Globalisation and Education Futures: Pisa: Ideology or Paradigm Shift

This chapter argues that PISA helps to strengthen the hegemony of the ruling groups. Still, at the same time, it generates political opposition from local actors and criticism from scholars. It displays the contents in six sections. First, it provides a brief background on the rise of the OECD and PISA and describes the content of the test. Second, it portrays the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) and the role of the OECD in its promotion. Third, it presents an analysis of how the OECD and the governments that applaud its action use the parsing of science. It aims to strengthen the ideas that good education is only one in which 15-year-old students answer questions about language, mathematical understanding, and science. Fourth, it sets the speculation that on why teachers are the main piece of the reforms’ purposes and, consequently, provoke rejection and opposition to PISA. Fifth, it exhibits the case of how the Mexican government ask for the OECD help to launch an education reform in 2009. However, the Department of Education rejected the OECD proposal in 2010. Afterwards, the government that took office in 2012 made a move following the OECD commendations. Still, the new administration rejected them again in 2018. Sixth, it discusses whether PISA meets the characteristics of normal science, that is, a paradigm that helps solve problems that education did not disentangle before. Or, if it is another tool, with sophisticated methodology, to reinforce the dominant ideology.