When the Norwegian minister of education Torbjørn Røe Isaksen woke up early in the morning on December 6 2016, he knew that it was a special day. In fact, it was “one of the most important days in my time as a minister. The Pisa day. It had been written down in my calendar for at least a year.” (Morgenbladet 2016). The idea that there is a special day when the overall quality of the national school system is assessed says something about the peculiar ways in which education is measured today. This new phenomenon, this paper argues, is not only part of the emergence of large-scale assessments, but should more precisely be seen as an effect of the very specific ways in which they nowadays order time. This temporal regime will here be labeled the Pisa calendar. The Pisa calendar is based on the idea of recurrent studies conducted every third year, reported swiftly and simultaneously across the whole world. Drawing on sociological and historical research on time (e.g. Zerubavel 1981; Rosa 2013; Ogle 2015) the paper aims at exploring how this temporal regime emerged and which consequences it has for educational policy and discourse. The paper discusses and compares the different conceptions of time in the early international assessments made in the 1960s and 1970s by the IEA with the PISA studies conducted from the year 2000 onwards. The study is thus based on both historical and contemporary sources. The historical part is mainly based on the published IEA reports, although this is complemented with media material, correspondence and internal IEA documents. The contemporary part of the paper draws on a more heterogeneous collection of sources, including press conferences, media representations and OECD-documents. The paper argues that there has been a shift in the ways that large-scale assessments structure time. The early IEA surveys were characterized by a relative slowness, lack of synchronization and lack of trend analyses. Years passed before studies were reported (making the results old already at publication date), and sometimes they were published with great time distance in different countries, and the studies were seldom – if ever – repeated. The Pisa calendar, by contrast, is characterized by high pace, simultaneous publication of results around the world and regular, recurrent studies making the analysis of trends possible. The emergence of this new time regime, it is argued, has implications for how education is governed.

Morgenbladet (2016-12-09) ”Advent er ventetid. Jeg venter på at en liten gutt skal komme til verden” Ogle, V. (2015). The global transformation of time: 1870-1950. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Rosa, H. (2013). Social acceleration: a new theory of modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. Zerubavel, E. (1981). Hidden rhythms: schedules and calendars in social life. Berkeley: University of California Press.