what we can observe with PISA for Schools are educators and policymakers, and the schools and schooling systems they ultimately help constitute, being willing participants in their own subjection to PISA performance measures and international comparisons. However, it is important to note that these PISA for School data are not somehow inherently ‘objective’, but instead actively constitute the very phenomena they purport to represent (see Desrosières, 1998; Hacking, 1986; Porter, 1995), with these data being deeply complicit in determining how schooling is inscribed and understood. This privileging of quantitative data, and especially particular types of quantitative data (i.e., internationally-comparative, PISA-referenced, OECDsourced), means that schools will potentially only be able to perceive themselves through the prism afforded by their PISA for Schools performance. Indeed, PISA for Schools is seemingly positioned by the OECD not just as a measure of school performance but as the measure of school performance, thereby marginalising other possible representations or modes of schooling accountability. This position is clearly articulated by the telling comments of the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher about the (supposedly) key role that PISA data play in school improvement agendas: ‘We cannot improve what we can’t measure’. Invoking the same generic management mantra, a key OECD publication promoting PISA for Schools to local educators is entitled International benchmarking for school improvement (OECD, 2013a), as if being measurable is somehow a necessary prerequisite for a school to be improvable.4 This axiom of ‘measure, then improve’ is not limited to the OECD itself, but is also seemingly prevalent amongst its partner organisations. Notwithstanding Goodhart’s (1984) Law, whereby ‘any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes’ (p. 96), a US philanthropic foundation executive made the following observations about the apparently beneficial effects of counting enabled by PISA for Schools: I’m a huge believer in the phrase, Tell me how you measure me and I’ll tell you how I behave. Especially in the U.S., assessment has taken a really overwhelming form of

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However, this discourse is not unanimously accepted by local educators in the U.S. A district-level administrator made the following rather revealing comments about measurement not necessarily leading to improvement in schooling outcomes: ‘The United States is in a testing frenzy. Our students probably—and I’m not exaggerating—have six different external assessments a year. The story everybody likes to tell is the farmer who wanted to make sure that the underweight pig gained weight by weighing it every day. Weighing a pig does not make it gain weight! Testing kids doesn’t help them learn and maybe we’re weighing our pigs just a little too much!’.

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influence in classrooms. Because everything – from whether a school is succeeding or failing to whether teachers are succeeding or failing – is based upon test scores here, so it has an outsized influence on school systems. More generally, the first step towards improvement is measurement’. (Emphasis added)

This promotion of a common policy discourse around test and data-driven education reform by various members of the PISA for Schools policy network produces a ‘convergence of methods’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012) around the primacy of numerical data. While rejecting any crude qualitative/progressive and quantitative/reactionary binary (see Dimitriadis, 2012), and acknowledging Piketty’s (2014), timely warning that ‘refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off’ (p. 577), one must nonetheless draw attention to how large-scale performance data, such as that produced by PISA for Schools, frequently come to define, at least in an educational sense, ‘what counts’. This is both in terms of how schooling is thought and practised, and how teacher identity and pedagogy are subsequently constituted. This key policy discourse—that improving schooling performance can only be achieved through measurement—is promoted by the OECD throughout its epistemic communities and policy networks, meaning that a very specific conception of ‘evidence-based’ policymaking is emphasised amongst schools and districts already engaged in, and thus putatively supporting, the collection of PISA for Schools ‘evidence’. Opening up of school-level policies, practices and performance to PISA scrutiny may increase the frequency with which PISA for Schools can inform local policymaking, making the OECD increasingly influential in the process. On this point, a US district administrator suggested that participating in PISA for Schools had significantly changed how the district approached the planning of future policy reform, especially in relation to curriculum, professional development and the determination of school ‘success’: Yes, at the district level, very much so. I’ve been disseminating it [PISA for Schools data] to our curriculum and professional development people and said, ‘This is where we’re going. Here’s the forecast for your future two or three years down the road’. It’s more than just the awareness. It’s the very different way that we determine that a school is successful. (Emphasis added)

This demonstrates the ideational modes of the OECD’s global governance of education—what Sellar and Lingard (2014), describe as epistemological governance—that are exercised through the promotion (and relative dominance) of the Organisation’s education policy discourses and comparative performance data. Such direct ideational connections with geographically dispersed schools and districts enable the OECD to enfold itself into local policymaking spaces, in order to ‘structure, constrain and enable the circulation of ideas and give “institutional force” to policy utterances’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 11). We can also see here the productive capacity of power-topologies, insofar as these normative data-driven discourses help constitute the very networks by which such epistemological modes of governance are exercised.

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This reflects how the OECD draws upon the reputation of its existing policy work, including main PISA, to position itself as a policy expert to local schooling sites. For example, a PGB interviewee foresaw that participating schools would be attracted to PISA for Schools, and hence be amenable to the OECD’s policy influence, largely on account of the new programme’s association with the globally venerable ‘PISA brand’: I think it’s important that [PISA for Schools] is aligned to PISA as well and it’s got that PISA moniker… PISA certainly is a real brand name. It’s a quality product and that shines through. And yes, anything that is vaguely a big assessment is now ‘PISA for this, PISA for that’… I think what PISA has is this ability to capture the imagination in a way that a lot of other products out there haven’t. (Emphasis added)

Similarly, an OECD senior manager asserted that such PISA ‘brand awareness’ is prevalent amongst most school-level educators, especially in the UK and U.S., where PISA for Schools has already been piloted and fully implemented, noting that ‘when I was first involved with PISA, schools in England—the majority of them—hadn’t heard of it. I don’t think you’ll find many now who haven’t heard of it’. PISA for Schools thus builds upon the already extensive public awareness of the PISA brand, especially amongst local educators and policymakers who can make significant changes to schooling policy and practice at the implementation level. The voluntary nature of the PISA for Schools instrument also means the new-found relational proximity between schools and the OECD can help overcome the traditional uncertainty often felt by local US educators towards large-scale assessments of student performance (see Berliner, 2013; Hursh, 2008; Ravitch, 2010). Given the testing saturation reported by American teachers (and students), it is interesting that PISA for Schools has proceeded with the greatest rapidity in the U.S. By contrast, a national PGB representative reflected on the usual difficulty of ‘compelling’ US schools to be involved in the triennial main PISA test: [Schools] don’t have a choice of whether you want to be in the [main] PISA sample, you’re randomly drawn… We have a lot of trouble sampling PISA schools. We’re always right at the border of too few schools to get a [national] score.

Another national representative to the PGB supported such an assertion, in which the targeted nature of PISA for Schools overcame local reluctance to engage in main PISA and the OECD’s educational policy work: We feel that there is a certain, for some years – how shall I put it? A mistrust of international data and evidence… That is the whole point of [PISA for Schools] being school-driven. If they want it they will pay for it, and it’s not a ‘shoving it down their throat’.

PISA for Schools thus facilitates the dissemination of the OECD’s policy work and the ability of local schooling spaces to willingly draw PISA within close reach, in order to legitimate local policy decisions and make new actions possible. In a related manner, PISA for Schools may also help schools and districts to ‘indigenise’ (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004) such global developments into local contexts, in which education policies from elsewhere are taken up and embedded (albeit with a local

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inflection) within the policy borrower’s school and/or district. Significantly, both instances of policy reach—reaching in (by the OECD) and reaching out (by schools and districts)—expand the audience of receptive local educators to the OECD’s policy influence but without, importantly, ‘shoving [PISA] down their throat’. By driving the emergence of these new topological and epistemic spaces, the measurements enabled by PISA for Schools reveal new possibilities, problematics and imperatives for action to participating schools, based on their comparative performance against international PISA benchmarks and international schooling systems. It is this ability to form continuities between physically dispersed schools and schooling systems that furthers the relevance and ‘reach’ of main PISA, and the OECD more generally, to schools and districts: a PISA to Schools that actively creates new opportunities for the OECD to govern how local education policy spaces can be known, measured and practised.

Commensuration and Crises of Perception Given the aforementioned ability of the OECD to ‘reach into’ local schooling spaces and exert policy influence, a key consideration then is how such influence helps govern local schooling practices. Here, I contend that the processes of commensuration enabled by PISA for Schools—between geographies and polities, and schools and schooling systems—and the corresponding identification of difference, or ‘discontinuities’ (Lury et al., 2012), are integral steps in the OECD’s creation of new possibilities for local educators. Commensuration, or the ‘transformation of different qualities into a common metric’ (Espeland & Stevens, 1998, p. 314), is by no means a wholly recent phenomenon. Indeed, these data help inscribe the very spaces they purport to represent, achieving what has been described as the ‘the mutual construction of statistics and society’ (Sætnan, Lomell and Hammer, 2011, p. 1). However, while the productive capacities of numbers—including PISA for Schools data—are largely beyond question, it is worth problematising precisely what is produced in these processes of commensuration, and particularly how these common spaces of measurement frequently ‘render some aspects of life invisible or irrelevant’ (Espeland & Stevens, 1998, p. 314). As Ball (2003) argues in his examination of performativity upon the ‘soul’ of the teacher, such data-driven commensuration helps translate ‘complex social processes and events into simple figures or categories of judgement’ (p. 217), albeit with often considerable consequences for the teacher as subject and for how ‘teaching’ itself is constituted (see Hardy, 2015; Holloway, 2019; Lewis & Hardy, 2017; Lewis & Holloway, 2019). Moreover, abstracting will ‘unavoidably omit many features of the world, distort others and potentially add features that are not apparent in the first instance. Outcomes will unavoidably channel users towards some kinds of inferences and/or actions more readily than others’ (Lycett, 2013, p. 384; emphasis added). It is these dual effects

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of commensuration, simultaneously reductive and productive, that help to illuminate how PISA for Schools enables the governance of education. A key governing modality of PISA for Schools is its ability to facilitate international school-to-system (and potentially school-to-school) comparisons, situating participating schools and schooling systems within a common ‘global education policy field’ (Lingard & Rawolle, 2011). Importantly, this also allows their local performance to be evaluated against notionally ‘high performing’ or ‘fast improving’ schooling systems, as determined by the results of main PISA (e.g., Singapore, Finland). While certainly not the first time that data have helped produce commensurate policy spaces, the inclusion of individual schools within this data-driven ‘global panopticism’ (Lingard, Martino, & Rezai-Rashti, 2013) arguably marks a significant development. Here, international comparisons between schools, nation-states and economies provide the means for schools to gauge how well they prepare their students to participate in the global economy: In a global economy, the benchmark for educational success is no longer progress by state standards alone, but the best performing education systems internationally. With this new OECD Test [PISA for Schools], schools now have the tools to see themselves in the light of what the world’s educational leaders show can be achieved. (OECD, 2019, np)

In this sense, the OECD presents PISA for Schools as a logical ‘next step’ for local policymakers and educators, being a voluntary and efficient means to obtain knowledge on school performance in the same way that main PISA purportedly ‘evaluates’ national systems. However, unlike main PISA, where school participation is largely limited to randomly sampled sites, any school possessing the necessary desire, and financial means, can participate in PISA for Schools. These schools and districts can then receive the imprimatur of the OECD, demonstrating to local, and national, stakeholders that they are a ‘world-class’ institution that adequately prepares its students for ‘educational success’ in the global economy.5 The ability of PISA for Schools to produce legitimate and internationally recognised ‘proof’ of a school’s performance may thus make such evidence a valued commodity for local communities, and especially for schools that do well in relation to national ‘under-performance’. According to the logic of the OECD, school performance can now no longer be sufficiently assessed within the nation, but must now also be globally competitive in order to demonstrate success, further construing—and bestowing meaning to— education through the lens of a ‘global eye’, as well as the ‘national eye’ (Nóvoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003). As evident from the comments of a US principal whose school participated in the PISA for Schools trial, these comparisons not only situate schools within a global space, but also, importantly, create the impetus for local action and reform, based on their relative global ‘success’:

‘World-class’ is an anodyne, ill-defined concept, an empty signifier that seems to circulate uncritically in the contemporary education policy space and which, I would argue, needs some critical attention in the policy literature.

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[PISA for Schools] came out as an opportunity and the first thing I thought of is, I have a ton of information on how we do relative to others students in the state [and] I have a good amount of information on how we do compared to the rest of the United States. What I don’t have is information on how we do globally. I wanted to know: How do we do as a school? Are my faculty members preparing our students to compete against the rest of the world, because that’s what their post-collegiate life is going to look like?… If not, then what do I need to change? (Emphasis added)

In a similar manner, a US superintendent whose district participated in PISA for Schools suggested how the mean performance scores for reading, mathematics and science presented in the school reports helped create a perceived need to improve against ‘successful’ global benchmarks: When you look at the content side of things—math, science and reading scores—you actually get a lot of detail in there. One is your aggregate score, so you can see how you rank against Singapore and blah blah blah. That is actually very useful because it gives you one snapshot that says, ‘Man [sic], you’ve got some work to do!’

What we have here then is a clear link between a school’s relative performance on PISA for Schools prompting changes to local policy and practice, and broader neoliberal notions of the individual—and the organisations such individuals constitute—as self-governing and self-responsibilising (see Rose, 1999). These school and district staff, and schools more generally, have been construed as entities wholly and solely accountable for their ability to improve student-learning outcomes, with their conduct managed and regulated through continual self-appraisal. In this sense, ‘poor’ comparative performance on PISA for Schools, under the ever-watchful gaze of the ‘global eye’, can catalyse and rationalise school-level reform in the same way that national educational crises—think here A Nation at Risk in the U.S. (Hursh, 2013; Takayama, 2007), or ‘PISA shock’ in Germany and Japan (Ertl, 2006; Grek, 2009; Takayama, 2008)—are often used to instigate bouts of neoliberal reform in education (Slater, 2014). As noted somewhat presciently by Milton Friedman (2002), in relation to the stimulatory effects of crisis within neoliberal society, ‘only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change’ (p. ix), with such crisis discourses frequently appropriated to legitimate local schooling reform. We might, therefore, consider these crises of perception, or ‘PISA shocks’, to produce what Deleuze and Guattari (2013), describe as an ‘incorporeal transformation’; that is, the acts internal to language. Just as an individual is transformed from ‘accused’ to ‘convicted’ by the judge’s verdict in a courtroom, so too can we see the instantaneous semiotic transformation of a school—from ‘nationally successful’ to ‘internationally lagging behind’—on account of the performance comparisons effected by PISA for Schools. The judgement that ‘this school is lagging behind’ inheres entirely within the proposition (‘is lagging behind’), and indeed nothing physically changes in relation to the school, its teachers and students. However, the enunciation ‘is lagging behind’, backed by the authority of the OECD, is a transformative event that changes what the school, its teachers and students are, not at the level of the body, but rather at the level of expression, thus enabling certain actions and schooling reforms to now be possible.

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However, the imperative for communities to compare their school’s performance against global educational leaders is not solely driven by local educators, but rather, is central to the raison d’être of PISA for Schools. Speaking in a New York Times feature article, Andreas Schleicher provides a utopian (or perhaps dystopian?) vision of how PISA for Schools might be deployed in the future as a means of externalising local reform agendas: Imagine, in a few years you could sign onto a website and see, ‘This is how my school compares with a similar school anywhere in the world’… And then you take this information to your local superintendent and ask, ‘Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland?’ (Friedman, 2012, np)

This reflects how the disposition of policymakers and educators is now arguably centred upon ‘looking around’, both nationally and internationally, in order to compare and supposedly learn from others (Lingard, Martino, Rezai-Rashti, & Sellar, 2016; Simons, 2015). This is where one’s own schooling system, or school, is positioned globally on performance league tables (e.g., PISA, PISA for Schools), and within systems in relation to the performance of others (e.g., the National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in Australia). Moreover, such ‘looking around’ is mutual, and simultaneously inwards and outwards. Different schools and systems look to external performance benchmarks (such as PISA), while such schools and systems are themselves subjected to the global gaze cast over the commensurate spaces of measurement constituted by international comparative data. Herein lies the central premise of PISA for Schools and main PISA more broadly: culturally different, and geographically distant, schooling systems and schools can be measured, and known, by reference to common assessment frameworks (PISA proficiency levels), learning domains (reading, mathematics and science literacy) and contextual factors (school and student background questionnaires). This creates a situation where school performance is not only able to be compared, but, in fact, should be compared, and where such comparisons are seen as a valid way of informing schooling policies through the local ‘looking around’ at the global.

Local School = International School System? It is also worth noting how the data most readily apparent to PISA for Schools participants are their mean student performance scores in the domains of reading, mathematics and science, which are presented towards the front of the school report, before any other contextualising information or caveats around the limitations of such data. This preferential positioning of mean performance data encourages schools, arguably, to disproportionately focus on these reductive data points, and ignore other potentially more nuanced (and informative) school-level measurements in the report (e.g., student attitudes towards reading). Demonstrating

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precisely this point, a US assistant superintendent noted how their school district’s attention was primarily directed towards the mean performance scores reported in PISA for Schools, meaning that they focused, in effect, on only 4 out of the report’s 160 pages: I’ve just got to be honest. Out of 160 pages, I flipped through the first report and saw that all the rest of them are almost identical. For all of the campuses, it was the exact same format. So, then I went straight to pages 13 to 16 and pulled that from each one of the schools’ reports, because that’s where you can see the specific data comparisons [tables and graphs of mean school performance scores for reading, mathematics and science]. I didn’t really look at the rest of the stuff because there was way too much wording [and] way too much content. (Emphasis added)

While the responsibility for this district-level response to PISA for Schools (‘I didn’t really look at the rest of the stuff’) has little to do with the express directions of the OECD, it does nonetheless reveal the danger of local educators attributing undue importance to overly simplified mean performance data. The tension surrounding the relative (un)importance of mean performance data in PISA for Schools in many ways parallels that present in the reporting of system performance in main PISA, where the highly publicised reporting of aggregated scores and rankings largely impedes the possibility for PISA data to provoke a more nuanced conversation around education reform. However, I would also draw attention to the fact the OECD has final authority over the design of the PISA for Schools reports in every national context and thus the prioritised location of mean scores is, ultimately, the decision of the Organisation. If the OECD did earnestly wish to downplay the significance attributed to average performance scores, then perhaps these data might be presented somewhat less conspicuously in the PISA for Schools report. The simplifying role that PISA for Schools must necessarily play in rendering complex and abstract qualities, like ‘education’ and ‘performance’, commensurable can thus lead to the problematic ‘oversimplification of more complex contexts and issues’ (Wiseman, 2010, p. 4). For instance, local variation (outside of performance) is largely obscured or ignored when school system rankings are produced every three years through main PISA. Gorur and Wu (2015) contend that PISA ranks all participating systems as commensurable (and comparable) units of analysis, irrespective of whether they are cities, subnational polities (e.g., states, provinces) or nation-states. Similarly, Engel and Frizzell (2015), note the isomorphism between national and subnational policy spaces in Canada and the U.S., when their respective schooling systems are ranked via main PISA. However, the enhanced granularity of PISA for Schools has further extended this commensuration between different units of analysis to an unprecedented level, as evident in the comments of an executive from America Achieves: What we learned about individual schools [via PISA for Schools] was striking. We did see some schools with [a] very ‘average’ student body, in terms of their demographics, that performed top of the world: beat out Shanghai in their scores. And so, that’s really important for people to know, that American students can do that… We have some schools here: top of the world… They broke the top 10, the top 10 countries in reading, so if they

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were a country they would have broken the top 10, which is far above where the US often is. (Emphasis added)

Arguably, one can see the commensuration here between the national and subnational schooling systems measured by main PISA, and the individual sites assessed via PISA for Schools. It would otherwise be impossible to contemplate a single US school ‘beat[ing] out Shanghai’ without first creating relations between notionally different entities by way of a common metric, turning qualities into quantities and differences into magnitudes (Espeland & Stevens, 1998). Although the above interviewee presumably recognises the difference between an individual school with 85 student respondents and a national schooling system of thousands (‘if they were a country’), one can still observe a clear conflation of the performance measured by PISA and PISA for Schools. Evident here then are the reductive effects of an overly-simplifying commensuration that represents complex qualities in terms of a common quantity (e.g., PISA proficiency levels), in which some aspects of the data—such that schools are not national schooling systems—are necessarily omitted to enable standardisation and comparability. Indeed, this (supposed) equivalence between schools and systems is strongly promulgated by the OECD in the official PISA for Schools report, in which commensuration is positioned as necessary so that schools can determine how they ‘compare internationally’: How do students at your school compare internationally? This section places your school’s performance in the context of a selected group of 12 countries and education systems from around the world, most of which are top-performing or have undertaken significant reforms, and have seen rapid improvements in learning outcomes as measured by the main PISA studies. (OECD, 2012, p. 89)

Despite the challenges that undoubtedly exist when drawing comparisons between different units of analysis on main PISA and PISA for Schools (see, for instance, Gorur & Wu, 2015), the OECD has made a variety of local and national schooling spaces commensurate so that their performance can be assessed within a common PISA metric. Whether such comparisons are useful or can provide valuable insights to inform school-level reform is somewhat of a moot point. Rather more relevant is that these school-to-system comparisons exist and can clearly affect how school performance is understood with respect to global benchmarking, in terms of PISA for Schools making certain actions possible, or even ‘necessary’, at the local level. While other measures of school performance data within commensurate spaces of measurement, such as Australia’s NAPLAN, have served as a type of ‘catalyst data’ to promote reforms at a systemic (Lingard & Sellar, 2013) and school level (Hardy & Lewis, 2018; Lewis & Hardy, 2015), I would argue that the performance comparisons enabled by PISA for Schools provide one of the first international data-driven catalysts of school-level reform. What we can see at work here is the influence of the ‘becoming topological’ (Lury et al., 2012) of cultural life through ‘practices of sorting, naming, numbering, comparing, listing, and calculating’ (p. 4), with PISA for Schools creating new relational continuities between the schools and the systems assessed by PISA. In

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this way, schools are considered conceptually similar, or isomorphic, with other schools ‘anywhere in the world’, as well as with the schooling systems against which they are compared. The formation of such school and system isomorphism through PISA for Schools also helps to ‘mark discontinuities through repeated contrasts’ (Lury et al., 2012, p. 4), and especially the differences between a school’s performance and that of ‘high performing’ systems.

