The attraction of mutual surveillance performances: PISA as knowledge-policy instrument

This chapter addresses the relation of governing and knowledge by focusing on the fabrication, circulation and mobilization, in the course of public action, of one carrier of international standards that has apparently become a recurrent category in the contemporary lexicon in education - PISA, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment. Informed by the hypothesis that new forms of governing are connected with new ways of knowing (Nóvoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003, Ozga, 2008), the analysis developed in this chapter focuses on the processes that sustain the expansion of thos exemplar of comparative governing knowledge and the ways it achieves the status of an indespensible resource for thinking-acting in policy, for the imagination and/or the scrutiny of educational problems and policies.