ABSTRACT
In many countries, the true potential of international student achievement surveys such as TIMSS and PISA has been subverted by political and media fixation on the resulting league tables. These prompt not just well-founded efforts to learn from others’ success but also ill-founded assertions about educational cause and effect, inappropriate transplanting of the policies to which success is attributed, and even the reconfiguring of entire national curricula to respond less to national culture, values and needs than to the dubious claims of ‘international benchmarking’ and ‘world class’ educational standards – the latter equated with test scores in a narrow spectrum of human learning. Chapter 21 critiques influential examples of this paradigm before illustrating an alternative approach drawing on the author’s comparative studies of culture and pedagogy. These show how explicating the principles that underpin observed classroom practice, rather than copying national policies, can lead to genuine transformation of the quality and outcomes of student learning.
