Data, diagnosis and prescription : Governing schooling through the OECD's PISA for schools

Abstract

[Extract] This chapter explores PISA for Schools, an instrument developed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in collaboration with a diverse array of (largely US-based) partner organizations, including philanthropic foundations, not-for-profit agencies and commercial edu-businesses. PISA for Schools, a school-based variant of the OECD's influential Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, not only assesses school performance in reading, mathematics and science against international schooling systems, but also promotes examples of what the OECD presents as best practices from notionally world-class schooling systems (i.e., as measured by PISA), as well as the policy expertise of the OECD itself. This arguably reflects the expanding scope, scale and explanatory power of the OECD's education policy work (Sellar and Lingard 2014), which helps extend the relevance of PISA beyond national policymakers and political leaders into decidedly more local schooling spaces (i.e., schools and schooling districts). Specifically, my focus here is how PISA for Schools helps to constitute new spaces and relations of global education policymaking, and how these emergent relational or topological, spatialities enable the OECD to influence how schooling is locally thought and practiced.