The process of quantification is a powerful development shaping many domains of life today. In the area of education, for example, performance measurement, testing and ranking have become common tools of governance. Quantification is not a neutral way of describing society, but a process of valorisation. It has three sociologically relevant…

The subject of this article are the factors and reasons for the bad results in reading of the Bulgarian 15-year-old students in PISA's international studies. The reference points of the analysis are the critical results from the last four studies--2000, 2006, 2009 and 2012. The aim of this analysis is to bring up for discussion unformulated topics…

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has developed impressive machinery to produce international comparative data across more than 70 systems of education and these data have come to be used extensively in policy circles around the world. In many countries, national and international comparative data are used as the…

This article synthesises some findings of an international research project called "Know&Pol" to question the effects of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) on the public debate in three European countries (France, Portugal and Scotland). Using a political science approach, it shows that Pisa did not…

The paper approaches the issue of school choice in an indirect manner by investigating the effectiveness of public, private government-dependent and private independent schools in 19 Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development countries selected from the PISA 2000 survey for this purpose. In a multilevel approach we estimate these…