What PISA Knows and Can Do: Studying the Role of National Actors in the Making of PISA
Source: European Educational Research Journal, Volume 11 Number 2, 2012, pages 243‑254.
The author argues that apart from increased visibility, what the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has brought to education systems in Europe is interdependence.
This is because one of the effects of comparison is that it creates representations of educational realities.
Furthermore, comparison takes those previously separate and disparate pieces and brings them together into a whole, into one single entity – in the case of PISA, the league table, the report, the speech and so on.
PISA has created such interdependence among education systems in Europe and beyond, and has simultaneously created the dependence of this new reality on the continuous production of PISA data.
This is precisely how PISA has secured its existence.
Following the constructed imaginaries of economic globalisation, which see nations and societies as mutually dependent, PISA has substantially contributed towards a fiscalisation of the thinking behind reforming education systems and the narratives and imaginaries that construct this thinking.