OECD Programme for International Student Assessment: Unraveling a knowledge network

The dissertation examines the construction of an international student assessment, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), by the Organization for International Co-operation and Development (OECD). The PISA is analyzed within the context of the global architecture of education where various agents such as the OECD and other international organizations, states and communities of experts are reconstructing, reproducing and legitimizing the discourse and material practices of societal and economic progress and of official educational knowledge. The dissertation argues that the PISA is a fragile entity that is susceptible to contestation not only as it is located in a highly politicized setting, the OECD, but also because it is founded on the socially-constructed science of educational measurement.; The dissertation draws on the Foucauldian concept of a power bloc formation in order to analyze the PISA's technical capacity, relations of communication and relationships of power. The analysis contributes to our understanding of how programs such as the PISA come to be constructed, how they work, how they attempt to order and shape our worlds, and how they are connected to global networks of power. It reveals that the international educational statistics that inform public policy decision-making are the result of a series of negotiated compromises made by communities of practice occupying various institutional structures within the global architecture of education.