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The 'Learning Compass 2030' was released by the OECD in 2019 as their new policy framework for the compulsory schooling sector. This framework takes the bold step of asserting that access to disciplinary knowledge is central to schooling, putting it in stark contrast to previous OECD reports which have advocated instead for more generic skills and competencies. Drawing on Basil Bernstein's concept of the pedagogic device, this paper critiques the way the Learning Compass 2030 imagines disciplinary knowledge. It argues that while its inclusion offers an exciting possibility, the way that the Learning Compass 2030 continues to be governed by the instrumentalist logic of knowledge economy discourses prevalent in previous OECD documents means that disciplinary knowledge is constructed in a limited way. Instead of a tool which opens up new perspectives to students, the Learning Compass 2030 positions disciplinary knowledge almost exclusively as something which has an immediate and practical value in a marketised world. In taking this step, the Learning Compass denies the critical, transformative powers of disciplinary knowledge, thereby undercutting students' access to frameworks which will allow them to reimagine and ultimately better our society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically documents media portrayals of Australia’s performance on the Program for the International Student Assessment (PISA), 2000–2014. We analyse newspaper articles from two national and eight metropolitan newspapers. This analysis demonstrates increased media coverage of PISA over the period in question. Our research data were analysed using ‘framing theory’, documenting how the media frames stories about Australia’s performance on PISA. Three frames were identified: counts and comparisons; criticisms; and contexts. Most of the media coverage (41%) was concerned with the first frame, counts and comparisons, which analysed PISA data to provide ‘evidence’ that was then used to comparatively position Australia against other countries, reference societies, which do better, with particular emphasis on Finland and also Shanghai after the 2009 PISA. The other two frames dealt with criticisms and contextual issues. This paper only focuses on the first frame. The analysis demonstrates the ways in which media coverage of Australia’s PISA performance has had policy impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial literacy education as policy has gained international political momentum in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. This paper analyses how two policy narratives operated in Canada to promote and ultimately enact financial literacy education policy: the ‘crusade’ and the ‘chicken coop’. While the dominant and counter-narratives offer different perspectives, they both maintain financial literacy’s ‘sacred cow’ status. The application of narrative policy analysis (NPA) underscores how the politics of education policy are complex and cannot be explained by rational, positivist models that would privilege evidence over metaphor. This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on NPA, and sheds light on how financial literacy education is likely to be shaped and legitimized more by the values and mobilization power of special-interest coalitions in favour of it through politics, than by evidence-based research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which has become a major and influential component of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) educational work. This measure of comparative performance of educational systems of member and other nations is based on tests commissioned by the OECD. The paper discusses the role of the OECD in establishing the 'comparative' turn and also describes PISA, its management and effects. It provides three examples of the impact of PISA in Finland, Germany and the UK before moving the focus to its impacts at the transnational level, through an examination of how key European policy actors see PISA and its effects. The paper concludes that PISA, through its direct impact on national education systems in Europe and beyond, has become an indirect, but nonetheless influential tool of the new political technology of governing the European education space by numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational policy depends on assumptions about fairness in education, whether they are made explicit or kept implicit. Without a view of fairness, one would be in the dark as to what should be done about the reproduction of social inequality through education, or whether or not anything should be done at all. The aim of this paper is to uncover the view of fairness in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) education policy. It is based on an analysis of the normative argumentation concerning educational fairness in a set of policy documents from the last seven years, with special emphasis on the association between social background and educational achievement. The main result of the analysis is that the OECD explicitly operate with a loose idea of equal opportunity, compatible with even a merely formal equality, but implicitly with a meritocratic variant of fair equality of opportunity. In the final section, I argue that the OECD approach to fairness suffers from a limitation in that it considers educational justice in isolation from social justice in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) in India, the largest basic education programme in the world, assesses the significance of foreign aid for achieving increased access to elementary education from 2002 to 2010, particularly for the most disadvantaged. It reviews the practical experience of India and its development partners in jointly developing and implementing a national education programme and how greater alignment of external assistance with the Government of India's national policy for