The OECD’s Defining Role in Education: Its Historical Rise, Global Impact and Comparative Perspectives

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Title:
The OECD’s Defining Role in Education: Its Historical Rise, Global Impact and Comparative Perspectives

Chair:
Christian Ydesen, University of Aalborg, Denmark

Discussant:
Toni Verger, University of Barcelona, Spain

Presenters:
Christian Ydesen, University of Aalborg, Denmark
Oren Pizmony-Levy, TC Columbia, USA
John Benedicto Krejsler, Aarhus University, Denmark
Felicitas Acosta, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Argentina

Background:
This panel session proposal arises from the research project ‘The Global History of the OECD in Education’ (https://www.learning.aau.dk/forskning/centre-projekter/oecd-learning/) hosted at Aalborg University, Denmark. The project organises and facilitates a network of international scholars working with different angles and takes for understanding the role and significance of the OECD in education from historical and comparative perspectives. The project has created a database of archival data collected in the OECD archive and in the national archives of selected case countries (Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark and USA) enabling researchers to trace the exchanges between the OECD headquarters in Paris and the ministries of education in the case countries.

Summary:
International Organizations (IOs) frame and shape national education systems via comparisons, benchmarking and transnational ideas and policies and therefore have a significant impact on:
• What is counted as valuable in education?
• Which knowledge is recognized as legitimate and authoritative?
• Who can access education and on which terms?
• What is considered to be the purpose of education?
These questions represent cornerstones in considerations about the very conditions of realizing sustainability in education. In the age of the Sustainable Development Goals, researchers need to raise awareness of the very workings of international organizations to provide decision-makers across the globe with tools for dealing with the challenges of education, such as privatization, increasing reliance on testing and accountability, lack of quality, today and tomorrow.
Beginning as the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) in 1948, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) gradually took the leading role in shaping a transnational education space from other international organizations, culminating with the first round of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2000. For decades, the OECD has promoted a global vision of education as a source of human capital needed to deal with social challenges and improve the economies of nation-states (Spring 2015). This amounts to a very utilitarian and limiting approach to education deeply concerned with evaluation and facilitating cross-national comparisons in order to achieve best practice.
While the OECD is essentially an economic organization, education appeared on the OEEC agenda in 1958 as a result of the Soviet Sputnik launch the year before (Bürgi 2015; Tröhler 2013). Education gradually came to play a defining role in understanding the economic capabilities and potential of nation-states. Today, the OECD is widely recognized as a global authority in education because of its unique role in governance by comparison and the production of educational norms and paradigms, such as educational measurement indicators, country reviews, test programmes, and reports (Martens 2007).
While most research recognizes the supremacy of the OECD as an education policy shaper, little effort has been afforded to gaining a firmer understanding of the developments and events that made it possible for the OECD to assume this dominant role. More than seventy years have passed since the foundation of the OEEC. It is the purpose of this panel to explore some of the events and developments that seriously put education on the economic agenda and which have shaped and informed the very way education is construed and enacted across the globe today.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Globalization and Education

Chair

• Christian Ydesen, Aalborg University

Individual Presentations

• What can we learn about global education from historical studies of the OECD? - Christian Ydesen, Aalborg University

• Why do some international assessments succeed, and others do not? - Oren Pizmony-Levy, Teachers College, Columbia University

• How a European ‘Fear of Falling Behind’ Strategy Turned Global: Exploring performativity of the transnational turn in European school policy - John Benedicto Krejsler, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University

• OECD, PISA and the internationalization of schooling: the cases of the countries from the Southern Cone - Felicitas Acosta, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento

Discussant

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona