International tests and the quest for «world class» schooling: a critical analysis of policy narratives

Abstract

During the past three decades, an influential network of contemporary providers of comparative education has emerged, formed by global agencies, consultants, multinational companies and think tanks. Its aim is to identify best practices in high-performance systems to recommend its adoption in other with one lesser. Its aim is to identify best practices in high-performing systems to recommend their adoption in poor performing systems. To do this, they analyse the cross-national tests of pupils’ academic achievement to provide the ‘evidence’ used by policy makers to construct their policy stories. This network produces and promotes a policy narrative, a new form of orthodoxy, which determines the need for educational reforms, its aims and even how to develop them. In this article, we analyse the logic that underlies the activity of this network, the assumptions on which it builds its narrative which revolves around the «global race» between nations, and, finally, the strategies and tactics that they use to mask the problems that they encounter in establishing causality. To conclude, we warn of the risks of narrowing the aims of education to prepare students to perform well on those international tests. Most notably, it will result in a closed and self-fulfilling system, concerned only with training human capital.