Will Brehm  1:07
Christian Ydesen, welcome to FreshEd.

Christian Ydesen  1:39
Thank you very much Will.

Will Brehm  1:41
So, can you tell me when the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was created?

Christian Ydesen  1:46
Well, the OECD as we know it was created in 1961. I think it’s fair to say that it’s very much a Cold War institution. Because it builds on the former organization called the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), which was working with the distribution of Marshall aid. And later on, it became very much also a forum for the exchange and coordination between Western, liberal democracies but also capitalist countries. And that’s why it’s fair to call the OECD a Cold War institution.

Will Brehm  2:25
So, it’s a group of Western countries, or capitalist countries, that came together after World War Two but then merged in 1961 into its present formation of the OECD. And so, you keep calling it a Cold War institution. So, you know, in what sense? Are they promoting sort of Western capitalistic values and ideas and institutions in contrast to the Soviet Union?

Christian Ydesen  2:54
Yeah, absolutely. Because, of course, the Marshall aid was a key instrument in securing Western Europe within the Western Hemisphere and avoiding a communist takeover, essentially. So, in that sense, it’s a Cold War institution. But also, because at this time, there was -the other big forum in education would be UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). And there, you had the whole world sitting and you had to listen to what all the countries in the world had to say about various matters. And the OECD in that sense, was more sort of agile and more sort of where the Western countries could come together. They shared points of view, shared agendas. So, the OECD was also a forum where the Western nations could actually coordinate and discuss matters of joint interest before engaging with UNESCO and other international fora. So, I think that’s one of the main reasons why the OECD was created. And the OEEC wasn’t laid to its grave because when the Marshall aid dried out, why would you need this organization? But the organization really tried to find new tasks, new purposes, new raison d’état, and they managed to do so. And then adding Canada and the United States to the organization then it turned into the OECD.

Will Brehm  4:28
So, the US and Canada joined in 1961?

Christian Ydesen  4:31
Yeah.

Will Brehm  4:32
Oh, right. I didn’t realize that. I thought they were involved from the beginning.

Christian Ydesen  4:35
Well, they were involved but more sort of in the background. Of course, the Marshall aid was an American undertaking. And you also had the European Productivity Agency, which Regula Bürgi has written about in the edited volume that I published in 2019. And what is important to understand there in terms of education is that the European Productivity Agency, which was part of the OEEC was really a forum where the US could try to sort of teach Western Europe the American way of doing business. So that they would invite stakeholders to courses and maybe engage in different kinds of educational activities, educate change agents, that sort of thing. So, in that sense, there’s the sort of need for like a forum that would connect the West or be like, kind of a glue between the Western nations in opposition to the Eastern Bloc. So, that’s really why I call it a Cold War institution.

Will Brehm  5:46
It’s really quite interesting. And then presumably, these countries would go into forums like UNESCO and vote as a bloc.

Christian Ydesen  5:54
Well, yeah. I mean, to some extent, yes. That’s true because there is this mode of operation within the OECD that the countries come together, they discuss problems, they identify problems, and maybe also solutions, of course. So, in that sense there’s this element of coordination. Yeah.

Will Brehm  6:16
Huh. And inside the OECD, are member states voting? How does power work within the OECD? Or how are decisions sort of made within the OECD?

Christian Ydesen  6:29
Yeah, well, they all have a voice and they can all vote but it’s very much a question of who is paying the funds, right? So, of course, the United States has exerted an enormous influence within the organization. But we do see also, some examples of other nations promoting their national agenda or sort of exporting them to the OECD forum. So, we do see examples of other nations also exporting their national agendas into the OECD forum. And then make connections with other countries and taking active part in how to develop policy instruments within the OECD. But certainly, the US was a key agent. Yeah.

Will Brehm  7:15
So, when it comes to education, did the original organization for European Economic Cooperation include any sort of work in education specifically?

Christian Ydesen  7:26
So, the “Sputnik Shock” in 1957, it sent really shockwaves through the Western world, and it created an atmosphere of being behind in the space race and also essentially in the competition with the Soviet bloc. And in terms of education, the implication was that there was an increased focus on the production of engineers and technical personnel. And that’s why the OEEC established a committee for scientific and technical personnel. And it made education planning a key focus area of the organization. And that sort of moved into the OECD when that transitioned in 1961.

