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This paper examines the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) PISA for Schools, a local variant of the more-renowned 'main PISA' test that measures and compares individual school performance on reading, mathematics and science against international schooling systems. Here, I address the governance implications of how PISA for Schools data has been taken up by the transnational European Schools System (ESS). Drawing suggestively across new 'relational' thinking around data-driven modes of governance, as well as interviews with key policy actors within the ESS, I show how PISA for Schools reflects contradictory logics within the ESS, in which the inherently context-based goal of 'becoming European' is juxtaposed with the desire to employ decontextualised international evidence. I conclude by exploring how the perceived need for such data, associated with the global authority of the OECD, can produce a problematic focus on data-driven practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines emerging techniques of educational governance - based on time, difference 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 difference through comparative test data, allowing educators to imagine, and bring about, different potential futures. Drawing on Deleuze’s thinking around forms of difference, and the governance function of potentiality, and informed by interviews with key PISA for Schools policy actors, I illustrate how the visualisation of difference 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 difference and potential’, where the underlying logic is for teachers to work on themselves in the present to continually improve the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Schools, a local variant of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD’s) influential PISA that not only assesses an individual school’s performance in reading, mathematics and science against international schooling systems, but also promotes 17 identical examples of ‘best practice’ from ‘world class’ schooling systems (e.g. Shanghai-China, Singapore). Informed by 33 semi-structured interviews with actors across the PISA for Schools policy cycle, and supplemented by the analysis of relevant documents, the paper provides an account of how these concrete examples of best practice are represented in the report received by participating schools. Drawing upon thinking around processes of commensuration and the notion of ‘governing by examples’, the paper argues that PISA for Schools discursively positions participating schools as somehow being commensurable with successful schooling systems, eliding any sense that certain cultural and historical factors – or ‘out of school’ factors – are inexorably linked to student performance. Beyond encouraging the problematic school-level borrowing of policies and practices from contextually distinct schooling systems, I argue that this positions the OECD as both the global expert on education policy and now, with PISA for Schools, the local expert on ‘what works’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]