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Globalisation, Societies and Education
ISSN: 1476-7724 (Print) 1476-7732 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgse20
PISA for scandalisation, PISA for projection: the
use of international large-scale assessments in
education policy making – an introduction
Gita Steiner-Khamsi & Florian Waldow
To cite this article: Gita Steiner-Khamsi & Florian Waldow (2018) PISA for scandalisation,
PISA for projection: the use of international large-scale assessments in education policy
making – an introduction, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 16:5, 557-565, DOI:
10.1080/14767724.2018.1531234
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2018.1531234
Published online: 11 Oct 2018.
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PISA for scandalisation, PISA for projection: the use of
international large-scale assessments in education policy making –
an introduction
Gita Steiner-Khamsi
a
and Florian Waldow
b
a
Teachers College, Department International & Transcultural Studies, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA;
b
Berlin, Comparative and International Education, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
ABSTRACT
The introductory article of the GSE special issue ‘PISA for scandalization,
PISA for projection: the use of international large-scale assessments in
education policy making’contextualises the four articles of the special
issue in the broader context of comparative policy studies in education.
It reflects in particular on the question of why cross-national comparison
is relevant for the study of ILSA (international large-scale assessment)
policy reception and how ‘methodological nationalism’may be avoided
when using national education systems as units of analysis.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 29 September 2018
Accepted 29 September 2018
KEYWORDS
Comparative policy studies;
international large-scale
assessment; PISA; reception;
comparative method
An ever-increasing number of countries participate in Program for International Student Assess-
ment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Progress in Inter-
national Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), and other international large-scale-assessments (ILSAs).
Unsurprisingly, the exponential growth of ILSAs has triggered an avalanche of publications on
the reasons for this growth and its impact on national school reforms.
The perspectives from which the phenomenon has been dissected are manifold. A great number
of studies focus on the global-level. Some of them scrutinise the global ILSA network, a coalition of
states, professional associations, international organisations, and the global education industry that
advocates for, funds, designs, administers, or sells these international tests (Benavot and Meyer 2013;
Martens, Knodel, and Windzio 2014; Hamilton, Maddox, and Addey 2016). The core beliefs that
hold this coalition together and the question of what the Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD), the World Bank, Pearson PLC, Cambridge Assessment International
Education, and other global actors each gain individually from nurturing the growth of a global test-
ing culture have become topics of academic scrutiny. Periodically, the global testing industry has
come under siege for developing tests while simultaneously selling the books and the teacher training
materials in preparation for the tests (Hogan, Sellar, and Lingard 2016). Unsurprisingly, the com-
mercialisation of test-based accountability has become an object of intense academic curiosity and
inquiry (Verger and Parcerisa 2017). Some have shown how the global education industry has suc-
ceeded in extending its reach by brokering education policies that require periodical testing of stu-
dents, such as standards-based curriculum and accountability reforms; once the demand has been
created, global actors sell their tests for an ever-increasing number of subjects, grade levels, and edu-
cational systems. Without a doubt, the rise of ILSAs has reconfigured power relations among global
policy actors, giving great weight to global actors –both public and private –that control the means
of test production. An analysis of global actors is relevant for understanding how global monitoring
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Gita Steiner-Khamsi gs174@columbia.edu
GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION
2018, VOL. 16, NO. 5, 557–565
https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2018.1531234
and comparison of national development is used as a vehicle to spread certain global education pol-
icies at the expense of others.
1. ILSA research and the re-emergence of the nation-state in cross-national
comparison
Equally important to analysing global actors, is the analysis of national and local actors. National
governments, school districts, and local politicians are not passive victims of the global accountabil-
ity lobby and the testing industry. The semantics of globalisation (Schriewer and Martinez 2004)
have produced political pressure on national policy actors to invoke the larger international edu-
cational space, represented by PISA, TIMSS, and other ILSAs, when justifying national policy
decisions. It is therefore necessary to draw attention to actors involved at the national- and subna-
tional-levels in order to explain how the exponential growth of ILSAs has changed power relations
among the many policy actors in a country.
