PISA, Power, and Policy
the emergence of global educational governance
Edited by HEINZ-DIETER MEYER & AARON BENAVOT
2013 paperback
336 pages US$56.00
ISBN 978-1-873927-96-0
About the book
Over the past
ten years the PISA assessment has risen to strategic prominence in the
international education policy discourse. Sponsored, organized and administered
by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), PISA seems
well on its way to being institutionalized as the main engine in the global
accountability regime.
The goal of this
book is to problematize this development and PISA as an institution-building
force in global education. It scrutinizes the role of PISA in the emerging
regime of global educational governance and questions the presumption that the
quality of a nation’s school system can be evaluated through a standardized
assessment that is insensitive to the world’s vast cultural and institutional
diversity. The book raises the question of whether PISA’s dominance in the
global educational discourse runs the risk of engendering an unprecedented
process of worldwide educational standardization for the sake of hitching
schools more tightly to the bandwagon of economic efficiency, while sacrificing
their role to prepare students for independent thinking and civic participation…..