Constructing Isomorphism in PISA for Schools It is worth noting this isomorphism and commensuration across schools and systems, and different national and local contexts, is not merely assumed by the OECD and PISA for Schools, but is rather actively constituted through accounting for differential item functioning (DIF), or item bias, in test design and construction (see Sellar & Lingard, 2015; Zumbo, 2007). On this point, Espeland (2002), usefully acknowledges the reductive and productive capacities of commensuration, noting that if ‘we understand commensuration as measuring something “out there”, we fail to grasp its constitutive power’ (p. 68). When assessment items for international comparative assessments like PISA for Schools (and PISA) are field-trialled, items that produce a great discrepancy in student responses between national contexts— possibly on account of cultural and curricula differences—are deleted from the available item pool. For example, the PISA for Schools technical report notes how an accredited national provider must conduct three types of statistical item analyses during preliminary field trials—(1) item response model fit, (2) discrimination coefficients and (3) differences in national and international item difficulty—to identify what the OECD deems ‘dodgy items’ (see OECD, 2015, pp. 39–40). Such ‘dodgy items’, or those for which national student responses are significantly different from the ‘international’ responses predicted when items are developed, are subsequently discarded from the pool of items used in the final operational version of the assessment. This is the technical work central to constituting isomorphism. The OECD’s purposeful selection against ‘dodgy items’, which might produce performance differences along national, cultural or language lines, is clearly indicated in the following excerpt from their PISA for Schools technical report: The outcomes of the item analyses are used to make a decision about how to treat each item in the participating country and for each language. This means that an item may be deleted from the scaling in a particular country and in particular languages if it has poor psychometric characteristics in this particular country and in those particular languages… A national list of ‘dodgy items’ and recommendations regarding item treatment must be reported to the OECD for approval. (OECD, 2015, p. 39; emphasis added)

Similarly, the technical report produced by ACER, the organisation that oversaw item development and initial field-testing for PISA for Schools between 2010 and 2012, notes that some potential assessment items for the school-level assessment were deleted or modified because of ‘excessive DIF [differential item functioning]’

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(ACER, 2012, p. 42). While this approach is for the putative reason of ensuring consistency across the often vastly different national (and indeed local) contexts participating in the assessment, it also has the effect of constituting otherwise diverse participants as isomorphic entities in terms of curriculum, pedagogy and culture. Such test construction instead attributes differences in student performance to differences in education policies and practices, a position that largely ignores the possibility that local contextual differences (curricula, culture, history, language, etc.) can, and do, contribute to different student performance outcomes. On this basis, the commensuration assumed and actively constituted through PISA for Schools positions a school as a decontextualised, acultural and ahistorical entity—a situation in which, paraphrasing Gertrude Stein, ‘a school is a school is a school’, irrespective of the broader polity, society or culture in which it is embedded.6 Indeed, the official OECD position strongly supports the ability of policy to account for student performance outcomes, rather than attributing success on PISA to non-transferable cultural or historical factors. We can see this in the following extract from the PISA 2009 publication, What makes a school successful: The results from the PISA 2009 assessment reveal wide differences in educational outcomes, both within and across countries… Naturally, GDP per capita influences educational success, but this only explains 6% of the difference in average student performance. The other 94% reflect the potential for public policy to make a difference. The stunning success of Shanghai-China, which tops every league table in this assessment by a clear margin, shows what can be achieved. (OECD, 2010, p. 3; emphasis added)

Arguably, the OECD’s overwhelming attribution of student outcomes to public policy implies that local contextual factors, including socio-economic status, exert a limited influence on schooling outcomes, and it is largely the implementation of effective policies that determines whether a school (or system) achieves Shanghai-China’s ‘stunning success’. Combined with the removal of ‘dodgy items’ that show significant variation between national (or language) contexts, PISA for Schools constitutes all participating schools (and systems) as being commensurable, and if not equal in performance then equally capable of ‘success’ if only the ‘right’ policies are adopted. This is despite research suggesting that there are numerous non-educational (or ‘out of school’) factors—specifically socio-economic status and culture—that significantly contribute to PISA performance outcomes (Feniger & Lefstein, 2014; Meyer & Schiller, 2013; Tan, 2012). It is thus overly simplistic and misleading to unproblematically attribute ‘high’ PISA scores to supposedly ‘excellent’ schools and systems (and vice versa), or to potentially redress ‘poor’ performance by focusing solely on ‘in school’ factors such as curricula or pedagogy.

‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’ (Stein, 1922, p. 187).

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Notwithstanding such qualifications around the possible (in)validity of PISA measurements and comparisons,7 we can see how PISA for Schools has arguably become the OECD’s educational global positioning device par excellence, constructing all schools and systems as commensurate, and hence comparable, entities locatable on the basis of PISA performance. The totalising nature of PISA for Schools’ comparative measurements—locating any school, anywhere in the world —is clearly evident in the comments of a senior OECD official, who noted how: … we can position [schools] not only in terms of their absolute performance, [but] we can compare them with what we call their ‘statistical neighbours’. Basically, we can see, ‘How does a school from a middle-class background in the United States compare against another middle-income school in the U.S. or anywhere in the world?’

Consequently, emphasis is given more to a school’s comparative performance in relation to its ‘statistical neighbours’, whether they are other national schools or international schooling systems, rather than its absolute performance. As revealed in the remarks of the OECD official quoted above, PISA for Schools putatively construes a ‘middle-class’ school in the U.S., as being comparable with any other ‘middle-class’ school anywhere in the world, with the expectation that each could be, and has no reason not to be (outside of policy settings), as ‘high performing’ as the other. While there is undoubtedly more that defines a school than its socio-economic status, a point that the OECD itself repeatedly emphasises (see OECD, 2010, p. 3), assuming schools to be equivalent on the basis of being ‘middle-class’ alone obscures the vast number of complex ways in which they could well be, or are, different. This reflects the reductive nature of the school-to-school (and school-to-system) commensuration enabled by PISA for Schools, which simplifies, omits or distorts qualities of the empirical world into measurable (and comparable) quantities; for example, the nebulous signifier ‘middle-class’ being numerically rendered, and thus controlled for, through the PISA index of economic, social and cultural status.

‘Centrist’ criticisms of PISA, and other similar international large-scale assessments, have been gathering in abundance and momentum. These critiques are not anti-testing per se, but instead highlight methodological concerns over how such comparative testing is being constructed, and the manner in which it is used in policymaking processes (see Rutkowski & Rutkowski, 2013; Rutkowski, 2011; Rutkowski, Gonzalez, Joncas, & von Davier, 2010; Rutkowski & Rutkowski, 2010, 2016; Rutkowski, Rutkowski, & Liaw, 2019; Rutkowski, Rutkowski, & Zhou, 2016). These criticisms have since culminated in open calls by education academics and other stakeholders for the OECD to suspend the 2015 cycle of PISA testing (Andrews et al., 2015), although this called-for suspension did not occur. 7

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‘Better Than Finland’: Promoting World-Class Status I would also suggest that PISA for Schools could possibly be seen as a means for elite US schools—those not content to only be the best in the state, but also keen to beat schools in Shanghai-China or Finland—to promote themselves as ‘world class’ on account of their students’ performance. Interestingly, this motivation to be ‘better than Finland’ was not uncommon amongst PISA for Schools participants in the U.S.; one US district even communicated with its students and the local community in the lead up their PISA for Schools testing by using the Twitter ‘hashtag’, #beatfinland (see Russo, 2014, p. 2). In this sense, it is perhaps not surprising that many local US educators appeared concerned with promoting their schools as ‘world class’, regardless of how inherently problematic this term might be. Such sentiments are clearly reflected here in the comments of two district leaders from different ‘high performing’ US school communities, who both readily embraced the opportunity afforded by PISA for Schools to position themselves favourably within the global: The good news for us was when we got the results back we were better than Finland, so we could pat ourselves on the back for that. (Emphasis added) We are a ‘high performing’ district and many times we’re at the ceiling of some of the normal testing we do, such as our state testing… [W]e’ve always had a real sense that we should be benchmarking against the best. The PISA Test for Schools was an opportunity that our superintendent really wanted to get a lot of our schools to participate in and see how world class we were. (Emphasis added)

It must be noted here that the problematic phrase ‘better than Finland’ refers to a school’s mean performance score on PISA for Schools surpassing the mean performance score of the Finnish system on PISA 2012. It does not suggest whatsoever that the US district in question performed better than every school in Finland’s national sample for main PISA. Nonetheless, such statements highlight the ability of PISA for Schools to forge connections between otherwise physically distant schooling sites, with some ‘high performing’ US schools and districts seemingly positioning themselves more in relation to the Shanghai-China and Finland schooling systems than their country or state system, or even—incredibly—other schools. This is, especially so in the context of the (supposedly) poor and declining national performance on main PISA by the U.S., where an individual US school’s ‘world class’ performance on PISA for Schools becomes a valuable commodity to demonstrate how ‘we are not like them’.8 The evidently problematic assertions of an individual US secondary school being ‘better’ than an entire school system should not merely be discounted as an example of overly enthusiastic aggrandisement, but should be seen instead as Despite the problematic ‘ranking’ of an entire nation system by its mean performance on PISA, the US national rankings are still frequently reported in the media, with the resulting ‘crisis’ significantly influencing popular and policy-focused discussions around education reform.

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‘dangerous’, something that is at best ambiguous and at worst intentionally misleading. Illustrating this point is the representation of Kettle Moraine High School’s (Wisconsin) 2015 performance on PISA for Schools (see Borsuk, 2015, p. 47), which places it in the global ‘top five’ for mathematics. While this claim might superficially be a cause for celebration, their ‘top five’ performance has only been achieved by purposefully removing six of the eight ‘top-performing’ schooling systems measured by PISA 2012, namely Shanghai-China, Singapore, Hong Kong-China, Chinese Taipei, Macao-China and Liechtenstein. Although such an omission is (presumably) for the reason that some of these political entities are subnational ‘economies’ and not strictly ‘countries’ (e.g., Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macao), this decision ignores the clearly independent status of Singapore and Liechtenstein, and the de facto (if not de jure) sovereignty of Taiwan as the Republic of China. Kettle Moraine High School’s 2015 performance on PISA for Schools actually positions it as 11th ‘in the world’ for mathematics (not 5th) and reading (not 7th) when compared against schooling system performance on PISA 2012 (see OECD, 2013c, pp. 47, 177). However, I would argue that a school being 5th or 11th (or 55th) ‘in the world’ for mathematics on the basis of average PISA performance scores is still a meaningless comparison. Despite the best efforts of the OECD, a school is still not the same as a schooling system. Such vigorous conceptual gymnastics clearly indicate the thoroughly constituted nature of the school-to-system commensuration enabled by PISA for Schools, with representations of school performance servicing, in effect, whatever local political exigency requires attention at a given time. This is perhaps suggestive of what Hardy and Lewis (2017), have described as a ‘doublethink of data’, where some data-informed assumptions—such as a Wisconsin high school being comparable with Korea, but (apparently) not with Singapore or Shanghai-China—are conveniently promoted or ignored as necessary to achieve a particular policy outcome. In this respect, such performance comparisons arguably serve more as a promotional aid for ‘elite’ school marketing (‘top five in the world’), and less as an educational tool to meaningfully reflect on student learning and teacher pedagogy. This is especially egregious when one considers the OECD’s stated intention around PISA for Schools is for it not to inform any sort of school rankings or ‘league tables’ (OECD, 2013a, p. 13; 2013c, p. 5; 2013d, p. 4), and instead be a ‘low-stakes’ means to drive local reform agendas. It is debatable then whether the school-to-system comparisons and commensuration effected by PISA for Schools, and the resultant claims of being ‘better than’ Shanghai-China or Finland (or whomever), are actually useful in any way to local educators, in terms of informing meaningful school-level reform. Taking a similar position, a national representative to the PGB suggested that prospective participants in PISA for Schools should consider long and hard what is actually obtained by comparing local performance to international schooling systems: Frankly, what are you getting from this? Your main comparison is with other countries, but you’re a school, right? So, what does that really mean? The closest I think that you can come to a really meaningful comparison with other countries is to say, ‘My school would

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be at the 75th percentile in that country’. You know, you hear a lot of, ‘My school is better than Shanghai because my school did better than Shanghai’, right? It’s crazy!

Despite the official position of the OECD that PISA for Schools is for school-level policy learning and not the ‘ranking’ of local performance in relation to international systems, it is hardly inconceivable that the normative effects experienced by national systems in relation to main PISA will manifest in a similar manner within local schooling sites. Indeed, it is possible that cultivating the appearance of success under the global (and national) ‘eye’ (Nóvoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003), will position the comparisons in PISA for Schools more as a mode of local educational governance, and less as a legitimate pursuit for driving student learning and improvement.

Creating Difference Through Similarity While PISA for Schools is arguably born of the OECD’s presumed, and actively constructed, isomorphism between decontextualised schools and systems, this should not lead one to believe that all difference between PISA participants has somehow been effaced. Rather, I would suggest that the construction of difference occurs, somewhat paradoxically, in conjunction with the processes of commensuration and equivalence described above. Although there are obvious resonances with the ‘becoming topological’ and the marking of discontinuities (alterity) through continuities (similitudes) (see Lury et al., 2012), it is also worth emphasising here the productive capacities of difference in relation to PISA for Schools. What I seek to provide then is an understanding of how PISA for Schools performance data, and especially the visualisation of difference (see also Hardy & Lewis, 2018), when local data are situated against international comparisons, modulates perception at the level of the school to produce an affective local response, and a desire to be other than one currently is. The notion of the OECD governing schooling through difference, and the allusion to a desirable future, resonates with a growing body of literature that examines the governance function of aspiration, potential, pre-emption and fear, and their effects on education policy (Sellar, 2015b; Staunæs, 2011; Webb & Gulson, 2012) and society more broadly (Anderson, 2010; Evans, 2010; Zedner, 2007). Collectively, such ‘future-oriented’ affects serve as a useful means of governing present (and future) conduct by aligning desirable future outcomes with contemporary feelings of potentiality, thus creating what Sellar (2015a), describes as a ‘sense of optimism produced through promises about a better future’ (p. 10). It is this sense of ‘optimism’—that something can be undertaken today to help achieve a more positive tomorrow—that makes people and organisations amenable to ‘anticipatory action’, where a desirable future becomes the cause for effects in the present (see Anderson, 2010).

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In many ways, the performance comparisons driven by PISA for Schools are largely animated by what Deleuze (1994), would describe as a representational sense of difference, or of difference subordinated to identity.9 Here, difference is construed as a school’s ‘empirical’ or ‘extrinsic’ difference (i.e., school-level PISA performance compared against schooling systems), insofar as a school’s identity (e.g., ‘low performing’) emerges from its apparent difference from a system identified as ‘high performing’. This is an identity thoroughly underpinned by the difference between two things within a commensurate global space of measurement, where this is not that; that is, a ‘low performing’ local school in the U.S. is not the same as a ‘high performing’ schooling system. By these logics, a school might consider itself ‘high performing’ or ‘world class’, but this relational identity can only be assumed, or even exist in the first place, if a school is positioned as more or less different from something, or somewhere, else (e.g., the Shanghai-China schooling system). Indeed, the designation of a school as ‘world class’ clearly cannot exist in the absence of a commensurate global space, or a prefigured ‘world class’ system against which a school can be evaluated and represented. Such examples of world class systems might thus be seen as the ultimate ‘them’, and at the same time, the ultimate ‘us’—them because these systems are different from local schools in terms of performance, and us because they demonstrate what the local can and must become if they are to be considered world class. These logics of comparison and comparability were evident in the remarks of a senior OECD official, who noted that the underlying premise of PISA (and, by extension, PISA for Schools) is precisely to identify the differences between schooling sites/systems, and to attribute possible reasons, such as policy settings and practices, for the production of these differences: I‘ve worked for TIMSS [Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study] before the OECD and technically those systems [TIMSS and PISA] are quite similar, in terms of their orientation. What I find, somehow, are lost opportunities. The focus of that IEA [International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement] assessment [TIMSS] is on the smallest common denominator of national curriculum. They want to be fair and therefore say, ‘I’m only going to test something that everybody’s teaching’, but you lose so many interesting facets of what’s being done, you know? … Our [the OECD’s] idea, I must really say, has been almost the opposite [with PISA]. We basically are not really interested in the common denominator. We are interested to expose why they are different. (Emphasis added)

While the focus with PISA for Schools comparisons is ostensibly to expose the difference between schooling systems and/or schools, this is a difference largely subordinated to a potential sameness. This enables the determination of further sameness or difference (i.e., ‘lack of sameness’) on account of the OECD’s

‘When we define difference as conceptual difference, we believe we have done enough to specify the concept of difference as such. Nevertheless, here again we have no idea of difference, no concept of difference as such… In reality, so long as we inscribe difference in the concept in general we have no singular Idea of difference, we remain only with a difference already mediated by representation’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 27).

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predefined concepts of ‘high performing’ and ‘best practice’, in which it is presumed that high performing schooling systems will demonstrate high performing practices that individual schools can adopt. PISA for Schools thus provides a way of representing schooling sites through difference, where ‘we can only think what a thing is through difference, or what it is not’ (Colebrook, 2002, p. 8; emphasis original). Interestingly, this is not only relevant for the ‘low performing’ schools that choose to participate in PISA for Schools, but rather, I would argue, all schools, irrespective of their relative performance, with all participating schools set the somewhat Sisyphean task of continual self-work and self-improvement. The following excerpt from an OECD-produced PISA for Schools promotional guide makes similar claims around all schools, both ‘high’ and ‘low’ performing, being able to leverage their PISA data to seek ‘even higher levels of performance’, and that such improvements are now ‘within their reach’: Schools with performance results that place them at the very top in comparison with schools in the United States and in other countries should not see in the tool [PISA for Schools] a means to ‘validate’ their excellence for publicity – they should see it as a means to strive for even higher levels of performance for all students. At the same time, school staff and students in under-performing schools should be motivated and encouraged that improvement is not only possible, but within their reach. (OECD, 2013a, p. 13; emphasis original)

The notion that all schools can improve, regardless of their current local performance, by ‘looking around’ to the policies and best practices of global reference societies (e.g., Shanghai- China; Finland), is indeed a central premise of PISA for Schools. It is perhaps unsurprising that the OECD would encourage participants to continually aspire to ever higher levels of performance, especially when such improvements are to be attained through following the policy advice and publications of the OECD. We can see here the centrality of difference to PISA for Schools, where constant improvement is a way of ‘always becoming’ (different) from what one currently is, and where the difference between representations of school and system-level performance provides the local impetus for educational reform. With this in mind, Williamson (2016), astutely describes the OECD not only as a centre of calculation (see Latour, 1987), but also as a centre of visualisation. To this I would add that the visualisation of difference—such as local school-level performance vis-à-vis Shanghai-China—invites particular social actions and affective responses by end-users of the data, with the purpose of their overcoming (or maintaining) this difference.