To fill this gap in the literature on national and local actors, the authors of this half special issue
ask questions such as when, how, and with what impact national policy actors have mobilised ILSAs
as a national norm setting device. Of course, these types of research questions are not new. They
constitute core research objectives of policy borrowing research, a subfield of comparative policy
studies. In the early days of this particular subfield, the question was which educational systems
have borrowed, transferred, or learned which reforms from which systems. For a long time, the
focus of policy borrowing research was on the relationship between two countries; for example,
the British interest in German education (Phillips 2015) or the United States interest in neoliberal
United Kingdom policies of the 1980s, and vice-versa (Whitty 2012). However, in the new millen-
nium, this traditional focus was dropped and replaced with studies of ‘traveling reforms’or global
education policies (e.g., Robertson et al. 2012; Steiner-Khamsi and Waldow 2012; Larsen and
Beech 2014; Edwards 2018). The twenty-first century intellectual kinship among policy borrowing
researchers and global education policy researchers is not coincidental; neoliberal, quasi-market
reforms of the late 1980s have spread like wildfire to every corner of the world over the past three
decades. The fundamental changes in how educational systems are regulated, notably, the shifts
from input to output, from government to governance, from external inspection to self-evaluation
by numbers, and finally from state actors to public-private as well as national-international networks,
have been convincingly documented (Ball and Junemann 2012; Jules 2017). The globally structured
neo-liberal agenda (Dale 2000; Robertson and Dale 2015) has indeed replaced punctual bilateral,
cross-national policy attraction with ubiquitous policy transfer processes in which one global edu-
cation policy diffuses across a large number of educational systems. As a corollary, when it comes
to the global spread of, for example, the accountability regime, accreditation in higher education,
or other global education policies, the directionality of transfer has become obsolete.
Strikingly, precisely at a stage in policy borrowing research when scholars have put the study of
cross-national policy attraction to rest and instead directed their attention to the ubiquitous diffusion
processes of global education policies, the cross-national dimension –and by implication the focus
on the nation-state and its national policy actors –has regained importance in ILSA policy research.
In the case of PISA, the preoccupation of national policy actors is, at least rhetorically, how their own
system scores as compared to others, and what there is to ‘learn’from the league-winners, league-
slippers, and league-losers, in terms of PISA’s twenty-first century skills. Because policy actors
often attribute ‘best practices’to particular national educational systems, the national-level regained
importance as a unit of analysis. ILSA policy researchers therefore found themselves in a position of
having to bring back the focus to national systems; a focus which if used naively, should be cause for
concern. The risks of methodological nationalism are reiterated here to demonstrate how the authors
of this half special issue distance themselves from the homogenising effects that cross-national com-
parison tends to have.
558 G. STEINER-KHAMSI AND F. WALDOW
In acknowledgement of the widespread critique of methodological nationalism, forcefully put for-
ward by scholars in sociology, social anthropology, and the comparative social sciences (Giddens
1995; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003; Dale 2005; Robertson and Dale 2008), the editors of this
issue feel that the choice of national education systems as the unit of analysis requires justification.
In a seminar article on methodological nationalism, Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller assert
that ‘[m]ethodological nationalism is the naturalization of the nation-state by the social sciences’
(Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003, 576). They identify three variants of methodological nationalism
within the social sciences: (i) disregard of the power of nationalism for modern societies, (ii) natu-
ralisation, that is, taking for granted the boundaries of the nation-state and using them to define the
unit of analysis, and (iii) territorial limitation of social research in that phenomena are only exam-
ined within the political and geographic boundaries of particular nation-states rather than transna-
tionally. In comparative education, the critique of methodological nationalism has greatly resonated
with scholars who draw on political economy thought, world systems theories, or critical globalisa-
tion studies to demonstrate the unequal transnational flows of educational goods, services and ‘best
practices’.
For these reasons, current intellectual projects that ‘bring back’the nation as the unit of analysis
must explain the difference--and in our opinion should explicitly distance themselves--from earlier
projects, which framed national educational systems as bounded and homogenous entities that could
be easily compared, or contrasted, to other systems. These earlier studies oftentimes ended up being
tautological or engaged in a ‘self-reinforcing way of looking at and describing the social world’
(Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003, 578). They predicted the existence of vast differences among
national systems and unsurprisingly, as an artifact of their method of inquiry, found these differences
and described them in an essentialising manner (see Steiner-Khamsi 2002).
Our own interest in comparing PISA reception across systems as well as across different reform
periods within a system, stems from a diametrically opposed research interest. Our preoccupation
with the national-level attempts to bring to light the performative act of systems. At particular
moments, systems generate national boundaries and reassert themselves as national entities in
order to make it appear that there is (global) external pressure for reform or change. In the same
vein, they construct other national systems as reference societies at particular moments to suggest
that lessons should be drawn from these systems. The political act of ‘externalisation’serves to
unify or –to use the proper term –to build coalitions in support of an educational policy. It is impor-
tant to point out here that every political act of externalisation necessitates, but also contributes to,
the social construction of the nation as an acting subject. Our attention is directed to how govern-
ments deal with policy contestation, at what moments they resort to the semantics of the ‘national’
and the ‘global’, and what impact their acts of externalisation have on authorising controversial edu-
cational policies in their country.
