ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with the specific activity on the educational Agora – how the media co-produces educational ‘facts’ in-between science, politics and society and how it constantly uses and depends on descriptions offered by the chimera of quantifications and comparisons. It explains the chimera of quantifications and comparisons is given the material form of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study. The chapter examines the Swedish media reception of PISA in general from the study in 2000 and onwards. Interest in international large-scale assessments has increased considerably in recent decades and the results have been widely disseminated in the media. The position obtained as a kind of educational expert is based on an engagement employed in discussing the state of schools, but also on calculations of PISA data in reports that are published and extensively cited. Based on own analysis, PISA is among other things used to argue that independent for-profit schools perform better than non-profit municipal schools.