PISA ‘Yet to Come’ Given the value placed on constructing difference in PISA for Schools comparisons, it is perhaps inevitable that educators would seek to embody this difference and act upon it to create local change. This idea of continual improvement as advocated by

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the OECD in PISA for Schools suggests a mode of governing focused significantly on potential, or a school’s as yet unrealised performance on—appropriating Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—PISA ‘Yet To Come’.10 This is where a possible desirable future, in terms of improved local PISA performance (e.g., becoming ‘better than Finland’), is revealed to participating schools through comparisons with commensurate ‘high performing’ international schooling systems, but where attaining this future requires local changes in the present. Using future performance as a contemporary incentive to improve, a potentiality that Easterling (2014), describes as a ‘real that is yet to come’ (p. 80), is clearly advocated by the OECD in the foreword of the PISA for Schools report issued to participating schools. Here, future improvement is understood by reference to other ‘high performing’ international systems that demonstrate ‘what can be achieved’: Results from PISA reveal wide differences in the educational outcomes of countries. Those education systems that have been able to secure strong and equitable learning outcomes, and to mobilise rapid improvements, show others what can be achieved. Some of the strongest examples pertain to those countries that have seen rapid improvements over recent years. For example, Korea’s average performance was already high in 2000, yet the Government was concerned that only a small elite achieved excellence in the PISA reading assessment. Within less than a decade, Korea was able to double the share of students demonstrating excellence in this area. (OECD, 2012, p. 3; emphasis added)

We can see here the articulation of multiple differences being used to prompt local desires to change policies and practices, on the basis of the data and visualisations provided by PISA for Schools. These include (1) differences between a school’s current performance level and that of a PISA ‘poster child’, such as Korea; (2) differences between the present and past performance of the celebrated ‘poster child’, especially in relation to their enactment of notionally ‘successful’ education reforms (e.g., ‘double the share of students demonstrating excellence’); and (3) differences between where a school is now and where they desire to be in the future (PISA Yet To Come). This focus on using the visualisation of difference in the present to prompt changes to performance in the future represents a significant evolution of governing through numbers, and constitutes instead what I conceptualise as governing through time, difference and potential (Lewis, 2018). Such re-theorising emphasises not only the importance of numbers and data to create comparisons and differences, but also that these differences operate across multiple temporalities—past, present and future—to invoke new understandings of a school’s potential performance, and thus new ways to govern practice in the present through future-oriented dispositions. An important factor of this governance is that the imagined ‘future’ is construed not as some ever-receding and unattainable horizon, but instead as something tangible and within reach of participating schools and educators. This is in terms of the OECD ‘I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come,’ said Scrooge. The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand. ‘You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us’, Scrooge pursued. ‘Is that so, Spirit?’ (Dickens, 2008, p. 39). 10

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(2012, p. 3), providing concrete examples of the reforms that can be implemented (‘these education systems show others what can be achieved’), as well as the compressed timeframes required for such investments to pay dividends through improved student performance on PISA (‘rapid improvements’; ‘within less than a decade’). Seemingly, becoming all that you can be requires schools to have the desire and courage to measure their performance via PISA for Schools, to learn from ‘high performing’ others what can be achieved, and then to undertake these reforms as they embark on their path to PISA Yet To Come. Further emphasising the temporal nature of these differences and aspirations, an executive at America Achieves noted how certain ‘high performing’ schools and systems could provide US schools with ‘windows into our future’, emphasising the difference between what is and what may be to show how desirable futures can be anticipated and brought into being: We now have schools across the U.S. where kids from all backgrounds are achieving at very high levels … We have these pockets of success that are windows into our future. Our problem is we haven’t done it on a large scale and we need to adapt those solutions in ways that can work for kids across entire communities. But the evidence is really clear: our kids, regardless of background, can and do succeed when we invest in them in the right way. (Emphasis added)

Moreover, the contrasting of local school-level performance with that of international schooling systems, and the construction of a binary between ‘failing’ school-level practices and ‘exemplar’ practices from PISA poster children, was positioned as a key motivator for schools to borrow practices that work well. This provided yet another ‘window’ to future success, as described in the following by a school principal: I found them [PISA for Schools report] really interesting because it is about comparison, but it’s also providing a window into bits of different education systems that work well. I think they were, as I recall, they were exemplar practices, and I think that was really useful. I thought the whole thing was really great, illuminating best practice in Japan and Shanghai. (Emphasis added)

Evident here is what might be described as the present-ing of the future, where desirable potential outcomes in the future (i.e., improving student academic success) are imagined and used to drive particular actions in the present, such as increasing investment in education or borrowing ‘best practices’. Again, these future-oriented practices in the present are preceded by the construction of difference and the embodiment of this difference within local educators, who are then motivated to look through the ‘windows’ enabled by PISA for Schools – to different schooling systems, to different exemplar practices, and ultimately, to different desirable futures and versions of the self.

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Conclusion This chapter has shown how processes of international commensuration and comparison—and the school and district-level responses elicited by such comparisons—exemplify the enfolding of the global into local schooling spaces. PISA for Schools elides the physical (and conceptual) distance between schools, international schooling systems and the OECD, producing an emergent topological continuity based on commensurable measurements and ‘looking around’ globally. Here we can see the extension of a global education policy field, formerly comprising national and subnational education systems, to now include local schooling sites (schools and districts), in which local performance on PISA for Schools can be compared in a space of PISA-mediated isomorphism. Schools and schooling systems are thus positioned by PISA for Schools as being one and the same: isomorphic education ‘spaces’ that can be known, compared and (importantly) learned from, irrespective of local contexts, histories or cultures. This creates what might be described as ‘non-local locals’ (Lingard, Sellar, & Savage, 2014), where topographically, culturally and socially distant schools are nevertheless connected up, and made ‘local’, through the relational spatialities made possible by PISA for Schools. Within such a discursive construction of education there is, therefore, no meaningful differentiation, spatially or conceptually, between ‘high performing’ schools and ‘high performing’ schooling systems, exemplified by the notion that schools or districts can consider themselves to be ‘better than Finland’ or ‘better than Shanghai’. Such distinctions are overcome to enable performance comparisons and the justification of local policy intervention and reform. This also demonstrates how PISA for Schools reflects, and helps to consolidate, an emergent topological mode of culture, where practices of continuity and ordering create new equivalences (i.e., connecting schools with international schools and schooling systems for purposes of comparison) and new discontinuities (i.e., differentiating between local and international performance and policy settings). Creating such commensurate topological spaces alongside territorial ones makes possible new local ways of thinking and practising education. Additionally, this helps to highlight productive differences that open up new possible local futures and future-oriented affective responses in terms of imagining PISA Yet To Come, influencing local schooling practices through governing through time, difference and potential. While the ability of comparison’s ‘global eye’ (Nóvoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003), to foster ‘looking around’ to the OECD and PISA ‘poster children’ for ‘best practices’ is a theme taken up further in Chapter Six, it is sufficient here to say that the commensuration invoked by PISA for Schools makes such comparison-driven policy making both possible and desirable. Importantly, the measurements and differences produced by PISA for Schools reveal new problematics and imperatives for local action based on school-level performance against international PISA benchmarks, and especially in the context of evidence-based (or evidence-informed) policymaking in education. Indeed, the

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performance comparisons enabled by PISA for Schools arguably provide one of the first international data-driven catalysts of school-level reform. This furthers the relevance and diffusion of ‘lessons’ from main PISA and the OECD to schools themselves, and extends the epistemic communities through which the OECD practices its global epistemological governance of education. As noted earlier, one may more accurately describe the school-level assessment not so much as ‘PISA for Schools’ as ‘PISA to Schools’, insofar as it actively extends the reach and relevance of PISA into the local policy spaces of schools and districts, allowing the OECD to influence education policy at an unprecedented local level. Topologically speaking, this is in terms of the global (i.e., the OECD, international schooling systems) ‘reaching into’ the local to steer school-level agendas, and by the local (i.e., schools) ‘reaching out’ to the global to help legitimate particular local policy decisions.

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Chapter 6

New Evidence: Governing Schooling Through ‘What Works’

Abstract In this chapter, the last analytical chapter, addresses the emergence of new ‘soft’ governing modalities associated with ‘best practice’ and other forms of schooling evidence. I examine how the OECD’s inclusion of ‘ready-to-go’ policies from ‘high performing’ schooling systems (e.g., Shanghai-China, Singapore) within PISA for Schools creates a decontextualised set of ‘what works’ solutions. Besides creating a problematic causal link between certain ‘high performing’ practices and desirable schooling outcomes, this suite of policies also provides a clear discursive limit to how education reform can be locally understood, constituting a global governance of local schooling through best practice. This chapter also examines how the OECD’s determination of ‘what works’ is sustained and promoted through the professional learning networks, both virtual and face-to-face, established around PISA for Schools, and how these help to disseminate the OECD’s global policies amongst local schooling spaces. At the same time, I contend that such professional learning communities might provide local educators and policymakers with fora for undertaking meaningful professional dialogue. I conclude by suggesting PISA for Schools may thus help to foster alternative policy spaces from which educators can ‘talk back’ to national and state authorities, and potentially promote more authentic understandings and renderings of schooling accountability.

Introduction This chapter focuses on how PISA for Schools data, and a difference-driven ‘impetus to act’, can translate into new possibilities for school-level practice. Given the commensuration effected between geographic locations, schools and systems by This chapter is derived in part from an article published in Journal of Education Policy; 4 November, 2016; copyright Taylor & Francis; available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/ doi/full/10.1080/02680939.2016.1252855; Article https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2016. 1252855. This chapter is derived in part from an article published in Education Policy Analysis Archives; 21 August, 2017; copyright EPAA; available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.25.2901; Article https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.25.2901. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Lewis, PISA, Policy and the OECD, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8285-1_6

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PISA for Schools, and the supposed need for the local to ‘look around’ at global ‘high performers’ to inform school-level reform, this chapter examines how the local practice of schooling can be influenced by global ‘best practices’. In this sense, the policy effects of PISA for Schools helps to externalise (Schriewer, 1990) local reform agendas, thus encouraging schools to look around to international ‘reference societies’ for examples of ‘what works’. Specifically, I seek to show how processes of decontextualisation and commensuration described earlier, and the inclusion of nominal ‘best practice’ in the PISA for Schools report, encourages problematic policy borrowing by schools from ‘successful’ schooling systems. I argue that this produces an OECD-endorsed global policy ensemble of ‘what works’ in education, but one that largely eschews any meaningful reference to local context, conditions or requirements. This normalisation of ‘best practice’ emerges as a key means by which the OECD can steer local policymaking and practice through PISA for Schools: if commensuration, measurement and the visualisation of performance difference help to identify local educational ‘problems’ (see also Hardy & Lewis, 2018; Lewis, 2018), then the inclusion of ‘best practice’ in PISA for Schools putatively provides ready-made, evidence-informed ‘solutions’. In this sense, ‘best practice’ can be considered an integral feature of ‘governing by examples’ (Simons, 2015), where forms of ‘soft’ qualitative evidence—such as ‘successful’ policies and practices—work alongside ‘hard’ quantitative performance data. While officially cautioning against problematic policy borrowing between contextually different schooling sites, we shall see how the OECD nevertheless encourages and validates the concept of global ‘best practice’ itself, and the adoption of such practices by schools seeking to improve local performance. In the context of the OECD promoting global ‘best practice’ to local schooling sites, it is also important to consider how such policy learning is encouraged throughout the epistemic communities and policy networks constituted by PISA for Schools. To this end, the remainder of this chapter addresses how PISA for Schools has facilitated the creation of professional learning communities in the U.S., comprising schools and districts, the OECD and several key partner organisations. Particular focus is given to the Global Learning Network, a professional learning community of PISA for Schools participants developed and supported by the US not-for-profit America Achieves, in conjunction with the OECD, philanthropic foundations and school network EdLeader21. Such professional learning communities represent not only an extension of the OECD’s policy influence and a mode of heterarchical governance, but they also, arguably, provide opportunities for schools to find collaborative policy spaces outside of those defined by more dominant discursive framings of accountability and performance. In short, I contend that such meetings of local US educators around PISA for Schools may, if perhaps unintentionally, help foster the ‘cracks’ and ‘fissures’ from which schools can ‘talk back’ to educational authorities and promote alternative and more authentic conceptions of school accountability.

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Defining ‘What Works’ Through PISA for Schools As noted at length in Chap. 5, a central aspect of the OECD’s educational governance through PISA for Schools is the creation of a commensurate space of PISA measurement, within which participating schools and schooling systems are rendered knowable and comparable. Given this apparent (and constituted) isomorphism of schools and systems across geographical and political divides, PISA for Schools performance, and especially the visualisation of performance difference, helps to justify local reform measures. However, the question of what reforms should be implemented, and how such reforms might be undertaken, remain stubbornly unanswered on the basis of performance measurement alone, especially if (as is often the case) undue focus is given to mean performance scores. Indeed, comparing the school performance against that of PISA ‘poster children’ arguably does little in itself except reveal differences, namely between present performance and potential future performance on PISA Yet To Come (see also Lewis, 2018). It is here that the inclusion of putative ‘best practices’ in the PISA for Schools reports helps the OECD to provide further steering to local processes of schooling reform, with these qualitative examples of ‘successful’ policies and practices accompanying the quantitative comparative measures of local (school) and international (system) PISA performance. Besides simply measuring a school’s performance relative to international PISA benchmarks, a key governing modality of PISA for Schools is the promotion of certain strategies, policies and practices to participating schools and districts. This is clearly evident in the following excerpt from the OECD’s Call for Expressions of Interest for prospective UK providers of PISA for Schools: The Accredited Service Provider will be required to ensure that the content of each school report follows the standard model established by the OECD, which includes approximately 20 text boxes describing examples from around the world that highlight best practices in education. (OECD, 2013a, pp. 12–13; emphasis added)

The OECD has mandated the inclusion of 17 ‘breakout boxes’ in the 160-page PISA for Schools report that highlight the policies and practices of ‘successful’ (as defined by their performance on main PISA) schooling systems, including the celebrated ‘poster children’ of Shanghai-China, Singapore, Finland and Japan. Table 6.1 provides a detailed overview of these particular 17 examples of global ‘best practice’ and the national schooling systems from which these practices are taken. Significantly, these are schooling systems that have shown ‘consistently high results’ or which have made ‘considerable progress’ on their PISA performance, the implication being that schools now have a ready prescription of how they should act in order to be among the ‘world’s top-performing school systems’ (see OECD, 2012, p. 22). These practices also validate the policy credentials of the OECD, as the inclusion of ‘what works’ from PISA-validated schooling systems suggest these concrete examples of policy and practice are ‘tried and tested’, and thus won’t—in the words of one OECD policy analyst—‘blow up in your face’. By establishing

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Table 6.1 The OECD’s 17 examples of global best practice presented in the PISA for Schools report, 2012–2017 Title of ‘breakout box’

International schooling system/s

Page/s in report

Description of ‘best practice’

1. The link between reading performance and success in adult life

Canada

39–40

2. School policies, practices and resources: Examples of innovative learning environments from around the world

Austria, Australia, Chile

52–53

3. Making the most of top teachers

Shanghai-China

54–55

4. How schools in Korea use ICT to make a successful education system even better

Korea

60

5. The importance of student engagement in Japan

Japan

63

• Make literature and other ‘cultural possessions’ accessible for students • Teachers to promote parent involvement in their student’s education • Promote reading for pleasure (e.g., ‘Drop Everything And Read’) • Improve student engagement • Focus on learning as a social and collaborative activity • Emphasise formative feedback to personalise student learning • Enforce continuous teacher professional development, including empirical research • Use ‘effective’ teachers to model ‘best practice’ and mentor beginning teachers • Relieve ‘effective’ teachers from classroom duties to support other teachers • Promote ‘effective’ teachers into district administrative roles • Adopt digital learning technologies into classroom pedagogy and curriculum planning (e.g., ‘smart textbooks’) • Move from uniform/ standardised education to diversified, creativity-based learning • Promote ‘noisy’ classrooms that encourage student collaboration, problem solving and learning through ‘mistakes’ • Avoid didactic pedagogical practices that emphasise ‘drilling’ or lecturing (continued)

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Table 6.1 (continued) Title of ‘breakout box’

International schooling system/s

Page/s in report

Description of ‘best practice’

6. Resilient students who succeed against the odds: Lessons from PISA

Unspecified

83-84

7. Effectively supporting disadvantaged students and schools: Examples from Canada, Shanghai-China and Ireland

Canada, Shanghai-China, Ireland

85–87

8. Education performance in PISA around the world: The group of comparison countries highlighted in the report

Various, including Korea and Poland

96–97

• Provide ‘disadvantaged’ students with more in-class learning time, especially in general science classes • Introduce more science classes into the curriculum • Develop strategies to promote confidence amongst ‘disadvantaged’ students • Support school (and district) teaching and leadership skills through a programme of internal and external professional development • Develop specific promotional positions at schools and districts (e.g., Student Success Leader) • Create an orderly learning environment by fostering positive teacher-student relationships • Mentor new teachers with more experienced teachers • Avoid the early tracking and streaming of students in relation to subject selection • Develop effective pre-primary student education and child care policies • Improve the performance of the lowest-achieving students (PISA proficiency level 2 or below) • Move from a teaching focus on grammar and literature to one emphasising the skills and strategies required for students to demonstrate ‘creative and critical understanding’ • Provide after-school remedial programmes in reading, writing and mathematics, especially for disadvantaged students (continued)

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Table 6.1 (continued) Title of ‘breakout box’

International schooling system/s

Page/s in report

9. What makes a school successful? Some lessons from PISA

Finland

92–94

10. School-to-school learning: How effective schools support other schools in Shanghai-China

Shanghai-China

99–100

11. The importance of recruiting and training good teachers: Examples from Singapore

Singapore

102– 103

Description of ‘best practice’

• Implement new standardised accountability and examination systems to measure changes in student performance • Attract the most talented teachers to the most challenging classrooms • Prioritise spending on improving teacher quality • Minimise student differentiation on the basis of socioeconomic advantage • Adopt a nuanced approach to school choice policies (e.g., consider the constraining influence of transportation, tuition fees) • Implement policies that encourage school autonomy over curriculum, student assessment and resource allocation • Openly publicise school performance data • Assess student learning in relation to individual progress and not statistical indicators • Introduce innovation and creativity into classroom practice and planning • Encourage regular intra-district teacher transfers to promote new ideas • Make ‘effective’ schools responsible for improving the performance of ‘low performing’ schools in their local ‘cluster’ or district • Invest heavily in teacher training and strong school leadership • Impose high standards on prospective teachers • Introduce annual appraisals for teachers (continued)

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Table 6.1 (continued) Title of ‘breakout box’

International schooling system/s

Page/s in report

12. Teacher-to-teacher peer learning in Japan and Shanghai-China

Japan, Shanghai-China

114– 115

13. Fostering the potential of immigrant students and English-language learners in schools

North Carolina (U.S.)