Having said this, it is also important to keep in mind that in some countries the government has
ceased to be the main national policy actor. In an era of ‘network governance’(Ball and Junemann
2012), businesses, churches, and parent groups as well as international organisations exert enormous
pressure on governments to further deregulate the system and delegate the provision of education
and the creation of new policies to the private sector. In some educational systems, such as in Eng-
land, the provision of education has been diversified and the role of the government minimised to the
extent that Stephen Ball suggests that we use the term ‘system’with precaution (Ball 2018). As is
explained in the following section, PISA lends itself to such boundary work because public policy,
including educational policies, are by definition controversial, that is, supported by some, and con-
tested by others.
2. Interpreting scandalisation and projection as idiosyncratic responses to ILSAs
This half special issue deals with cross-national policy attraction, but it studies the phenomenon in
two new ways: It is analytical rather than normative and it critically reflects on how policy actors use
GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION 559
the method of comparison for national policy setting. First, rather than normatively postulating that
the ‘best-performing’educational systems of Finland, China, Singapore, or other league-winners
should be used for lesson-drawing (Liang, Kidwai, and Zhang 2016), the analytical focus of this
group of authors is on how national policy actors have actually used ILSAs for national agenda set-
ting or policy formulation. Second, the cross-national dimension of ILSA policy research begs for an
additional objective of inquiry: Which countries do policy actors select as a ‘reference society’
(Bendix 1978, 292) and which countries do they consider as ‘negative reference societies’(Waldow
2017, 647) or ‘counter-reference societies’(Takayama in this issue), respectively? The concept of
reference or counter-reference society is based on commensurability. How do national policy actors
make the educational systems of league winners appear to be comparable to their own educational
system, in order to suggest that lessons could be drawn? The inverse also applies when negative refer-
ences to league-losers are made, begging the question: How do policy actors use comparison as a tool
to differentiate themselves from ‘low-performing systems’? The question of how commensurability is
constructed and to whose benefit or at whose expense, has been an important field of study in his-
torical sociology (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001) as well as, more recently, in the sociology of
measurement (Gorur 2014). Thus, the analysis of how commensurability is established is another
research topic that ILSA policy research has brought to focus.
In this collection of articles, two particular national policy strategies, both closely associated with
the reception and translation of ILSA results, are examined in greater detail: (i) the scandalisation of
public education and (ii) projections into ILSA league-leaders, league-slippers, and league-losers.
According to Gita Steiner-Khamsi (2003), ‘scandalization’means ‘highlighting the weaknesses of
one’s own educational system as a result of comparison.’This does not necessarily mean that low
scores are the reason for the scandalisation. Comparison is a complex process of meaning-making,
and different ways of framing success and failure play an important role in that process. Thus, scan-
dalisation can even occur when ILSA results are very good, e.g., if there is a perception that good
results have been bought at too high a price, as claimed by some observers, e.g., in Korea (see Lee
and Sung forthcoming).
Research on policy borrowing and lending has shown again and again that references to ‘else-
where’depend mostly on the perspective prevalent in the context from where the referencing is
being done, not on the context serving as the reference (see Zymek 1975; Steiner-Khamsi 2004).
The concept of projection (Waldow 2017) takes this insight one step further, stressing that actual
conditions in the place that is being referred to are often of minor importance. Rather, what is impor-
tant is what observers want to see, to the extent that what is observed may not actually exist in the
place serving as the reference. Projections serve to legitimate or de-legitimate educational policies
and agendas in the place from where the projection is made. Conceptions of ‘good’and ‘bad’edu-
cation are projected onto countries or regions like a slide or film is projected onto a projection screen.
Reference societies will thus usually be depicted in a very selective way, with certain aspects being
emphasised out of proportion and complex or contradictory aspects being presented in a simplified
way.
