PISA Under Examination - Comparative Education Society in ...

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PISA AS A POLITICAL INSTRUMENT to environmental changes. In the nineties ICT entered as a technology education and with Internet the asset to information and knowledge radically changed. The dominating themes in the public discussion during the '90s were the professional role of the teacher, school management and educational leadership. This has to be understood as a consequence of the changes sketched above. To govern by goals requires clear goals. At the same time these goals must give space for interpretation and implementation. The essence of goals is that they are not formed as rules. Goals have to be owned by those who have the responsibility to implement them. Here the essence of goals meets the essence of professionalism in the sense of having a knowledge base to interpret and make goals concrete in relation to teaching and learning processes. And furthermore, it calls for a clear division of responsibility and, hence, accountability. To summarize, the changes in production and economy created a pressure on handling an expanding welfare society. Movements towards decentralisation and privatisation can be interpreted as two ways of solving the problems discussed. Both these solutions demand changes in curricula and in evaluations. The contradiction I have tried to point at is that the change of the political landscape and in administration operated in a way that goals became more abstract. The change towards what can be described as the “third industrial revolution” called for new abilities and competencies that reinforced the difficulties to articulate goals in such in a precise way. This change has changed the conditions for international comparisons by assessments. The German historian Reinhard Koselleck uses the concept “temporalisation” in his research on how concepts change meaning over time (Koselleck 1979, 2003, 2006). International assessment is a concept that has been temporalised. It has moved from the Cold War context to a world threatened by environmental change and conflicts between faiths and a global economy. PISA IN CONTEXT These notes about a emerging “knowledge society” has the intention to give a context to the development of the PISA programme. In 1968 OECD established a specific centre for Educational Research and Innovation – CERI (Papadopoulos, 2006). It is unnecessary to say that 1968 was a year of specific importance in the history of education. CERI became besides the Educational Committee as an important policy institute (Waldow, 2006). During the seventies and the eighties I participated in several OECD activities including an evaluation of the school system in Norway. In the late eighties I was involved in the “Education Indicators Program” (INES). This very ambitious programme aimed at building a system for education statistics in order to enable comparisons between countries within the OECD. Such a statistical system had of course an impact on national policies. In a global world international indicators delivered support for arguments on competitive strength. The active advocate for an OECD statistic was the United States. The background was of course the 25
U.P. LUNDGREN emerging knowledge society and the renewal of human capital theory (OECD, 1998, 2000, 2001). In July 1991, I became Director General of a new Swedish government Agency − National Agency for Education − aiming at national evaluation and development of the school system in Sweden. The Agency replaced the National Board of Education that was established in 1919. The Director General for the national board of agency for education was also member of the board of CERI. I served for nine years, the last two years I was chairman. As being involved in INES I became a member of the steering group for INES. The INES programme had an impact of the statistics produced within the OECD countries. I mean that on the whole the quality increased substantially. At the same time it was obvious that the data collected also had a steering effect. Even if OECD not has the mandate to change policies they influence them. That steering device was one of several reasons why it was important a General Assembly to get a clear support and a mandate from the member countries. Every second year the General Assembly decided on the development of the programme. The statistics were published annually in Education at a Glance. With time it was obvious that political interest grew not at least demonstrated at the minister meetings. One problem that followed the project from the beginning was how to report learning outcomes. The only available international data that existed were those collected by the IEA. After negotiations with IEA we got access to the data for the member countries of OECD. They could thus after being reworked be presented in Education at a Glance. However, this was not unproblematic affair. When INES got the data they had been published in other forms and had lost its novelty. The most essential was that when outcome data was published in “Education at a Glance” it had taken so much time that data were from a political point of little or no interest. The IEA data was not possible to use over time as the test varied between collections. The number of participating countries varied also, which gave the comparative analysis various reference points depending on the various data collections. The launching of an outcome study carried out by INES came up on several occasions. Tom Alexander, at that time director of CERI, argued for an OECD managed programme. I will not go into the rounds and the negotiations between the IEA and CERI. The decision was taken and a steering group was formed to formulate a specification of the assessment program to be required - PISA Program for International Student Assessment. I became a member of the steering group for PISA and worked with it up to 2000. As chairman for CERI I prepared to present the progress at the General Assembly in Tokyo in August 2000. Due to acute sickness I had to leave before the programme came in operation. As PISA progressed the European Union started to argue for an own assessment programme. Two parallel test systems would have been too burdensome for the EU countries. We have not reached the end of that story. The major problem to master was the construction of a test that allowed comparisons over time. Freudenthal’s criticism of the content validity of the test in mathematics used by IEA was important. What is also important to point out is the 26
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