By design, the OECD is primarily an economic forum, but its interest and influence in education policy making today is without doubt, prevailing. By now, it certainly is amongst the most prominent international organizations being active and influential in this field. Especially since it established its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) around 20 years ago and produced publications on best practices in education and subsequent policy recommendations, the OECD has become a major driver for domestic reforms (Bieber et al. 2014; Verger and Parcerisa 2018). However, we know very little about the underlying leitmotifs in education the OECD is spreading with its publications. So far, the literature on the OECD’s education policy has either focused on the impact of PISA on policy making, and policy diffusion (e.g. Dolowitz and Marsh 2000; Steiner-Khamsi 2006) or on single case studies (e.g. Hopfenbeck et al. 2018). Another strand of research has analysed aspects of the OECD’s work in a historical perspective (Papadopoulos 1994; Ydesen and Grek 2019). However, the research lacks a systematic assessment of how the OECD discursively frames the purpose of education and its objectives in steering education policy. In this paper we explore the OECD’s overall focus on different topics regarding education.

The OECD is not only contributing to the recent rise in policy borrowing and diffusion, but more importantly the spread of a common model and view on education policy across the globe (Addey et al. 2017; Niemann and Martens 2017). The comparisons of countries through the PISA ranking tables and the subsequent policy recommendations cause regular debates on efficient education systems in participating countries (ibid.). Even countries not participating in PISA are influenced by the major publicity around the study (Breakspear 2012). To be taken seriously in the international community, countries subject themselves to the OECD’s measurements and recommendations and follow along with the debate on what good education for a healthy, stable labour market could mean and the participation in PISA can almost be considered a matter of good manners (Addey and Sellar 2017). This discourse has contributed to the increasing isomorphism among education systems, as has been observed by world society theorists (e.g. Meyer 2010). It is however, not always obvious at first glance, which agenda the OECD has when recommending the implementation of certain policies. We will shed light on the agenda that influences policy makers by highlighting what topics the OECD’s publications are focusing on, and therefore can inadvertently influence the direction of policy making.

We conceptualize our analysis as a mixed methods approach: We analyse publications on education and education policy with a quantitative topic modeling approach by focusing on the large corpus of periodicals and publications the OECD has brought forward since its beginning in the 1960s. We then compare these results which show the most discussed themes over time, with results of a qualitative content analysis of key OECD documents. We will hereby not only explore what the overall focus and view of the OECD is, but also track the changing of education ideas over time and situate PISA within this discourse. In essence, we focus on whether (and at which period) the OECD’s view on education is either shaped by considerations of human capital formation or on issues of equality, equity, and social cohesion through education. Against the backdrop of identifying the ideational framework of the OECD in education, we also analyse if the OECD actually practices what it preaches, and if the ideational framework is reflected in the OECD’s education measures.

Topic modeling in general is a quantitative text analysis tool. This method uses an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that is trained to discover topics in a corpus of documents. The topics are built from the co-location of words in the documents. This process can be roughly compared to a cluster analysis, where topics comprised of words are clustered together, thus showing a number of underlying themes in the documents analysed (Wesslen 2018). The stm package (Roberts, Stewart, and Tingley 2018) in the statistics software R (R Core Team 2019) allows the joint analysis of topics and document related meta-data. This enables the examination of changing topic prevalence over time (Roberts et al. 2019). This approach is often used for large sets of documents or texts and can be understood as speed-reading these documents. Since the OECD publishes a multitude of documents on education each year, this approach can help to understand the overall gist and focal points the organization brings forth. This allows the detection of themes that are addressed frequently by the OECD but are not emphasized through placement in the public eye such as PISA. To improve the validity of our results, as is recommended for topic modeling, (Chang et al. 2009) we contrast these results with a qualitative text analysis on selected documents published throughout the years. Combining a deductive (text analysis) and an inductive (topic modeling) approach on a similar corpus might reveal interesting results on both accounts. The topic modeling is performed on 941 documents distributed through the entire timeline (1961 to 2019), to establish a birds-eye-view of the OECD’s agenda since the beginning. The qualitative text analysis encompasses a manual coding of several key documents of the OECD, declaring the organizations mission statements and goals. Through this approach we can detect when the organization regards education under the perspective of economic utilitarianism or as a tool to promote social cohesion. This in-depth analysis will allow a close-up inspection of concepts identified with the topic modeling and will highlight the results of our quantitative analysis and provide for a better understanding of the results.

The results of the topic modeling show the broad range of interest of the OECD. Instead of a heavy focus on secondary education as might be expected from the frequent discussion of PISA results, we find a multitude of other foci. In addition, most topics are dependent on the publication series such as “Education at a Glance”, resulting in repeated discussions of similar topics in different series. The most prominent topics are concerned with policy making, curriculum development and the quality of higher education institutions. While the OECD focusing on human resource development and education system structure in the early years, during the 80s policy making becomes much more important. Adult education and the sustainable development goals, along with the development and definition of skills and education for the labour market are topics gaining traction more recently. This finding coincides with the heavy focus on a neo-liberal market structure - viewing education not only as a lifelong process, but retraining the population as a necessity to allow flexibility on the labour market. The qualitative analysis shows similar results. All in all we conclude, that the OECD not only has a labour market focus throughout the years, but also a multitude of different agendas. PISA is much less prominent than initially anticipated. Instead of focusing on the lower levels of compulsory education solely, most of their publications are concerned with education after the completion of compulsory education or overarching topics such as system assessment. We conclude that the OECD is in fact not a unitary actor and this might be a result of the IO’s internal complexity. In addition, PISA is by far not the only topic on the IO’s focus, instead, it only makes out a fraction of the OECD’s overall education agenda.

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