ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the globalizing of testing regimes and performance-based accountability and enactments and resistances to them in the USA. The chapter recognises the USA’s contribution to creating this agenda through its pressure on the OECD in the late 1990s to develop what became PISA. All of this occurred against the backdrop of neo-liberal globalization. More recently, the OCED’s ambitious expansionary testing agenda, the desire to enhance its scope, scale and explanatory power, has come under criticism from the USA. This resistance is situated in relation to the rise of ethno-nationalism in the USA, evident in President Trump’s America First anti-multilateralism. There is also a focus on testing within the USA, managed by the states but required by federal legislation. The pressure for such testing linked to the perceived poor performance of US schools, with poor PISA results contributing. Progressive resistance to this high-stakes testing and performance-based accountability in New York State is another focus. The chapter theorizes these matters in terms of the changing spatialities of globalization; the ways the global is in the local and national, the local and national in the global and the multiple directions of these interwoven relationships.
