Historicizing new spaces and relations of the OECD’s global educational governance: PISA for schools and PISA4U

This chapter addresses how emerging modes, spaces and relations of educational governance are constituted by and through two recent and more locally focused instances of the OECD’s PISA survey of schooling system performance: (1) the school-focused PISA for Schools test and (2) the teacher-focused PISA4U online professional learning platform. Both programs have emerged alongside demands for increased accountability and transparency in public schooling, which have, in turn, produced new urgencies centered on finding evidence-informed solutions to putative problems of policy and practice. Drawing on a relational, or topological, theoretical framework to better understand processes of global educational governance, this study explores how PISA for Schools and PISA4U forge new relations between otherwise diverse schooling spaces and international actors while displacing more traditional, professionally grounded forms of teacher knowledge and expertise. I argue that PISA for Schools and PISA4U represent a thorough respatialization of PISA, insofar as they make PISA data and the education work and evidence of the OECD more generally accessible, relevant and usable to audiences of schools and educators without previous access. This chapter concludes by highlighting the danger of PISA for Schools and PISA4U becoming primarily a means of consolidating the seductive powers of PISA and the authoritative status of the OECD.