The four articles comprising this half special issue have employed the concepts of scandalisation
and projection in fruitful and original ways, generating important insights into the ways in which
ILSAs and their results are used as a national policy device in various locations. The authors are
part of a larger community of globalisation scholars who acknowledge the intellectual value of ana-
lysing local meaning-making of global policies and devices. They use the national actors as their unit
of analysis to understand why, when, and with what impact these actors engage with the ILSA global
policy device, and how they establish commensurability or non-commensurability with other edu-
cational systems that participate in global testing. The methodological tool of the authors of this half
special issue is comparison in its most comprehensive sense; that is, comparison across different
national educational systems, comparison across different time periods within the same educational
system, as well as comparison of national educational systems against constructed international stan-
dards or benchmarks. This comparative method of inquiry enables the authors to show the varied
560 G. STEINER-KHAMSI AND F. WALDOW
national policy uses of ILSAs. It is through comparisons of different national contexts as well as tem-
poral comparisons within a singular national context that the conceptual link between the varied
local encounters with global education policies and devices may be made.
3. The wide range of comparative methodology
The four articles in this collection use a comparative methodology to demonstrate how the same
ILSA result can be interpreted differently, reflecting varied political agendas and stakeholder inter-
ests. Joakim Landahl focuses on the early stage of ILSAs in the early 1970s and examines the policy
impact of the Six Subject Survey on curriculum reform in Sweden. The International Association for
Educational Assessment (IEA) released the results of the Six Subject Survey in 1973. A total of 21
countries, including Sweden, participated in the ILSA. The release occurred a decade after a
major school reform in Sweden was launched: The comprehensive school reform. The reform
replaced older forms of secondary education such as grammar schools, girls’schools, and vocational
schools with a system that was less selective and therefore deemed more democratic. The reform was
controversial and was heavily criticised by conservative parties in Sweden, who claimed that aca-
demic standards had declined and that students were learning less as a result of the reform. However,
in 1973, the Six Subject Survey results were released for three of the six subjects (literature education,
reading comprehension, and science) suggesting that the 10-year students in Swedish schools were
high performing. The results stunned both proponents and opponents of the comprehensive school
reform.
Landahl writes that in the early days of ILSAs, IEA condemned the competitive nature of cross-
national comparison and refused to provide league tables. Instead, the results of the Six Subject Sur-
vey were used as a tool to evaluate the common school reform in Sweden. Despite the warnings of
academics against using the results in a competitive manner, the Swedish media referred to the test as
the ‘knowledge Olympics’and spread the news that students in Sweden were ‘the best in the world’in
reading and comprehension (Landahl, in this issue). Landahl compares the media’s depiction of the
Swedish fundamental common school reform before and after the release of the spectacular Six Sub-
ject Survey results, enabling him to examine the impact of an international standardised test on
national reform debates. He asserts that the national reading or translation of the ILSA results led
to a de-scandalisation of the common school reform. The proponents of the grundskolan (common
school), including the minister who initiated the reform, used the ILSA results as political leverage to
reassert the reform path taken with the common school reform. Landahl notices a discursive shift in
how the quality of Swedish education was assessed. Prior to the Six Subject Survey, the unit of com-
parison was the national past, whereas beginning in the 1970s, developments abroad became the
object of study for national policy actors in Sweden.
Dennis Niemann, Sigrid Hartong, and Kerstin Martens draw attention to the subnational-level,
which is often neglected in ILSA research. They compare two federal political systems; the one in
the United States with its large decision-making authority at school-level, with the one in Germany,
where power is geographically decentralised to the Länder (sub-national state)-level. Through this
comparison the authors examine how PISA results are received and translated in contexts where
the national-level is of limited relevance for decision-making. Embedded in the interpretive frame-
work of historical institutionalism, the authors use the concept of path dependency to explain why
the policy responses to PISA differ so widely in the United States and Germany. German stake-
holders at Länder-level actively used the PISA results to generate reform pressure and advance
their own reform agenda. In contrast, interest in the PISA results was strikingly absent in the United
States, where PISA became moderately interesting only when China entered the race (2009) and
when PISA For Schools entered the ILSA market (2015).
Self-proclaimed as the ‘gold standard’for evaluating school reform, how are the PISA results in
fact used in highly decentralised federal systems such as the United States and Germany? Niemann
et al. identify the key features of the PISA technology that actually encourage stakeholders ‘to make
GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION 561
projection to other education systems, derive concise reform strategies, and justify policy changes.’
