PISA and the limitations and risks of an OECD global governance programme

Abstract

The paper is the written version of the talk made at the closing conference of a research project that questioned the reasons why the OECD considered Portugal’s participation in PISA (2000-2018) as a ‘success case’. The article brings together the set of theoretical references that guided the work of the researchers and the specific contribution they give to the continuation of a reflection and debate, scientific and political, on the role played by the OECD in the attempt to establish lasting forms of global governance of education. After recalling the origins of the OECD, which indelibly mark the way in which this international organization equates education problems, the author presents the reasons for the ‘political success’ of PISA and other surveys conducted by the OECD and the organization’s purpose of making these instruments the main fine-tune of the member states’ education policies. The article points out the changes in the OECD in the late 1990s, which led to PISA, and presents the theoretical source that underlies them: the theory of knowledge capital. In the end, the author underlines the limitations and risks of the approach that the OECD intends to make hegemonic, defending a strong investment of citizen social science in the search for humanist alternatives for education policies, understood as a universal common good and a right of global citizenship.