Dr. Florez Petour in an article in the Oxford Magazine calls out the dynamic about international tests like PISA, and how they are used by Education Ministers to impact policy decisions and the behaviour of their Department.
While not agreeing with all the statements the author has made, the article does providing much political cultural insight and food for thought. This is healthy. I especially like the description of the dynamics of policy legitimisation - including externalisation, scandalisation, and the use of audit culture.
Here are some direct quotes:
“Authors like Gillies (2008) and Gür et al. (2012) have highlighted how media, and especially the press, have acquired an important role as governance tools in contexts where neo-liberal ideologies in education are predominant. They become the means for governments to demonstrate that they “are doing it right” or to justify predesigned and unproven reforms on the basis of spurious causal relationships. And numbers derived from assessment systems provide a very efficient way of legitimising policy decisions.”
“One general strategy is externalisation; that is the appeal to an external model or parameter when a local policy is being contested or has a controversial nature (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004). The reference to an external party is used as a means to legitimise the policy and take the responsibility away from the local government, e.g. the use of PISA parameters as a reference to the ‘world class education’ that we are all supposed to aspire to. A second strategy is scandalisation (Steiner-Khamsi, 2003), which refers to the use of assessment results and league tables to generate a feeling of public scandal after which the intended reform will be perceived as a necessity.”
“At local levels accountability systems in relation to assessment data are used as a governance tool. Managerial principles in education, in the context of neo-liberal ideas, require the installation of an audit culture (Suspitsnya, 2010: p572), where systems are developed in order to monitor quality and effectiveness of the “service” provided to “consumers” of education. Through these mechanisms the State can keep its power despite the increased autonomy of schools and their supposedly devolved power by governing from a distance (Ozga et al., 2009).”
The article goes on to give examples of “PISA Shock”, to describe the tyranny of the experts in this area, and the role of the OECD in the marketisation of education.
The article is worth a read. See attached:
Download Florez Petour 2013 The misuses and abuses of assessment data