116– 118

Description of ‘best practice’

• Develop alternative career streams for teachers (e.g., master teacher, curriculum specialist, school leadership) • Implement continual teacher professional development programmes (100 h per year) • Encourage teacher collaboration and peer learning • Mandate that experienced teachers develop and model demonstration classes to mentor less experienced teachers • Address the social and educational difficulties of students from immigrant backgrounds • Encourage immigrant students to develop reading and speaking skills in the language of their ‘host country’, both inside and outside of school • Develop whole-school strategies for immigrant students that are integrated across the curriculum and school activities, rather than relying on specialised exclusionary practices • Provide additional resources to support immigrant students at disadvantaged schools • Encourage a ‘balanced’ distribution of immigrant students through the district by promoting school-choice practices to parents (continued)

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Table 6.1 (continued) Title of ‘breakout box’

International schooling system/s

Page/s in report

Description of ‘best practice’

14. A commitment to inclusion: An example from schools in Finland

Finland

119

15. Learning—and teaching— in the twenty-first century: Implications for educators

Various, including U.S. and Canada

120– 122

16. What PISA shows regarding student achievement in mathematics

Unspecified

122– 124

• Make schools the ‘heart’ of local communities by providing various student health and wellbeing services (e.g., counseling, dental care, psychologists) • Develop specialist intervention teachers to assist ‘low performing’ students • Ensure school staff (principals, teachers, support staff) consider the care of the ‘whole child’ (i.e., educational, medical, social) • Develop’21st-century’ or ‘deeper learning’ skills in students that encourage the ability to transfer learning between contexts • Promote student acquisition of non-cognitive competencies (e.g., resilience, conscientiousness) • Continuously re-evaluate curriculum and pedagogy to make any necessary reforms • Develop policies that are targeted to improve the classroom disciplinary climate, which will in turn promote higher mathematics performance • Improve student attitudes, motivation and confidence towards mathematics • Introduce additional out-of-school mathematics homework for students but ensure most learning is school-based • Increase the instruction time devoted to mathematics • Mandate that teachers continually update their skills in mathematics teaching and student support (continued)

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Table 6.1 (continued) Title of ‘breakout box’

International schooling system/s

Page/s in report

Description of ‘best practice’

17. What PISA shows regarding student achievement in science

Unspecified

125-127

• Increase the frequency of student-initiated science activities in their classes • Increase the instruction time devoted to science for all students • Improve students’ motivation and sense of self-efficacy towards the study of science

this pedigree of successful implementation in other ‘high performing’ systems, the OECD is clearly encouraging local educators to have confidence in the efficacy of the proffered policy reforms—namely, that ‘what works’ actually works. However, and as we shall see, such claims of ‘best practice’ are still always ‘dangerous’ (see Foucault, 1983, p. 231). It must be noted here that ‘best practice’ is understood entirely by reference to system performance on main PISA, while other potential definition of ‘best practices’ excluded. We can see the productive power of policy discourses, with the OECD (and not schools or districts) ultimately controlling who is ‘high performing’ and what are the ‘best practices’ responsible for such performance. Even the concept of ‘best practice’ itself is presented in an entirely unproblematised and self-evident manner, as though schools should no more question the notion of ‘best practice’ than they should the OECD’s presentation of these practices. Indeed, the OECD suggests that the ‘sharing of effective practices’ between international schooling systems and local schools via the PISA for Schools report is a ‘logical next step’ (OECD, 2013b, p. 5), when school leaders look to implement schooling reform processes. Such sentiments are clearly palpable in the comments of a senior OECD official, who noted how PISA for Schools not only positions local schools within a ‘global context’, but also helps to disseminate lessons about ‘what works’ in other (international) schools and countries: Individual teachers, school leaders and local administrators often asked me, ‘How do we find out where our school stands in a global context? And what can our school, or our local school district, learn from the highest-performing schools or school systems in other countries?’… So, we decided to develop a tool, a test [PISA for Schools] that would allow schools and school districts to answer those questions… Schools can learn not only about how their students perform, but also ‘what works’ in other schools and other countries, in order to improve learning outcomes. (Emphasis added)

There is a deceptively linear relationship being advocated here between measuring schooling performance, determining ‘what works’ within other putatively

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‘successful’ schooling systems and adopting these self-same practices in order to improve learning outcomes at local schooling sites. Given the current political penchant for three-word slogans, perhaps this dialectical process (thesisantithesis-synthesis) could be similarly distilled into the following axiom: Compare; borrow; improve. I would contend that such notions of global, decontextualised ‘best practice’ reflect a thoroughly modernist (Wagner, 2012) and reformist/ameliorative (Kaloyannaki & Kazamias, 2009) approach to comparative education research, which is itself predicated on the amenability of the social world to human reason, understanding and intervention. This also invokes the scientistic and neo-positivist outlooks, and the underlying onto-epistemological assumptions, of the policymakers and educators who promulgate such positions, and their faith in science and statistics to be able to understand the social world, including education (Lingard, Sellar & Baroutsis, 2015). In fact, one can arguably see in PISA for Schools the emergence of a new neo-positivism (Lather, 2013) in education policymaking around the apparent ‘expertise’ of test-derived data, and a sense that ever-greater measurements will enable education to be (ever)more thoroughly understood and (ever)more effectively practised. By this logic, such measurements as attained through PISA for Schools are not merely possible, but also a necessary element of educational policymaking. Taking this rationale of policy borrowing from schooling systems deemed ‘successful’ through measurement to its ultimate (if not necessarily logical) conclusion, I would argue, in agreement with Kamens (2013), that ‘[i]f one can compare school systems [or schools] in terms of their characteristics and outcomes, the idea of borrowing features from the “best” systems is a natural corollary’ (p. 124).

The Power of the Example The ‘evidence’ from such comparative assessments have now occupied a central importance in educational policymaking, at both the school and schooling system level, and especially when these forms of evidence are used to legitimate looking abroad to, and borrowing from, (supposedly) more successful systems (Rappleye, 2012). These processes, for the ostensive purpose of becoming world class, have become so normalised as to become what Auld and Morris (2014), have termed the ‘New Paradigm’, which is underscored by three assumptions. Namely, these are that (1) the aims and outcomes of different schooling systems are directly commensurable; (2) system performance on such comparative testing is directly correlative to future economic success; and (3) causal factors are universal and absolute (pp. 134–135). Importantly, these assumptions all overlook the numerous problems inherent in promoting both best practice and policy transfer. However, the centrality of ‘hard’ numbers to educational governance and evidence-based policymaking should not lead us to overlook newer modalities that incorporate, alongside numbers, other ‘softer’ forms of qualitative evidence,

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including examples of ‘what works’. Such evidence-based policymaking can thus be considered, in this instance, to have progressed from merely addressing, on the basis of performance measures and comparisons, ‘Is reform necessary?’ Indeed, perhaps the more pressing question these forms of evidence force is ‘What type of reform is necessary?’ on the basis of global ‘best practices’. Simons (2015) usefully described this evolution of governing through data and numbers as a form of ‘governing by examples’: [G]overning through evidence is not only about governing by numbers but also includes a mode of governing by examples. To a large extent, the examples of good practice are examples of good performance and are being decided upon available numerical performance data. In that sense, governing by examples is to be regarded as complementary to governing by numbers. (p. 715; emphasis added)

Here, qualitative forms of evidence—narrative accounts, examples of successful practices and even educators’ professional experiences—provide an additional richness to the enumeration of performance, but these accounts are still framed in terms of their ability to improve performance, insofar as that performance can be captured quantitatively on metrics such as PISA, and now, PISA for Schools. Gorur (2016) suggests that the widespread focus on comparative enumerations of schooling performance has created a situation whereby it is becoming increasingly difficult to not ‘see like PISA’, with PISA and PISA for Schools not so much representing an empirical reality as they are creating one anew, and correspondingly changing the purposes and possibilities for schooling. Coupled with dominant discursive constructions around schooling system performance being best measured on international league tables constituted through comparative data (such as PISA), this has arguably led to a disproportionate focus on researchers, policymakers and educators seeking to determine the policies and practices (that is, ‘what works’) of top-performing schooling systems (Auld & Morris, 2016). Arguably, for best practice to be valued and counted by the OECD as evidence, its enactment must improve performance at the school and/or schooling system level, demonstrating the imbrication of numbers and examples in contemporary modes of educational governance. Put simply, such practices or policies must work by bringing tangible—read: ‘measurable’—improvements, producing a narrowed conceptualisation of evidence that validates particular kinds of knowing over others (Williams & Glasby, 2010). For instance, Slavin (2008, p. 125), rather scientistically defines what works as ‘an approach to teaching algebra to pupils aged 14–16 capable of improving their performance on national or international measures (e.g.,. PISA for Schools) by at least 25% of a standard deviation’. Presumably, such a hypothetical solution could then be successfully applied for all students at all schools in all contexts, and produce the same expected result. The inclusion of ‘best practice’ in the PISA for Schools reports specifies an ensemble of qualitative ‘evidence’ from school systems with quantitative ‘success’ on main PISA, thus complementing quantitative and qualitative forms of evidence, or governance by numbers and examples. Poor local performance on PISA for

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Schools, especially when compared with that of ‘high performing’ schooling systems, provides the means to prompt participating schools to adopt the OECD’s proffered examples of ‘best practice’, a conclusion similarly reached by a national representative to the PGB: I think the fact that we are encouraging not just policymakers within this building but schools and teachers – and this is where we can with Shanghai – to look outward at ‘best practice’. It’s [PISA for Schools] ideal for encouraging that because you can see where your school sits compared to schools in other countries. (Emphasis added)

This emphasises the significance to PISA for Schools of governance by numbers and examples, where the ‘hard’ evidence of numerical data authoritatively validates the ‘soft’ examples of best practice. Further reflecting this complementarity of numbers and examples, it is worthwhile noting that schools are seemingly encouraged here to ‘look outward’ to Shanghai-China, a normative ‘looking east’ (Sellar & Lingard, 2013a), that is presumably based on the municipality’s ‘world-class’ performance on PISA 2009 and 2012. The logic then is inescapable: ‘successful’ performance is attributable to ‘successful’ practices, and such practices can be readily transferred between settings and contexts. However, the very notion of individual schools looking elsewhere for policy solutions, even if through ‘PISA lenses’, raises several key issues, not least of which is Sadler’s (1964) perennial question at the heart of comparative education: What is actually obtained through the study of international schooling systems and their policy settings? Indeed, it can be argued that a schooling system’s ‘success’ on PISA is significantly mediated by local historical and cultural factors, in addition to purposefully introduced policy settings and practices (Sahlberg, 2011; Simola, 2005; Tan, 2015). This mediation is what is variously referred to as ‘path-dependency’ for policy in specific systems (Simola, Rinne, Varjo, & Kauko, 2013; Takayama, 2015), ‘vernacular globalisation’ (Appadurai, 1996) or ‘localised globalisms’ (de Sousa Santos, 2006). For example, the broadly egalitarian and decentralising education policies of Finland arguably stand in stark contrast to the more general global convergence around largely neoliberal ideals, such as school choice and other market-based mechanisms (see Rizvi & Lingard, 2010; Rutkowski, 2007). A further complication to the notion of US schools borrowing international ‘best practice’ is that Shanghai-China has itself recently undertaken education reforms based on selective policy borrowing from ‘the West’ (see Tan, 2015). As such, and while comparative education as a field has arguably become more analytical and nuanced in outlook apropos of such policy learning (see Steiner-Khamsi, 2010), the inclusion of international ‘best practice’ within the PISA for Schools reports presents a decidedly more normative and less educative approach. An OECD policy analyst reached a similar conclusion in terms of PISA for Schools normatively defining the ‘lessons from PISA’ that can improve school-level performance:

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[W]e also want to embed this [PISA for Schools] in the broader policy lessons from PISA and whatever we can learn from PISA that is relevant for school-level improvement. So, all of those lessons from PISA we’ve also put into the report, so it’s quite comprehensive … So, it’s not just showing the schools, ‘This is what your students answered; this is how they performed’. We can also explain to them, based on [the OECD’s] international research, what is actually important here for improvement. (Emphasis added)

These comments reveal a supposed universality regarding the policy advice advocated within the PISA for Schools reports that omits any reference to the individuating local characteristics of schools or systems, producing instead what Ball (1998), describes as ‘magic solutions’ for generic global ‘problems’ (p. 119). Moreover, this implies a strict one-way traffic in relation to opportunities for professional learning, a PISA to Schools in which the OECD’s understanding of ‘what is actually important here for improvement’ limits the potential for schools and districts to make meaningful local contributions to teacher practice or student learning. This prepositioning of the OECD as the global ‘expert’ on matters of education policy is deftly captured in the comments of an OECD policy analyst, who notes how the OECD—and not local schools or educators—is ultimately responsible for deciding which examples of ‘best practice’ (the ‘static elements’) are emphasised in the PISA for Schools reports: We [the OECD] chose them [the examples of ‘best practice’] for the US and the UK. We developed the template for the report. So, all the static elements, we developed them… We took the final decision here about what to include. (Emphasis added)

Again, this sense that the OECD ‘knows best’ is clearly evident, providing education policy advice that seemingly elides contextual considerations within and across local schools and national schooling systems, reducing the potential for schools to individualise their policy responses in ways that address and acknowledge local contexts. As Grek (2013), rather tellingly notes, this supposedly ‘universal advice’ reflects the OECD’s imbrication of knowledge and policy so that knowledge is policy, in which ‘expertise and the selling of undisputed, universal policy solutions drift into one single entity and function’ (p. 707).

Proposing ‘Best Practice’ The generic and decontextualised nature of the OECD’s policy solutions is further emphasised by all participating US schools receiving exactly the same 17 examples of best practice in the PISA for Schools report. This situation would suggest that there can be a single ensemble of policy advice and best practice that is equally relevant to all schools, as though local educators can merely ‘wander through the garden’ of international education systems and ‘pick off’ practices at their leisure from the PISA for Schools report (see Sadler, 1964, p. 310). It should be noted here, however, that this means of achieving educational change is by no means unique to

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PISA for Schools, and many school professional development programmes are designed on a similar presumption of universality that (often) fails to adequately account for local context. Indeed, the OECD is but one of many organisations that provides ideas to promote educational change by way of decontextualised, yet concrete, qualitative examples of best practice, and in this we can see how Simon's (2015) notion of governing through examples has arguably become the dominant approach to school change globally. It may be useful at this point to illustrate some specific examples from the 17 included ‘best practices’ in the PISA for Schools report to see how the OECD advocates the local reform of education policy. A particular instance involving the ‘high performing’ Singapore an system is remarkable insofar as it considers Singapore to be equivalent with any US state or school district, on the basis of similar student enrolments and numbers of secondary schools. By this logic, and purely on account of school system size, districts and states (in the U.S.) and Local Education Authorities (in the UK) are invited to ‘borrow’ teacher training policies, but without any apparent concern for the obvious differences in their respective local and national contexts: Singapore’s success and its policies regarding the recruitment and training of teachers may be particularly relevant for local education systems with similar numbers of secondary schools and students. With 196,200 students enrolled in 155 secondary schools in 2010, Singapore’s education system is comparable in size to several state education systems in the United States [e.g., Connecticut, Oregon, Kentucky, Chicago Public Schools; the Los Angeles Unified School District]… Thus, the example from Singapore may offer relevant insights for local education systems such as in the United States and the United Kingdom (e.g., with districts and Local Authorities) that wish to focus on the quality and effectiveness of teacher recruitment and training policies. (OECD, 2012, p. 103; emphasis added)

The supposed link between ‘Singapore’s success’ on PISA and ‘its policies regarding the recruitment and training of teachers’ presents such examples of best practice in an arguably causal light, as though the implementation of the reform is directly responsible for (measurable) improvements in student performance. However, this largely ignores the numerous non-policy factors that can (and frequently do) influence student learning and PISA performance outcomes (Feniger & Lefstein, 2014; Meyer & Schiller, 2013), promoting the discourse that policy exerts the overwhelming influence on school performance, while positioning culture as something external to schooling, rather than being immanent to how education is locally understood and given meaning. As such, there is little evident consideration given to how Singapore, and US states and school districts, and UK Local Education Authorities, might also be substantively different in terms of socio-economic, cultural, historical or geographic factors, outside of the superficial similarities around their respective numbers of schools and students. This de-coupling of best practice from its original context demonstrates the largely epistemological nature of the OECD’s global educational governance and influence, which depends on ‘stressing the importance of policy factors over the effects of cultural and social context’ (Sellar & Lingard, 2013b, p. 723).

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Another significant factor in the ability of PISA for Schools to steer local reform agendas is that the examples of best practice being advocated are arguably more concrete, readily implementable and school-level in focus. This is in contrast with the more abstract policy-level advice generally provided to schooling systems via the publication of main PISA results, which has historically meant their limited uptake by US schools and districts. For instance, observe the clear differences between, first, an example of policy learning around school resourcing provided to schooling systems from the publication of PISA 2012; and, second, an excerpt from the PISA for Schools report on classroom practice: How resources are allocated in education is just as important as the amount of resources available to be allocated. [Main] PISA results show that beyond a certain level of expenditure per student, excellence in education requires more than money. (OECD, 2013c, p. 17) Many people outside Japan, imagine Japanese schools as quiet, intense places where students quietly and diligently write down everything the teacher says. But that is far from what actually occurs. In fact, visitors to Japanese schools often report that the level of noise is often well above that found in Western classrooms. Students can often be heard excitedly talking with one another as they tackle problems together. PISA results show that this approach to education is far from ineffective, as the performance of Japan’s students in reading, and most notably in mathematics and science, is quite impressive compared with those in other OECD countries. (OECD, 2012, p. 63)

It is interesting to note, broadly speaking, the divergence between the best practices advocated in main PISA (abstract, open to local interpretation, not readily translated to school-level practice) and those present in PISA for Schools (concrete, clear, readily translated to school-level practice). We can see here then how local educators might interpret the above advice as promoting ‘noisy’ classrooms as an end in themselves, and that such pedagogical practices are instrumental to the success of Japanese students in reading, mathematics and science, at least as is represented by main PISA. It is thus conceivable that the prescriptive, and highly implementable, solutions provided in PISA for Schools would enable the OECD to exert a more substantial influence over local schooling reform than has previously been possible. To further demonstrate this point, note here, first, the more abstract and strategic policy learning around school autonomy offered by main PISA; and, second, the more prescriptive practices on disadvantaged students contained within the PISA for Schools reports: Schools in high-performing systems tend to have more responsibility for curricula and assessments. Schools with more autonomy tend to perform better than schools with less autonomy when they are part of school systems with more accountability arrangements and greater-teacher principal collaboration in school management. (OECD, 2013c, p. 18) Students from disadvantaged backgrounds who take one hour extra of regular science classes are 1.27 times more likely to be resilient than other disadvantaged students who do not have this opportunity. Taking more general science classes benefits disadvantaged students even more so than those who come from an advantaged background. Therefore, introducing compulsory science classes such as physics, biology and chemistry into the

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core curriculum of disadvantaged students might help close the performance gap with students that come from more advantageous backgrounds. (OECD, 2012, p. 83)

The answer for a participating school receiving such advice from their PISA for Schools report is ostensibly simple: all ‘disadvantaged’ students, notwithstanding this rather nebulous signifier, are to receive one additional hour of science per week to make them ‘1.27 times more likely to be resilient’. Problem solved. This type of policy advice in PISA for Schools reflects the positivist, ameliorative and quantitative approach to schooling reform that arguably undergirds the OECD’s promotion of generic best practice, as something equally applicable for all of the schools and students that might participate in PISA for Schools. Putting to one side the problematic leap to causality between compulsory science classes and student resilience, there also appears to be no allowance made whatsoever for local schooling context or—perhaps more egregiously—the particular interests, needs or abilities of individual students themselves. More significantly, yet again we can contrast the advice presented in the PISA for Schools report, namely ready-to-go and explicitly linked with changes to student performance, with the perhaps more nuanced policy learning offered in the main PISA document.

Problematising Best Practice I would suggest this approach reflects the dangers inherent in making the ‘treacherous leap’ (Gorur & Wu, 2015) from data to policy, and particularly the attribution of causality to relationships—‘1.27 times more resilient’—that are, at best, tentatively correlative. Alexander (2012) describes this process as perpetuating the philosophers’ fallacy of division, where what is true for the whole (e.g., Shanghai-China is high performing) is deemed equally true for some or all of the parts (e.g., the practices of Shanghai-China are responsible for its high-performing status). However, even if practice X is a common feature of high-performing schooling systems a, b, c, d and e, one cannot simply ascribe a cause-and-effect relationship between the presence of X and high performance, especially if X also happens to be present in low-performing schooling systems (e.g., g, h, i, j and k). Indeed, what are often touted as global best practices can be as prevalent in countries at the top and bottom of the PISA league table, as has been usefully noted of ‘whole-class instruction’ or, for that matter, a narrow curriculum dominated by a ‘back-to-basics’ focus on literacy and numeracy (Alexander, 2012, p. 13). This follows similar developments associated with the move, broadly speaking, from a focus on explanation to correlation—that is, from understanding why something works to simply being satisfied with what works (Lewis, 2017; Lewis & Lingard, 2015; Tröhler, 2015). Beyond the PISA for Schools report, we can see clear evidence of such a rationale in other PISA publications such as Strong performers and successful reformers in education (OECD & Pearson Foundation, 2013), and other non-OECD literature around education policy reform in the U.S.

