Understanding PISAs Attractiveness: Critical Analyses in Comparative Policy Studies

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Understanding PISA's Attractiveness examines how policy makers and the media interpret the results of PISA league-leaders, losers, and slippers in ways that suit their own reform agendas. As a result, a myriad of explanations exist as to why an educational system is high or low performing. The chapters, written by leading scholars from Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the UK and the USA, provide a fascinating account of why results from PISA and other international large-scale assessments are interpreted and translated differently in the various countries. The analyses in this book bring to light the wide array of idiosyncratic projections into these international tests. In some countries, these tests are also used to scandalise ones own educational system and to generate quasi-external reform pressure. Compiled by two leading scholars in comparative education, Florian Waldow and Gita Steiner-Khamsi, this book offers a truly global perspective on the uses and abuses of PISA and will be of great interest to students and academics working in educational policy, comparative education and political science and those working on large-scale data sets.

Reviews

A highly important and timely edited collection on a topic of phenomenal and -alas- ever growing significance. This is a book that brings together the work of a group of internationally known scholars whose writing and influence in the field of education governance research cannot be over-stated. Thoroughly recommended. * Sotiria Grek, Senior Lecturer in Social Policy, University of Edinburgh, UK *

Author Bio

Florian Waldow is Professor of Comparative and International Education at Humboldt University, Germany. Gita Steiner-Khamsi is Professor of Comparative and International Education at Teachers College Columbia University, USA.