When Do Numbers Count? The Differential Impact of the PISA Rating and Ranking on Education Policy in Germany and the US
By Kerstin Martens, D. Niemann. 2013
111 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Why do international comparisons have an impact on some countries while other countries do not respond? This article examines the power of international ratings and rankings (R&R) using the OECD's PISA study and its differential impact on education policymaking as a case study. It argues that international R&R have an impact when two conditions are simultaneously fulfilled: the evaluated topic is framed as crucial in the national discourse, and a substantial gap between national self-perception and the empirical results can be observed. After assessing the media impact of PISA on 21 OECD countries, the theoretical argument is illustrated by an evaluation of the differing reactions of two similarly poorly performing countries: Germany and the US. While the German system of secondary education was strongly affected by the international comparison, beginning with the first PISA study in 2000, and underwent comprehensive changes, the US first responded noticeably in the public and the political discourse only in 2010 to its below-average ranking.
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/062bc9b3afcce3400faab01ff06debe5062c25b0
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Citations in the corpus
- The rise of international large-scale assessments and rationales for participation (2017, background): “Rankings may create ‘shocks’, which open windows for policy reform, when performance does not match expectations and is seen to be an important issue nationally (Ertl 2006; Martens and Niemann 2013; Wiseman 2013).”