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This paper examines the impact of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in two national policy contexts: Canada and Australia. Drawing on theories of globalisation and affect, the paper explores ‘catalyst data’ and its effects in these contexts to show how affective responses to mediations of PISA performance have become important levers for policy change. Two empirical cases of the role of data in the globalisation of schooling are discussed. The first case examines responses in Canada to the PISA 2012 results, which generated senses of anxiety among parents that coalesced into a view that Albertan schools faced a mathematics crisis. The second case interrogates how, since PISA 2009, a narrative about the declining quality of Australian schooling has become dominant in political discourse and in media representations. The paper compares and contrasts the affective effects of data across both contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the expansion of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment ( PISA) and associated growth in the influence of the OECD's education work. PISA has become one of the OECD's most successful 'products' and has both strengthened the role of the Directorate for Education within the organization and enhanced the significance of the organization in education globally. We provide an overview of the OECD, including organizational changes in response to globalization and the changing place of the Directorate for Education within the organization, particularly with the development of PISA in the late 1990s. We show how the OECD is expanding PISA by broadening the scope of what is measured; increasing the scale of the assessment to cover more countries, systems and schools; and enhancing its explanatory power to provide policy-makers with better information. The OECD has also developed the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies ( PIAAC) and PISA-based Tests for Schools, which draw on the PISA template to extend the influence of its education work to new sites. The paper draws on data from 33 interviews with past and present personnel from the OECD, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement ( IEA) and the English and Australian education systems, as well as analysis of relevant OECD documents. We argue that PISA, and the OECD's education work more broadly, has facilitated new epistemological and infrastructural modes of global governance for the OECD in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces developments across Stephen J. Ball’s policy sociology in educationoeuvreand considers their implications for doing research on education policy today. It begins with an account of his policy sociology trilogy from the 1990s, which outlined his conception of the policy cycle consisting of the contexts of influence, text production and policy practice. It then considers the emergence of a strengthening focus on the global in Ball’s work, noting the significance of the 1998 paper, ‘Big policies/small world’, which demonstrated how policy problems and solutions circulate through global discourses, but are always recontextualized within national policies and practices. Next, the paper reflects on two recent books:Global Education IncandNetworks, New Governance and Education. The former is concerned with the rescaling of the contexts of policy and the enhanced significance of both international organizations and global edu-business in the education policy cycle and the implications for doing policy analysis. The latter employs a network ethnography approach and provides an account of the new network governance in education: the rise of heterarchies, a melange of bureaucracy, markets and networks. The paper concludes by suggesting this account is indicative of the topological turn in culture and social theory. The conclusion gestures towards the implications of this for the policy cycle conception and for doing education policy analysis today, suggesting that Ball’s recent work provides the scaffolds of such an approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a critical discussion of contemporary policy agendas to raise aspirations for university study among students from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. It traces the politics of aspiration from the working class ‘poverty of desire’ thesis propounded by British socialists at the turn of the twentieth century to recent concerns about the educational aspirations of low SES groups. These concerns are manifest in the current aspiration-raising agenda in Australian higher education, which aims to realise equity objectives by cultivating market-rational behaviour and dispositions to maximise self-investment in human capital. However, changes in contemporary global education and labour markets present significant obstacles to the ‘good life’ promises made by advocates of human capital theory, and even when these promises are realised, deficit constructions of aspirations persist. The paper identifies a tension in aspiration-raising logics between (1) human capital promises of economic rewards for enterprising behaviour and (2) the policing of aspirations and associated behaviours according to dominant social values. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses how the ‘funds of knowledge’ approach (FoK) offers a socially just alternative to the logics of capital, by drawing on knowledge assets from students’ family and community lifeworlds to build engaging and rigorous learning, supporting school–community interactions that build capacities. We explain how we applied FoK in an action research project – Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN) – to design curriculum and pedagogy in schools of a high-poverty region. With reference to RPiN, we also observe how high-poverty regions, and their schools, appear to be undergoing complex unsettlements, as effects of globalisation, which raise problematic questions about who/what is ‘the local community’. We argue that this calls for new thinking, both sociological and ethical, which can refine the FoK approach to take fuller account of the diverse and complex spaces of social-historical life in new times. We conclude by considering a pedagogical approach through which learners in such regions can re-imagine hopeful forms of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses an article on the effect of global policy agendas on conceptions of student equity embedded in national higher education (HE) policies, another on the connections between HE and vocational education and training, and another on the effect of a global field of HE on equity issues.