Australia has declared its ambition to be within the ‘top five’ in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) by 2025. So serious is it about this ambition, that the Australian Government has incorporated it into the Australian Education Act, 2013. Given this focus on PISA results and rankings, we go beyond average scores to take a close look at Australia’s performance in PISA, examining rankings by different geographical units, by item content and by test completion. Based on this analysis and using data from interviews with measurement and policy experts, we show how uninformative and even misleading the ‘average performance scores’, on which the rankings are based, can be. We explore how a more nuanced understanding would point to quite different policy actions. After considering the PISA data and Australia’s ‘top five’ ambition closely, we argue that neither the rankings nor such ambitions should be given much credence.
History
Journal
Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education
Volume
36
Pagination
647-664
Location
Oxford, Eng.
ISSN
1469-3739
eISSN
1469-3739
Language
eng
Publication classification
C1.1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal, C Journal article