Cuenca, una mirada hacia el pasado

According to the changes of national rankings in PISA or the changes in domestic contexts, the reactions of policymakers at national level can evolve. For example, in the UK, although its data in the first two rounds of PISA could not be used for comparison due to UK samples’ low response rate in the assessment (OECD, 2014b), it is considered that UK did well compared with other participating education systems, and no concrete initiatives were steered at national level as responses to PISA results (Grek, 2009).

However, this has been changing since the release of PISA 2009 results in 2010 which has led to a growing recognition of high-performing countries' education policies (Knodel and Walkenhorst, 2010; Knodel et al., 2013). In PISA 2009, the slipped rankings of UK motivated policymakers to take actions on the reforms of schools. As the then Education Secretary Michael Gove wrote, PISA 2009 is considered “as a spur to action” and “provides clear pointers to how we can reform our schools system to make it one of the best in the world” by learning from the education systems of PISA high- performing countries (Gove, 2010). As claimed by Gove (2011), based on the perceived characteristics of education systems successful in PISA, the schools white paper The importance of teaching was launched to raise the quality of teaching, enhance school autonomy, and improve accountability mechanisms. However, Baird et al. (2011) argue that the relationship between some content of these policies in the white paper with PISA findings is not obvious.

For France, Pons (2016) classifies the evolution of French policy debate on PISA between 2001 and 2014 into three periods, and argues that this evolution is brought by the changes in domestic policy context. In the first period from 2001 to 2004, PISA results were collectively ignored due to domestic policy configuration, and there was only narrow debate centring on the statistical limits of PISA methodology (Pons, 2016). In the second period from 2005 to 2010, the policy context changes under the implementation of Lisbon strategy (Lisbon European Council, 2000) which encourages member

countries to identify objectives and benchmarks for their education systems, the debate focus therefore moved progressively to political discussion on educational reforms and expected education system (Pons, 2016). In the third period, political speeches increased, in which PISA was frequently used by policymakers to legitimise their ideas or initiatives (Pons, 2016).

3.2.3 The phenomenon of policy borrowing

Amongst the policy actions or reforms catalysed by PISA or proposed under the context that unsatisfactory PISA results were received, sometimes policy borrowing or learning from those in PISA high-performing education systems is involved (e.g. Gove, 2011; Forestier et al., 2016). As denoted by Phillips and Ochs (2003, p. 451), “borrowing” covers “whole range of issues relating to how the foreign example is used by policymakers at all stages of the processes of initiating and implementing educational change.” PISA high- performers, such as Finland and some countries and regions in Asia, therefore are framed as “reference societies” for the education reforms (Sellar and Lingard, 2013a).

For example, the initiatives in Germany made references not only to PISA itself but also to other countries such as Finland (Etrl, 2006; Ringarp, 2016). In the German context, the education reforms focusing on national

educational standards was justified by the Federal Ministry of Education that countries successful in PISA widely have had national educational standards, and the Ministry specifically investigated the development and application of educational standards in these countries (Ertl, 2006). When borrowing policies from elsewhere, domestic policymakers tend to use foreign examples selectively, conditioned by domestic factors such as their prior perceptions of reference countries and economic relations with these countries (Waldow et al., 2014; Waldow, 2017). For Germany, Finnish

education, as opposed to Asian education, is considered as a positive model and more acceptable (Waldow et al., 2014; Waldow, 2017). Finland’s

success in PISA is interpreted based on the historically-rooted positive image that Finnish education is child-centred and encourages intrinsically- motivated learning (Waldow, 2017). Policy debates in some other contexts (e.g. Australia, UK, USA) tend also to “look East”, with the perceptions that Asian economies are significant economic competitors (Sellar and Lingard, 2013b; Waldow et al., 2014). For example, as reflected in the book edited by Tucker (2011), Surpassing Shanghai: An agenda for American education built on the world's leading systems, USA has been drawing lessons from

Asian high-performing systems such as Shanghai-China, Japan, and Singapore since PISA 2009.

On the other side of policy borrowing is policy lending. According to the survey on the policy impact of PISA conducted by the OECD (Breakspear, 2012), education systems with high performance are frequently cited that they were made reference to by other systems in policy reforms. For Finland which has had gained worldwide admiration for its success in PISA, with this reputation, Finnish government even has taken initiatives of making its education a nation brand to promote education exportation (Schatz et al., 2017). “PISA tourism” (Chung, 2010) emerges in Finland that many

educational policymakers and practitioners of other education systems go to Finland for learning something.

It is argued that internationally comparable data, as provided by PISA, have become an important policy technology, which makes policy borrowing and lending more prevalent than they used to be (Steiner-Khamsi and Waldow, 2012). Along with the globalised phenomenon of policy borrowing that countries and regions search for “best practice” of education elsewhere (Kamens, 2013), debates and critiques of policy borrowing have been raised (e.g. Oates, 2011; Auld and Morris, 2016). It is admitted that crudely

transplanting others’ policies without the consideration of contextual differences is problematic (Auld and Morris, 2016). Yet, rather than genuinely import policies from other context and apply them to one’s own context, there have been cases that high-performing education systems and PISA are used by policy-makers to legitimise their own pre-shaped ideas with regard to educational reforms (Pons, 2012; Chung, 2016). In this case, the claimed policy impact is considered as “political rhetoric” (Baird et al. 2016), and it may not have an explicit link with those claimed references (Morris, 2015).

3.2.4 The governing power of PISA on global education