The recent OECD education ministers’ meeting held in Paris on November 4^th and 5^th was unusual for three reasons:  for the first time in its ten-year history it had permitted a brief union presence in the form of Education International (EI) and TUAC, the trade union group that advises the OECD ; the morning session on Thursday was chaired by the New Zealand Minister of Education, Hon. Anne Tolley, and PPTA was there!

As an organisation the OECD works actively to push privatization in member countries more for the benefit of multi-national corporates and its own OECD consultancy arm than for students.  Its prime tool for influencing education policies in member countries is its international achievement tests such as PISA (Programme for International Assessment). Even though the PISA comparisons ought to be treated with great caution for the reasons discussed in PPTA’s conference paper, Building on excellence: How to make a great schooling system even better, education ministers seem to be in thrall to the data.  The OECD creates a market for its testing products by keeping nations in a perpetual state of performance anxiety about the simplistic global rankings it extrapolates from the tests.

As the OECD Secretary-General, Angel Gurria  said: 

 “One obvious conclusion is that we cannot afford to be complacent. While expenditure on education increased by 40% between 2000 and 2006, our PISA assessment is implacable: the overall performance of countries has remained unchanged. Thus, we need to significantly increase the efficiency and effectiveness of educational systems. The OECD’s role is to help you achieve that…Above all, we need to focus on education outcomes, to lay the ground work for a better performance of our education systems. And for this it is crucial that we spread best practices throughout our education systems.”

 All in all, a nice little earner!  Even more lucrative is its development of a new test, the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) which imagines it can link student achievement directly with teacher performance. Of course, it isn’t possible to treat these two items as causally-related when they are simply correlated but what government is going to let that stop it?

 The OECD’s other source of funding is by direct donations from governments. New Zealand contributes at least $20 million not including the cost of the regular conferences and meetings.   The OECD headquarters in central Paris is large and luxurious and as far away from public hospitals and state school classrooms as it’s possible to get.  The speakers at the meeting seemed similarly remote from the reality of teachers lives, except interestingly enough, the token secondary student representative who was impressively empathetic in her appreciation of the challenges teachers’ face.   That contrasted with the set piece from one Charles Leadbeater who was billed as having been an adviser to Tony Blair, a fact that most of would have expunged from our CVs, rather than trading on. He belonged to an elite group that one unionist characterised as   “global educational tourists” that is, they flit about the world visiting schools in exotic locations then  hire themselves out as “educational experts”.

It was hard to see any value for New Zealand’s $20 million from exercises like this.  It would be far better for New Zealand students if the minister put that money towards the settlement of the STCA .