Understanding PISA’s Attractiveness: Critical Analyses in Comparative Policy Studies (New Directions in Comparative and International Education)

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 one’s 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.

Stephen Carney is Professor of Educational Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark.
His research focuses on global educational reform and has involved ethnographic work in Denmark, England, Nepal and China. He is active in the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), especially its Special Interest Group concerned with 'Post-foundational approaches to comparative and international education'. He is also President of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE).

Irving Epstein is the Rhodes Professor Emeritus of Peace and Social Justice at Illinois Wesleyan University, USA. In addition to Education, Affect, and Film, he is the author of Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse (2019). His other book length publications include the edited volumes Chinese Education: Problems, Policies and Prospects (1991), Recapturing the Personal (2007), The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Children's Issues Worldwide (2007), and The Whole World is Texting: Youth Protest in the Information Age (2015). From 1988-1998, he served as an associate editor of the Comparative Education Review and is currently an Emeritus member of the Scholars at Risk advisory board, an international network devoted to protecting scholars from persecution while engaging in academic freedom advocacy.

Daniel Friedrich is Associate Professor of Curriculum at Teachers College, Columbia University, USA. He is the author of Democratic Education as a Curricular Problem (2014) and co-editor of a special issue of Education Policy Analysis Archives on the global network Teach For All (with Rolf Straubhaar).