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(Rothman, 2013; Tucker, 2011), Australia (Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation, 2014; Jensen et al., 2012) and the UK (Barber & Mourshed, 2007). In all of these examples, the notion of ‘learning from the best’—a process predicated upon comparative assessments like PISA—is a seemingly constant refrain. The OECD’s promotion of ‘learning from the best’ via PISA for Schools is interestingly not only limited to the sharing of policies and practices from putatively ‘high performing’ schooling systems. Rather, local educators and policymakers are also encouraged to peruse the extensive collection of OECD publications and research papers included in the PISA for Schools report, given that 33 (out of a total of 49) referenced works are authored by, or under the auspices of, the OECD (see OECD, 2012, pp. 129–131). The following excerpt from an OECD document designed to promote PISA for Schools to prospective US participants similarly suggests how such material can assist schools in their ‘search for excellence and best practices’: The wealth of PISA results and related OECD research and resources (reports, videos and publications) are easily accessible through e-books provided to schools and their active hyperlinks. Users of the OECD Test for Schools assessment and readers of the results are thus invited to explore these and other resources in the search for excellence and best practices. (OECD, 2013b, p. 5; emphasis added)

Moreover, the vast majority of these PISA-related references—‘the wealth of PISA results’—are available through direct hypertext links to online OECD documents and e-books. This means that school and district-level access to the research of the OECD is instantaneous and unimpeded, while most schools would be unlikely to have a similar level of free access to non-OECD-sponsored educational research that might present alternative possible conclusions. An EdLeader21 consultant drew similar conclusions around the ready accessibility of these educational resources, enthusiastically noting how ‘it’s all there for free at the OECD!’ I should emphasise there is nothing innately wrong with local educators accessing the work of the OECD, or any other policy authority for that matter, to inform their teaching practice and reform measures. However, it is arguably problematic for the OECD’s research to be the dominant (or only) contribution to this process on the basis of the Organisation’s status, with the danger being that the OECD becomes the overwhelming authority on schooling, rather than just one voice amongst many. In this way, the OECD may well be able to authorise what counts as valued evidence for the schools and districts that choose to participate in PISA for Schools, thereby limiting the possible ways in which schooling might be alternatively understood and practised. Here, we can see how the ready-made, or ‘pick ‘n’ mix’ (Morris, 2012), nature of the OECD’s proffered best practices facilitates their local uptake by schools and districts, but without first ensuring that these practices are understood in the context of the countries and systems from which they are being borrowed. Arguably, the processes of commensuration so central to the governance of education via PISA for Schools also help to render certain elements of social life invisible or irrelevant (Espeland & Stevens, 1998; Lycett, 2013). However, it is precisely this elision of difference that makes such

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policy borrowing not only possible but also desirable, even if the comparisons generated by such abstractions very often misrepresent the empirical reality one is seeking to understand in the first place. For example, the notion of ‘best practice’ presumes that certain curricula, pedagogical and administrative schooling reforms from ‘high performing’ systems can be equally applicable across different contexts and jurisdictions. The following excerpt from an OECD publication—PISA 2009: What makes a school successful? —speaks to precisely this point, suggesting that the ‘commonalities’ between PISA ‘poster children’ largely transcend differences in their particular histories, cultures and economic development: [T]he greatest value of PISA lies in inspiring national [and school-level] efforts to help students to learn better, teachers to teach better and school systems to become more effective. A closer look at high performing and rapidly improving education systems shows that these systems have many commonalities [‘best practices’] that transcend differences in their history, culture and economic evolution. (OECD, 2010, p. 4; emphasis added)

This supposed transcendence of ‘best practice’ is despite the concerns frequently raised by comparative scholars around the peril of not accounting for historical and cultural factors when educators, and policymakers, look abroad for examples of ‘what works’ (see Biesta, 2007; Crossley, 1999; Meyer & Schiller, 2013; Steiner-Khamsi, 2010; Wiseman, 2010). It is worth noting here as well the policy focus of the OECD’s use of PISA data, and the neglect of local contexts and history —the latter cannot be unproblematically transferred across schooling systems, despite the obvious attempts to do so in PISA for Schools. I would also note here the interesting tension between the local/contextual and the abstract that exists in PISA for Schools. On the one hand, contextualisation and acknowledgement of the local is happening (to a greater or lesser extent) in PISA for Schools, insofar as the report highlights the specific policies, practices and student performance of particular high-performing schooling systems (e.g., Shanghai-China, Singapore, Finland), and in the way it construes itself as directly applicable to individual schools (i.e., as relevant to specific contexts). On the other hand, PISA for Schools discursively positions participating schools as being somehow commensurable with these successful schooling systems, with the implication being that schools can (allegedly) borrow and enact examples of best practice from the likes of Shanghai-China and Korea. However, this elides any sense that certain cultural and historical factors are inexorably linked to student performance. Moreover, the PISA for Schools report references no specific schools in Shanghai-China when emphasising certain schooling practices but rather invokes the more general notion of ‘schools in Shanghai-China’. This effectively creates an idealised and decontextualised rendering of the ‘good school’ that overlooks variability within any given schooling system, let alone between Shanghai-China and participating US schools. This results in a constant shuttling in the PISA for Schools report between standardised, abstracted and decontextualised examples of best practice (e.g., what ‘schools in Shanghai-China’ do), and the richly contextualised and specific local

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schooling spaces from where these practices are actually derived. Indeed, the inclusion of local, yet abstracted, practices and contexts in the PISA for Schools report arguably achieves a form of decontextualised contextualisation, in which context is simultaneously acknowledged and marginalised. At any rate, the way in which context is purportedly considered in PISA for Schools reflects how this focus upon context, and processes of (de)contextualisation that surround notions of context, seem to constitute governmental strategies in themselves.

Contesting Best Practice The contradictions noted above between acknowledging local context, and at the same time, the supposed universal nature of best practice speaks to inherent tensions in the OECD’s position around the extent to which such comparative data, like PISA for Schools, can inform concrete policy reform measures. For instance, the following excerpts from two main PISA-informed OECD publications promote the OECD’s opposition to ‘best practice’, in terms of the limited utility of borrowing strategies from other national schooling systems, and the difficulties in employing such practices to guarantee ‘world-class results’: National and state education systems are very complex … Any exploration of the individual country trajectories towards high education performance must account for each country’s unique history and economic evolution, recognising that countries hold different values, different assets and different liabilities in their education systems, and employ different strategies to gain world-class results. (OECD, 2011, p. 229; emphasis added) In short, many successful school systems share some common features… However, the fact that such characteristics are more likely to be found among successful school systems does not mean they are necessary or sufficient for success. Not all successful school systems share the same organisational characteristics, and not all school systems that are organised in this way achieve high levels of performance and a moderate impact of socio-economic background on student performance. (OECD, 2010, p. 29; emphasis added)

Evident here is the tension within an organisation that, on the one hand, promotes the benefits of PISA-mediated policy borrowing from abroad, and on the other, discourages such activities on account of the unique differences between national (and subnational) schooling systems. Moreover, these passages emphasise that identifying and adopting the common features of ‘successful school systems’ is insufficient to ensure similarly high levels of performance in the school system (or school) adopting such measures. Somewhat contradictorily, the notion of international ‘best practice’ is one regularly cultivated by the OECD in a large variety of its PISA and PISA for Schools publications (see OECD, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013c), as well as during my interviews with many OECD personnel. Despite the frequency with which such global ‘lessons from PISA’ are promoted, the OECD does ‘officially’ caution against the use of causal inferences, or ‘recipes for success’ from PISA data. It is possible that this reflects an institutional contestation between the

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necessary empirical limitations of PISA data and the OECD’s desire to provide ‘useful’, and hence definitive, policy advice to the end-users of such data. The contrasting positions expressed across the various ‘official’ PISA and PISA for Schools documents noted above suggest the contradictions of an education policy agenda that has emerged via the complex institutional architecture and politics of the OECD as an intergovernmental organisation—a necessarily imperfect settlement between different OECD directorates, their staff and member countries and economies. Methodologically, we should thus avoid reifying the OECD as a single univocal entity when analysing its presence in educational policymaking and governance, and instead consider where, from whom and for whom such ‘institutional’ policy discourses are developed. The issue of ‘best practice’ provides a ready demonstration of this point. Different OECD positions on ‘best practice’, ranging from something problematic to something readily transferable and implementable, are evident in different documents designed for vastly different contexts and purposes. These range from informing national policymakers on system-wide issues (e.g., main PISA reports) to providing school-level teachers with the evidence to make concrete ‘practice shifts’ (e.g., PISA for Schools reports). What must be emphasised here is that this contradiction and multiplicity of positions does not in any way legitimate one particular message around ‘best practice’ over another (e.g., ‘readily implementable’ over ‘problematic’), but rather that different competing positions and discourses exist, and exert influence on their various audiences, at the same time. The inherent danger in all of this is that time-poor teachers and principals may only read the interpretations of ‘best practice’ presented directly to them in the PISA for Schools reports, and thus not consider, or even be aware of, the more cautious approaches to ‘best practice’ being advocated in other OECD publications. On this point, an executive from a large US urban school district indicated that time constraints had so far made it very difficult to access, let alone use, any of the OECD publications beyond the PISA for Schools report: I’m going to say [we’ve] utilised very little [of the other OECD materials]. The information started coming in right as our school year began, and it’s only now that the school year is underway fully that we can step back and start integrating it. What I have to do is ensure that it informs next year’s practice. It wasn’t able to inform this year’s practice.

Even assuming the best intentions of school and district staff to work beyond the materials present in the PISA for Schools report, it is understandable that many participants may well be limited to the positions directly presented to them in their 160-page report. Backed by the legitimacy of the OECD, it is conceivable then that teachers and principals might well interpret the ‘best practices’ in the PISA for Schools reports in highly problematic ways, with considerable potential impact to local schooling policy and practice. Consequently, I would contend that the dominant rationale around ‘best practice’ in the PISA for Schools report might best be described as solutions looking for a problem, with the OECD ostensibly determining which set of global ‘best practices’ are most appropriate for local implementation, even before a school takes the PISA

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for Schools test. While the presumed logic of evidence-based policymaking usually sees policies emerge in response to social ‘problems’, PISA for Schools instead promotes interventions in advance of the legitimating ‘evidence’. As a senior OECD official opined, this temporal volte-face, where policy prescriptions are known before the performance diagnosis, is seemingly common practice for national and subnational policymakers when they consider comparative performance data, such as PISA and PISA for Schools: The question often is, of course, what comes first? Is it the policy idea and then PISA is telling us something similar? Or is it, ‘Let’s really not have a policy idea and let’s look at what the international evidence tells us’? I’m probably being grossly unfair in even asking the question but that is always an issue. (Emphasis original)

The use of PISA’s supposedly objective ‘evidence’ by national policymakers to legitimate what are often prefigured policy reforms is by no means a new or even unique phenomenon. However, these existing processes of policy externalisation appear to be substantively different to the OECD directly presenting schools (and districts) with a defined collection of global ‘best practices’, even in advance of their performance being measured. Perhaps more troubling is that these ‘best practices’ are also not explicitly linked to any particular issue of local educational performance (other than the need to be ‘better’), and as such the proffered solutions can address whatever ‘problem’ happens to be revealed, or constructed, by PISA for Schools. Arguably, this makes sitting the test, and the data that are generated, somewhat redundant beyond providing schools with the impetus to act upon the OECD’s policy recommendations. Regardless of which questions are raised around school-level performance, the answers offered by PISA for Schools are invariably the same, encouraging a normative policy borrowing, rather than more educative policy learning. It is worth reiterating too that schools and districts are intended to voluntarily participate in PISA for Schools, with no compulsion from federal, state or local education authorities. As noted by an America Achieves director, the voluntary nature of the assessment encouraged participating schools to use PISA for Schools data and the OECD’s examples of ‘best practice’: That’s what makes this [PISA for Schools] different, because there’s a whole booklet to dig into, but it also proposes some ideas based on international ‘best practice’. The other thing I would say is the fact that it’s voluntary also plays into that hugely because people have a real sense that this is something I’ve chosen to invest in, this is something that I’ve chosen to do, [so] I’m going to learn from it. (Emphasis added)

A further interesting and related development is the apparent need for schools and districts to undertake additional testing to determine whether the enacted reforms have produced any (measurable) effect on student performance. As suggested here by a US superintendent, their district’s initial involvement in PISA for Schools provided—if nothing else—an incentive to undertake yet more PISA testing in the future:

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The next question is going to be based on how you digest the data. I think when you get right into it and then really begin to analyse what are some of the policy levers and frameworks and perspectives, I think then you might want to do it every couple or three years, because you need enough time for intervening changes to take place to even think about getting a measurable result. (Emphasis added)

PISA for Schools testing thus creates a local impetus to search for and implement policy reforms, while also legitimating on-going testing to determine how ‘productive’ the chosen reforms have been at improving student performance. This potentially creates a cycle of constant self-appraisal and reform reminiscent of Deleuze’s (1995) notion of the control society, characterised by ‘perpetual training’ or ‘continuous control’, where school and district-level actions are modulated by reference to international PISA benchmarks, local performance and ‘best practice’.

Governing Schooling Through Communities of Practice Given that we have just witnessed how PISA for Schools highlights ‘high performing’ schooling practices, and since such global policy ‘prescriptions’ accompany local performance ‘diagnoses’, there is already a significant impetus for schools and districts to adopt the ‘lessons from PISA’. However, it is equally important here to consider how such school-level policy borrowing is facilitated by the OECD’s many partner organisations within the PISA for Schools policy network, including philanthropic foundations, not-for profit bodies and edu-businesses (see Chap. 4). To this end, I now turn to the Global Learning Network (GLN), a professional learning community around PISA for Schools that has been developed and is supported by the US not-for-profit America Achieves. Despite its putative focus on facilitating peer-to-peer, evidence-based learning around PISA for Schools data, I contend that this voluntary association of local educators and policymakers helps the OECD to promulgate particular discursive constructions of schooling, encouraging the uptake of PISA-informed policy interventions. This is not to say, however, that the peer-to-peer collaborations enabled by the GLN are entirely problematic in effect. Rather, there is also evidence of PISA for Schools being appropriated by local educators to drive meaningful, ‘bottom-up’ communities of practice, which may produce spaces from which to counter more dominant relations of power around education policy. Indeed, and as Foucault (1978), usefully notes, ‘relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play’ (p. 94; emphasis added). A more nuanced understanding and critique is thus required here to appreciate how PISA for Schools is neither solely positive nor negative in outcome or intent, reflecting a situation that is decidedly more both/and, rather than either/or. Creating professional learning communities around PISA for Schools, typified by the GLN, is far from an exercise of secondary importance to the OECD, with such developments central to the long-term purpose of the assessment. A senior

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OECD official proclaimed the Organisation’s desire to ‘join up’ participating schools, and create a global platform to share ‘effective’ policies and practices through PISA for Schools: I think the next important step is to bring the schools together, to create a platform where schools that have done it can actually share their experiences with other schools [and] can learn from other schools all around the world… I mean, you look at the results and you can see schools that might learn so much from schools in another country, coming up with very different results. And enabling schools to sort of join up – to speak with each other and learn from each other – is really, I think, the true objective, the long-term objective, of this exercise. (Emphasis added)

Such inclinations for international networks of PISA for Schools participants were not only present amongst the OECD but also, importantly, its partner organisations. In fact, some of the most enthusiastic advocates outside of the OECD were the US philanthropic foundations that funded the development of PISA for Schools, a sentiment clearly reflected here in the comments of a US philanthropic executive: I think from the beginning that’s been a concern: How do we network the schools virtually, physically, regionally? How do we get them together so they can learn from the high performers but also, possibly, have a connection with an international school that’s much more effective? (Emphasis added)

Regardless of whether such comments originated from actors at the OECD or the supporting partner organisations, it is interesting to note how these opportunities to ‘learn from other schools all around the world’ was still very much predicated on comparative PISA performance and the marking of difference. As such, and reinforcing the normalising role of such testing regimes and comparative data to render education largely through ‘PISA lenses’ (Carvalho & Costa, 2015), ‘very different results’ at the local level were the basis by which schools should look around for, and share, examples of ‘what works’. To this end, the US not-for-profit America Achieves, an organisation funded by many of the same philanthropies supporting the development and enactment of PISA for Schools in the U.S., created a professional learning community called the Global Learning Network. As an America Achieves executive noted, the justification for GLN was to ‘raise the bar’ for U.S. education through PISA for Schools by ‘facilitat[ing] their access to the best policies and practices from around the world’ (America Achieves, 2014, p. 5). This ‘access’ was to be enabled through a variety of scheduled ‘virtual’ and ‘physical’ convenings produced and coordinated by America Achieves, in which local educators and policymakers can share their experiences around PISA for Schools, as well as discuss the OECD’s proffered policy advice. Significantly, these professional conversations are to be driven almost exclusively by PISA for Schools, with GLN offering opportunities to access ‘actionable school-level data… in light of their performance compared with global peers’, as well as the ability to ‘better understand assessment results [and] learn about global best practices’ (America Achieves, 2015b, p. 4).

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What is most apparent here is the absence of any meaningful problematisation around the implied causality between ‘best practice’ and performance (‘global best practices’), which largely ignores the inherent dangers in making unsubstantiated causal links between performance and in-school policy settings. Adding further to the resonances between the OECD and GLN is that these ‘best practices’ are sourced exclusively from schooling systems that demonstrate ‘consistently high results’ on the main PISA test (OECD, 2012). As such, GLN provides the means, in effect and intent, to give further ‘institutional force’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012), to the policy utterances of the OECD, thereby promoting ‘best practice’ as something that can be readily transferred between international systems and schools, irrespective of local context. This rationale also invokes the idea of governing by examples (Simons, 2015), where specific ‘soft’ forms of educational evidence (‘best practice’) are used to help steer local possibilities for action and reform, but where improving ‘hard’ numbers and data provides the impetus for employing such practices. The influence wielded by the OECD, in terms of deciding which policies and practices should be emphasised within the Global Learning Network, extends far beyond the 17 examples of ‘best practice’ contained within the PISA for Schools report. Despite the OECD being one node, albeit a significant one, within the PISA for Schools policy network, it still maintains considerable control over the ‘learning’ activities of the Global Learning Network. Indeed, when I questioned an America Achieves manager on the OECD’s influence over the Global Learning Network activities, they candidly revealed that the objective for America Achieves is to ‘align with what the OECD thinks is right’: Absolutely. I will be candid and say it’s not official. Andreas [Schleicher] has not said to us, ‘We need to approve everything you do’. It’s more that they [the OECD] are the experts on this [and] they created the assessment. And so, before we do any virtual convening that touches upon analysing test results, before we do any regional meetings, they always review the materials. Between our virtual convenings and regional meetings in-person we’ve had about 15 different ‘interactions’ [as of January 2015], and the OECD has been present for most of them and reviewed materials for all of them, so they’re a really critical partner in this work. And I think everything we do, we want to make sure that it aligns with what they think is right. (Emphasis added)

The purposeful seeking of the OECD’s support for all learning activities undertaken in the Global Learning Network provides a clear demonstration of ‘soft power’ (Nye, 2004), in educational governance, with America Achieves encouraged to promote the broader education policies of the OECD through ‘techniques of persuasion, attraction and seduction’ (Williamson, 2016, p. 133). While there is no compulsion for the OECD to pre-approve the learning materials and convenings used in the Global Learning Network (‘it’s not official’), the willing ‘submission’ of America Achieves to this process of ‘expert’ review (‘they always review the materials’) implies that the OECD retains a critical influence in this work. This ‘soft’ steering implies that there is no substantive challenge to the OECD’s rendering of ‘what works’, which risks positioning the Global Learning Network more as a mouthpiece for normatively promoting the policies and discourses of the

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OECD, and less as a truly ‘critical’ partner for meaningful professional development. Beyond ‘unofficially approving’ the convening materials created by America Achieves, the OECD’s ‘soft’ steering of the Global Learning Network also includes promoting its own research publications to school and district leaders, creating ‘recommended reading’ for local educators and policymakers. While I have already noted how the PISA for Schools report makes extensive use of OECD research and publications, this self-referencing is promoted further, still by encouraging local educators and policymakers to examine OECD texts as part of the Global Learning Network’s professional development activities. An America Achieves manager spoke openly of such partiality in the Global Learning Network, and the clear extent to which OECD publications were given preference over other research and possible renderings of schooling reform: We have a monthly newsletter in which we always highlight new articles or publications, and it’s typically an OECD resource in there. We also, when we do different sessions, will reference different OECD documents... One of the things that we shared that got a lot of clicks were those fantastic videos that the OECD did in partnership with Pearson [‘Strong performers and successful reformers’]. (Emphasis added)

Thus, even as school and district leaders can freely meet under the aegis of the Global Learning Network to share their insights from PISA for Schools, there are unmistakable discursive limits to what can be said and who can say it, outside of which lie non-OECD and non-PISA utterances. This largely restricts the ‘conditions of possibility’ (Foucault, 1994), or the ‘possibilities of policy’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012), for how local schooling reform can be conceptualised, and enacted, to that ‘authorised’ by the OECD. In this constraining of local actions, we can see clear resonances with what Ball (1993), describes as a ‘moving discursive frame’ (p. 15) of policy, in which possible ways of understanding and practising education are limited to those made available by the language of the dominant (read: PISA) discourse.