Will Brehm  8:13
So, how did the OECD understand and view and work in education from the 1960s onwards?

Christian Ydesen  8:21
Well, in the 1960s, the two key programs of the OECD in education was the Mediterranean Regional Project, and also the project on Educational Investment and Planning. And those were the real sort of backbones in the 1960s. And those two programs were very much about education planning, and also, optimization. The Mediterranean Regional Project covered the Mediterranean countries that were seen as like being a backward region of the OECD. So, there was an interest there in seeing how education could work to develop those countries. And in many ways, the Mediterranean Regional Project served as an inspiration for the OECD’s later work also with non-member states. So, in that sense, there was this sort of modeling to the world, according to a European standard, or at least in this sense, the experiences drawn from the Mediterranean Regional Project. It’s also maybe important to mention that in terms of indicators, it was very much about input indicators at the time. So, how much energy, how many resources do you invest in education, rather than output indicators, which is something that belongs later on, that they began work on really in the 1980s. But we can get back to that later.

Will Brehm  9:52
So, in this moment in the 1960s, when they’re focused a lot on education planning, was the OECD working with the IIEP (International Institute for Educational Planning) of UNESCO that focuses on educational planning as well?

Christian Ydesen  10:05
Yeah. So, you know, the interesting thing is that between UNESCO and the OECD, you could have staff members who would sort of move back and forth and that’s quite interesting. But there’s also kind of a competition between the two organizations. They had the headquarters in the same city -in Paris, right? There was a formal agreement between the two organizations signed in 1963 but I found in the archives, a document mentioning that the Secretary General of the OECD at the time, a Dane called Thorkil Kristensen would say that the collaboration with UNESCO should be strictly at the sort of top level and not something about engaging in concrete programs and that sort of thing.

Will Brehm  10:51
Why do you think that was?

Christian Ydesen  10:53
Yeah, well. I think there was this element of competition, and maybe even also suspicion towards the other organization. And there’s another interesting document within UNESCO saying that it’s a life or death struggle, actually. That the OECD is imitating their work. And UNESCO, they don’t have any place to complain to because they have the same member states, so they can’t complain anywhere. So, it’s a complicated relation. Let me just say that. And over time, I think it’s been, I wouldn’t maybe say a love hate relationship, but certainly, at some periods in time, they have collaborated quite a lot. And at other times they’ve been sort of at odds with each other. So, yeah.

Will Brehm  11:45
Yeah, right. And it is quite interesting. So, you said in the 1980s, they began to change, again, some of their focus -the OECD. So, what happened in the 1980s where the OECD began to change the way it understood and worked in education development?

Christian Ydesen  12:02
The main development there is the 1983, “A Nation at Risk” report in the United States that came out during the Reagan administration. And it really painted a very dire picture of American education -that America would essentially lose the Cold War if something wasn’t done about education. And the Americans felt there was a need to develop indicators that would allow them to create knowledge about how the education system was faring essentially. And they saw the OECD as the vehicle for producing those kinds of indicators. So, there was some experience in the United States across states about reporting education data from across states and some of these experiences were taken to the OECD and the US tried to get the OECD to work with these indicators. Although there was a lot of suspicion within the OECD at first. There was some people in the OECD who really felt that this was an unserious undertaking. They know it wouldn’t be possible to do that kind of global comparative instruments that the Americans were proposing.

Will Brehm  13:26
How did the idea become dominant then? Because now, today everyone talks about PISA and the OECD. So, in the 1980s, there was some suspicion. How did the people proposing these ideas of the metrics win the argument?

Christian Ydesen 13:43
Well, essentially, through funding. Because the Americans would say that we will stop funding CERI, that is the Center for Educational Research and Innovation. That is the body within the OECD that does educational research. So, they said, “We’ll dry out your funding, if you don’t go along with us on this”. And then they also built some alliances, for instance, with France that would also be interested in like a Republican interest from the French Republic. Like an interest in statistics and that sort of thing. So, they might have different agendas, but even so, they were able to come together about this, and that’s what Sotiria Grek and I have called a “boundary space” in an article that’s published in the special issue that I co-edited with Susan Robertson and Tore Sorensen. So, this boundary space, it meant that it had the sort of appeal of bringing key players in education together, so that they could join forces in terms of promoting this program on the development of indicators. And there was then the INES (Indicators of Education Systems) program or the program for international indicators.

