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This paper examines the expansion of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and associated growth in the influence of the OECD's education work. PISA has become one of the OECD's most successful 'products' and has both strengthened the role of the Directorate for Education within the organization and enhanced the significance of the organization in education globally. We provide an overview of the OECD, including organizational changes in response to globalization and the changing place of the Directorate for Education within the organization, particularly with the development of PISA in the late 1990s. We show how the OECD is expanding PISA by broadening the scope of what is measured; increasing the scale of the assessment to cover more countries, systems and schools; and enhancing its explanatory power to provide policymakers with better information. The OECD has also developed the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and PISA-based Tests for Schools, which draw on the PISA template to extend the influence of its education work to new sites. The paper draws on data from 33 interviews with past and present personnel from the OECD, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and the English and Australian education systems, as well as analysis of relevant OECD documents. We argue that PISA, and the OECD's education work more broadly, has facilitated new epistemological and infrastructural modes of global governance for the OECD in education.

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This paper examines the perverse effects of the new accountability regime central to the Labor government's national reform agenda in schooling. The focus is on National Assessment Program -Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) results that now act as 'catalyst data' and are pivotal to school and system accountability. We offer a case study, with two embedded units of analysis, in which NAPLAN has become high stakes testing for systems. The first involves the relationships between the federal government and three States (Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland) in negotiating performance targets on NAPLAN for reward payments in respect of a national agreement to improve literacy and numeracy. We show how Victoria used 2009 data as baseline, set ambitious targets and failed to meet them, while Queensland set much less ambitious targets, met them and was rewarded. New South Wales created targets that combined literacy and numeracy scores, obfuscating the evidence, and met their targets. The second focuses specifically on Queensland and the ramifications of the poor performance of the State on the 2008 NAPLAN. This resulted in a review commissioned by the Premier, a Report on how to improve performance, and the introduction of Teaching and Learning Audits and State-wide targets for improvement on NAPLAN. This unit of analysis focuses on the perverse effects of this highly politicized agenda. This paper shows how States seek to protect their 'reputational capital' and as such, 'game' the system. The data for the analysis draw upon interviews with relevant senior policy-makers and on analysis of relevant documents and media coverage.

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This paper examines how datafication is creating new topologies of education policy. Specifically, we analyse how the creation of data infrastructures that enable the generation, communication and representation of digital data are changing relations of power, including both centralised and dispersed forms, and space in education. The paper uses conceptual resources from cultural topology and infrastructure studies to provide a framework for analysing spatial relations between educational data, discourses, policies and practices, in new governance configurations. The paper outlines a case study of an emergent data infrastructure in Australian schooling, the National Schools Interoperability Program, to provide empirical evidence of the movement, connection and enactment of digital data across policy spaces. Key aspects of this case include the ways that data infrastructure is: i) enabling new private and public connections across policy topologies; ii) creating a new role for technical standards in education policy; and, iii) changing the topological spaces of education governance. 2 Emerging data infrastructures and the new topologies of education policy This paper examines how datafication is creating new topologies of education policy. We aim to provide new theorisations and empirical evidence to understand how the creation of data infrastructures, which enable the generation, communication and representation of digital data, is contributing to the emergence of digital educational governance (Williamson, 2016) and changing relations of power and space in education. We aim to engage in conversation with two key literatures. The first is the literature on critical geographies of education (Pini, Gulson, Kraftl & Duffy-Jones, 2017; Nguyen, Cohen & Huff, 2017), or more specifically the geographies of education policy (e.g., Basu, 2007). This work has primarily focused on the ways in which education policy performs a spatial ordering of organisations, such as schools, and especially the connections between policy, schools and urban change (Butler, Hamnett & Ramsden, 2013; Gulson, 2011). Relational notions of space and place, including mobility (e.g., Cohen, 2017), have informed these inquiries. In this paper, we build on this work by utilising topological theorisations of space (Martin and Secor, 2014) that have recently been introduced into studies of education policy and data in education (e.g., Lewis & Hardy, 2017; Thompson & Cook, 2014). The second literature is that which makes new and novel connections between public policy, infrastructure and governance (Sage et al., 2015; Prince, 2016), with a focus on data. Lawn (2013a: 8) argues that 'the creation and flow of data has become a powerful governing tool in education,' in a similar manner to the focus on calculation, metrics and benchmarking in urban policy (e.g., McCann, 2008). In education producing the right second order objectives (numbers) has become as important as first order objectives (pedagogy, curriculum, assessment) in new performative accountabil...