Fostering Data-Driven Dispositions Over and above advocating a particular discursive construction of ‘performance’ (i.e., that which can be measured by PISA) and ‘best practice (i.e., that which leads to improvements in measurable performance), a central role of GLN is to produce a particular data-driven disposition amongst the local educators using PISA for Schools. Indeed, there was a palpable sense amongst the participating teachers and administrators that they considered themselves to be more progressive, globally minded and forward-looking than their non-PISA counterparts. One U.S. principal even went so far to suggest that such attributes were indicators for ‘PISA-based people’, and that these data-driven individuals were the most desirable (and employable) teachers:

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The other thing I’d like to say is that for me, in terms of hiring and sitting down and choosing staff, I want to hire teachers that get this [PISA for Schools] … It is the future of education and I want it to actually make their minds kind of click too, and I sort of feel like they can lead the kids in this learning by sort of being ‘PISA-based people’ themselves. (Emphasis added)

This ably demonstrates how PISA for Schools, and performance data more generally, is influential in processes of teacher subjectivation and the constitution of schooling practices more broadly (Ball, 2003; Hardy & Lewis, 2017; Holloway & Brass, 2018), creating educators that can be largely described as ‘numbers people’ (Hardy, 2015). Even though PISA for Schools is notionally ‘low-stakes’, in the sense that it is not explicitly linked to evaluations of teacher tenure or individual teacher performance, it is interesting to note how some school leaders clearly might choose to use favourable teacher dispositions towards international testing and evidence when hiring (‘I want to hire teachers that get this’). In this sense, the lower stakes nature of PISA for Schools is perhaps elided by the dominance (and prevalence) of the data-driven and data-responsive logics that underpin such comparative assessments. In fact, the GLN school recruitment website explicitly suggests that PISA for Schools participation is a useful way to identify US educators who are seriously committed to learning from and implementing international ‘best practice’, and to mark those who, by default, are not: Members of the Global Learning Network are educators and district leaders who take the OECD Test for Schools to demonstrate a willingness to embrace the truth about how well they are preparing their students for our changing world. [They also] commit to learning best practices from others – nationally and globally – and implementing those practices to attain high levels of student achievement. (America Achieves, 2014, np; emphasis added)

There are several interesting (and questionable) values being promoted here, foremost of which is that PISA for Schools is positioned again as somehow providing the definitive version (‘the truth’) of a school’s performance, which diminishes other possible ways of articulating local forms of educational accountability. In the context of the teaching subject, it also depicts PISA for Schools participants as those who are willing to leave the ‘darkness’ for the ‘light’ of PISA learning, as though a desire to compare performance and implement ‘best practices from others’, and especially those of ‘high performing’ international schooling systems, is a prerequisite for being an effective educator. Such constructions of the teaching subject create a normative binary, juxtaposing those teachers (and schools) who shun the international with the (supposedly) progressive, effective and outward-looking ‘PISA-based people’ who do not. Such articulations of teachers and schools reflects how teaching has become, more broadly, a data profession: a profession in which data and evidence are central, and where teachers are required to constantly profess themselves as data. We can see such logics in the collection, analysis and comparison of performance data being positioned the central consideration, regardless of whether such metrics are voluntarily implemented (e.g., PISA for Schools) or legislatively mandated

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(such as value-added models or teacher observation rubrics); or whether they are to inform high-stakes decisions around teacher tenure and performance pay or low-stakes decisions around local professional development. Moreover, these processes and logics—what I have described elsewhere as the effects of data (Lewis & Holloway, 2019)—exert considerable influence on how individual teacher subjectivity is itself constituted, and how a data-driven teacher disposition is construed as being of most value. These dispositive responses—or the affects of data (Lewis & Holloway, 2019)—embody how teaching professionals are compelled to see data as the only way to validate and inform their teaching, and thus it is necessary for such professionals to be fully responsive to data in order to know and profess one’s worth as a teacher, transforming teaching professionals into professors of data.

A More Educative Appropriation of PISA for Schools? Of course, this reading of PISA for Schools and GLN as merely facilitating the OECD’s global governance of education is one that largely overlooks local attempts to use these professional development opportunities for more broadly educative purposes. Potentially, a more instructive disposition amongst teachers and district leaders might instead represent what Hardy (2014), describes as a ‘logic of appropriation’. Here, tools of educational accountability (such as PISA for Schools) are actively engaged with to facilitate meaningful student learning and professional development, rather than teachers being seduced by (or succumbing to) the performative demands of such technologies. By highlighting this appropriation, I am not purposefully ignoring the clear discursive constraints imposed by the OECD, its partner organisations and learning communities like GLN upon how schooling is locally understood and practiced. However, the interviews I conducted with school and district personnel would suggest that local US educators can (and often do) use PISA for Schools to encourage alternative policy spaces—perhaps reminiscent of Foucault’s (2007) ‘cracks’ and ‘fissures’—in which productive professional dialogue, and more ‘authentic’ modes of accountability, might be possible outside of dominant discursive regimes. Despite the apathy with which many US educators regularly engage with test-driven accountabilities, many district and school-level personnel were enthusiastic about participating in PISA for Schools, especially when it was considered alongside existing modes of national and state-level student testing. Given that PISA for Schools has no mandated public release of student results and no official sanctions for schools (or teachers) that fail to reach performance benchmarks, many educators felt that the ‘low-stakes’ nature of the assessment could more readily drive instructional conversations that transcended mere test scores. In turn, they believed this would avoid the ‘name and shame’ reaction that many existing high-stakes tests often elicit, especially if combined with the highly publicised release of school performance data (see Keddie, 2013; Smith & Fey, 2000).

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For instance, a US superintendent explained how she/he felt PISA for Schools data could help foster the transition from focusing on local test scores to ‘rich discussions’ about student (and teacher) learning: One of the things that PISA for Schools helps reinforce is … [moving] away from the ‘I got you!’ mentality to ‘How can we learn?’ That’s one of the most powerful transitions that [are] a result of a high accountability system. The first phase of it is always, in every country of the world it seems to be, ‘Oh my God, who’s that?’ and ‘I got you’, and ‘Why are you at such a low performing school?’ When you can get past that to then identifying some of your outlier positive performers and then learn the policies – whether they be a school-level policy or procedure or practice, or a district-level policy, procedure or practice that has influenced that experience for kids in the classroom – that’s when you get into very rich discussions about schooling and learning, and not about test scores. (Emphasis added)

The benefits of this (potentially) more educative approach were also noted by a US assistant superintendent, as PISA for Schools data could not be used by educational authorities—be they district, state or national—to hold individual students and teachers to account. As such, the absence of sanctions and other punitive measures (staff replacement, school closure) meant that conversations were more inclined to be about instruction (‘content, curriculum, level of rigour’), rather than accountability (‘we got you!’): It’s not high-stakes for the kids. So, then we can talk about content, curriculum, level of rigour and that type of thing, as opposed to, ‘Are you an exemplary school or an unacceptable school?’ And ‘we got you!’ on this, and now you have all these interventions and these sanctions, and that kind of stuff… I’m hoping we can keep it lower-stakes so it can feed more the instructional conversations, as opposed to the accountability conversations. (Emphasis added)

This prospect is a welcome contrast to the dominant ‘Anglo-American approach’ (Lingard & Lewis, 2016) to top-down, test-driven accountabilities, typified by the census testing of all students that attained special prominence in the U.S., under the No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top initiatives. In fact, it is clear from the statements above (‘I got you’; ‘why are you at such a low-performing school?’; ‘are you an unacceptable school?’) that the prevailing US focus on ‘high-stakes’ performance data has produced considerable performative demands, and affective impacts, on local educators (see Berliner, 2013; Hursh, 2013). Consequently, the ‘lower-stakes’ nature of PISA for Schools, in both actuality and perception, may encourage local educators and policymakers to see the creation of school accountability data as merely the start of a professional dialogue, rather than as a more performative end. In a similar manner, many educators reported that the sampling methodology employed in PISA for Schools, which requires only 85 randomly-selected students, provides a less intrusive way to ‘take the temperature’ of local performance, meaning that pedagogy need not be entirely subordinated to the demands of constant testing and accountability. Speaking about how PISA for Schools can help drive local education reform, an EdLeader21 executive invoked the ideas of effectivity and efficiency, whereby the data can enable ‘rich conversations’ within

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professional communities of practice but without subjecting every student to repeated (and potentially disruptive) testing: The way I see it, [PISA for Schools] is one of very few instruments that can effectively facilitate a data-driven approach to continuous improvement in schools and districts, [but] without over-testing kids. Because you don’t have to test every kid in your high school, it’s sort of light and flexible, yet rigorous enough, to effectively drive change at the local level… I think that communities of practice of all kinds can be really well informed by this instrument, and certainly in our case our focus is on the deeper learning implications of an instrument like this. And it’s really tailor-made to support those kinds of rich conversations and continuous improvement initiatives. (Emphasis added)

In this sense, PISA for Schools might possibly be considered more an assessment as and for learning, rather than being an assessment of learning that merely measures performance outcomes, and hence somewhat more educational than accountable in nature. Although the types of conversations enabled by PISA for Schools may well be inclined to follow the discursive limitations of the OECD, such as the evident focus on the identification of generic ‘best practice’ and ‘data-driven continuous improvement’, there is nonetheless a clear possibility for more productive ‘teacher talk’ to emerge from the GLN. However, and even with this more nuanced approach to school performance accountability, the limiting assumption that testing, ipso facto, improves learning and performance remains a significant position in US education discourses, especially amongst national policymakers vis-à-vis the prevalence of testing in government policies like RTTT. Neither should not dismiss out of hand the voluntary nature of PISA for Schools, with many local educators considering it a valuable tool for promoting professional collaboration and learning, within both ‘sanctioned’ learning communities like the GLN and other more ad hoc constructions. Indeed, a US superintendent whose schools participated in the pilot study enthused that: … PISA for Schools is by far the best vehicle that I know of to really prompt professional conversations between districts… PISA for Schools is at this stage a very voluntary thing. I mean, no state, no organisation has twisted the arms of any group of people that I know about and said, ‘Thou shalt take PISA for Schools!’ The people who have done it are people who have sought it out, probably believe that it’s valuable and want to learn from it. (Emphasis original)

Such ringing endorsements from an experienced, and presumably dedicated, educator cannot nor should not be easily discounted, especially if we are to value the professional and contextual knowledge that educators clearly possess, and also their ability to employ this knowledge in the best interests of their students and schools. Although I have highlighted elsewhere in this chapter the potential dangers to curriculum and pedagogy if PISA for Schools is used solely to normatively borrowing global ‘best practice’, benefits may still emerge simply by virtue of local educators using the test—in conjunction with other forms of evidence—for diagnostic purposes, and for sharing their experiences and insights. This professional learning would occur between sites of similar or different socio-cultural backgrounds, but in a way that recognises, and seeks to accommodate, the nature of

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these differences and how they necessarily influence educational practice. Such a vernacular approach aligns with what Kemmis and colleagues (2014), describe as ‘site-based education development’, in which education, and educational practices, are developed in response to the local needs and circumstances of each specific schooling site, rather than being downwardly imposed from government authorities or for that matter, intergovernmental organisations like the OECD. We can perhaps see early attempts at such ‘site-based’ peer-to-peer dialogue and professional development through the various activities of the GLN, including ‘regional convenings’—physical, face-to-face meetings of school and district staff from the same geographic region or state—and the nation-wide ‘virtual convenings’ of PISA for Schools participants in the U.S. For instance, the agenda for the June 10, 2015, virtual convening of the GLN reveals that such peer-to-peer sharing and dialogue between individual member schools is a central activity of the community: Representatives from Kohler High School (Kohler School District, Wisconsin) and Berkmar High School (Gwinnett County Public Schools, Georgia) will highlight the practices that they feel contributed to the strong achievement in science at their respective institutions, in addition to sharing the steps that they are taking to continue improving student outcomes. (America Achieves, 2015a, np; emphasis added)

Although somewhat problematic for its assumed causality between certain practices and student performance, this sharing nevertheless has the potential to benefit schools and educators, especially when contrasted with using the system-level results from main PISA as the basis for informing local practice. Furthermore, there appears to be at least some acknowledgement here that local context does matter, insofar as US schools are learning from other ‘similar’ US schools and not contextually distinct international schooling systems (e.g., Shanghai-China, Finland). In spite of the continuing focus on ‘high performers’ and ‘best practice’, there is at least a sense here that comparisons with more contextually-similar school peers may well produce more meaningful opportunities for policy learning (see Beech, 2006; Crossley, 2010). This may also go some way to overcoming the reductive effects of PISA for Schools, and the elision of individuating historical and socio-economic factors. I would argue that there are conceivable benefits from local educators sharing their experiences and insights within professional networks in ways that help to acknowledge the importance of local context, even if these conversations are largely being held in, or at least instigated by, the language of PISA and its reductive focus on reading, math and science.

‘Talking Back’ Through PISA for Schools Perhaps most importantly for driving more enduring (and authentic) processes of policy change, PISA for Schools potentially empowers local educators to ‘speak back’ to their state and federal authorities. This represents a topological ‘reaching

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out’ (Allen & Cochrane, 2010) by schools and districts into the political centres of State power, in order to influence events occurring within their own local policy spaces. In response to the more common imposition of ‘top-down’ accountabilities and policy discourses from governmental (or non-governmental) policy actors, PISA for Schools may enable local communities and educators to petition their respective education authorities to enact progressive change in more ‘bottom-up’ ways. This opportunity was clearly not lost on one particular US superintendent: If there was PISA for Schools data out there, how will a state authority resist pressure from local communities who say, ‘I’m looking at my PISA for Schools data and I’m looking at somebody else’s. Why are you inhibiting certain conversations? Why do we have to wait for you to make a decision at the state level before we proceed with certain policies?’ I think it will empower local organisations and local communities that want to take power to force questions with high-level authorities, whether it’s a regional entity or a national one. (Emphasis added)

We can see here the intentional ‘reaching out’ by schools and districts via PISA for Schools to the OECD, and other schooling sites through the Global Learning Network, in order to make new local actions possible, including by potentially influencing the educational conduct and policies of national (or state) governments. Notwithstanding the geographical distance between the OECD and other schooling systems, the relational proximity afforded by PISA for Schools may help local educators and policymakers to draw upon comparisons with elsewhere to drive purposeful conversations with their education authorities. Of course, it must be noted here that this petitioning of national and state authorities assumes that these authorities are indeed still relevant to the school. Greater moves towards Charter schools in the U.S., in the context of increasing neoliberal and libertarian agendas (Kretchmar, Sondel, & Ferrare, 2014; Lubienski, 2003; Tanner, 2013), not to mention the presence of the PISA for Schools test itself, would appear to suggest then that schools, rather than systems, are increasingly positioned as the most important educational unit. This means that national and state-level authorities, in fact, have a diminished ability to intervene in all schools, with this logic presuming that schools and teachers are, by extension, solely responsible for the performance of their students, outside of broader socio-economic and cultural influences. While these developments may enhance the abilities of some schools to exercise greater local agency, this also has obvious implications for the ability of systems to work in a redistributive way to address issues of equity, access and resourcing. These moves towards greater local autonomy would thus seem to benefit already more advantaged and affluent school communities—which arguably reflect the majority of US schools and districts that have to date, participated in PISA for Schools—while possibly being to the detriment of others, an issue further compounded by PISA for Schools being a voluntary, user-pays assessment. Also relevant in this context are the increasing moves in the U.S. for local forms of resistance to the ‘top-down’ imposition of ‘high stakes’ student testing. These have recently included a parental ‘opt-out’ of tests in New York State that is supported by national teachers’ unions (e.g., The American Federation of Teachers)

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and investigative journalists (see Hursh, 2016; Singer, 2015), and teacher boycotts in Seattle following the introduction of standardised Measure of Academic Progress testing (see Zeichner, 2013). Invoking this resistance to the imposition of ‘top-down’ testing, an educational consultant at EdLeader21 revealed how school and district leaders saw PISA for Schools as an opportunity to replace existing, and (in their eyes) flawed, educational accountability measures with something allegedly ‘superior’: In Virginia and New York, the superintendents are gung-ho about going to their state’s Department of Education and saying, ‘Please, dear God, allow us to substitute PISA for Schools for the idiotic, inane, weak state-level high school standards assessment. You want accountability – fine! We’ll provide you the accountability data you want for our schooling but what we’ll provide you [with] is PISA for Schools, which would be vastly superior’.

These local educators have readily positioned PISA for Schools as a welcome alternative to existing testing regimes and, relatedly, the State’s dominance of schooling policy, providing the impetus for a possible ‘exit’ (Hirschman, 1970) for schools from other (apparently) more performative assessments, modes of accountability and relationships with central schooling authorities. It is also interesting to note that it is not so much the demand for accountability data, per se, that is criticised here so much as it is the type of accountability data (‘idiotic, inane, weak state-level high school standards assessments’) that the State is demanding. While this ostensibly sees schools and districts confronting one set of dominant power relations (i.e., state and national authorities) with another (i.e., the OECD), and despite these discussions being conducted in the ‘language of PISA’, the value of empowering local educators and communities to exercise their agency—possibly their ‘exit’ but particularly their ‘voice’ (Hirschman, 1970)—should not be underestimated. This is particularly so if it encourages a greater ‘data legibility’ among teachers, parents and citizens, which helps to build democratic enfranchisement and involvement in debates around how education could be alternatively rendered (see Biesta, 2004; Lingard, Sellar, & Lewis, 2017). Ranson (2003) notes how such pluralistic discursive exchanges (and even contestation) are integral, and not somehow peripheral, to the constitution of a public domain like education, as legitimacy can only ever be truly achieved through extensive democratic deliberation. In this way, PISA for Schools may well help some local educators to provide different ways of being accountable and doing accountability.

Conclusion Given that PISA for Schools helps the OECD to topologically ‘reach into’ school-level spaces and extend the relevance of PISA to the local, my purpose in this chapter has been to emphasise how this ‘reach’ is translated into a means for steering local education policies and practices. Within the evidence-based approach to policymaking that underpin PISA for Schools, typified by looking around for

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‘what works’, the OECD’s inclusion of global ‘best practice’ provides schools with a decontextualised and universal suite of policy reforms that can be locally implemented. Indeed, one can see how the OECD’s governance of schooling practice is achieved through multiple, and yet overlapping, techniques: the diagnosis of schooling problems that provide a local impetus to act; and the provision of, supposedly, ‘ready-to-go’ policy solutions. In this way, PISA for Schools enables the global governance of local schooling by both numbers and examples, allowing the OECD to discursively constrain how ‘world-class’ schools and systems, and their policies and practices, are defined. Arguably, such possibilities for thinking and practising schooling at the school and district level, at least for PISA for School participants, are rendered almost wholly through the lens afforded by PISA. The very notion of ‘best practice’, and its elision of cultural and historical differences, is itself extremely problematic, with PISA for Schools inducing a more normative policy borrowing than an educative, and contextually informed, policy learning. Even while the OECD ‘officially’ cautions schools and systems against making causal inferences from PISA data, there is clear evidence of selected policies and practices from PISA ‘poster children’ being offered as highly transferable schooling reforms in the PISA for Schools report. While the positioning of ‘best practice’ in the report is admittedly but one of many conflicting policy messages of the OECD, its direct delivery to teachers and principals means that these examples of ‘best practice’ may be taken up in problematic ways in schools and districts, without first considering the OECD’s alternative positions. As such, these reforms are positioned as being able to elicit valued (and hence measurable) changes to future local performance on PISA for Schools, despite the inherent dangers in making undue leaps to causality on the basis of PISA performance. Such a ‘one size fits all’ approach to policymaking has the danger of ignoring the particular needs and requirements of those most affected by such reforms—that is, the school, its stakeholders and its local community. Building on the epistemic communities created through PISA for Schools participation, we can also see how partner associations, like America Achieves and EdLeader21, facilitate the promotion of PISA and the OECD’s broader education policy work. In particular, the GLN helps to provide the OECD with a receptive audience of local educators and policymakers, in which its particular discursive construction of schooling and performance is, more or less, unproblematised and accepted. This demonstrates the significant role of ‘soft power’ (Nye, 2004), of governing by co-option rather than coercion, in the OECD’s determination of what counts, simultaneously enabling and constraining the circulation of ideas, and, in turn, the possibilities for locally thinking and practising education. However, and notwithstanding such discursive limitations, it must be acknowledged how the GLN, and other more ad hoc forums arising from PISA for Schools, also makes available opportunities for meaningful collaboration between local educators and policymakers, despite these discussions often being conducted in the language of PISA.

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Chapter 7

New Topological Spaces and Relations of the OECD’s Global Educational Governance

Abstract This chapter summarises the overall findings of my research and outlines its contribution to the field, in terms of empirical, theoretical and methodological insights. The research reveals the complexity around contemporary processes of educational policymaking, and how PISA for Schools represents new relations, spatialities and modes of global educational governance, in which international discourses and processes are enfolded into school-level spaces and actors. In turn, this helps to influence, and potentially limit, the possibilities by how schooling might be locally understood and practised. I also discuss the implications of these findings, in terms of how local educators might more meaningfully engage with such global developments, and how a more nuanced form of policy sociology research might otherwise be conducted. What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. (T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding, lines 214–216).

Introduction I have chosen to preface this chapter, the conclusion, with this quote from the last of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. While arguably providing a lyrical backdrop to the final chapter of the book, it also emphasises that this is very much an arbitrary, if necessary, juncture: a single line in the sand upon an interminable beach; an ‘artificial blockage’ (Deleuze, 1994); or, perhaps more accurately, the first few tentative steps by a researcher towards ever-receding horizons of understanding, where each new certainty uncovers yet further new uncertainties. Nevertheless, despite what else this moment might be, it is still an ending. It is in this spirit that I outline here how the ending of this particular research makes a number of significant contributions—empirical, theoretical and methodological—to the sociology of education, policy sociology in education and comparative education, in terms of helping us to understand the new spaces and relations through which the global governance of education is realised. The chapter also sets out the implications of my © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Lewis, PISA, Policy and the OECD, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8285-1_7

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analyses for education policy and practice, before, in the sense that ‘to make an end is to make a beginning’, gesturing towards some possible future directions for education accountability.

