As a result of its country reviews, international assessment programmes and reports, the OECD has risen to prominence as one of the most powerful International Organisations (IOs) in the shaping of a global education space. But while most research recognises the supremacy of the OECD as an education policy trendsetter, little effort has been put into understanding the history and events that brought the OECD to this important policy mediator role. There are three main exceptions to this observation, however.

In her recent PhD dissertation Regula Bürgi argues that understanding the processes behind the rise to prominence of the OECD in the field of education requires a nuanced picture of the organisation taking the institutionalisation processes, the key agents and networks, and the ruling paradigms into account. And Kerstin Martens argues that the ‘comparative turn’ in global education policy advocated and promoted by the OECD must be understood as the result of a historically instituted paradigm of cross-national comparison as the best engine to promote quality in education.Finally, Daniel Tröhler has pointed out that a paradigm of social engineering and statistical planning sprung from the United States in 1945 and triggered a technocratic culture of which the OECD is a very good example.

But while this article draws on the insights provided by these three studies, the article builds on two interdependent premises to study the case of the OECD in the production of education research and policy that moves beyond the three studies. First, it starts from the proposition that behind the universalistic rationality of the consensual world-visions such powerful policy actors apparently support, lays a field of tension and antagonism. This field does not only relate to the external environment in which IOs operate; IO structures and struggles are often as significant about the ways that an organisation may structure its thinking and work. Secondly, the article argues that the role of quantification has played a crucial part in shaping and governing the field. Education metrics have infiltrated not only organisational cultures; crucially, they are reshaping the very ways IOs compete and survive in an increasingly quantified, yet uncertain world.

The article takes a historical perspective to analyse the configurations and positions of OECD’s work in education in relation to other powerful agents defining and shaping education policies with global impact. The agents treated are the European Commission, UNESCO and the United States, including the Ford foundation which sponsored the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) in 1968. More specifically, the article examines two periods as its object of analysis.

The first decade is the 1960s when the shock of the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 reverberated in Western education planning; the 1960s is also the decade which saw the foundation of the OECD (in 1961) and the establishment of CERI.

The second period we will investigate is the early 1980s till the early 1990s featuring the end of the Cold War, the establishment of the OECD International Indicators of Educational Systems (INES) in 1988, and the groundwork of the large scale international comparisons of the early 1990s.

In examining these historical junctures, the article will ask the following questions: in the making of numbers, how did the OECD negotiate financial resources and knowledge production priorities? How did the OECD actively produce collective sense-making? How much do we know about the beginnings of the establishment of the OECD expert networks? Ultimately, if the OECD’s rating and ranking practices are a ‘zero-sum’ game for the assessed, how much do we know about the rules of the game for the assessors?

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