PISA, policymaking and political pantomime: education policy referencing between England and Hong Kong

Abstract

Since the mid-1980s, a number of East Asian societies have consistently performed well in international tests, and their education systems have emerged as models of "best practice", including Hong Kong, which has been extensively referenced by politicians and their advisers in England. In parallel, local dissatisfaction with the education system in Hong Kong has prompted major education reforms. This mismatch between the two policy communities in their perceptions of Hong Kong education is explored using documentary analysis and semistructured interviews with policymakers and other key stakeholders. We analyse the ways in which features of Hong Kong's education system are reconstructed in policymaking in England and argue that the referencing is political theatre, reminiscent of a pantomime, with stereotyped villains and heroes, narratives of good conquering evil, and comical set-pieces. However, there is a darker side to this form of comparative education that involves the manipulation of an unwitting audience.3 PISA, policymaking and political pantomime: education policy referencing between England and Hong Kong

PISA and the criticism of Finnish education: justifications used in the national media debate

“…In PISA research the term is frequently linked with societies or systems that become popular by virtue of their achievements in international comparisons and which are thus emulated in other systems in order that they, too, should do well in future competitions. Scholars assert that this construction (or reconstruction) of reference societies involves a shift from an historical basis of reference to a performance or test-based reference, coupled with scalar and quantitative shifts to include more national and subnational systems as reference points (Adamson, Forestier, Morris, & Han, 2017;You & Morris, 2016). For example, Sellar and Lingard (2013) argue that the inclusion of Shanghai in the PISA 2009 assessment changed considerably the ways in which exogenous systems were referenced in national education policy debates.…”

What did PISA and TIMSS ever do for us?: the potential of large scale datasets for understanding and improving educational practice

“…Interestingly, with their eyes on what are perceived as desirable aspects of Western educational practices (Elliott & Nguyen, 2008), supposedly model countries, such as Hong Kong and China, have introduced reforms in a different direction to those advocated by the English policymakers (Adamson, Forestier, Morris, & Han, 2017;You, this volume). Nevertheless, the performance levels of East Asian countries continue to beguile many Western policymakers who appear to be largely undaunted by the many variations among these in terms of educational systemlevel features including curricula, public expenditures on education instruction time per year, or the time spent on studying out-of-school (Leung, 2002;Schmidt, McKnight, Valverde, Houang, &Wiley, 1997).…”

School performance in three South East Asian countries: lessons in leadership, decision-making and training

“…The global education reform model Various multi-lateral educational organisations such as the IEA, UNESCO, World Bank and OECD promote a package of reforms in school leadership, governance and autonomy (Grimmett, 2018;Klees, 2008;Sahlberg, 2016;Shahjahan, 2016;Verger et al, 2018b), which have been termed the global education reform model (GERM; Sahlberg, 2006). Among other prescriptions GERM proposes that school leaders and teachers should have high levels of autonomy, schools should be responsible for staff training and development and that schools should be accountable to parents (Sahlberg, 2016); PISA data have been used to justify such reforms in various Asian jurisdictions, including Hong Kong (Adamson et al, 2017), Japan (Kimura and Tatsuno, 2017;Tasaki, 2017), Shanghai (Ngok, 2007;Sellar and Lingard, 2013;Tan, 2012Tan, , 2017 and Singapore (Lee et al, 2014;Tan, 2011).…”