A kick against rubbish

Remove PISA and Bologna / Withdraw competence from Schneider-Ammann Department / Decision rights on school and education back to the cantons where they are incorporated in the constitution and accessible to direct-democratic control

by Sandra Buchser

PISA: The international alignment of education policies

The PISA system (Programme for International Student Assessment) has caused several real shock waves since 2000. This seems to be systematic: Where these standardised tests are applied, alleged serious deficiencies in the knowledge of students are often identified. As Naomi Klein has pointed out in her book “The Shock Doctrine”, such shocks pave the way for profound changes with far-reaching consequences. This happened in the wake of PISA: The bad news was repeated a thousand times in the media that our children (and thus our school system) had allegedly failed fundamentally. The shocking news put great pressure on those responsible to do something very quickly.

“A widespread and fashionable view is that the United States is a classically imperialist power. … That mood has been expressed in different ways by different people, from the hockey fans in Montreal who boo the American national anthem to the high school students in Switzerland who do not want to go to the United States as exchange students.”

^{The seasonal diplomat Thomas Pickering, quoted in: Nye, Joseph S. Jr.: Soft power. The Means to Success in World Politics. New York 2004, p. 127.}

Accordingly, the following “reforms” were characterised by the “inconsiderate and rapid adoption of ready solutions without sufficient scientific and public debate” (Langer, p. 61). But where does the idea come from that our schools and school systems have to be exposed to competition, which has such far-reaching consequences for our students and our established school system? In short it comes from the US that has exported it to our countries through the OECD.

OECD: US turns education forum into educational actor

To understand this, a glance shall be thrown at the history of OECD¹ (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development). The organisation was founded in 1961 as the successor of the OEEC (Organisation for European Economic Cooperation). The latter aimed at implementing the Marshall Plan in Europe after the Second World War. Thus it was dominated by the US from the beginning. By selectively applying pressure in the 1980s, it then made the OECD into what it is today: a highly active “player” in the field of education^.2 Urged by the US (under President Reagan) the OECD developed the standardized PISA tests in the 1990s.

How did this happen? In 1983, the population of the United States suffered a shock, more precisely, an education shock.³ The report “A Nation at Risk: Imperative for Educational Reform” attested the Americans an alarming level of education.⁴ The threat not only originated from the technological developments and advances of the Japanese, the South Koreans and the Germans, but also from the underlying skills. Knowledge, learning, information and “skilled intelligence” were the new commodity of international trade (pp. 6f.). The report pursued an economic direction. But there was also a military jargon. The authors, for example, considered the educational plight a result of “unilateral educational disarmament”, p. 5) or even as an act of war: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war“ (p 5).⁵ President Reagan declared the improvement of education quality a “priority task of his presidency” (Martens/Wolf, p. 165).

Federalism added to US blacklist

The education authority lay with the states, so the central government lacked the competences. The “obstacle” of federalism should be overcome by the creation of external international pressure. For this, the school quality debate was “exported” and shifted to an international level by the OECD. Kerstin Martens, director of the Collaborative Research Center 597 “Transformations of the State” at Bremen University, conducted interviews with OECD staff and thoroughly reconstructed the development:

“By shifting the debate to the international level, the US government hoped to gain more leverage over education as a federal concern, and thereby more power over US States: thus ‘for domestic American political reasons, education was jacked up in the OECD. (…) This meant that suddenly there was a huge pressure, politically, on the US Secretary of Education to show results and benchmarks against other countries.’” (Martens/Wolf, p. 165)

OECD instrumentalized by the US

The pressure mentioned above was to be generated through comparisons of education systems at international level. The OECD, by then a forum for educational issues without its own initiatives, was earmarked as the instrument. It took over the job of developing indicators that would allow a comparison between the very different educational systems of the countries:

“Thus the US government, particularly the Secretary of Education, played a very active and critical role in pushing the OECD to modify its program on international educational indicators. It hardly hoped to find international improvements of educational performance worldwide, rather ‘it was necessary – for purely internal American reasons – to find a support externally, in a sense to export the American debate, in order to avoid considering that the crisis of education was only an American issue.’” (Martens/Wolf, 165f.)

... disregarding the government and democratic institutions

With the OECD being instrumentalized this way, the idea of an “education crisis” could be imposed on other countries in the world: They also should “realise” that their education system was bad and their children had a correspondingly low educational level, according to the motto: If we are not good, then you must not be either. Conclusion: With the “export” of the US education disaster to an international level, two purposes could be pursued simultaneously: It allowed the US, firstly, to cover up its own educational problems and, secondly, to significantly influence the education policies of both the United States and other countries of the world with the help of the OECD, disregarding the government and democratic institutions

PISA: a “pathological aberration” / US pressure increases

The OECD initially refused the US demand to develop indicators to compare education in different countries. For good reasons: “Concerned about possible abuse, ‘they [education department staff, CC] intentionally avoided everything, which could contribute to motivate states to mutual comparisons.’” (Martens/Wolf, p. 166) (What they meant by “abuse”, we now know all too well.) In 1987, the United States even threatened to withdraw from the organisation if it continued to refuse to fulfil its demand. “The fact that the United States walked out of UNESCO […]⁶ showed that this was […] no joke.” (Martens/Wolf, p. 166) The threat had an impact: In 1988, the OECD started the job and began a first Indicators Project (Ines). In 1990, the idea of PISA, i.e. the comprehensive collection of data, was born. For five years, about 300 (!) international scientists worked on the preparation of the PISA study. They were under virtually no control. An OECD staff member said: “In the OECD the experts had ‘lots of freedom (..), much more than in the national administrations, because there is basically no one who would limit the scope of political freedom.’” (Martens/Wolf, p. 167)
1995: The OECD seizes control from the governments

In 1995 national coordinators were appointed in order to spread the “indicator culture” in educational circles (Langer, p. 56). Later professionals were astonished about the fact that PISA had already been rubber-stamped in 1997 despite broad initial scepticism. “Within a short time the idea of international comparative studies had become standard under growing peer pressure that could not be publicly opposed.” (Martens/Wolf, p. 167) As a consequence, the OECD increasingly “seized control from the government.”