achieving universal elementary education was brought about, thus promoting country leadership and harmonising donor practices for effective aid delivery in line with the principles of aid effectiveness set out in the Paris Declaration (signed by the members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD and representatives of the developing countries in 2005). The paper draws on documentation about, and experience of SSA design and implementation to establish, through analysis, a picture of how foreign aid principally from three development partners is being used effectively to support India's own policy and strategy for universalising elementary education. The case shows that the development partners are playing an important role and that external support for elementary education in India is organised in a unique and effective way and contributed to increased access to basic education, particularly in the populous north of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban schools in many OECD countries are contending with policy trends that squeeze budgets and incentivize parent fundraising. The trend may be most pronounced and longstanding in the US, where parent groups and local education foundations have turned increasing attention to raising funds to support additional services, staff, or programs for schools to which admittance is primarily based on residence. This article argues that private fundraising for public schools contributes to the creation of what public economics, public choice, and urban planning theorists have described as 'clubs' that may exacerbate inequality. It examines two school districts that have adopted policies aiming to curb this potential inequity: the Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District in California and Portland School District in Oregon. A case study approach was used to detail the policies adopted and explore their potential for de-clubbing as well as resistance encountered to reallocation of dollars at the district level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facing increasing critique that PISA focuses too narrowly on cognitive achievement and human/knowledge capital, the OECD has recently shifted some of its focus to student happiness. The 2017 Students' Well-Being report distinguishes between 'happy schools' and 'unhappy schools', showing that among students who combined high performance and life satisfaction, northern European countries topped the charts. Meanwhile, students in East Asian countries including Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Korea registered the lowest 'life satisfaction' scores among all participating countries. This piece points out some of the problems inherent in the OECD's recent turn to happiness, problematizing the OECD yardstick of life satisfaction. Attempting to keep the critique constructive, we suggest that the OECD may want to consider using alternative metrics, then briefly highlight one developed in East Asia from different first assumptions: the Interdependent Happiness Scale. In conclusion we flag, but cannot answer, some related educational questions concerning policy, pedagogy, and priorities for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review essay discusses the history, evolution and development of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and traces the growing impact of its education work. The essay is in four main sections. The first discusses Carrol and Kellow's The OECD: A Study of Organizational Adaptation (Edward Elgar) and provides a brief historical account of the Organisation. The second section reviews Woodward's The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (Routledge) and considers the different modes of governance employed by the OECD, particularly its exercise of soft power through peer review. The third section considers Tucker's edited book, Surpassing Shanghai." An Agenda for American Education Built on the World's Leading Systems (Harvard Education Press) and the effects that Shanghai-China's 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) success has had on education policy debates in the USA and globally. The final section engages with Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn From Educational Change in Finland? (Teachers College Press) and describes factors that have contributed to the high quality and equity of schooling in Finland. The review essay thus moves from an examination of the role and function of the OECD in general terms to more specific discussion of the recent impact of its PISA, which has drawn attention to particular school systems and has influenced education policy-making in both member and non-member countries. We conclude by providing a framework for understanding the epistemological and infrastructural governance functions of the OECD in education globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is currently engaging in a worldwide feasibility study entitled International Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO). This feasibility study seeks to develop measures that would assess student learning outcomes that would be valid across different languages, cultures, and higher education institutions. Drawing on anticolonial perspectives, this article provides a critical policy analysis of the AHELO project. Based on a review of the AHELO texts, it presents two themes: (1) crisis and imperial logic in policy production and (2) Anglo-Eurocentrism as global designs and colonial relationships. It argues that, through AHELO, OECD is striving to construct a global space of equivalence for teaching and learning in higher education, and in so doing, perpetuates coloniality in global higher education. It concludes by noting some comparative observations between AHELO and Programme for International Student Achievement in terms of the increasing role of global knowledge for policy tools in educational policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]