The author has been invited to reply to this response to her article of December 2006 in this journal. This response can only be a summary of some of her findings and a reiteration, in very truncated form, of her arguments. She would refer any interested reader back to her original extended review of the PIRLS project as it was there that she lays out her full critique. The author first pointed out that her extended critique of the PIRLS project is not one of the detailed technical and statistical procedures carried out by international teams of experts and psychometricians, of which these members of the British National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) can be numbered (Whetton et al.). Rather, she focuses on their ability to understand what is culturally at stake within the very complex decisions that were, at some level, driven by a need to establish a necessary consensus between participating nations in producing and using a common measurement instrument. She also expresses doubts about the way that it actually functioned in England, and the ways its results entered a charged highstakes political agenda around the testing and success of English children. She also points to the larger issue of subtle cultural hegemony involved in this kind of international survey where richer nations apparently do much better on what is claimed to be a context-free measurement. The author questions the very basis of what these authors call, in contrast to what they characterise as her "extreme position", the "more pragmatic philosophy" of the whole PIRLS exercise.