The Taming of PISA Literacy: Global Functional Literacy and National Educational Content

 The purpose of this paper is to “tame” the literacy advocated by OECD’s PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) by exploring what characteristics it has and how it has made an impact on the educational policies of participating countries. I. Hacking (1990) used the phrase “taming of chance” to express the increase in controllability of people and society through collecting and analyzing statistically relevant data at the time of the formation of the nation states of western Europe in the 19th century. Similarly, PISA has devised indicators for the capacities to be developed across cultures and countries, collected and analyzed relevant data, promoted the comparison and policy borrowing between countries, and constructed a global standard of education in the globalized world at the turn of this century. We can call it the “taming of educational diversity.”<br> The “taming of PISA literacy” in this paper refers to disclosing what PISA literacy really is and making its impact controllable. This has been done by examining the methods of assessing student capacities at global and national levels and placing PISA literacy in the framework of different concepts of literacy constructed since the 1950s.<br> PISA has developed basic indicators, contextual indicators, and trend indicators as part of the OECD’s INES (Indicators of Education Systems). Generally, educational indicators tend to be normative. PISA’s indicators have become even more so because its detailed data analysis based on trend indicators makes it possible to compare not only student performances at a point in time but also the extent of their improvement. PISA thus functions as a tool for the promotion of education reform as well as the international benchmark of education. PISA actually assisted in constructing an evidence-based improvement cycle in Japanese education reform. What underpins PISA’s influence is the logic of magnet economies, which advocates that a highly skilled national workforce is a critical factor for attracting foreign investment and promoting economic growth. As shown by the increase in countries participating in PISA, this logic is spreading throughout the world from the developed countries, further reinforced with the recent logic of ‘race against the machine.’<br> The characteristics of PISA literacy are made clear by comparing the different concepts of literacy constructed since 1950s: functional, cultural, and critical literacies. PISA literacy is similar to functional literacy, which developed an orientation toward work by stressing its contribution to economic growth in the human resource development policies of the 1960s. In addition, PISA literacy lacks the background content knowledge of each particular culture in contrast to cultural literacy as well as the perspective of the politics of meaning-making in contrast to critical literacy. Therefore PISA literacy is characterized by a functional literacy hypothesized as globally applicable, which is deficient in content knowledge and awareness of politics.<br> What is required of us is our own literacy for reading the inner meaning of PISA literacy and its impact. Such understanding would enable us to tame PISA literacy.