The theoretical and practical value of the OECD policy advice for education

Abstract

This research seeks to evaluate the policy advice on educational matters provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), particularly through its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The thesis assesses the “value” of the OECD education policy advice (EPA), that is, whether the EPA is advice worth following because there is evidence that it could help or has helped countries to achieve the goals of greater quality and equity in education.
Firstly, a multi-agent practical reasoning model and political discourse analysis are applied to OECD publications to extract education policy recommendations. The EPA is thus comprehensively reconstructed, summarised and organised. The EPA is analysed in terms of its internal coherence, its consistency over time and over publications, as well as its soundness: whether there is empirical evidence that what the OECD suggests that countries should do could work in principle.
In the second part of the thesis, evidence of effective EPA-aligned country policies is sought using national and cross-national level data and a mixed-methods approach. From a cross-national perspective, country alignment with the EPA is analysed by collecting 61 expert judgements from 30 PISA countries using a specifically-developed online questionnaire. The plausible impact of EPA-aligned policies is inferred by applying multilevel growth models to PISA trends in performance and equity.
The cross-country analysis is complemented by two case studies: The Republic of Ireland and the French Community of Belgium. Data on 50 policies is collected from more than 800 policy documents and through 25 semi-structured expert interviews carried out over two study visits. Policy alignment is analysed with a visual adaptation of the delta-convergence method to account for qualitative data. The effectiveness of EPA-aligned policies is evaluated using a framework developed by Prof J. Douglas Willms and adopted by the OECD, as well as national evaluation reports.