The largest global database on educational performance, the PISA dataset is rich both in terms of
variables (indicators) and cases (educational systems). As Niemann et al.assert, the dataset is
made easily accessible for non-experts though visualisations, rankings, summaries, and interpret-
ations of main findings. What is more, the league tables create a test-specific international commu-
nity, composed of countries that agree to having their students take the particular test. However,
PISA has had a limited impact on school reform in the two federally governed countries of the Uni-
ted States and Germany. It was instead most influential as a monitoring device. It popularised the
tool of standardised testing and monitoring learning outcomes. Thus, what mattered in the United
States and Germany were neither the results nor the ‘best practices’from cross-national comparison
undertaken by PISA, but the device itself. The global test helped to accelerate and institutionalise
test-based accountability or, as Radhika Gorur would say, made policy actors –at Länder-level
but also at school-level –‘see like PISA’(Gorur 2016).
Keita Takayama compares the reception of the two ILSA league leaders, Finland and Singapore,
in Australia. He finds that the media in Australia attributes the high performance of students in Sin-
gapore to the overly protective, ambitious, and stressful childrearing practices in Asian societies. Sin-
gapore is not the only Asian country that is depicted negatively despite its high scores in terms of
students’learning outcomes. Two out-of-school factors, notably ‘tiger parenting’and private coach-
ing, are the most commonly used explanations for students’high performance in Singapore, Korea,
Japan, People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan. Cummings (1989) observed a similar negative reac-
tion to education in Japan. When the report Nation at Risk suggested that policy analysts should
learn from Japan, Cummings notes that American researchers tended to use a ‘yes, but …’approach.
This approach acknowledges the successes in the other educational system, but at the same time
‘argues that these successes come at too high a price, a price Americans are unwilling to pay’(Cum-
mings 1989, 296). At the time, the exaggerated statements or myths about Japanese education
included an inverted socialisation paradigm (indulgence in early childhood, discipline in adoles-
cence, and early adulthood), education for the nation and the state, kyoiku mama (education-
oriented mother), rote learning in schools, competition and suicide, elitist higher education, and
social inequality. These generalised judgments of Japanese society and education helped to fence
offpublic pressure to learn from Japan.
The American stereotypes used to describe education in Japan in the 1980s are remarkably similar
to the stereotypical, negative explanations Australians use in the new millennium to explain why
Asian countries score so high on ILSAs. Takayama asserts that the negative stereotypes serve as a
device for Australians to distance themselves from education systems they consider to be ‘bad.’
They project the opposite of what they consider to be good education onto Asian education systems.
By doing so, they generalise and essentialise. The Australian media lumps together the league-leaders
in the region and uses identical, negative explanations for ‘PISA success’in Asian countries. Finally,
the assumption is made that Asian education practices are biologically determined and hereditary,
that is, passed on from one generation to the next. As Takayama contends, the projections onto
Asian education systems are racist and the Pan-Asian stereotype only serves to create the generalised
Pan-Asian Other.
Oren Pizmony-Levy examines how national debates on PIRLS, PISA, and TIMSS have created a
sentiment of ‘achievement crisis’in Israel. He compares actual ILSA results with how they are pre-
sented in the media and how they are used politically by national stakeholders. The scandalisation of
the Israeli school system is reflected both in headlines such as ‘Disappointing performance’,‘Israel
repeats a grade’,or‘The grade: failing’, as well as in how the results are visually manipulated in
national newspapers. In one newspaper illustration, the ranking table of the countries that partici-
pated in TIMSS 1995 is cut offafter the names of the first twenty participating countries (from a
total of 45 countries). The partial list of countries was meant to make readers believe that only 20
countries participated in TIMSS and that Israel’s rank of 17 was near the bottom.
562 G. STEINER-KHAMSI AND F. WALDOW
This dramatisation in the media has remained constant over the period 1996 to 2016, even though
the Israeli school system is positioned near the middle on the PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS ranking
tables. The 2015 TIMSS results in mathematics and science are similar to the ones in the mid-
1990s, with a slump in test results between 1990 and 2003, followed by a recovery between 2007
and 2015. Similar to the TIMSS findings, the PISA results suggest that Israel’s performance in math-
ematics and science fluctuates somewhere around the international average. In reading literacy, the
country improved its position on the ranking tables of both PIRLS and PISA. Clearly, the national
average scores alone do not warrant the crisis scenario depicted in the media. What does deserve
attention, however, are the significant differences in ILSA results between Jewish and Arab students
and between students from high and low socio-economic backgrounds. The vastly different results
provide a wide spectrum of possible interpretations. As Pizmony-Levy points out (in this issue),
These patterns provide local actors with ample opportunities to interpret ILSA results in different ways. Some
actors could draw on the average achievement scores to characterise the Israeli educational system as mediocre,
but stable in terms of performance. Others could use the ranking tables to characterise the Israeli educational
system as going downward with regard to performance. Yet, other actors could simply ignore ILSA results and
delegitimise them as relevant, appropriate, and useful evidence.
