Communities of practice and PISA for Schools: Comparative learning or a mode of educational governance?

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.25.2901

Keywords:

PISA for Schools, OECD, governance, Global Learning Network, best practice, professional learning communities, topology

Abstract

This paper examines the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) PISA for Schools, a new variant of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that compares school-level performance on reading, math and science with international schooling systems (e.g., Shanghai-China, Finland). Specifically, I focus here on a professional learning community – the Global Learning Network (GLN) – of U.S. schools and districts that have voluntarily participated in PISA for Schools, and how this, arguably, helps to normatively determine ‘what works’ in education. Drawing suggestively across diverse thinking around contemporary modes of governance, and emerging topological spaces and relations associated with globalization, and informed by interviews with 33 policy actors across the PISA for Schools policy cycle, my analyses suggest that GLN allows the OECD to discursively and normatively constrain how ‘world-class’ schools and systems, and their policies and practices, are defined. However, and in light of the productive capacities of power relations, I also argue that GLN provides opportunities for local educators and leaders to undertake meaningful collaboration and sharing, and to find policy spaces outside of those defined by more performative discursive framings of school accountability. To this end, I explore how GLN may help to foster alternative policy spaces from which educators can ‘talk back’ to national and state authorities, and potentially promote more ‘authentic’ understandings of, and possibilities for, schooling accountability.

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Author Biography

Steven Lewis, Centre of Research for Educational Impact (REDI), Deakin University

Steven Lewis, Ph.D., is the Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2017–2019) at Deakin University, Australia. His research focuses on how new global modes of standardized testing and data, and evidence around ‘what works’, help to reshape local schooling practices, teachers’ work and student learning. He has recently published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Comparative Education Review, Critical Studies in Education and Journal of Education Policy. 

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Published

2017-08-21

How to Cite

Lewis, S. (2017). Communities of practice and PISA for Schools: Comparative learning or a mode of educational governance?. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 25, 92. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.25.2901

Issue

Section

Global Perspectives on High-Stakes Teacher Accountability Policies