The OECD PISA Study as a Soft Power in Education? Lessons from Switzerland and the US

Abstract

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.

Deconstruyendo los puentes de PISA : del análisis de resultados a la prescripción política

“…Es una manera sutil de intervenir políticamente desde la esfera internacional en la nacional sin que se dé la impresión de que se está produciendo semejante intervención. De ahí que se haya acuñado la expresión de «poder suave» para referirse a la influencia de los estudios PISA sobre las políticas nacionales de educación (Bieber & Martens, 2011). Como sucede generalmente con los sistemas de indicadores, y más en general, con las evaluaciones internacionales de políticas pú-blicas y de gobierno (Besançon, 2003), los indicadores elegidos no son nunca neutros sino que siempre reflejan una particular concepción de los objetivos de las políticas públicas (Arndt & Oman, 2006;Kaufmann, Kraay, & Mastruzzi, 2006).…”

An Examination of the Influence of International Large Scale Assessments and Global Learning Metrics on National School Reform Policies

“…We were most interested in obtaining official reports and policy briefs produced by national and international organizations (e.g., OECD, UNESCO), and scholarly articles published in peer-reviewed journals that offered analysis based on empirical research. 10 In other words, we did not including commentaries and opinion-based perspectives, even if they were published in peer-reviewed journals. We also included relevant book chapters, but not entire books, given the limited timeframe of our study.…”

“…Likewise, Switzerland's participation in PISA 2000 and the IEA PIRLS and TIMSS surveys contributed to their government's acceleration of pre-existing efforts to make the curricula and standards more unified across the country, as well develop better systems for monitoring educational progress within and across regions (Baird et al, 2011;Bieber & Martens, 2011). The UK's New Labour government has also used the country's PISA results to promote a narrative of declining educational standards that then justified reforms to General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) targets (Sellar & Lingard, 2013).…”

The Soft Power of Teacher’s Instructional Decision Making: An Empirical Study of 4 Chinese EFL Teachers and Native English Teachers

“…Trilokekar (2010) also proposed that the foreign policy should contribute to the internationalization of higher education, and the international education is interpreted as a nation's soft power. And through the study of the OECD PISA in Switzerland and the US, Bieber & Martens (2011) found this program can be rendered as a soft power in Education, and the extent of policy convergence depends on whether OECD can trigger convergence mechanisms in the respective country. While from the perspective of discourse analysis, Lomer (2016) represented the results of a textual analysis conducted on policy discourses on international students in the UK, and analyzed soft power as a policy rationale for international education.…”