A recent working paper the OECD takes a close look at the way its own comparative data are being taken up by policy makers in the OECD-countries: is PISA still causing the 'shock and awe' it did in Germany in 2000?

Every three years, the PISA results stimulate a global discussion about school reform in both international media and at the national level across many OECD and partner countries.

PISA shock

In Germany, the education policy debate and changes have been intense. Confronted with lower-than-expected results in student performance, PISA triggered a sustained public debate about education policy and reform that came to be known as 'PISA shock'.

The PISA-inspired debate over public education has resulted in a range of significant reform measures, including generating national standards and establishing further support for disadvantaged students, especially those from immigrant backgrounds.

A similar reaction to PISA 2000 occurred in Denmark, where the data raised serious questions about how the well-funded Danish education system yielded only middle-range outcomes, and about why social equity continued to be a problem despite significant investment in social welfare programmes.

Embedded

Countries that have demonstrated the most substantial policy responses to PISA included those that perform above, at and below the OECD average. Overall, PISA seems to have become accepted by policy-makers as a valid and reliable instrument for internationally benchmarking current system performance and the relative changes in outcomes.

There is also evidence that PISA has been embedded as an external global standard for setting system goals and evaluating system progress. A substantial number of countries have set PISA-based national performance targets. These policy targets often define measurable system goals in terms of relative rank or absolute PISA score.