PISA ‘yet to come’: governing schooling through time, difference and potential

This article examines emerging techniques of educational governance – based on time, di erence and potential – enabled by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s PISA-based Test for Schools (‘PISA for Schools’). I show how PISA for Schools facilitates the production of di erence through comparative test data, allowing educators to imagine, and bring about, di erent potential futures. Drawing on Deleuze’s thinking around forms of di erence, and the governance function of potentiality, and informed by interviews with key PISA for Schools policy actors, I illustrate how the visualisation of di erence produces a local desire amongst schools and educators to become other than they currently are across multiple temporalities, and how this ‘impetus to action’ makes new actions and futures possible. This constitutes what I theorise as ‘governing through di erence and potential’, where the underlying logic is for teachers to work on themselves in the present to continually improve the future.