PISA for development and the OECD’s passage to empire Open Access

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is a standardised test designed to measure the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in the subjects of reading, mathematics and science. Launched in 2000, PISA was initially designed for the OECD countries. As more and more non-member countries joined PISA, senior officials of the OECD realised that PISA was not providing an adequate service to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Andreas Schleicher, the current Education and Skills Director of the OECD, explained:

This passage suggests that the OECD encountered difficulty in extending PISA into LMICs; the original framework was designed for students in the OECD countries, which are fairly similar in terms of social economic development. Nevertheless, the suitability of PISA for LMICs is important for the OECD, because less relevant instruments are likely to produce unfavourable results that could create legitimacy challenges from national governments. For example, in 2009, India withdrew from PISA after it performed poorly, and claimed that the test was insufficiently adapted to the Indian context.

In order to make PISA more suitable for LMICs, in late 2013, the OECD launched the PISA for Development (PISA-D) project. There are three ways in which PISA was supposed to improve on PISA in terms of relevance to the context of LMICs. First, PISA-D would extend the PISA metric at the lower end by having more test items at lower levels, allowing for greater detail in the distribution of student scores at level 2 and below. Second, PISA-D would adjust the contextual questionnaires used in PISA to provide a better interpretation of the test results. Third, PISA-D would develop an out-of-school assessment to include 15-year-olds who are not enrolled in school. The ultimate goal of PISA-D was to broaden PISA’s coverage from over 70 mainly affluent nations to 170 nations by 2030 so that the results from future PISA cycles would provide a consistent measure of progress towards the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals for education (i.e., SDG 4), of which the basic proficiency level is benchmarked as PISA level 2.

Nine countries participated in PISA-D: Ecuador (2014), Zambia (2014), Guatemala (2015), Paraguay (2015), Senegal (2015), Cambodia (2016), Honduras (2016), Panama (2016) and Bhutan (2017). Although they constitute a very small group, there are significant differences among these participating countries, and arguably even more differences between the PISA-D countries and those that participate in PISA. Such diversity raises critical questions about the possibility of developing an assessment framework that is “as comparable as possible to facilitate peer-learning and as country specific as necessary to be meaningful and interpretable in national contexts” (Schleicher, 2013, Slide 9). Gorur, Sørensen, and Bryan (2019) identified the acute challenges faced by those administering PISA-D and the adjustments needed to deal with local realities, while Addey and Gorur (2020) surveyed the stages through which the image of participating countries was reduced from a rich picture to a uni-dimensional scale. Kaess (2018) suggested that PISA-D played a key role in perpetuating global epistemological inequities by giving precedence to the knowledge systems of the Global North over those of the Global South.

The present analysis aims to contribute to the literature by drawing upon Hardt and Negri’s (2001) concept of “Empire” to explore how the OECD operated to incorporate LMICs into the PISA framework and manage their differences. Hardt and Negri’s book presents an analysis of late, or global, capitalism that is rooted in the philosophy of Foucault. It has been criticised and contested. For example, it has been described as an update of the Marxist theory (La Nouvel Observateur, cited in Thompson, 2005, p. 73) and yet criticised for its rejection of the basic Marxist concepts of dialectical materialism (Sprague, 2011, p. 202). Hardt and Negri have been considered as putting forward a utopia (Callahan, 2004), but their own account seems to be closer to a dystopia that they describe in order to oppose. Acknowledging those diverse views of the work, our purpose in using Hardt and Negri as the basis for our analysis is to clarify both the role of the OECD in global governance, and to remove some of the vagueness in Hardt and Negri’s account, a weakness that has also been identified in the critiques cited here.

This paper uses documentary research as its basic approach, but semi-structured interviews and secondary analysis of the literature supplement this. Overall, this paper presents new understandings to the development of PISA-D through the concept of Empire, and contextualises it under the OECD’s expansionist agenda in establishing itself as the barometer of educational achievement and development. The next section of this paper provides a review of the literature discussing the various ways in which the OECD sought to expand PISA without limits. Hardt and Negri’s (2001) work on the nature of Empire is also reviewed. The following section applies the key terms identified to understanding the OECD’s passage to becoming an Empire of assessment. The paper concludes with a consideration of the future of the OECD’s assessment work.

