The Changing Role of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development in Global Educational Governance

• In Event: New Directions in the Study of Global Policy Actors in Education

Abstract

This chapter describes the place of the OECD’s educational work in the context of the Organization’s overall functioning since its creation in 1961.We also outline its intergovernmental structure, which differentiates it from other international organizations such as UNESCO and World Bank. After providing this background, the chapter examines this educational work in the global context since the late 1990s through to the present. We focus specifically on PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) and the new PIAAC (Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies) and their roles in global educational governance. This is followed by an account of the changing place of the Education Directorate within the OECD’s organizational structure since the 1990s, related to the rise of PISA and the recent development of a cross-directorate Skills Strategy, including the establishment of PIAAC. We then analyse the expansion of PISA in three domains: the broadening scope of PISA (what is measured), its increasing scale (the extent of coverage), and efforts to enhance its explanatory power (to inform policy makers of what works). The OECD is also drawing on the PISA template to develop new skills assessments for adult populations through PIAAC and AHELO (Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes), which looks set to increase its influence in education beyond schooling and further enhance its standing as a site of the production of quality and useful comparative education data. Data collected through more than thirty interviews with policy actors located at the OECD and within national education systems (Australia and England), as well as OECD documents, provide an empirical basis for the analysis. Overall, we argue that the OECD has contributed to the creation of new modes of global governance in education: epistemological governance through the creation of global epistemic communities of policy makers and infrastructural governance through the development and provision of surveys and databases that help to produce a global commensurate space of measurement and comparison.

Authors

• Robert L. Lingard, University of Queensland

• Sam Sellar, The University of Queensland