The Empirical This book, and the research upon which it is based, is one of the first instances in which PISA for Schools has been the subject of empirical investigation, and to this end it makes a significant empirical contribution by examining, in some detail, a new OECD instrument designed to compare school-level performance against international PISA benchmarks. Whereas the few existing studies into PISA for Schools have so far been restricted by the relative absence of publicly available information, my analyses were instead informed by detailed interviews with key policy actors from the OECD and its diverse complement of partner agencies, providing rich insider accounts that covered the full breadth of the policy cycle. These interview data were also accompanied by analyses of an extensive array of public and internal institutional documents, ranging from the school e-books produced by the US accredited provider, to technical reports on the initial development and testing of the pilot programme, and promotional materials designed to encourage local communities to participate in PISA for Schools. In this way, I could draw upon a wealth of individual and organisational perspectives to chart the trajectory of how PISA for Schools had been developed and administered, while also examining some of the initial policy effects of its local enactment by schools and districts in the US states of New York, Virginia, Wisconsin and Texas. PISA for Schools clearly provides an archetypal example of contemporary educational policymaking and governance via the export of ‘statework’ to a variety of private actors and agencies, including intergovernmental organisations, not-for-profits, philanthropic foundations and commercial edu-businesses. While this is by no means an entirely unique phenomenon, my research reveals how PISA for Schools was developed almost exclusively in response to school-level demands for PISA-based comparisons of local performance, rather than being at the behest of national governments or the OECD’s partner organisations. These findings directly respond to the first of my overarching research questions: What were the conditions and policy opportunities, both for the OECD and its network of partner organisations, under which PISA for Schools was developed, promoted and administered? Here, we can see a significant evolution in PISA and the education policy work of the OECD, insofar as PISA for Schools represents one of the first instances where the Organisation has sought to directly engage school-level policy actors and spaces, sidestepping the usual mediating influence of national or subnational education authorities. The development of PISA for Schools through philanthropic donation, rather than national government contribution, also suggests the adoption of a new ‘innovative’ funding model by the OECD when undertaking riskier ‘blue-sky’ projects—like PISA for Schools, PISA for Development or PISA4U (see

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also Lewis, 2019, 2020a)—in the future, helping the OECD to retain, and indeed grow, influence amongst existing and new users of its data. The presence of numerous partner agencies in the development and delivery of PISA for Schools, each with their own distinct policy agendas, arguably sees the OECD reduced to but one node in a diverse network. However, my analyses clearly indicate that the OECD still retains an overwhelming influence, co-opting partner organisations to pursue its own policy goals and extending the epistemic communities through which it exercises its education policy influence. Even as PISA for Schools seemingly affirms the increased relevance of heterarchical methods in the creation and delivery of education policy, it also underscores how these horizontal networks of material and discursive flows are constitutive of, and constituted by asymmetric power relations, whereby ‘all animals are equal but some are more equal than others’. For instance, the activities of America Achieves’ Global Learning Network, with its guiding rationale to ‘align with what the OECD thinks is right’, reveal how the policy lessons of the OECD can be given ‘institutional force’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012) by partner organisations within a common epistemic community. Although we must guard against reifying the OECD as somehow being a homogeneous and univocal organisation, and thus recognise the presence of individual agency amongst its employees, my research into PISA for Schools provides further evidence—in support of others before me (see Henry et al., 2001; Sellar & Lingard, 2014)—that the OECD is increasingly operating as a significant global policy actor in its own right. My analyses would also suggest that the OECD is exercising this newfound policy actor role, and associated modes of educational governance, in a thoroughly respatialised manner. I have thus addressed my second research question: How does PISA for Schools respatialise relations between the OECD and local schooling spaces, with respect to enabling the governance of schooling policy and practice? PISA for Schools enables the OECD to ‘reach into’ (Allen & Cochrane, 2010) schools and districts, providing a direct policy conduit to influence how schooling is locally practised and conceptualised that by-passes traditional education bureaucracies. The test arguably facilitates this by making local educators and policymakers accountable for school-level measures of student performance, rather than the more abstract and disconnected data generated by main PISA. This PISA to Schools positions the OECD as the global and local education expert that can normatively determine ‘what counts’, adding to the expanding scope, scale and explanatory power (Sellar & Lingard, 2014) of its education policy work. There is also the clear sense that PISA for Schools helps to locate participants within a commensurate global space of measurement, especially given that local performance is benchmarked against ‘high performing’, and putatively comparable, international schooling systems. In both of these developments, we can see evidence of the ‘becoming topological’ of culture (Lury et al., 2012) and emergent topological spatialities associated with globalisation (Amin, 2002). Comparative PISA-based measurements establish continuities between schools and systems (e.g., common vocabularies and metrics of assessment; presumed and constituted isomorphisms), and—at the same

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time—the marking of discontinuities and differences (e.g., different schooling practices and levels of performance). In particular, my research shows that these discontinuities between participating schools and ‘high performing’ systems provide a key impetus for PISA for Schools, and the OECD itself, to drive local reform through system-to-school comparisons, making new local actions possible and, perhaps, even ‘necessary’. Whether such comparisons actually provide valuable insights to local educators remains to be seen. Nevertheless, my data analyses suggest that these school-to-system comparisons clearly affect how local school performance is understood with respect to the global, so that PISA for Schools provides one of the first—if not the only—international data-driven catalysts of school-level reform. Lastly, my final research question—How does the OECD use the concept of ‘best practice’ in PISA for Schools to help govern local education reform agendas? —has been addressed by providing insights into how the PISA for Schools report facilitates a mode of governing through ‘best practice’. Given that the performance comparisons constitute schools and systems as putatively isomorphic entities, the practices included from ‘high performing’ systems promote certain policies and practices to local schools and districts, providing a ‘soft’ qualitative accompaniment to otherwise ‘hard’ quantitative data. This linking of performance and ‘best practice’ enables the OECD to normatively define both what schools should strive towards (i.e., ‘world class’ status as defined by PISA), and at the same time, how they should notionally attain such goals (i.e., by adopting ‘best practices’). We can see then how PISA for Schools limits the possible ways in which schooling might be alternatively understood and practised, outside of that promoted by the OECD and its partner organisations. I would also suggest that the OECD’s promotion of ‘best practices’, and the very notion of ‘best practice’ itself, in the PISA for Schools report problematically marginalises the importance of local context and ‘out-of-school’ factors to student learning outcomes, despite the Organisation simultaneously promoting a more nuanced position in its other publications. In short, the inclusion of these practices is arguably more normative and less educative in nature. Collectively, the research advances new empirical understandings of how PISA for Schools makes possible new modes of global educational governance—that is, governing via heterarchy, respatialisation and ‘best practice’—and how these developments manifest in more local schooling spaces (see also Lewis, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; Lewis, Sellar, & Lingard, 2016). It should be noted that the alternative forms of governance I am offering here do not suggest any implied hierarchy or order amongst the ways schooling is governed. Nor do I seek to replace or supplant earlier contributions to the literature. Arguably, more recent articulations of governance exist comfortably alongside those previously suggested, such as governing by numbers (Grek, 2009) or by data (Ozga, 2009). Despite the pervasion of numerical data in educational governance, what I am arguing here is that the governance of teachers and teaching is far from determined solely by numbers. One need to only consider the abundance of recent theorisations around educational governance—such as governing by examples (Simons, 2015), ‘best practices’

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(Auld & Morris, 2016; Lewis, 2017b), socialisation (Grek, 2017), platforms (Lewis, 2020a; Williamson, 2020), time (Decuypere & Simons, 2020; Lewis, 2018), ‘visual shapes’ (Decuypere & Landri, 2020) and expertise (Grek, 2013; Lingard, 2016)—to see how these shifts in governance are, in fact, far from ‘exclusively based and dependent upon the cold rationality of numbers’ (Grek, 2017, p. 295). Nevertheless, to paraphrase Galileo’s famous assertion, and yet it governs; that is, these processes all shape how teachers undertake their classroom practice, how policymakers determine the policy settings of their schooling systems, and how publics contemplate the success of education. These modes of governing (data, numbers, best practices, platforms …) all govern in the sense that they both constrain and enable, limiting some possibilities for action while rendering others anew. Rather than seeing these developments, including my own theorisations, as reflecting paradigmatic shifts away from numbers or data, or any other more traditional articulation of governance, I would emphasise instead how new(er), and often more qualitative mechanisms often reference, and even complement, existing numerical data. For instance, consider how qualitative examples of ‘what works’ are valued for their ability to ‘improve’ numerical forms of performance data. In short, my contributions seek not to recast what is meant by governance, but to draw attention to the varied ways in which schooling is now being governed in contemporary times.

The Theoretical Beyond these empirical insights, my research has also helped to develop new ways to theorise these emergent modes of global educational governance, and especially their extension into decidedly local schooling spaces. If PISA for Schools has been developed, administered and enacted through diverse networks and flows of policy actors, agencies and schools that elide traditional territorial boundaries, the analytical tools that we use to make sense of such developments must also necessarily adapt. For instance, the productive capacity of power-topologies, which help to constitute the very networks by which these new ‘respatialised’ modes of educational governance are exercised, means that the relations between actors (e.g., performance comparisons) can often matter as much as their physical location. Even while the school districts I observed in New York, Virginia, Wisconsin and Texas are still very much situated within their own national, and state-level, political spaces, the new ‘relational’ empirical realities that PISA for Schools makes apparent suggest that our theoretical approaches must similarly embrace such a ‘relational’ underpinning. Hopefully, what my research demonstrates most of all is the utility of working together an eclectic variety of intellectual resources, including thinking around heterarchical modes of governance, new topological spatialities and rationalities associated with globalisation, and developments associated with governing by ‘soft’ examples. This conceptual framework allows us to theorise not only how PISA for

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Schools helps to constitutes new spaces and relations of educational governance, such as prepositioning schools to be the passive recipients of the OECD’s policy expertise, but also how these processes materially affect the practice of schooling by local educators. It should also be noted that these ‘topological’ analytics have generally been employed, if at all, only in the service of policy sociology and comparative education at the level of national schooling systems (see, for instance, Ball, 2012; Ball & Junemann, 2012; Beech & Artopoulos, 2016; Carney, 2009; Larsen & Beech, 2014; Lingard & Sellar, 2014; Lingard, Sellar, & Savage, 2014; Thompson & Cook, 2015). Consequently, this research arguably provides the first evidence that such relational approaches can be productively used to understand the impact of global flows on local schooling spaces and practices. Within this topological framework, I have particularly sought to emphasise how continuities between schools and schooling systems, and the subsequent marking of difference between these entities, are thoroughly productive forces. Drawing on thinking around potentiality, my research suggests that it is the visualisation of difference, facilitated by PISA for Schools, that is critical for promoting new types of affective responses amongst local educators, and in turn, the impetus for seeking new local actions and outcomes. This is where a possible desirable future, in terms of improved local PISA performance—such as becoming ‘better than Finland’— is revealed to participating schools through comparisons with commensurate ‘high performing’ international schooling systems, but where the attainment of this future requires local changes (e.g., policy reform) in the present. In what I theorise as governing through time, difference and potential (see Lewis, 2018), it is the articulation of multiple differences through PISA for Schools that prompts local desires to change policies and practices. These include (1) differences between a school’s current performance level and that of a ‘high performing’ system; (2) differences between the present and past performance of the ‘high performing’ system, especially when ‘reform’ has led to improvements in their schooling performance; and (3) differences between a school’s current performance and their desired future performance (PISA Yet To Come). This is a present-ing of the future, in which desirable potential outcomes (i.e., improving student academic success) are imagined and used to drive particular actions in the present, with this potential constructed largely out of difference. Although global educational governance associated with comparison can often be construed as repressive or constraining in nature, my research also emphasises the thoroughly productive nature of these processes, which must be addressed by a rich policy sociology.

The Methodological Finally, the research has made significant methodological contributions towards how such topological and relational thinking can be deployed to understand contemporary policymaking and governance processes that elide the boundaries of the

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nation-state, as well as traditional notions of public/private. Earlier renderings of policy sociology (for example, Ball, 1993; Bowe, Ball, & Gold, 1992; Ozga, 1987; Taylor, Rizvi, Lingard, & Henry, 1997) were focused primarily on hierarchical government, and its bureaucracy, as the sole site of policy development and dissemination, constituting policy as ‘top-down’ flows from those governing to those being governed. More recent developments (for instance, Baker & McGuirk, 2017; Ball, 2012; Ball & Junemann, 2012; Gorur, Sellar, & Steiner-Khamsi, 2019; Gulson et al., 2017; Piattoeva & Saari, 2020; Takayama, Lewis, Gulson, & Hursh, 2017; Williamson, 2019) have since recognised the increasing relevance of non-State actors and spaces across the policy cycle, forming a complex network of government, intergovernmental organisations, philanthropic foundations, not-for-profit agencies and for-profit edu-businesses. Here, we can see not only ‘private’ actors and organisations working to solve putatively ‘public’ problems like education, but also the lingering presence of government in this process through the setting of legislative frameworks and data infrastructures. In a methodological sense, this makes it necessary to examine the vertical and horizontal relationships inherent in heterarchies, and the various discursive and material flows these make possible. While these insights have contributed to a considerable reframing of policy sociology, it is a mode of critical enquiry that arguably still focuses on the effects of such relational influences on the educational policies and practices of national schooling systems, while more local schooling spaces are often ignored. However, my research has clearly demonstrated that attention must now also be paid to understanding how emergent globalised relations and spaces influence local schooling spaces and actors, especially given that this can now be done—at least in the case of PISA for Schools—without the intervening political mediation of national- and state-level bureaucracies. Rather than considering the effects of globalisation as something merely ‘done to’ educators and school communities via supranational authorities and national governments, I would instead suggest that policy sociology must focus on how the topological proximity enabled by PISA for Schools, or other such policy instruments, produces its own unique flows between the local and the global. For instance, acknowledging the local as a relevant space of concern not only addresses how global discourses and processes help to govern school-level practices, but also how these developments might create new opportunities for local agency (e.g., ‘speaking back to’ or ‘exiting’ accountability relationships with government authorities) and professional collaboration (e.g., the activities of the Global Learning Network). In this, we can see both the global ‘reaching into’ the local, and at the same time, the local ‘reaching out’ to the global (see Allen & Cochrane, 2010), and these rich insights would not be possible if one sought to understand the local policy effects of global educational developments through a solely national lens. The study has thus shown that the respatialisation of educational governance means that policy sociology must be directed towards where globalisation is actually occurring, and that we as researchers must adopt a similarly ‘spatial’ research disposition and not be content to simply look for the presence of new actors in otherwise traditional spaces (Gulson et al., 2017; Lewis, 2020b).

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This research has also helped to innovate thinking around the need for policy sociology, or any other form of theoretically informed qualitative enquiry, to be appropriately reflexive in its methods. I have sought to apply a greater level of nuance when researching the provision of private ‘solutions’ to public education ‘problems’, and have hopefully avoided adopting an unreflexive critical stance in advance of conducting the investigation itself. As I noted earlier, unthinkingly criticising the privatisation of education policy is arguably as harmful as the unquestioning acceptance of its purported benefits, especially when the vast majority of contemporary policymaking involves some degree of ‘private’ contribution. If not careful, we are in danger of attributing responsibility for all of the things we dislike in education to non-government agencies, as though everything was somehow perfect in a by-gone era of wholly public education, even though this was very clearly not the case (see Gerrard, 2015; Rowlands & Rawolle, 2013). For instance, the examples of collaborative learning and professional development facilitated by PISA for Schools would be largely ignored if one was to unreflexively adopt the axiom of ‘private’ or ‘OECD’ equals ‘bad’. In this way, I hope to have encouraged a critique that is more both/and in outlook than either/or, thus enabling the empirical to speak for itself and beyond any a priori theorising or personal presuppositions.

(Re)Thinking Schooling Accountability This book has so far (hopefully) demonstrated how PISA for Schools reflects a rationale of measuring, knowing and comparing schooling performance that has gained something of a global ascendency, if not consensus. However, the fact that these logics currently dominate should not lead us to think them irrefutable; indeed, the meteoric rise of PISA, and its various incarnations, over the past two decades suggests just how susceptible the discursive terrain of education policy is to change. Just as we should question the taken-for-granted nature of tools and practices such as PISA, we should equally not take for granted that they need to remain a constant fixture of the schooling landscape. As Yurchak (2005), usefully reminds us about the hegemony of the apparently eternal Soviet state, the rapidity of its decline was equalled only by its unexpectedness—‘Everything was forever until it was no more’. While not in any way suggesting that PISA can be equated with the USSR as a vehicle for shaping thoughts and actions, the passing of the latter should behove those of us who research PISA to consider what alternative modes of educational accountability could possibly look like, both to contrast existing dominant practices (i.e., high-stakes, test-based, ‘top-down’) and to chart a prospective future course. I would argue here for the development of different modes of educational accountability that only partially rely on test data, and which reflect broader societal purposes of schooling outside of merely constituting stocks of human capital. There are many inherently value-laden questions around the purpose of education that

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require deep contemplation, rather than the ‘knee-jerk’ reactions that often accompany the publication of performance league tables, especially when these comparisons are based on narrow and decontextualised conceptions of ‘what counts’. As a complex social practice, education needs to be treated complexly, and not in a way that reduces this complexity for the sake of facilitating comparison and governance. Moving beyond solely test-based measures of student performance, where the data that counts is more often than not that which counts (Hardy, 2013; Wilson, Croxson, & Atkinson, 2006), we might instead see the development of new accountability vocabularies, procedures (e.g., teacher narrative accounts) and infrastructures—for example, ‘competency groups’ of interested local stakeholders (Lingard, Martino, Rezai-Rashti, & Sellar, 2016, p. 220)—that are mutually valued by, and accessible to, all parties. I should emphasise that this would not require the wholesale rejection of ‘top-down’, test-based accountability data or methods, but would instead see the additional presence of more local narrative accounts that consider (and value) the specific contexts in which student learning occurs. Indeed, one can readily argue that each type of accountability (‘top-down’/quantitative versus ‘bottom-up’/qualitative) might best serve a particular purpose; enumerative performance data could satisfy the needs of schooling systems, while context-specific data can help inform how local educators reflect on their respective practice. In this way, the two approaches might complement one another to collectively produce a ‘rich’ mode of accountability, in which a balance is struck ‘between the value of large-scale generic data sets for system-level policy and governance purposes, and the need for idiosyncratic knowledge specific to local contexts to inform local policies, pedagogy and curricula’ (Lingard et al., 2016, p. 220). There is also the need to complement such educational accountability with meaningful two-way horizontal relationships between schools and their communities, thus creating a multilateral ‘answerability’ (Ranson, 2003), and level of expectation that holds all stakeholders—parents, teachers, local communities and schooling systems—‘to account’ (see also Lingard, Sellar, & Lewis, 2017). Such a reconstitution of educational accountability would function in an ‘opportunity to learn’ way (Darling-Hammond, 2010), giving schools (and their communities) the capacity to demand of their systems and policymakers that schools (and their communities) are provided with the necessary resources, both human and otherwise, to achieve what is demanded of them. This would help to recognise the funds of knowledge in all communities and how these might foster what could perhaps be described as more ‘authentic’, or ‘intelligent’ (O’Neill, 2013), modes of educational accountability. Outright opposition to accountability, per se, is not a justifiable position, nor one that I would advocate here. Rather, we need a progressive reconceptualisation of accountability that acknowledges the broader societal purposes for schooling, and which holds systems, schools and communities accountable in ‘bottom-up’, and ‘top-down’, ways. While it is perhaps too early in the lifecycle of PISA for Schools to see whether it can actually enable such a reconceptualisation, and hence my opinions now are largely speculative, this is arguably

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a key way in which the school-level comparative assessment might exercise a more educative, and less performative, effect on local schooling practice. Given these alternative modes of rich accountability, let us now revisit whether the uptake of PISA for Schools by US schools and districts does in fact help local educators to think, and practice, different ways of being accountable, especially in terms of promoting a new multilateral approach to accountability relationships. While some superintendents have clearly seen PISA for Schools as an opportunity to petition their state education authorities, and thus exercise local agency, I indicated earlier in Chapter Six that this does raise a somewhat paradoxical scenario, where one form of imbalanced power relations (i.e., between schools and the State) is potentially replaced by another one equally so (i.e., between schools and the OECD). The recent release, and largely enthusiastic (if limited) uptake, of PISA for Schools in the U.S. means that it is too early to judge whether local educators and policymakers will, in time, petition the OECD to modify the school-based test, perhaps in a manner reminiscent of enthusiastic (if unsuccessful) calls for the delayed implementation of PISA (see Andrews et al., 2015). I would suggest that if PISA for Schools is to truly promote new forms of ‘bottom-up’ professional dialogue and educational accountability, then local educators should feel empowered to ‘speak back’, not only to traditional State-centric authorities, but also, importantly, the OECD itself. To this end, it will be interesting to see whether there are opportunities for schools to feedback to the OECD around PISA for Schools testing beyond those made available during the 2012, pilot programme. For instance, a basic (and yet fundamental) point would be to address whether the questions asked by PISA for Schools reflect the types of questions that schools want answered. Or, relatedly, whether local educators and communities can help decide how the examples of ‘best practice’ are chosen, and presented, in the PISA for Schools report, so that opportunities for policy learning are at least derived from contextually similar schooling spaces. Given that PISA for Schools measures the performance of local schooling spaces with a view to reforming local policy and practice, it is both evident and appropriate that those being judged (i.e., schools and districts) should themselves also be empowered to judge their judges (i.e., the OECD and PISA for Schools). I would argue that the Organisation is morally obliged to ensure that the policy expertise provided in its name is both relevant and responsive to the diverse needs of local school communities. This form of ‘rich’ accountability would then enable a multilateral (i.e., ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’) deliberation and ‘answerability’, in which PISA for Schools is not only used to hold the local ‘to account’ in terms of its performance, but where test feedback can also keep the OECD accountable to the schools and districts seeking to inform their local practice with ‘lessons from PISA’. Prompted by the release of PISA for Schools in the U.S., Rutkowski and colleagues (2014) posed the question, Should individual schools participate in PISA, although this was admittedly underscored by a search for ‘lower-cost alternatives’ to schooling accountabilities in the context of ‘shrinking state budgets’ (p. 71). To this pressing question, I would also ask how and to what end should schools seek to

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position themselves within the global commensurate space of measurement constituted through PISA. If PISA for Schools merely serves as a vehicle for ‘high performing’ and privileged institutions to promote themselves as being somehow ‘better than Finland’, in order to aid their already considerable advantage, or to normatively borrow practices from radically different schooling systems or societies, then this is clearly problematic. However, the comments of participating educators and policymakers suggest that PISA for Schools, at the very least, does help promote professional collaboration, and a form of ‘PISA learning’ that acknowledges the importance of context to recontextualising how schooling can be locally thought and practised. It must be emphasised, however, that this potentiality does not efface the many normative ‘PISA effects’ regularly visited upon national education policy and practice by such large-scale comparative assessments. Nor does it suggest that, on balance, the drawbacks of PISA for Schools are exceeded by its potential benefits. On the basis of my analyses, it is conceivable that the many such opportunities for professional learning will be subordinated to the OECD’s discursive construction of education performance, where ‘low’ comparative performance serves merely as the catalyst for the decontextualised, and problematic, adoption of ‘best practice’ from ‘high performing’ schooling systems. Neither should one assume that the replacement of the State’s educational authority with that of the OECD, or indeed professional learning communities like the Global Learning Network, automatically resolves all potential imbalances of power around the thinking and practice of education. Foucault (1983) presciently suggested in relation to alternative solutions ‘not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous’ (p. 231), with the implication that each possible rendering of education policymaking and governance, be it ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’, will necessarily bring into existence its own unique set of challenges and problems. What these analyses do nonetheless highlight is the possibility of PISA for Schools, and associated bodies like the Global Learning Network, being ‘productive’ and giving rise, potentially, to more meaningful professional collaboration and dialogue between local educators, policymakers and communities. In light of the potential benefits outlined by educators in Chapter Six, it is perhaps more profitable to instead seek a ‘productive balance’ (Lingard et al., 2016) between the normative and performative demands of enumerative assessments like PISA for Schools, and their other, more tentative, educative opportunities.