Meyer and Benavot (2013) argue that a new form of global educational governance is emerging on the basis of the influence of international agencies. They describe the influence of international agencies as “introducing changes in how nations and states organise public education, to what ends, and in what spirit – and whether to do so according to emergent international standards” (Meyer & Benavot, 2013, p. 9). Specifically, they identify the model of education being promoted by international agencies as a Western model: neoliberal, economistic and with a smaller role for national governments. They argue that the OECD deliberately sets out to control this new system of global educational governance and that PISA is a key instrument in achieving this goal. More recent scholarship confirms that PISA is essential for the “globalisation of education policy spaces” (Högberg & Lindgren, 2021) and that the organisation is the heart of the “global governing complex” (Ydesen, 2019).

Sellar and Lingard (2014) argue that PISA has served as a prototype for the development of subsequent assessments, indicating that PISA is part of a global, and supra-institutional, governing complex. They note that the expansion of PISA has taken place across three domains: (1) scale: covering a larger number of countries; (2) scope: measuring a wider range of “qualities” and (3) explanatory power: providing policy-makers with better information. Since 2000, the OECD has extended its testing regime to include more populations and concepts. Various OECD projects now include tests for pre-school children (IELS, 2018), university students (AHELO, 2012), teachers (TALIS, 2008) and adults (PIAAC, 2013), as well as tests of “innovative domains” such as global citizenship and creativity (Grey & Morris, 2024). PISA-D is another such expansion. Designed for LMICs, it includes an out-of-school assessment that aims to capture the skills and circumstances of 15-year-olds who are not in school.

Some scholars have attempted to understand and conceptualise the recent developments of the OECD. For example, Auld, Rappleye, and Morris (2019) describe these initiatives as representing the OECD’s efforts to implement a “new paradigm for development”. They identify seven key components of the new paradigm, namely: (1) a universal standard of education quality (PISA); (2) a cognitive-economic model of education, with quality defined in terms of human or knowledge capital (PISA as the proxy); (3) assessment as a public good, or “human right” (merging human rights and human capital); (4) alignment of national level assessments with a global standard (PISA); (5) a global policy network of mentorships to transfer “best practices”; (6) increased private involvement at each stage of the process and (7) incentivised compliance and punitive accountability. Moss and Urban (2019) suggest that these developments constitute a “global web of measurement” that aims to reduce education to a purely technical exercise of producing common outcomes measured by common indicators, with the OECD acting as the global arbiter, assessor and governor of education.

Other scholars approach these developments from a perspective that is more explicitly based on the sociology of policy transfer. For example, Lewis (2020) points out that the broad family of PISA products constitutes the central elements of the OECD’s global policy ensemble, and that the OECD, while occupying only a single nod in a transnational policy network, retains the dominant steering role and ultimate control of messages among its partners. Similarly, Lingard, Martino, and Rezai-Rashti (2013, p. 552) describe PISA as part of “the move towards new global forms of networked governance”, where “infrastructures of “datafication” function as a form of global panopticism”. The OECD is an important site for institutional networks that have evolved into a “global political superstructure” (Sorensen, Ydesen, & Robertson, 2021, p. 101). The workings of this superstructure are characterised as soft governance, multilateral surveillance and projection and reference (Martens & Jakobi, 2010; Niemann & Martens, 2018; Waldow & Steiner-Khamsi, 2019).

There is a general convergence in this critical literature towards the view of a global network of influence or governance, succinctly described by Hardt and Negri (2001, pp. xii–xiii) as “Empire”:

The idea of Empire describes an important transformation in international relations in the early 1990s caused by the collapse of the communist Eastern Bloc. In reference to this transformation, political theorist Francis Fukuyama (2006) announced that the end of history is approaching. This meant that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism was to be interpreted as the final form of human government, and any alternative to the liberal democratic state and free-market capitalism would be rendered dangerous and obsolete. Hardt and Negri (2001) described a form of politics that could reform the democratic structures of the new world order. They wanted to answer a simple question: how is it possible to have a political reform or transformation when there seems to be nothing coherent to rebel against?

Hardt and Negri (2001) introduced the concept of Empire to render global political power more visible. They interpret Empire as a network of different centres of power that function together. They suggest that the power of nation states is still very significant, but this power should be related to the power of supra-national organisations, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the UN. Moreover, sub-national powers, such as non-governmental organisations and media outlets, are also elements in the new world order – Empire. They suggest that the Empire has no centre, it is a network of many centres of powers all functioning together.

