Magazine / Culture / School in Europe / Background | 19/12/2007

The Pisa story

The question of whether education can be measured or compared has produced many altercations. Yet the question of comparability disappears behind the force of the comparisons: today, almost no country can avoid PISA.

Every 3 years, shortly before Christmas, the Organisation for Economic Collaboration and Development, better known under their acronym, 'OECD', presents us with the PISA trial. PISA – this stands for Programme of International Student Assessment, and is in the meantime just as well-known as the town of the same name in Italy – at least in Germany.

Photo: Photocase

This year, too, the time had come: on 04.12.2007, the results of this international comparative trial, in which 57 countries participated, was officially published – countries from the USA to Indonesia, from Brazil to Luxembourg.

Germany, too, participated once more, and, once again, the debate was characterised by shrill tones on educational opportunities, family homes and migrational backgrounds - even though this debate was almost superimposed by methodical discussions and political demands (are the different trials really comparable? Has Germany improved? How could results leak out prematurely? And who is responsible for this?

Only one obvious question is not being asked: why does PISA exist? And why does the OECD, of all establishments, coordinate these comparative measurements? After all, the "E” in OECD does not stand for "education”, but rather for "economic”. The most important target of this organisation is to further the economic development and collaboration of its member states – since 1948, when it took over administration of the Marshall Plan funds.

For some, PISA is therefore a capitalist plot brought about by rich industrial countries: finally, education should also be subject to the market. For others, PISA is the work of an egomaniac, Andreas Schleicher: he is obsessed by the trial, wants to get even with the German education system or even "climb the political ladder" - as several Ministers for Education have speculated, who have repeatedly called for his resignation.

The fact that the OECD only carries out this trial every three years is however due only to a number of coincidences and a remarkable coalition in spite of national and transatlantic opposites. There is no plot behind the history of PISA, but rather a didactic play on the delimitation of national politics, in this case the political field of education.

In 1964 – in the time of the planning euphoria – the member states commissioned the OECD to gather national education statistics and to form indication points: the amount and type of school pupils and those studying should become foreseeable. The aim was to control the costs of the expected educational expansion, in particular in the Universities, using mathematical models. And yet the quality was poor, the data was incomplete and sometimes incorrect, and no comparisons could be made across different countries. The project was stopped.

It wasn't until 1981 that the topic of educational indication points was played back into the OECD's court. At that time, the US government had occasioned a trial on American education, to be carried out by a US Commission. The results were appalling. In the 1983 A Nation at Risk: Imperatives for Educational Reform, American education was proved to be awful. 23 million adults and 17 percent of teenagers could neither read nor write. In the "wedding period” of the Cold War, this was equal to US disarmament and was considered a national "security risk”.

President Reagan was worried. He declared a reform of the school system as his main assignment. However, education policy in the USA as in Germany is not a responsibility of the federation. The states keep a jealous watch over their measure of influence. The USA therefore turned to the OECD: they should produce internationally comparable education statistics and evaluate the condition of education in the industrialised world. By "pushing up” the debate into international politics, the US government wanted to make the education system in the USA - as a part of foreign affairs, the privilege of the President - a federal issue, thus increasing the weight of the federal government against the individual states.

Die OECD was not impressed; it wasn't interested in producing internationally comparable indication points and data from the results. For the employees in the OECD Education Department, Education Policies belonged to Culture: it wasn't possible to press it into figures or comparative tables. But the political pressure from the USA was too strong. At a conference in Washington in 1987, the signal from the USA was clear: "If you keep blocking us, we will pull out of the OECD education programme". In 1984, the USA had already pulled out of the UNESCO. The threat had to be taken seriously.

The USA received unexpected protective aid from France. In 1984, the socialist "Savings Premier”, Mauroy, and his successor, the "Reform” socialist, Fabius, placed emphasis on the education policy: the new Minister for Education, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, wanted to enforce equal education and life opportunities, independent of social origins. He was interested in completely different reforms than was Reagan, but he required the same things: figures on the real condition of education, in this case on French school children and their poor education; for him a result of the elitist French education system.

Strange bedfellows? Looking at the international politics in Brussels, Genf and New York, strange bedfellows seem to be more the rule than the exception. Otherwise, in such different countries, nothing would actually happen. Either, as is usual in the EC, "package deals” are made between the large interested parties, such as in the European treaties, and things which bear no relation to each other are collated. Or the interested parties expect completely different effects from one and the same measures – und others, such as the Federal Republic of Germany with PISA, run along with the others and then wait to see what happens.

This unusual coalition made between US Republicans with the French Left-wingers in the 1980's led directly to the new education investigations performed by the OECD. Now only one thing was missing: expertise, in order to be able to carry out an empirical project of this size at all. The Education Department was at that time small; a dozen employees. None of them wanted to work towards the new indicator points. A Swiss; a philosopher, finally took the weight of the project upon his shoulders. He had no previous knowledge of statistics and always fetched the required knowledge externally, from education experts across the whole world. Networks were created for individual subjects and the necessary indicator points were developed therein. New personnel were employed, among them Andreas Schleicher. He had worked for a long time at the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, and had helped to carry out the first international comparative trials on reading competences and mathematical competences in the 90's.

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