The Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) has instigated domestic policy debate aimed at improving education systems' quality and efficiency. Its high performers are often described as knowledge-based legitimation tools that have become reference societies. This article analyses if and the extent to which PISA affects the choice of…

Globalisation and policy transfer in education make it incumbent upon decision makers to prioritise among competing policy options, select policy initiatives that are appropriate for their national contexts, and understand how system-specific factors moderate the relationship between those policies and student outcomes. This study used qualitative…

This article examines French and English average performances and educational inequality in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) between 2000 and 2018. It asks why English average scores in 2018 are much higher than those of France when they were fairly similar in previous PISA assessments. It questions why the impact of…

The state school lives immersed in the tension between democratic purposes and the ideals of merit and selectivity. In this context, state schools establish instruments of public praise for students who stand out academically or in other dimensions. We propose to map the rituals of academic distinction in Portuguese state schools and to discuss…

This article examines student accounts of credentials, talent and academic success, against a backdrop of the enduring liberal ideal of an education-based meritocracy. The article also examines Bourdieu's account of academic qualifications as the dominant source of institutionalised cultural capital, and concludes that it does not adequately…

This article focuses on analysing the effect of educational differentiation policies of OECD educational systems on socioeconomically disadvantaged students, based on data from PISA 2009. The analysis is conducted on the basis of a definition of two subgroups of disadvantaged students: those that achieve high scores, and those obtaining scores…

The article focuses on some findings of a comparative study carried out by a network of scholars and researchers who are active in the field of intercultural education in the European context in the main "old immigration countries" (United Kingdom, France and Germany), "new immigration countries" (Italy, Spain and Greece) and…

The tracking of pupils by ability into elite and nonelite schools represents a controversial policy in many countries. There is no consensus on how large the elite track should be and little agreement on the effects of any further increase in its size. This paper presents a natural experiment where the increase in the size of the elite track was…

This paper explores the PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] achievement of twenty countries in light of some of their demographic differences. SES [student socioeconomic status], nuclear family, gender, home language, and native status were predictive of achievement for every country. Demographics accounted for as little as 8…

This paper provides evidence on the sources of differences in inequality in educational scores and their evolution over time in four European countries. Using Programme for International Student Assessment data from the 2000 and the 2006 waves, the paper shows that inequality decreased in Germany and Spain (two "decentralised" schooling…

This is the 2011 edition of a biennial series of compendia describing key education outcomes and contexts of education in the Group of Eight (G-8) countries--Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The report is organized into five topical areas: population and school enrollment,…

It is argued that the social control function of education and training is becoming increasingly explicit in England and France. Education and training can be viewed as a form of custody for young people, with enforced participation post 16 planned in the near future in England. Compulsory education for this age group is not currently planned in…

This article evaluates PISA 2000 as a resource for providing information on educational attainment and inequality, focusing on France and England. Going beyond pupils' performance, it assesses levels of educational inequality by examining distributions of scores and the relationship between socio-economic status and performance. This review raises…

The gross differences in scholastic achievement among public, private government-dependent, and private independent schools in 22 countries are analyzed with Programme for International Student Assessment 2000 data. In a multilevel approach, the authors estimate these sector effects, controlling for sociological characteristics of students and…

The provision, in most industrialized democracies, of public funding for schools that differ from the state system in religion or pedagogy has the effect of encouraging philosophical diversity and school-level decision making alongside a substantial degree of curriculum alignment and with various forms of government protection for the interests of…