As with other analyses of global networks of governance, Hardt and Negri’s (2001) concept of Empire makes it difficult (and perhaps pointless) to identify the separate influence of a specific international organisation. However, they delineate three distinct “moments” that constitute the general apparatus of imperial control. They call the three moments of Empire the “inclusive moment”, the “differential moment” and the “managerial moment”.

The first inclusive moment refers to the “magnanimous, liberal face” of Empire, which appears “indifferent” in its acceptance and welcomes all within its boundaries. The second is the differential moment which involves the “affirmation of differences” within the imperial realm. The third moment is the managerial moment. As Hardt and Negri (2001, p. 199) note, “the differential moment of imperial control must be followed by the management and hierarchisation of these differences […]. Whereas colonial power sought to fix pure, separate identities, Empire thrives on circuits of movement and mixture”. The final point made here by Hardt and Negri implies that the three moments should be thought of not as separate and sequential but as overlapping, mixing and bleeding into each other.

Hardt and Negri’s (2001) three moments provide the tools for analysing the development of the OECD’s work in education. The inclusive moment has already been noted, with the OECD extending its scale and scope through its portfolio of projects. In particular, PISA-D was designed to incorporate populations of LMICs into the regime of international assessment. PISA-D marks the beginning of the second moment, the recognition and celebration of differences. For example, the OECD claimed that all participating countries “have benefited from the opportunity that PISA-D has provided, namely, including more diversity in policies and practices, increasing the chances for peer learning; and enriching analyses by having a greater range of points of comparison” (OECD, 2018, p. 3). The managerial moment is embodied in the process through which, despite their differences, all countries are ranked, compared or benchmarked on the single standard, creating a single hierarchy. Moreover, the notion that participants lower down the hierarchy can benefit from the lessons of “what works” given by those higher up the hierarchy emphasises the fact that this is a normative hierarchy of control (Xiaomin & Auld, 2020). PISA has become a central feature of the OECD’s work because it underwrites the hierarchy that is necessary for the third moment of Empire.

The growth of Empire, incorporating more entities, growing an ever more intricate network of internal feedback and blurring the boundaries between sub-systems, means that it will develop characteristics that cannot be described in terms of command and control. For example, there is repetition of self-similar patterns at different levels of the system so that macroscopic features of the system are echoed in microscopic features, and vice versa. This recursive symmetry is typical of systems that have been variously described as “self-organising”, “complex” or “chaotic” (Gleick, 1988), and the ability to see the organisation as a whole in each of its parts is described as “holographic”, based on the analogy to the ability to see the whole of a hologram in each part of a photographic plate that records it.

Empire is such a holographic system, and patterns will be evident at different levels. The three moments of Empire will be present at the macro and the micro levels, as will the interactions and tensions between them. In the following sections, we trace those patterns, first at the institutional level, as the OECD becomes more firmly embedded in Empire, then at the sector and programme level, as the OECD exploits PISA to strengthen its integration into a global system of governance.

The end of the first decade of the twenty-first century was an important turning point in this development, with the OECD reflecting on its achievements and repositioning itself in certain policy areas. We examine this in the next section. We subsequently trace the growth of the OECD’s engagement with assessment and evaluation in education, which occurred at the same time as the OECD’s more general re-orientation.

In 2011, the OECD celebrated its 50th anniversary. This year the Ministerial Council Meeting considered a milestone to take stock of its achievements and look ahead to frame priorities for the next 50 years and how the organisation can best respond to global challenges in a rapidly changing world. One major challenge is the changing global economic landscape in which the economic centre of gravity is shifting from industrialised countries to the large number of developing and emerging economies. This changing dynamic was reflected in the following excerpt from the Secretary-General’s Strategic Orientations for 2011 and beyond:

The aspiration expressed in this passage clearly indicates an explicit engagement with the inclusive moment of Empire, where the concerns of the organisation extend beyond its membership.

The inclusive moment of Empire was further emphasised in policy documents produced at the same time. Recognising the need for its work to be more inclusive and responsive to the changing global realities, the OECD laid out the Framework for an OECD Strategy on Development (2011d; adopted by the OECD Council in January 2012). The framework outlined a broader development strategy for the OECD, which was to synthesise its “multidisciplinary expertise on a wider range of policy areas with its accumulated knowledge on development issues, and to ensure that this work is accessible and relevant to countries at all stages of development” (OECD, 2011d, p. 3).

