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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 paper explores how data-driven practices and logics have come to reshape the possibilities by which the teaching profession, and teaching professionals, can be known and valued. Informed by the literature and theorising around educational performativity, the constitutive power of numbers, and affective responses to data, it shows how different US educators experienced, and came to embody, new forms of numbers-based accountability. Drawing on interviews with teachers, and school- and district-level leaders, as well as relevant school-based documents, it is argued that such data are now both effective (i.e. they change 'what counts' within the profession) and affective (i.e. they produce new expectations for teachers to profess data-responsive dispositions over actual educative practices). This prevalence and use of data have combined not only to change teaching into a 'data profession', but also to change teachers into 'professors' of data. [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]

The research reports how a particular school reform initiative - 'Project 600' - constituted students in one school region Queensland, Australia. Drawing upon topological understandings of power and recent work on the visualisation of data in education, as well as the insights of key staff involved in the project, we reveal the complex and contradictory ways in which so-called 'invisible' (i.e., 'averageperforming') students were made 'visible' through data. On the one hand, Project 600 enabled teachers to see these students as learners and beyond broader pressures to enhance results on standardised testing (i.e., beyond data). However, associated processes of datafication meant that these students' 'visibility' as holistic learners was simultaneously challenged, as their schools and region came to be increasingly governed through data. These students were then at risk of becoming 'invisible' in a different sense, as processes of commensuration and visualisation of data contributed to them being constituted as data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides insights into teachers’ and school administrators’ responses to the current ‘fetishisation’ of school performance data in Australian schooling. Specifically, the research investigates the accountability practices that emerged in a Queensland metropolitan primary school in response to this broader focus upon performance data. Drawing upon interviews with teachers and school administrators, literature and theorising on educational performativity and data, and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the article reveals how performative, data-driven practices play out at the level of the school. This process reveals a ‘field of schooling practices’ characterised by contradictory and contested logics of deifying, delivering and denying data. We describe this as the ‘doublethink of data’, involving teachers engaging with performative processes for purposes of compliance but without any real sense of the value of doing so. The research reveals the extraordinary energy involved in this work, and cautions against these performative practices and associated technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws upon recent theorising of the ‘becoming topological’ of space– specifically, how new social spaces are constituted through relations rather than physical locations – to explore how standardised data, and specifically test data, have influenced teachers’ work and learning. We outline the varied ways in which teacher practices at a primary school in Queensland, Australia, were actively constituted through processes of ‘tracking data’ and ‘keeping data on-track’, and how teachers were simultaneously being disciplined, or ‘tracked’, by these very same data. Our analyses suggest that what appear to be more ‘technical’ activities and tasks of ‘using’ data are, in fact, actively constituted modes of governance, enabled through and deployed by ongoing practices of comparison and topological respatialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]