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Every three years, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) ranks seventy-two national educational systems from across the world. The United Kingdom originally appeared on the list as a whole, and it scored respectably. However, when the results separated the four UK home nations in 2006, they showed that Wales was performing very badly. Beginning in 1997, with the introduction of Welsh devolution, the nation enacted significant reforms to its education system. According to PISA, these measures hadn’t worked: Welsh children lagged behind the rest of the United Kingdom — and indeed much of the world — in literacy, numeracy, and science. There hasn’t been much improvement since then. Wales scored poorly in in 2009, 2012, and again in 2016. Successive low scores created an existential crisis within Welsh education and within the country more generally. The idea that our kids are thick and our schools are useless has rapidly become the national common sense. The PISA rankings represent just one more pillar of failure in a country that only ever appears in the British news as a representative of poverty and decline. A BBC Wales headline about the 2013 results illustrates how fully the country has internalized this narrative: Wales braces itself for PISA results. The PISA release has become something of a political tradition in the Welsh parliament. Every three years, the scores embarrass the Labour government, and the opposition parties gleefully promote them as statistical evidence of the ruling party’s incompetence. The media participates by enviously comparing Wales to countries with semi-militarized education systems, which, despite their success in literacy and numeracy, push children to breaking point. The fact that many of the top-performing countries score very poorly in student happiness and well-being seems irrelevant. Labour’s Welsh enemies are not the only ones who benefit from the country’s educational decline: like the National Health Service, Welsh education has become a convenient stick that Tory-controlled Westminster can use to beat the Labour Party: “This is what will happen to English kids if Labour ever gains power at Westminster!” Shortly after the latest PISA results came out, the Welsh parliament held a special debate that illustrated the country’s current political landscape. Labour defended its record on the basis of an internal report that it hadn’t made public, so no one could fact check them. AMs (assembly members) disingenuously claimed that any attack on Welsh education was really an attack on Welsh teachers — their standard method for shutting down criticism. The Tories looked jealously at England’s march toward more selective schooling. Plaid Cymru, the center-left Welsh nationalist party, highlighted PISA’s inherent problems and unrealistic targets before jeers shut its line of discussion down. UKIP, the far-right party, didn’t bother to turn up. The beleaguered new education secretary, Kirsty Williams, who had only been in the position for a few months, stated that Wales must follow PISA’s recommendations and announced that the Welsh government had invited PISA to monitor and guide Welsh education. AMs met her plan with sage nods — she was in a room of true believers. Apparently, the many highly respected dissenting voices have been successfully drowned out. PISA is now the only show in town.

What Neoliberalism Wrought PISA appears to have entirely benign goals. Its introductory video explains that the program determines “whether fifteen-year olds are acquiring the social and emotional skills they will need to thrive, like knowing how to work and communicate with others.” Its ranking system helps PISA identify good practices in education in order “not only to show how these systems are constructed, but to encourage countries to learn from each other’s experience in building fairer, more inclusive school systems.” This façade masks a number of serious issues. First, the program suffers from quite basic and well-documented sampling problems, including its use of imputed scores and the fact that it doesn’t produce truly longitudinal data. More than that, PISA simply doesn’t measure like with like. Is it valid to compare an extremely deprived country of three million to an economic powerhouse of fifty-three million? This question becomes especially urgent in Wales, where many children are classed as either deprived or in need of special education. Professors Gareth Rees and Chris Taylor came up with an alternative model for measuring educational attainment. When they compared Wales to a composite nation comprised of English counties facing similar social problems, Wales did relatively well. PISA’s issues run deeper than sampling or method. For all its egalitarian rhetoric, it perfectly aligns with the deep structural changes that have occurred within world education since the neoliberal turn. Starting in the 1970s, the basis of the world economy shifted. Advanced capitalist economies moved away from manufacturing and resource extraction, and those sectors migrated to poorer countries. Places like the United Kingdom and United States began to measure their economic growth and success on knowledge, which they subsequently transformed into a commodity. The population’s intelligence and skills became a country’s main natural resource, and governments started prioritizing information, technology, and education over production. Meanwhile, as capitalism spread across the globe, advanced capitalist countries pushed to remove as many barriers between their economies and the rest of the world as possible. Trading partners from different countries needed to communicate effectively, so they standardized everything measurable. Neoliberal ideology holds that the education system — like world trade — should become borderless. Academics and students must be able to move between institutions with ease; tests and qualifications must become internationally comparable. As part of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development’s educational component, PISA fills this need. Incidentally, the program makes a lot of money, too, having spawned a cottage industry of consultants and companies that sell PISA solutions to countries in need. Thatcher famously claimed that neoliberal economic policy was not the end in itself, but rather a way of changing a society’s heart and soul, of altering its values. Nowhere can we see this more clearly than in education, where neoliberalism’s seductive logic has altered both its purpose and its nature. While education has always been linked to the economy, society’s understanding of why education matters has fundamentally changed since the neoliberal turn. Today, people believe that the sole purpose of education is to grow the economy, which helps explain why bosses’ organizations routinely weigh in on school reform. Individuals are encouraged to accrue qualifications to build capital that will help them find a job. Education no longer appears as a public good in its own right; if it doesn’t benefit the economy, narrowly defined, it is pointless. Notions about cultural development, personal fulfillment, and civic participation seem outdated. If education’s function has changed, so too has its content. Subjects that add no tangible value to the economy — like art, music, and sociology — are marginalized in favor of hard sciences. The world needs engineers and web developers, not sculptors and theorists. In a world where everything is quantifiable, teaching and education now focus on producing data. Schools test children to track their progress, and schools and teachers themselves must be tested to ensure that they are delivering high-quality services. This culture forces schools and schoolchildren to compete with one another. It discourages solidarity and encourages overwhelmed teachers to begin “teaching to the test.” In this standardized model, coursework is designed only to prepare children to pass exams. It no longer imparts an in-depth understanding of or deep interest in the topic. These unquantifiable achievements don’t improve league-table standings, after all. In Britain, as the economy moved toward services, innovation, and culture, Tony Blair and New Labour enthusiastically embraced the knowledge economy and became obsessed with using education to drive growth. Although New Labour retained residual elements of the “first way,” its approach to the school system faithfully followed Tory reforms, espousing a managerial ethos. They retained school league tables to ensure efficiency, and launched the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to allow private providers to enter the educational sector. (The Conservatives have since ramped these programs up.) Under New Labour, education focused on delivering higher standards to consumers, and teachers buckled in for a tougher life. Parental choice — which often set parents against teachers and staff — became the new mantra. The government and media began treating educators as a vested interest that selfishly refused to be held accountable for their performance. Blair’s education minister, David Blunkett, made the continuities between New Labour’s moralizing communitarianism and the Tories’ policies impossible to ignore. He attacked progressive instruction, insisting that schools return to traditional, whole-class teaching and emphasize the “three Rs” to raise standards.