Platforms, profits and PISA for schools : New actors, by-passes and topological spaces in global educational governance

This paper focuses on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) PISA for Schools assessment. Our first substantive focus is a descriptive and analytical account of changes and developments in the functioning of this ground-breaking assessment since its creation in 2012. These changes include an expansion of the number and diversity of participating schools and countries, the introduction of a ‘user-pays’ model, the enhanced role of edtech firms and an explicit capacity-building focus, which we argue helps to strengthen an instrument constituency for the broader OECD testing regime. The second focus of the paper is the impact of PISA for Schools on changing modes of educational governance, situated against emerging spatialities of globalisation. Here, we provide an analysis using the concept of ‘by-passes’, which we elaborate as spatial, governance and systemic, to understand the new topological spatialities of globalisation and the global governance effects of these specific by-passes.

摘要
本文关注经济合作与发展组织的PISA学校测评项目。我们的首要重点是描述和分析这一开创性测评自2012年推出以来所经历的变化和进展，包括参评学校和国家数量与类型的不断增加、推出“用户付费”模式、强化教育技术公司的作用以及明确聚焦能力建设。我们认为这一系列变化有助于增强经合组织更为广泛的测评体制的参与和支持网络。本文的第二个重点是在全球化之空间性浮现的背景下，探讨PISA学校测评项目对教育治理模式变化的影响。具体而言，我们借助“旁路”这个概念，包括空间旁路、治理旁路和系统旁路，来理解全球化的新拓扑空间性以及这些具体旁路的全球治理效应。