The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey and the knowledge it produces, has built its status as an expert in education policy. It has been often described as the international actor with greatest impact in the steering of education reforms in a vast number of countries and in the global policy scene (Grek, 2009). By describing the best performers’ education policies and creating standards based in these countries’ practices, this organization re-directs PISA’s lower performers to learn from the best, urging practices of policy borrowing from education systems with proven success.
A growing number of researchers employ the externalisation thesis (Schriewer, 1990) and theories of policy borrowing and lending (e.g. Steiner-Khamsi, 2002; Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow, 2012) as their lenses to understand the use of global organizations, policies and trends or practices in other countries as external points of reference.
Earlier studies analysing individual countries or regions, show that, PISA has been (re)constructing the reference societies (Bendix, 1978) utilised as models in the debates on education reform, as societies where to look to improve the education systems (e.g. Takayama, 2009; Carvalho & Costa, 2014; Sellar & Lingard, 2013; Waldow et al., 2014, Waldow, 2017). Some of these authors argue that the use of the ‘other’ is a mere discursive construction useful in the (de)legitimation of contested policy reforms (Steiner-Khamsi, 2002; Waldow, 2012, Takayama et al., 2013). This study contributes to this line of research by asking if and how are the successful countries in the OECD’s PISA survey used as reference societies in the Portuguese parliamentary debates focusing on education.
While there is enough evidence to state that the participation of Portugal in PISA is influencing national policymaking in education (e.g. Afonso & Costa, 2009; Carvalho & Costa 2009; Costa, 2011), it has not been yet explored if and how PISA high performers are being used as a discursive construction aiming at strengthening arguments pro and against education policy reforms and continuities.
Considering that recent research analysing Australia, Canada, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, UK and the USA (e.g. Rautalin et al. 2018) demonstrated that neither PISA nor its high performers have been used as the main point of external reference in these countries’ parliamentary debates on education this topic proves to be as interesting as it is controversial. Our study analyses the use of reference societies in the Portuguese parliamentary debates discussing the state of education and on education reforms, and explores political ideologies and agendas driving the choice of these reference societies or, as Schriewer posits, the ‘socio-logic’ (Schriewer, 1990) which leads to the discursive use of selective policies and practices from elsewhere.
The analysis aims to develop the understanding on the strategic use of external references as an instrument to strengthen the arguments presented in the parliamentary debates on education in Portugal, with a special focus on the uses of PISA’s high performers as reference societies, between January 2002 and December 2017.
This study contributes to the European discussion on comparative education and policy studies through the identification of political agendas and argumentative strategies in the education policy debate in Portugal, expanding our understanding of the strategic use of the ‘other’ in these argumentations. Consequently, the study will contribute to both, the understanding of convergence/divergence of education policies, processes of policymaking and the global-local intertwinements in these processes, with Portugal as member of the European Union and being therefore, confined within its hard governance norms.
