This article argues that the worlds which comparative education has explored and is exploring are characterised by three main political patterns. The first and oldest is the competitive nation-state as the starting point of the comparison, an educationalised nation-state, one whose relative global strength in economy and military prowess is…

This article analyses the media coverage of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) by progressive and conservative media outlets in South Korea from 2000 to 2018. Through systemic content analysis, the study reveals that the tones and content of PISA-related articles were largely influenced by the political alignment between the…

Development in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is widely emphasized worldwide. In the past decades, China has become the largest rising economy with a strong forward momentum in STEM advancement and education, which has profoundly impacted the global economy. This study investigates the current trends in STEM career…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has garnered increasing attention since its inception in 2000. Correspondingly, there has been heightened interest in 'PISA poster countries' like Singapore and Shanghai-China. Yet to date, little is known about the processes and dynamics of the construction of PISA discourses within these…

In this article we carry out a preliminary reconstitution of the genealogy of the political decision to integrate Portugal in PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), promoted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, made in 1999 and implemented in 2000. For this we used a comprehensive analysis of newspaper…

There is now an extensive body of research concerning the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and its recent additions and variations. Despite this, we argue that there is a paucity of theory-informed empirical research on the ways in which the PISA results about a nation's education system both circulate within, and are…

In the evaluation of any political strategy, it is essential to carry out the collection and analysis of the available data. The presentation of a complex phenomenon by means of synthetic measures can improve both the political actors' understanding of the situation and the design of new measures. In this paper, we deal with the problem of the…

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…

Since 2000, the PISA test implemented by OECD has become the prime benchmark for international comparisons in education. The 2015 PISA edition introduced methodological changes that altered the nature of its results. PISA made no longer valid non-reached items of the final part of the test, assuming that those unanswered questions were more a…

For the last 30 years international assessments have become more widespread and systematic, and their influence on education policy has increased: the OECD through the PISA tests has played a major role in this process. This article reflects on the case of the countries of the Southern Cone: Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. It analyzes the…

PISA allows for comparisons and contributes to the distribution of certain types of capital among countries, which is converted into soft power. Education has been considered an important pillar of the increased status and power China holds globally. However, Chinese participation in PISA differs from other countries, whereby only some of China's…

Turkey's politically induced 'curricular modernization initiative' intended a philosophical change and a system-level transformation from behaviouristic to constructivist-inspired pedagogies in the early 2000s. Science curriculum has been one of the curricula that has taken precedence. It has changed four times since then. The latest science…

Two separate data searches underlie this analysis of how references to educational research and to PISA are used in the Swedish education debate. The data consist of 380 newspaper articles from the eight largest print media outlets in Sweden and 200 protocols from parliamentary debates (2000 to 2016) that made explicit reference to 'PISA' and/or…

This study investigates the timing for a global education reform to be adopted locally. Drawing on the Multiple Streams Approach while expanding it with a transnational dimension, the Free-Semester Program in Korea is used to examine the convergence of the streams of problem, policy, and politics. An analysis of policy documents, media accounts,…

Critical policy analysis examining how powerful actors use educational policies to reproduce unequal social structures presents many challenges. These challenges are amplified by the politics of spectacle, where duplicity comes to dominate how educational policies are conceptualized, presented to the public, and subsequently enacted. The pursuit…