This paper will trace the globalization of testing regimes and performance-based accountability from the creation of the OECD’s PISA through to the expansion of its scope, scale and explanatory power (Sellar and Lingard, 2014). The development of PISA and global flows of performance-based accountability will be shown to be the globalization of the Anglo-American approach to both testing and accountability, which always touches down in different nations and their school systems as localised globalisms inevitably in path dependent ways. The development in many nations of complementary national testing regimes and related modes of accountability will also be analysed. While in the discursive sense these approaches and the complementarity between global and national testing have become hegemonic, the paper will analyse two cases of resistances of different kinds to this global/national model. The first will be the case of the USA with a focus on the Opt Out movement in New York State, where parents have withdrawn their students in substantial numbers from sitting the Common Core State Standards tests in Years 3 through 8. Consideration will also be given to the emergent criticisms of PISA and its ambitions re scope, scale and explanatory power emanating from senior policy levels in Washington, set against President Trump’s anti-multilateralism and the rise of protectionist ethno-nationalisms (Grek, 2019). The second case will be that of Japan, where there have likewise been, but for different reasons, critiques of the expansion of PISA and the OECD’s ambitions for it and its broader testing regime. This case will also consider the absence of a performance-based mode of accountability in Japan, set against a very much path dependent usage of testing at three levels of educational governance (Takayama and Lingard, 2019). These tests have limited psychometric input, are developed by experienced teachers, some tests are marked by teachers, and the purpose of the tests is to provide teachers with formative pedagogical feedback. Yet, there have been some modifications to the tests, especially at the national level, to bring them in line with the application of knowledge focus of PISA. The analysis will demonstrate the importance of acknowledging the historicity of policy and the multiple spatialities in which contemporary education policies are situated and the need to theorise changes in statecraft as global/national/local relations are being constituted and reconstituted.

Grek, S. (2019). The rise of transnational education governance and the persistent centrality of the nation. International Journal for the Historiography of Education. 2: 268-273. Sellar, S. and Lingard, B. (2014). The OECD and the expansion of PISA: New global modes of governance in education. British Education Research Journal.40, 6: 917-936. Takayama, K. and Lingard, B. (2019). Datfication of schooling in Japan: An epistemic critique through ‘he problem of Japanese education’. Journal of Education Policy. 34, 4: 449-469.