The Case for a PISA Alternative? Exploring the Global Educational Reform Movement

Part Two: The Economy of Performance vs Ecologies of Practice

The knowledge economy and the targeting of particular educational objectives to economic focused outcomes is currently in conflict with a profession that has a history of social, moral and cultural approaches to education where:

The professional is motivated by service to the community rather than by the anticipation of an immediate material reward; altruistic values predominate over egoistic inclinations (Turner 1993 p14 cited in Stronach & Corbin 2002 p2)

In early 2014 an open letter written by Heinz-Dieter Meyer and signed by many educationalists challenged some of the perceived problems posed to education by OECD and PISA with some significant arguments that oppose the types of comments shared by Schleicher and others seen earlier in this essay. I would like to share three statements from the letter here:

1. PISA results are anxiously awaited by governments, education ministers, and the editorial boards of newspapers, and are cited authoritatively in countless policy reports. They have begun to deeply influence educational practices in many countries. As a result of PISA, countries are overhauling their education systems in the hopes of improving their rankings. Lack of progress on PISA has led to declarations of crisis and “PISA shock” in many countries, followed by calls for resignations, and far-reaching reforms according to PISA precepts
2. PISA, with its three-year assessment cycle, has caused a shift of attention to short-term fixes designed to help a country quickly climb the rankings, despite research showing that enduring changes in education practice take decades, not a few years to come to fruition.
3. PISA takes attention away from the less measurable or immeasurable educational objectives like physical, moral, civic, and artistic development, thereby dangerously narrowing our collective imagination regarding what education is and ought to be about.

These three statements raise important educational concerns about how governments are applying reforms in connection with PISA and I will now analyse them in reverse order by providing three directly contrasting statements that intend to highlight the conflict between the profession and its policy makers. Point three is raised by the new UK Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, who justifies the coalition government reforms as necessary by criticising previous government policy, in the Telegraph on the 11^th August 2014:

England’s performance in international studies stagnated… This wasn’t the fault of hard working teachers, but of a system which prized all the wrong outcomes… as schools were encouraged to push… young people towards poor quality qualifications [which have] little or no labour market value

This statement clearly emphasises a government focus on a particular form of educational attainment as being more important than the less measurable objectives outlined by both Grek and Meyer. 

The issue raised in point 2 above is that under the current reformation this focus is also short-term in its gaze, demanding education systems to apply strategies that are historically expected in the world of corporate business. Subsequently a government’s investment in human capital now demands immediate results and is at odds with the historical approach to the profession that cultivates successful educational content where ‘all good and true education is an expression of national life and character’ (Sadler 1900 cited in Alexander 2001, 27). Sellar and Lingard cite Feher 2009 on this matter and explain that:

[I]n the neoliberal world of globalized and unregulated financial markets, corporate governance is concerned less with optimizing returns on investment over time than with maximizing the distribution of dividends in the short run.

When applied to the education sector of a nation, governments become preoccupied with the perpetual appreciation of the international value of the sector rather than the original investment in training which waits for productive future returns. 

The initial point made by Meyer that I selected is the one that currently causes most conflict within the profession where:

The political conflict relocates the centre of debate outside the profession itself, leaving the professionals mere spectators. Accordingly, one rescue strategy (amongst many others) in such embattled professions is of course to change sides, ‘to abandon the professional mode’ in favour of more successful and dominant contributors to the discourse (Stronach and Corbin 2002, 7)

This significant external influence on the methodology of delivery is seeing the divisive application of approaches such as performance related pay, free schools and academies in England, the compulsory teaching of English in Chinese schools, the Race to the Top contest in the United States and forms of policy borrowing between nations which is resulting in an:

intolerable contradiction between what teachers are expected to do and what they want to do as individuals [longing] for meaningful ways to maintain their self-esteem in new personal and professional identities and to deal with the conflicts between the new roles established by the new curriculum and their ‘old’ identities (S. Guo et al. 2013, 250)

Competition between teachers regarding performance is particularly contentious. Governments feel that they can legitimise attacks on the profession and undermine cultural pedagogical approaches by raising issues found in other countries that are deemed to be successful. It therefore implies that one’s pedagogical strategy has no personalised context for delivery but is universal to any other educational system where other teachers can understand and use the narrative constructed for a particular cultural environment. It could be considered part of an educators professional skill set to be able to manipulate others pedagogical approaches and indeed this is possible, but it does cause confusion within the identity created by each individual, nurtured and developed over time through repetition, trial and error. (Alexander 2001, 30) questions the validity of this interchangeable transnational approach to education:

in countries that are as culturally different as the UK and Japan, treating culture as an independent variable in a statistical calculation encourages the assumption that an educational strategy can be detached from the values and conditions which give it meaning and ensure its success, transpose it to a context where these may be diametrically opposed, and yet expect it to deliver the same results.

Since referring to Meyer’s open letter I have explored areas of tension between policy makers and those who deliver it. But is PISA to blame for how policy makers are using the evidence they provide? Certainly it can be stated at the outset that the focus of PISA on such a narrow band of educational achievement, as discussed in some detail so far, is not particularly helpful. However the data in itself is quite useful and shortly I will explore some possible interpretations that go beyond simply regurgitating the stats in the form of policy before looking at viable alternatives to the pressures of the PISA bubble.