The new approach set out in the OECD framework was reinforced by another OECD publication, Better Policies for Development: Report on the DevGoals Exercise (2011a). However, in this document there are the early indications of a shift in focus from the inclusive moment of Empire to the differential moment, and the suggestion that there will be a transfer of expertise from OECD members to other countries. By 2012, the transition into the differential moment had advanced further. The 2012 strategy paper, OECD Strategy on Development, identified four thematic areas where the OECD was positioned to “have core competence” and “could add value to other international efforts, respond to the demands and needs of developing countries, and leverages its multidisciplinary expertise” (2012b, p. 5). The four areas are (1) innovative and sustainable sources of growth, (2) mobilising resources for development, (3) governance for development and (4) measuring progress for development. Taken together, these areas offer “a holistic framework from which member and partner countries could identify a set of specific instruments, mechanisms and tools in interconnected policy areas, relevant to their particular circumstances and needs” (OECD, 2012b)

The emergence of the managerial moment of Empire could have begun at that point, but there were significant obstacles. For the most part, current international organisations have relatively flat structures that are not suitable for legitimating stable and finely graduated hierarchies. For the OECD itself, there were only members and non-members. In UNESCO, as far as the constitution is concerned, all countries are equal members of the General Conference, and UNESCO on its own has difficulty reaching even the differential moment of Empire. For the UN as a whole, the constitutional position is similar, apart from the different statuses of members of the Security Council, and above all of permanent members. The transfer to the managerial moment of Empire, therefore, requires the development of a mechanism that can support the institutionalisation of hierarchy.

In 2012, the OECD identified three complementary levels of engagement that it needed to strengthen (OECD, 2012a, b). The first level was working with OECD member countries to support their collective efforts to design policies that are consistent with development. The objective was to enhance policy coherence, based on more systematic approaches to evidence-based analyses and robust indicators to monitor progress and assess their impact on development. The second level of engagement was working with other international organisations and international efforts to seek solutions to address current and emerging global issues and development challenges. The major concerns were the SDGs and the effectiveness of development co-operation highlighted at the Busan High-Level Forum (2011b). The third level of engagement was working with developing countries to promote knowledge sharing and policy dialogue activities, such as multi-dimensional country reviews and the clustering of countries with similar economic challenges.

These three levels of engagement map almost directly onto the three moments of Empire. The inclusive moment involves the development of collective efforts and policy coherence, while the reference to the SDGs suggests that inclusiveness not only blurs the boundary between members and non-members, but also leads to inter-organisation collaboration. The tensions between, and the interdependence of, the inclusive moment and the differential moment can be seen in different aspects of the SDGs. The inclusion of the word “developing” in their name may be seen as differentiating the developing countries to which the SDGs apply. The SDGs have been criticised on exactly those grounds, as they seem to place an additional burden on some countries rather than others. Interpreting the SDGs in this narrower sense may lead the wealthiest countries to ignore them, on the assumption that they have achieved them already. On the other hand, the rhetoric about the SDGs, and their location in UNESCO implies universality and inclusion. And lastly, the call for international efforts to address the issues and challenges of development suggests coordination between unequal partners, differentiating between clusters of countries facing similar challenges in the managerial moment.

All that is missing is a mechanism for stabilising the hierarchy that is necessary for the implementation of the managerial moment of Empire, and neither UNESCO nor the OECD can provide it on its own. The OECD does have the metrics of PISA and related projects that could be used to develop such a ranking of countries in a supposedly objective way, although they might be seen to imply excessive differentiation, and therefore attachment to the differential moment. This can be tempered by linking with the SDGs, which are at least notionally inclusive, allowing the full development of Empire. By a kind of practical synecdoche, PISA assessments come to represent the whole of the OECD in the emerging Empire.

There has been a critical shift in the OECD’s approach to governing global education, which was greatly facilitated by the expansion of PISA into LMICs. In an episode of Top Class, the OECD Education Podcast, Schleicher (2018) emphasised the inclusive moment:

In another interview conducted in the same year, Schleicher explained how they would advance the transition into the differential moment:

The emerging mechanism is one in which PISA is part of a “configuration”, as Schleicher observed, representing in microcosm the new approach set out in the OECD framework that provides multidisciplinary expertise and a governance toolkit that can be tailored to countries at all stages of development.