In addition to the media analysis, Pizmony-Levy compellingly demonstrates how different stake-
holders in Israel have interpreted the ILSA results in ways that advance their own agendas. Members
of the Knesset used the release of the ILSA results to mobilise financial resources for the education
sector by presenting the mediocre performance as a security risk and a national defense issue for the
country. The Ministry of Education used the political momentum to break teachers’strikes, revise
the national curriculum, establish system-wide standards, introduce new textbooks, and institute
the National Task Force for the Advancement of Education in Israel. The Teachers Union, in
turn, used the political attention being given to the education sector to demand salary increases.
Both Pizmony-Levy (in this issue) and Resnik (2011) observe that several groups in Israel used
the ILSA results to first construct a new social problem, labelled as ‘interstate achievement gap’,
only to then promote managerialism as a global solution for the national problem.
4. Invoking ILSAs as a quasi-external source of authorisation
As the four articles in this collection demonstrate, a comparative perspective is needed to examine
why ILSAs are attractive to local policy actors and how local policy actors translate ILSA results into
their own context. Such a dual focus on reception and translation is core to comparative policy
studies in education.
In recent years, an interesting new body of research has emerged that analyses why the same glo-
bal policy resonates and is adopted differently in different local contexts. The assertion that global
education policies resonate for different reasons in different contexts has also been made in recent
studies on why governments participate in ILSAs, such as PISA or TIMSS. The most widely
advanced rationales concern the claim that valuable lessons can be derived from comparing edu-
cational systems both at a certain point in time and over time. Addey et al. (2017), however,
move beyond these rationales and present instead a sophisticated analytical framework that allows
them to identify the wide array of reasons why national governments participate in ILSAs. The seven
most common reasons for governments’engagement with ILSAs are: (1) evidence for policy; (2)
technical capacity building; (3) funding and aid; (4) international relations; (5) national politics;
(6) economic rationales; and (7) curriculum and pedagogy. With a similar focus on national policy
context and an interpretive lens of historical institutionalism, Antoni Verger and his associates trace
the pathways to privatisation in different countries (Verger, Fontdevila, and Zancajo 2016). They
identify six different pathways: (i) privatisation as a reform in which the state was systematically
restructured along market lines and services previously provided by the public sector were out-
sourced to the private sector (e.g., Chile; the United Kingdom), (ii) as an incremental reform in
which the decentralised system scaled-up privatisation by means of vouchers, charter schools and
GLOBALISATION, SOCIETIES AND EDUCATION 563
choice policies (e.g., the United States), (iii) as a continuation of an already existing, long held pub-
lic–private partnership between, for example, faith-based institutions and the state (e.g., Nether-
lands, Spain), (iv) as a stated public administration reform to make the public sector act more
like businesses by selectively adopting principles of the private sector, also known as ‘endo-privatiza-
tion’(e.g., prevalent in many social-democratic governments of Scandinavia and continental
Europe), (v) as de facto privatisation in low-income countries, and finally (vi) as privatisation by cat-
astrophe (e.g., New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, aftermaths of wards in El Salvador and Iraq).
The global neoliberal wave of privatisation has encountered varied degrees and variants of privatisa-
tion in various national contexts. The receptiveness or resistance towards the new neoliberal wave of
privatisation can only be captured adequately against the backdrop of past adaptations of privatisa-
tion in a national context.
Similarly, there also exist a plethora of studies on how PISA results are discussed or ‘translated’at
country-level, mostly in the media. However, rarely do these studies adopt a critical comparative per-
spective that allows them to see how PISA translation relates to ongoing policy debates and power
relations among the various policy networks in a country. In particular, these studies fail to examine
which kind of discursive power is associated with ILSAs that eclipses, or exacerbates, conflict over
agenda setting at the national-level. ILSA top-scorers such as Finland and Shanghai have become
global ‘reference societies’for policy-making; the processes at work here are far more complicated
than the commonsensical explanation of straightforward lesson-drawing from league-leaders
would suggest. ILSAs are more often than not used to either generate or deflect reform pressure
on national educational systems. Strikingly, reform pressure related to ILSAs is being actively gen-
erated by national policy actors themselves. National actors use international tests as a quasi-external
stamp of approval to carry through unpopular reforms, to stave offunwelcome reform pressure or, in
the aftermath of recent reforms, to justify the path that was taken to improve the educational system.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Gita Steiner-Khamsi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9986-2150
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