Reference Societies, PISA and the parliamentary debates on education reform in Portugal

• In Event: Nations and Numbers: The Policy Influence of PISA

Proposal

A growing number of researchers employ the externalization thesis (Schriewer, 1990) and theories of policy borrowing and lending (e.g. Steiner-Khamsi, 2002, 2004; Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow, 2012) as their lenses to understand the use of external references to global policies and trends or practices in other countries in moments when proposals for policy reform are contested (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012). The use the ‘other’ is thus a discursive construction useful in the (de)legitimation of these policy reforms (Waldow, 2012). This study is positioned in this line of research. It analyses the use of reference societies in the policy discourses focusing on educational reform in the Portuguese parliamentary debates, and explores political ideologies and national features driving the choice of these reference societies or, as Schriewer posits, the ‘socio-logic’ (Schriewer, 1990) which leads to the discursive borrowing of selective policies and practices from elsewhere.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey and the knowledge it produces, has built its status as an expert in educational policy. Consequently, it has been often described as the actor with greatest impact in the steering educational reforms in a vast number of countries and in the global policy scene (Grek, 2009). By describing the best performers’ education policies and by creating standards based in these countries’ practices, the OECD publicly but softly re-directs PISA’s lower performers to look up and learn from the best, urging the development of processes of policy borrowing from educational systems with proven success. Several studies, focusing diverse national and regional contexts, point out that PISA has been (re)constructing the reference societies utilized as models and used in the debates on educational reform, as societies from where a country should borrow in order to improve its educational system (e.g. Takayama, 2009; Pons & Mons, 2012, Carvalho & Costa, 2014; Sellar & Lingard, 2013; Waldow et al., 2014; Adamson et al., 2017). This provides countries with empiric knowledge that can be used to legitimize or de-legitimize reforms aimed at improving the school system (Takayama et al., 2013).
In Portugal, there is enough evidence to state that the participation of Portugal in PISA is influencing the Portuguese policy-making in education (e.g. Afonso & Costa, 2009; Carvalho & Costa 2009; Costa, 2011). However, recent research analyzing a sample of parliamentary debates from mid-1990s to mid-2010s (Centeno & Santos, submitted), demonstrated that similarly to countries such as Australia, Canada, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, UK or the USA (e.g. Rautalin et al., 2018) this common argument that the OECD and its PISA survey have the greatest importance in Portuguese education policy discussions and changed the countries used as reference societies is not observable in the parliamentary debates. There are no significant changes in the external references used before and after PISA was implemented and the survey’s high performers are rarely used as reference societies. This study’s results instigated our curiosity and the need to deepen the understanding on the use of references to external entities and practices disseminated by PISA in the Portuguese context.
Motivated by the conclusions described above, this study aims to develop our understanding on the patterns of the strategic use of PISA’s high performers in education reformatory debates at the Portuguese parliament between January 2002 and December 2017. When are references to PISA’s high performers made, how and for what reasons? The empirical questions are:
- When and under what conditions are PISA’s high-performers referenced, by Portuguese policy-makers, in the discourses concerning education policy in the parliament?
- What features of PISA’s high-performers’ educational systems are used by Portuguese policy-makers in their education discourses in the parliament, and what are the functions of these references?
- What are the changes (if any) of the patterns of referencing identified in the education policy arguments, developed by Portuguese policy-makers over the timeframe studied?
The sources of this study are all parliamentary debates (n=47) on the reform of education (2002-2017 – excluding the year 2004 where no debate on education reform was available). We find this arena of debate of major interest to study the use of reference societies in education reform arguments, as the parliament is the place where political strategy and power games are more intensively played in the formal process of policy-making.
To answer the study research questions, we perform qualitative content analysis. This research method facilitates the necessary reduction of the amount of data and enables the researcher to concentrate on selective elements that relate directly to the research questions (Schreier, 2014). We created beforehand concept-driven categories focused on our research questions and aims, such as ‘Problem/issue debated’, ‘Kinds of reference’, ‘Functions of the reference’, ‘Reference society’. Further, we created data-driven categories that emerged from the text, as for instance: ‘Problem/issue debated: teacher assessment’, ‘Kinds of reference: positive’, ‘Function of the reference: legitimation’, ‘Reference society: Denmark’.
Our preliminary conclusions support earlier evidence that PISA’s high-performers are not the most referenced societies in education policy discourses performed in the Portuguese Parliament. In addition, much more than the OECD and its PISA survey, the European Union, its recommendations and legislation hold to its position as the international/supranational organization with more references in the discourses focused on educational reform by this country’s policymakers.
This study contributes to the field of comparative education through the identification of political agendas and discursive strategies in the education policy debate in Portugal, expanding our understanding of this strategic and superficial form of policy borrowing.

Author

• Iris Santos, University of Tampere