Within this comprehensive approach, education was identified as a cross-cutting theme reflecting a series of related development efforts. In terms of the educational action plans outlined, enhancing learning outcomes and making them visible remained crucial. The imperative was related to the series of high-level fora on aid effectiveness (OECD, 2003, 2005, 2008, 2011b), which had been held to assess progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). A broad consensus emerged during this period among influential donors that investments in education had not yielded proportionate gains in outcomes, followed by the call for greater accountability through the identification of basic minimum standards of education quality. The OECD seized the opportunity and became influential in shaping and promoting this discourse when UNESCO was framing SDG 4 (Li & Morris, 2022).

PISA-D can be understood to be in strategic alignment with the OECD’s broader vision for 2011 and beyond. Reviewing the OECD’s configuration of policy instruments, the background report stated that “some have a potentially global reach, such as the generation and analysis of data and indicators on financing for development or measuring progress of societies” (OECD, 2012a, p. 34). Shortly after this report was published, the Education Committee and the Development Assistance Committee started to reflect on “how they could better capitalise on the PISA tool and make it more applicable for a wider range of developing countries” (OECD, 2013, p. 12), indicating engagement with the managerial moment of Empire.

Indeed the significance of PISA and PISA-D was acknowledged in the 2014 Report on the Implementation of the OECD Strategy on Development:

When the PISA-D project was completed and declared successful in September 2019, the strategic alignment efforts noted earlier in the text were revisited in the Project Completion Report (OECD, 2019). This report celebrated all countries’ commitment to the universal education agenda, stating that for the OECD, “this means an acceleration of the transition envisaged in the 2012 Strategy on Development towards more inclusive policy dialogue and the participation of a wider array of countries in its activities” (OECD, 2019, p. 89). A noticeable development is that PISA is [now] the world’s most inclusive metric on student outcomes and one of the most global instruments of the OECD’, and its significance was stated as “not just for monitoring SDG progress but also for informing policy and funding decisions that will help countries achieve the SDGs” (OECD, 2019, p. 90). Therefore, through PISA-D, the OECD has succeeded in drawing more non-members into its policy network. By facilitating peer-to-peer learning among these new and existing participants, the OECD can also achieve greater utility of its policy expertise, and is, therefore, better positioned to shape the future global architecture of development.

While UNESCO’s decision to identify basic minimum standards of quality under SDG 4.1 (2015–2030) marked the shift from Education for All to learning for all, the OECD’s vision for 2011 and beyond can be interpreted as assessment for all. The ensuing call for a “data revolution” in developing countries that was made in the OECD Development Co-operation Report 2017: Data for Development constitutes the point of arrival of this tendency. The report underlined the lack of statistical capacity in most developing countries as the greatest obstacle to achieving the SDGs, and it suggested greater investment in data infrastructure and the enforcement of legal, ethical and quality standards. The following excerpt from the Secretary-Generals remarks provides an illustration of this problem:

Martens (2007) argues that the OECD is departing from the “comparative turn” in the late 1990s and its new “turn” takes a “humanitarian” approach which has been facilitated through engaging with the SDGs and aligning PISA data with the monitoring efforts (Auld et al., 2020). Using the categories provided by Hardt and Negri (2001) the comparative turn requires a single dimension for comparison, but a distribution along that dimension, thus combining the inclusive and the differential moments. By emphasising the link to policy and monitoring, the new turn takes the OECD/UNESCO collaboration into the managerial moment or humanitarian turn.

Emergence into the managerial moment requires the simultaneous integration of the inclusive and differential moments, which remain present in the maturing Empire. The friction between these coexisting moments creates a dynamic tension that makes it difficult for the Empire to remain static.

The Empire is holographic, or fractal, in the sense that this dynamic tension is repeated at different levels within its organisation. It is reflected, for example, in the tension in the PISA-D process between making the results universally applicable (inclusion), while adapting to the specific local context (differentiation). Faced with the dilemma of growing or dying, the Empire becomes, as Hardt and Negri (2001) describe it, “one machine” that thrives by always including more within its sphere. PISA-D is the latest manifestation of this endeavour, which has helped to establish some initial data infrastructure in LMICs for PISA data collection.

