Although originally created for economic purposes, the Organisation for Economic Co‐Operation and Development (OECD) has increasingly gained weight in education policy in recent years and is now regarded as an international authority in the field, particularly through its ‘Programme for International Student Assessment’ (PISA), which was highly esteemed in many countries and enabled diverse domestic education reforms. OECD derived a variety of policy recommendations from the PISA results. However, which of these were implemented at the national level and how OECD was able to achieve an impact on its member states have not yet been analysed in sufficient depth. To answer these questions, we analyse which OECD recommendations were reflected in Switzerland and the US. As their reception differs across countries, we assess under which conditions policy convergence towards the OECD ‘model’ took place. Then we elaborate on the governance mechanisms that caused policy convergence. We show that in Switzerland PISA's platform for transnational communication enabled policy learning at the expert level, thus leading to a rather high degree of policy convergence. This was not the case in the US, where PISA was regarded only as one of many studies assessing the performance of education systems.
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In the last decade, European education has experienced far-reaching transformation through the international initiatives of the Bologna process in higher education (HE) and the Copenhagen process in vocational education and training (VET) for enhancing European cooperation. This study investigates the mostly underresearched effects of these initiatives on Switzerland to discern whether Swiss HE and VET policies have converged towards European models, and which mechanisms were influential.
It combines research on Europeanization and convergence and uses process-tracing based on expert interviews and document analysis. Results reveal that Swiss HE policy strongly converged towards the Bologna model, while the development of a partial convergence of VET policy towards the model of the Copenhagen process can be observed.The study demonstrates the impact of domestic politics on shaping Europeanization effects and reconstructs the processes through which the initiatives took effect through transnational communication.
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