Peer pressure as a basis for decisions on national and international level? Why should such an antidemocratic process supplant the democratic evolution of the free school system? Because according to Martens, the PISA performance testing, “cannot be counted as the result of a functional cooperation between states, which would have been made about the intention to bundle resources and work together to improve the quality of education.” (Martens/Wolf, p. 168) According to Martens and Wolf, PISA and its consequences are rather a “pathological aberration” (ibid.) of the original indicators project.

By characterizing PISA and the continually recurring testings as “unintended consequences of an attempted exploitation of the OECD” (ibid.), the authors reveal a way to turn back to the interested parties – and that is good. However, from their own research it has become clear that the consequences would have been foreseeable if they had only listened to the critics in the OECD. Secondly, the said exploitation of the OECD has not only been attempted but also carried out and established a de facto monopoly: “The OECD has today a full leadership role in the field of education indicators.”7 (Martens/Wolf, p. 163) This supremacy of the OECD allows the predominant states to formulate competencies to be analysed at their discretion.

The totalitarian grip already considers itself to be permanent

What should be the use of these “internationally comparable standards”, i.e. of the international comparison? The PISA consortium in Germany, for example, officially says that the “clients [the participating states, CC] [expect] empirically substantiated control knowledge” (!) (Prenzel, quoted in Langer, p. 63). “Control knowledge”: Who decides where the ship is to be navigated to? Langer puts it this way: “The states (...) have managed to establish a permanent system that turns the educational system gradually into an accessory for the specific purposes of maintaining political and economic hegemony.” (p. 69) The current mess in politics and the economy is certainly not worth being preserved. So it is necessary to intervene in this “development”. For it is man-made.

PISA: “policy in an autocratic manner” – no legal basis

A large part of the reforms in education is justified by the results of the PISA studies. But PISA is no reliable information about the education of our students. Already the fact that the PISA managers keep a low profile (Langer, p. 62), is a compelling reason for sitting up and taking notice. Only a few examples of tests were published, the test as a whole was kept back from both the general public and the scientific debate. Why is an honest and open discussion of the tests inhibited? What exactly is examined? How? On what basis? All these questions are not answered by those responsible. On the contrary, Langer sees tangible interests behind the denial tactics and characterizes the “communication behaviour” as follows: “(...) if you represent interests and pursue definite targets, then you advertise a product, that is constant repetition of the same arguments, as pictorial as possible, not aiming at a dialogue. Avoiding dialogue, and skipping, downplaying or defaming critics appear to be appropriate means for those who are of the opinion that you should not ask the frogs if you want to drain the swamps. It may be doubted whether such autocratic policies are still aiming at an emancipated society – at least as a side-effect.” (p. 66). We are not at the mercy of these dishonest manoeuvres, as the OECD has “no legally binding instruments with which it could impose decisions on its member states” (Martens/Wolf, p. 162). Such exertion of influence is neither honest nor democratically legitimated.•

^Literature:

^{Langer, Roman: “Warum haben die PISA gemacht?” In idem: “Warum tun die das?” Governanceanalysen zum Steuerungshandeln in der Schulentwicklung. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008.
Martens, Kerstin / Klaus-Dieter Wolf: “Paradoxien der Neuen Staatsräson”, In: Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, 13/2 (2006), pp. 145-176. (for a summary in English see http://www.politikwissenschaft.tu-darmstadt.de/fileadmin/pg/media/papers/martens-wolf.pdf)}

^{1 Founding members (1961): Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, Greece, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Canada, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United States, Great Britain. Joined later: Japan, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Czech Republic, South Korea, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia. Since 2010: Chile, Slovenia, Israel and Estonia.
2  It is known that the EU is an equally active initiator of “education” offensives. Since 1960 it – or more precisely, the European Commission – has been involved in the work of the OECD alongside the states. “European Commission representatives work alongside members in the preparation of texts and participate in discussions on the OECD’s work programme and strategies, and are involved in the work of the entire organisation and its different bodies. While the European Commission’s participation goes well beyond that of an observer, it does not have the right to vote on decisions or recommendations presented before Council for adoption.” www.oecd.org/pages/0,3417,en_36734052_36761800_1_1_1_1_1,00.html
3  Whose goals remain to be seen
4  Very telling detail: From the onset, the order was not only to determine the level of education of American students, but to compare it with that of other leading nations (“comparing American schools and colleges with those of other advanced nations”, report p. 1).
5  The whole thing sounds like an economic war.
6  And this is also an interesting detail: In 1984 the US, Great Britain and Singapore left ­UNESCO, after a resolution had been adopted to reduce the dependence on the four major news agencies AP, UPI, AFP and Reuters (Resolution on The New World Information and Communication Order). What could they object?
7  Also, the continuation of the quote is very revealing: “[...] and has now outranked other organizations that have addressed this before (such as the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, IEA). This is particularly evident in the fact that the OECD has even taken on the further development of the handbook for the International Standard Classification of Education (known as ISCED) from UNESCO.”
(Translation Current Concerns)}