Since movement and transformation are key concepts of Empire, projecting developments into the future will be a critical success factor for the OECD and its partner international organisations. The specific plan for the integration and future use of PISA-D instruments has been outlined in the Project Completion Report (OECD, 2019). The report states that the OECD is seeking to build on the success of PISA-D to continue making PISA more accessible and relevant to a wider range of countries, especially LMICs. To effectively cope with the demands of different participants, the plan has put into place “next steps” for managing “a larger PISA programme” (OECD, 2019, p. 102), which is a blueprint for the configuration of the future. The OECD listed 13 key steps, which are summarised in Table 1.

The future development of the distinct, separate, but also inter-connected, moments of Empire shine through this plan at every point. But perhaps the most significant developments that are anticipated are the continued extension of PISA to more LMICs (the inclusive moment), the promotion of peer learning from “experienced” to “new” participants (the differentiated moment) and very strong signals about hierarchy and control, with some elements not being “offered” to new partners, and an emphasis on technical expertise and the governance of national project managers (the managerial moment).

The OECD’s governance approach is currently undergoing a steady and gradual transition. In the previous period it focused on establishing standardised criteria and setting the overall framework, but configuration and modulation are now at the core of the OECD strategy. Specifically, the emerging approach operates through a configuration of the OECD’s multidisciplinary expertise and a governance toolkit, which can be optimally applied to countries across all geographies and at all stages of development. Modulation refers to the process of tailoring that coordinates differences under a hierarchical structure.

At the same time, universal application and modulation extend beyond the competence of the OECD, and require the engagement of UNESCO, and the SDGs, for legitimacy. Consequently, entry into the managerial moment involves a softening of boundaries between international organisations, in tandem with a hardening of the monitoring hierarchy. These various changes, which sometimes appear contradictory, are at the heart of the development of Empire.

Hardt and Negri (2001) describe the process of capital accumulation in which all forms of value are brought together on one common plane and linked through money. The OECD performs a similar transformation of data, applying what d’Agnese (2015, p. 56) describes as its “univocal logic”, to bring all forms of educational quality together on one common plane linked through assessment data, in “an educational intelligent economy” (Jules & Salajan, 2020).

Modulation is the process of simultaneously accepting and acknowledging differences and ensuring that the configuration continues to make sense. This process is “needed to take into account the heterogeneity of growth and development models, and the differentiated institutional settings and capacity to tap into resources and address any binding constraints” (OECD, 2012b, p. 4). As the OECD (2012a, p. 10) also stated, “there are no one-size-fits-all solutions in development; differentiation – adopting differentiated approaches, more diagnostic than prescriptive, will be key to identifying the varying needs of countries at different stages of development and develop better analysis considering their diverse economic and social contexts”.

The dynamic tensions between the moments of Empire, where the exercise of power becomes invisible behind “circuits of movement and mixture” (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 199), make identification of prime movers difficult or ambiguous:

The illusion of diversity and free will has been successfully fostered as the assessment Empire constructs a continuous, smooth space across which subjectivities glide without substantial resistance or conflict.

Looking to the future, Empire is dynamic and fluid, and must move continuously forward to occupy all the space where a potential rival might arise. To use an expression that was coined to describe the Chinese Empire at the time of the Warring States, it is both infinitely big and infinitely small (“其大无外,其小无内”). That is to say, it is so big that there is no space outside it, and so small that there is no unoccupied space within it. While PISA-D can be seen as an attempt to extend the geographical scope of PISA, and thereby ensure there was no space outside the Empire of assessment, “PISA for Schools” and “baby-PISA” can be seen as an effort to extend the Empire of assessment into the smaller geographical spaces at the micro-level.

At the present time, as the OECD seeks to assert its presence in these new areas, we would expect it to revert to the inclusive moment, but once it has established its legitimacy in these new areas, we would expect to see a progression through the differential and managerial moments. As before, progress will not be linear, and the different moments may be intertwined. These developments not only affirm the OECD’s expansionist agenda but also contribute to the growth of Empire at the micro levels of the system, using this univocal logic of assessment to entrench into the schooling system and the lives of young people.

The authors express gratitude to Professor Paul Morris, University College London, and Professor Edward Vickers, Kyushu University, for reading an earlier draft and offering valuable comments.

This paper forms part of a special section “The Politics of Post-Crisis Challenges Confronting Education”, guest edited by Dr Latika Gupta.