Much has been written about the emergence of a global education policy field enabled by the enhanced significance and impact of International Large Scale Assessments (ILSAs) such as the OECD’s PISA and the IEA’s TIMSS and PIRLS (Lingard and Sellar, 2016; Addey et al., 2017).This paper will briefly document this transnational development in education policy considering the impact of ILSA on the governance and conceptualisation of education in participating nations. These developments can be situated against the backdrop of a particular neoliberal manifestation of globalisation that has played out in education policy since the end of the Cold War. More recently, however, we have witnessed left and right backlashes against globalisation of the neoliberal kind with the rise in particular of new ethno-nationalisms and the electoral success of right-wing parties arguing against the kind of multilateralism that underpinned the emergence of the global education policy field. Brexit, Trump’s ‘America First’ and right-wing governments in Hungary, Turkey, Japan, Australia and the Philippines are manifestations of this ethno-nationalism as are right wing movements in many nations. This paper then will look at the double challenge of transnationalism in education policy and re-nationalizing trends. The focus will be two cases. The first is the USA where President Trump’s anti-multilateralism and America First have provided a facilitative backdrop to criticisms of the OECD’s PISA emanating from a senior federal education official in the USA, Mark Schneider, Director of the federal Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. These criticisms will be documented and analysed (e.g. costs, growth in national participants, incorporation of PISA for Development, reduction in usefulness of PISA data, technical quality and validity of expanded test items, lack of research-base, failure to utilise technical possibilities re computer adaptive testing etc). The second case will be that of Japan where some similar criticisms have been expressed in research interviews about PISA. Additionally, research interviews will be used to document and analyse Japan’s non-participation in the OECD’s Study of Social and Emotional Skills because of its underpinning western construction of personality. It will also be noted that both the USA and Japan did not participate in the global competency items on PISA 2018. Both the US and Japanese cases dealt with appear to be manifestations of an emergent ‘education protectionism’ (Grek, 2019) and the new tensions between transnationalism and nationalism in education policy.

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