Implications for Policy and Practice I believe the research here has several key implications for how schooling might otherwise be understood and practised. More than anything else, the effect of PISA for Schools is to position schools and districts within a global commensurate space of measurement, comparison and governance, in which local schooling practice can now be directly influenced by international organisations and education systems. As

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such, there is the lurking danger that educators who participate in PISA for Schools will use these school-level measurements to inform local pedagogy and curriculum in the same narrowly normative manner as many of their national education counterparts have so far done with main PISA. Yet again, we might see comparison function more as a mode of governance (Nóvoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003), rather than as a means to prompt considered and contextually aware discussions over how education can best facilitate the learning of all students, as well as foster a more progressive and socially inclusive society beyond that mandated by the demands of accruing human capital. In short, the research implies the very real prospect of PISA for Schools representing but the first step towards measurements of local schooling performance being valued only if they reference, directly or indirectly, the supposedly ‘objective’ benchmarks of PISA. The referencing of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in the U.S. against those of ‘high performing’ international schooling systems provides but one example of how national (and local) schooling accountabilities have increasingly come to be commensurate with more global initiatives (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2020). Moreover, while the dominance of the OECD’s policy ‘voice’ does not necessarily prevent the promotion of alternative discourses, its authority does arguably restrict the ways in which educators and policymakers might otherwise understand notions of ‘effective’ education. While I have raised significant questions over the more problematic aspects of the PISA for Schools test and report, I would be equally reluctant to wholly impugn the OECD or its partner organisations for the creation of such an instrument. After all, the US experience has demonstrated how it was pressure from local educators and policymakers that instigated the development of PISA for Schools, and the voluntary nature of the instrument, insofar as no education authority is currently mandating participation, means that only ‘willing’ school communities need be assessed against PISA benchmarks. In this respect, PISA for Schools might be considered no different to the many other such products, interventions and professional development programmes that schools regularly receive from soliciting edu-businesses and service providers, except for the OECD’s considerable reputation as the global (and now, local) expert on education policy. So, where does this leave us, in terms of suggesting how schools and communities could more meaningfully engage with PISA for Schools, or indeed any other similar opportunities to assess, compare and reform local schooling performance by looking around to, and borrowing from, ‘non-local locals’ (Lingard, Sellar, & Savage, 2014)? As suggested earlier, I believe the relevant question is not so much whether schools should participate in PISA for Schools, or whether such accountabilities are unreservedly ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but rather how and to what ends local educators might productively engage with these global policy developments. The local enactment of PISA for Schools is clearly a decision for schools, districts and their respective communities, and I would hasten to add that it would be overly presumptuous to counsel experienced (and presumably well-meaning) educators against their voluntary engagement with the OECD’s policy work. Even so, the

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experiences of the school districts in New York, Virginia, Wisconsin and Texas, combined with the activities and rationales of the Global Learning Network, do show a real potential for school-to-system comparative measurements to drive the problematic borrowing of so-called global ‘best practice’, often from systems socially and culturally distinct from the schools that will be enacting these policies. The research has emphasised that such forms of policy borrowing enable the governing of local schooling through the OECD’s definition of ‘what works’, rather than necessarily promoting meaningful and sustainable policy learning in light of philosophical considerations around the purposes of schooling. However, almost all of the school and district-level educators that I spoke with, revealed a great enthusiasm for the collaboration and sharing that followed their participation in PISA for Schools, under the auspices of America Achieves or through their own communities and professional networks. The early stages of this professional collaboration mean it is too soon to tell whether the net outcome is more educative or performative in nature (or both), but there is the possibility, nonetheless, that PISA for Schools will enable local educators to share their insights and experiences with contextually similar school communities. Such an approach invokes a sense of ‘site-based education development’ (Kemmis et al., 2014), in which education and educational practices are developed in accordance with the specific needs and circumstances of the local community. While this assessment may be too optimistic on my behalf, it is difficult to find fault, in principle, with the idea of enthusiastic educators looking to voluntarily engage in relevant, and contextually aware, professional learning with their colleagues, even if this is prompted by performance comparisons with China and Singapore. There is also something that must be said here about educators, policymakers and researchers looking beyond the headline performance figures to the (relative) wealth of contextual information included in the PISA for Schools reports. My research showed that many participants in PISA for Schools were overwhelmingly interested, at least at first, in their school’s performance average for reading, mathematics and science, and how this positioned them in relation to ‘high performing’ international schooling systems. This may well reflect the prominent positioning of such data on the opening pages of the school reports, before any other school-level data or caveats are presented. It is this same disproportionate interest in the average performance scores, amongst national readers of main PISA and local readers of PISA for Schools, which often leads to ‘knee-jerk’ policy responses that are more performative, and hence less educative, in nature. However, given that many of the richer learning opportunities arose when educators considered their PISA for Schools performance in the context of local school and student factors (e.g., student attitudes towards reading; teacher-student relationships), it does suggest that a more nuanced reading of student performance, at the school and system level, could possibly lead to quite different policy actions. Finally, and central to the broader emancipatory project of policy sociology, it is incumbent upon us to encourage in our research more progressive possibilities for how education might be conceived, outside of those promoted by the OECD and others as merely the means to achieve a continually self-capitalising end. Despite

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the current dominance of neoliberal mindsets and modes of educational accountability, these are far from unassailable, and there always exists the potential for alternative discourses to be revealed. To this end, I draw upon the words of Foucault (1988), to remind us that the conditions of the present need not determine those of the future: I would like to say something about the function of any diagnosis concerning the nature of the present. It does not consist in a simple characterisation of what we are but, instead – by following lines of fragility in the present – in managing to grasp why and how that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is. In this sense, any description must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i.e., of possible transformation… I would also say, about the work of the intellectual, that it is fruitful in a certain way to describe thatwhich-is by making it appear as something that might not be, or that might not be as it is. (p. 36; emphasis added)

As such, we are beholden to problematise the taken-for-granted assumptions and discourses in education, and reveal the present as something contingent, unstable and (ultimately) amenable to change. In a somewhat poetic symmetry with the topological approach that informs this study, change is the only constant.

Conclusion The beginning is often the end and the end is where we start from again. Let us return then to the question posed by Sadler (1964), all those years ago that opened this book, where he contemplated what might be learned from studying foreign systems of education. If this question presumably provoked different answers in 1900, the globalised milieu in which we now find ourselves—with its innumerable flows, continuities and complexities—is sure to produce not only different answers but also different, and more complex, questions; namely, ‘how’ and ‘to what end’ such learning should be undertaken. My research clearly suggests there is much to be avoided if one chooses to look abroad to foreign systems of education, and perhaps even more so if this looking is done solely through the lenses afforded by PISA for Schools and the OECD. However, I have also sought to demonstrate how such processes of commensuration and comparison could help stimulate new, and potentially productive, relations of local accountability. Developing and drawing on a topology-informed policy sociology approach, we have seen how PISA for Schools enables new relations and respatialisations between the global and school-level spaces and actors, and how this, in turn, helps promote new modes of educational governance and accountability that position the OECD as an increasingly prominent policy actor in its own right. However, the research also suggests that educators and their communities might be able to appropriate PISA for Schools data to promote meaningful local reform and professional dialogue, even if these conversations are problematically conducted in the language of PISA. Finally, I called for the unsettling of the taken-for-granted in

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education, and the need to promote a more progressive vision of how schooling might be imagined and practised. If this hyper-globalised world of connections, comparisons and commensurations is here to stay, and will continue to thoroughly influence what education is and how it is enacted, then all of us are equally obliged to converse, contest and contribute towards what these new forms of education might be and possibly become.

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Index

A Accountability Anglo-American approach, 44, 68, 160 ‘perverse effects’, 69 ‘teaching to the test’, 69 Affect/affective, 3, 50, 56, 98, 100, 103, 104, 114, 120, 122, 125, 159, 160, 174, 176 America Achieves convenings, 83, 155–157 Global Learning Network, 73, 134, 154–158, 173, 183 Schnur, Jon, 83 Australia Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), 21, 67, 72, 73, 86, 115 National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), 31, 112, 114 B Ball, Stephen J., 3, 23, 31–37, 48–55, 65, 66, 70–72, 74, 76, 77, 83, 84, 87, 88, 107, 109, 145, 156–158, 173, 176, 177 Benchmarking, 1, 2, 105, 106, 114, 118 Bloomberg Philanthropies, 72, 73, 83, 85 C Canada, 15, 19, 25, 32, 72, 99, 113, 136, 137, 140 Carnegie Corporation of New York, 72, 73, 75 Catalyst data, 114 Causality, 148, 156, 162, 165

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 S. Lewis, PISA, Policy and the OECD, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8285-1

‘Centre of calculation’, 13, 18, 122 China (PRC) Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang (China), 99 B-S-J-G (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Guangdong), 19, 99 Shanghai-China, 8, 9, 22, 97, 98, 103, 116, 118, 119, 121, 122, 133, 135–139, 144, 148, 150, 162 Commensuration, 45, 98, 109, 110, 113–117, 119, 120, 125, 133, 134, 149, 184, 185 Comparative education, 2, 29, 49, 65, 142, 144, 171, 176 Continuities/discontinuities, 8, 30, 38–41, 44, 46, 55, 74, 97, 98, 102, 109, 114, 115, 120, 125, 173, 174, 176, 184 Crisis/crises, 68, 78, 109, 111, 118 See also ‘PISA shock’ CTB/McGraw-Hill, 5, 66, 72, 73, 75, 77, 84–88, 90 D Data ‘catalyst’, 114, 126, 174 qualitative, 134, 174, 175, 179 quantitative/numerical, 106, 134, 174, 179 Deleuze, Gilles, 37, 111, 121, 154, 171 Differential Item Functioning (DIF), 115 E Economisation (of education), 16 EdLeader21, 5, 72, 73, 75, 76, 100, 134, 149, 160, 164, 165

189

190 Edu-business, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 23, 30, 35, 36, 48, 52, 54, 65, 66, 71, 81, 84–89, 154, 172, 177, 182 Epistemic communities, 36, 66, 82, 84, 86, 104, 105, 107, 126, 134, 165, 173 Evidence-based/evidence-informed, 35, 44, 67, 98, 107, 125, 134, 142, 143, 153, 154, 164 Externalisation, 25, 98, 153 F Finland, 8, 15, 19, 22, 97, 110, 112, 118, 119, 122, 123, 125, 135, 138, 140, 144, 150, 162, 176, 181 Flows, 3, 30, 31, 35–37, 40–44, 48, 49, 54–57, 66, 74, 82, 173, 175–177, 184 Foucault, Michel conditions of possibility, 40, 105, 157 governmentality, 46, 47 G Global education policy field, 110, 125 Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), 44 See also Sahlberg, Pasi Globalisation spaces of, 41, 42 vernacular, 144 See also Path dependency ‘Globalised localism’, 44 See also ‘localised globalism’ Governance by ‘best practice’/‘what works’, 3, 4, 9, 22, 76, 82, 84, 133, 135, 142–146, 149, 150, 165, 174, 175 by examples, 134, 143, 156, 174 by heterarchy, 3, 8, 29, 36, 43, 48, 134, 174, 175 by numbers, 35, 143, 144, 174 by respatialisation, 3, 9, 30, 41, 97, 174, 177, 184 by time, difference and potential, 9, 97, 98, 123, 125, 176 epistemological, 84, 107, 126, 146 Grek, Sotiria, 3, 6, 35, 50, 67, 111, 145, 174, 175 H Heterarchy, 3, 8, 29, 34–36, 43, 48, 56, 174, 175 Human capital, 16, 17, 34, 54, 76, 178, 182 I Indigenisation, 25 Infrastructure, 31, 34, 35, 40, 53, 81, 85, 177, 179

Index International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), 17 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), 17, 18, 121 Isomorphism, 8, 97, 113, 115, 120, 125, 135, 173 J Janison, 72, 77, 87 Japan, 15, 19, 111, 124, 135, 136, 139, 147 K Kern Family Foundation, 72–75 Knowledge economy, 17 L Lingard, Bob, 2, 6, 13, 16–18, 33–35, 38, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 55, 67–69, 78, 80, 85, 89, 99, 101, 103, 104, 107, 110, 112, 114, 115, 125, 142, 144, 146, 148, 160, 164, 173–177, 179, 181, 182 ‘Localised globalism’, 44, 144 See also ‘globalised localism’ Lury, Celia, 3, 30, 37–40, 42, 43, 74, 98, 102, 109, 114, 115, 120, 173 M Methodological territorialism, 37, 53 See also Methodological nationalism N Neoliberalism imaginary, 33 roll-out/roll-back, 33 Network ethnography, 54 New Public Management (NPM), 32, 33 O Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) budget funding, 71 centre for research and innovation (CERI), 16, 80 convention, 14, 15 directorate for education and skills (DES), 5, 7, 14, 16 indicators of educational systems (INES), 17, 68 member countries, 67, 68, 71 2030 learning framework, 18 Ozga, Jenny, 3, 4, 31, 35, 50, 51, 81, 174, 177

Index P Panopticism, 110 Path dependency, 144 See also Globalisation, vernacular Pearson, 84, 148, 157 Philanthrocapitalism, 55, 76, 78 Philanthropy, 48, 55, 65, 66, 70–73, 76, 79, 81, 83, 85, 155 PISA for Schools accredited providers, 5, 6, 20, 22, 23, 25, 73, 85–88, 172 ‘breakout boxes’, 22, 135 cost, 75, 77, 78 ‘dodgy items’, 115, 116 See also Differential Item Functioning, DIF funding, 19, 24, 25, 70–73, 76–80, 87, 90, 103, 172 online delivery, 78, 84, 89, 173 participants (countries), 102 participants (schooling districts), 73 participants (schools), 6, 24, 83, 88, 112, 118, 134, 155, 158, 162, 165 pilot study, 20, 72, 73, 85 promotion, 4, 5, 56, 75, 82, 83, 107, 148, 149, 174 school report, 6, 22–24, 97, 111, 112, 135, 183 technical report, 6, 21, 72, 115, 172 Policy, 1–9, 13, 14, 16–18, 22, 25, 26, 29–32, 34–38, 40, 41, 43–46, 48–56, 65–68, 70–72, 74–90, 97–105, 107–113, 116–123, 125, 126, 133–138, 140–157, 159–165, 172–184 Policy borrowing/transfer ‘New Paradigm’, 142 Policy mobility, 43 Policy networks, 4, 5, 8, 23, 30, 32, 35, 40, 53, 65, 66, 70–72, 75, 82–84, 86, 107, 134, 154, 156 Policy sociology, 4, 6–9, 29, 30, 37, 49–51, 53–56, 171, 176–178, 183, 184 Political legitimation, 98 Professional learning communities, 6, 9, 72, 100, 133, 134, 154, 155, 181 See also Global Learning Network Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assessment frameworks, 20, 112 brand, 26, 71, 108 criticisms of, 117 league tables, 24, 112, 119, 143, 148 lessons from, 103–105, 137, 138, 144, 145, 151, 154, 180 media discussion of, 101

191 performance, 20, 78, 88, 98, 106, 116, 117, 119, 121, 123, 135, 146, 155, 165, 176 ‘PISA effects’, 181 PISA for Development, 18, 19, 79, 80, 90, 172 PISA4U, 18, 19, 79, 80, 90, 172 PISA Governing Board (PGB), 5, 67, 71, 101, 108, 119, 144 ‘PISA lenses’, 144, 155 ‘PISA shock’, 111 PISA ‘Yet To Come’, 122–125, 135, 176 ‘poster children’, 124, 125, 135, 150, 165 See also Reference societies proficiency levels, 20, 23, 25, 112, 114, 137 strong performers and successful reformers, 148, 157 R Rankings, 24, 30, 45, 113, 118–120 Reference societies, 122, 134 Republic of Korea (South Korea), 15, 19, 119, 123, 136, 137, 150 Rose, Nikolas, 3, 33, 34, 45, 54, 55, 105, 111 S Sadler, Sir Michael, 1–3, 49, 144, 145, 184 Sahlberg, Pasi, 44, 144 See also Global Education Reform Movement Scale/scalar, 18, 20, 25, 33, 35, 37, 40–46, 79, 80, 85, 104, 107, 108, 124, 173, 179, 181 Schleicher, Andreas, 22, 67, 68, 75, 83, 106, 112, 156 Singapore, 9, 19, 22, 110, 111, 119, 133, 135, 138, 146, 150, 183 Site-based education development, 162, 183 Soft power, 36, 87, 105, 156, 165 Spain autonomous communities, 99, 102 Instituto Nacional de Evaluación Educativa (INEE), 102 national languages, 102 Sputnik, 103 T Testing, 5, 6, 17–20, 22, 69, 73, 79, 81, 84–86, 97, 99, 106, 108, 115, 117, 118, 142, 153–155, 158–161, 163, 164, 172, 180 Topology becoming topological, 30, 37–40, 98, 102, 114, 120, 173 cultural topology, 38 London underground, 37, 40 of policy, 3, 8, 37, 65

192 power-topologies, 41, 44, 45, 48, 56, 98, 104, 107, 175 reach, 40, 46, 48, 55, 102, 104, 164 Seven Bridges of Königsberg, 37 spatiality, 3–5, 8, 29, 37, 41, 97, 173, 175 topological rationality, 30, 37–41, 48, 55 topological reach, 40, 46, 48, 55, 102, 104, 164 U United Kingdom (U.K.) Local Education Authorities (LEAs), 146, 153 United States of America (U.S.) A Nation at Risk, 17, 68, 111 Common Core State Standards (CCSS), 182 No Child Left Behind Act, 31, 160 Obama, President Barack, 81, 83, 100, 103

Index Race To The Top (RTTT), 31, 34, 81, 100, 160, 161 school districts, 5, 78, 99, 146, 152, 183 state-level assessments, 164 V Visualisation centre of, 122 of difference, 120, 122, 123, 176 W William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 72–74, 76, 85 ‘What works’, 4, 9, 22, 53, 67, 76, 82, 133–135, 141, 143, 148, 150, 155, 156, 164, 175, 183 ‘World-class’, 110, 118, 121, 142, 144, 151, 165, 174