This presentation tries to characterize a set of elite actors structured around a programme of educational reform legitimizing the PISA survey in France. These actors hold positions of power or influence that enable them to participate directly in decision-making within reformist networks. In this way, they define general guidelines based on shared values in order to make public action in education more effective. They formulate problems and draw up diagnoses through studies, reports and statements in the public arena and the media. They develop arguments and reasoning while advocating the adoption of reformist measures, and they participate in various high councils and expert groups. They have sufficient cognitive and symbolic resources to guide and legitimise policy-making or to challenge it. They mobilise situational capital (they occupy high positions in the civil service or in the academia), intellectual capital (they have expert knowledge) and symbolic capital (they enjoy a high level of notoriety and recognition). They are also players engaged in a power struggle in the field of education policy between the Left and the Right. They act as mediators while setting the reform agenda, either as experts, ideologues or intellectuals, brokers or translators, moral entrepreneurs, technocrats or researchers. They are part of a dynamic of social and cognitive learning that leads them to formulate public problems in education but also to produce ignorance of some other problems. Historically involved at the core of the State, these elite actors are increasingly involved in think tanks and circles of reflection outside the State sphere. From a methodological perspective, our study aims to gather sociographic data to characterise these elite actors (social origin, education, status, professional trajectory, positions held in their careers, etc.) and to use network analysis to show their relationships within the state technostructure, demonstrating certain links of dependence and affiliation as well as games of influence and power that determine reformist policy-making. We will also use our tacit knowledge of this field of power and some documentary resources (papers, reports, legislative and regulatory texts, the press, social networks) to study different epistemic and political positions within the state technocracy.

Normand, R. (2022). PISA as epistemic governance within the European political arithmetic of inequalities: A sociological perspective illustrating the French case. In Critical perspectives on PISA as a means of global governance (pp. 48-69). Routledge. Normand, R. (2023). French Education Policies and the PISA Paradigm: The Strong Republican State Absorbing External Influences. In School Policy Reform in Europe: Exploring Transnational Alignments, National Particularities and Contestations (pp. 117-137). Cham: Springer International Publishing.