1st Edition

Critical Perspectives on PISA as a Means of Global Governance Risks, Limitations, and Humanistic Alternatives

Edited By António Teodoro Copyright 2022
    218 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    218 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This volume offers a critical examination of the Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA), focusing on its origins and implementation, relationship to other international large-scale assessments, and its impacts on educational policy and reform at national and cross-national levels.

    Using empirical data gathered from a research project carried out by the CeiED at Lusofona University, Lisbon, the text highlights connections between PISA and emergent issues including the international circulation of big science, expertise and policy, and identifies its conceptual and methodological limits as a global governance project. The volume ultimately provides a novel framework for understanding how OECD priorities are manifested through a regulatory instrument based on Human and Knowledge Capital Theory, and so makes a powerful case to search for new humanistic approaches.

    This text will benefit researchers, academics and educators with an interest in education policy and politics, international and comparative education, and the sociology of education more broadly. Those interested in the history of education will also benefit from this volume.

    Introduction: A Success Story? Critical Perspectives on PISA as a Means of Global Governance

    António Teodoro

    1: Invisible Struggles, Encoded Fantasies and Ritualized Incantations: A Critical Infrastructure Studies Analysis of PISA

    Camilla Addey

    2: How PISA is Present in the Scientific Production: A Bibliometric Review

    Carlos Décio Cordeiro and Vítor Duarte Teodoro

    3: PISA as Epistemic Governance within the European Political Arithmetic of Inequalities: A Sociological Perspective Illustrating the French Case

    Romuald normand

    4: Pisa and the Curricular Reforms in Brazil: The Influence of a Powerful Regulatory Instrument

    João Luiz Horta Neto

    5: Testing PISA Tests: A Study about how Secondary and College Students Answer Pisa Items in Mathematics and Science

    Vítor Duarte Teodoro, Vítor Rosa, João Sampaio Maia, and Daniela Mascarenhas

    6: International Large-Scale Assessment: Issues from Portugal's Participation in TIMSS, PIRLS and ICILS

    Vítor Rosa

    7: PISA in Media Discourse: Prominence, Tone, Voices and Meanings

    Ana Carita, Teresa Teixeira Lopo, and Vítor Duarte Teodoro

    8: OECD and Education: How PISA is becoming a ‘Big Science’ Project

    Vítor Rosa and Ana Lourdes Araújo

    Conclusion: Limitations and Risks of an OECD Global Governance Project

    António Teodoro

    Biography

    António Teodoro is Professor of Sociology of Education and Comparative Education at Lusofona University, Portugal. He is also Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Education and Development (CeiED).

    "If different books have been published in recent years about the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the book edited by António Teodoro singles itself out as the first to offer a resolutely polemical look at the evaluation piloted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which has gradually established itself as a reference in terms of school comparison. The interest of the critical approach to PISA developed in this work is redoubled by the fact that it refers to work carried out within the framework of an important research project which specifically questioned the "success" of PISA […]. By approaching PISA from different angles of critical study, the book allows for an in-depth discussion of important questions raised by this assessment, not only at the scientific level, but also at the educational, political and social levels." - Daniel Bart, In Spirale - Journal of research in education