Will Brehm  15:04
So, then how did PISA begin to come about given this history?

Christian Ydesen  15:09
Well, the INES program, which is sort of the stepping stone, or the catapult, you might even say for PISA, was launched in 1988. And the first sort of outcome of that program was the Education at a Glance report, which are now published annually and have been so since 1992. And the INES program was really able to build critical mass to enroll a lot of OECD member states into different working groups, and they sort of laid the groundwork and developed the technologies and the instruments and had all the discussions about conceptual clarifications and all that stuff that you would have to go through in order to reach a level where you could launch something like PISA.

Will Brehm  16:09
So, when did PISA launch?

Christian Ydesen  16:12
The first round was in 2000 and was published in 2001?

Will Brehm  16:18
So, the idea is that PISA started in 2000. And then it happens every three years, right? And every round, the numbers of countries have been increasing, and even non-member countries to OECD are taking the test.

Christian Ydesen  16:33
Yes. And that is at least one of the interesting things because talking about global governance in education, then you have to be able to say that something is really global. And PISA is actually a very global undertaking.

Will Brehm  16:50
Yeah. 70 plus countries taking it. It’s a huge amount of data being produced, supposedly, cross-national, and can produce all these comparisons? And there’s a lot of interesting sort of methodological questions that we can go down. But I guess I’m more interested in that issue of global governance and global education policy. Because you mentioned a lot of really interesting internal struggles for power. And as OECD changed and evolved over time, in terms of education, and how a lot of that was tied to the funding that was being given to the OECD by members. And they were sort of driving the agenda internally. But how did OECD gain so much power sort of externally across the globe? Because it’s not like the World Bank, where they can give out loans to countries and then have these sort of financial arrangements that in a sense, give power. So, where does the OECD power come from externally?

Christian Ydesen  17:55
Yeah, that’s also a very good question. Because it’s very characteristic that the OECD wields what we call “soft governance”, right? So, that will be data gathering, instrument development, policy evaluation, and, of course, enrollment and participation in OECD led programs. And actually, also the facilitation and creation of a space of multilateral surveillance among members and participating states. So, that’s part of the root of the governance but then there’s also the role of the data itself. Because what is very visible in the historical sources is that building comparative data is really, really uphill, right? So, because countries will count in different ways, they will use different definitions. And so, the OECD was really frustrated with that also. So, essentially, they decided to sort of take over that part of it. And say, “We will be the ones who are actually doing the data collection”. Of course, it’s still the countries but the OECD would sort of be the compiler and definer of the data that needed to be collected. So, of course, you’re familiar also with that research agenda about the governing by numbers, right?

Will Brehm  19:26
Yeah.

Christian Ydesen  19:27
So, that’s part of it also, because education, statistics, the data, they offer a naturalizations of meaning, an orientation and direction to actors. And these actors are the ones who shape education and it could be decision makers. It could also be practitioners. So, it creates like a compass for navigating education in that sense. So, that’s where the governance really lies. But I think it’s important also to mention that it’s, in a way, also an ideological component here because -and that goes to the concept of development really- because it’s very important to remember that the D in OECD stands for development. And also, when I talked about the Mediterranean Regional program, it’s fair to say that the OECD’s work in education can be viewed as an ideology establishing a Western hierarchical understanding of development stages, categorizing the world into developed countries, developing countries and also maybe wrongly developed countries. So, it’s a Western image of development and rationalization that is sort of engraved into the OECD’s work here.

Will Brehm  20:42
And that approach to development, that sort of understanding of development or that ideology of development has been consistent despite all the changes to the way in which the OECD has thought about education?

Christian Ydesen  20:57
Yes, more or less, I would say. It resembles a bit modernization theory, where you have to go through some stages in order to reach the promised land, I was almost going to say. It can almost be understood in a way in religious terms. And there’s a really interesting article by Jens Beckert, that came out last year where he talks about “promissory legitimacy”, which really is this narrative that if you as a country or an education system follow our recommendations, our programs, we promise, then in turn to you that you are on the right path to the promised land, essentially.

Will Brehm  21:42
And the promised land is economic growth of certain-

Christian Ydesen  21:46
Yes. And…

Will Brehm  21:47
Per capita GDP.

Christian Ydesen  21:49
Yeah. And that you’re able to compete well in the global market.

Will Brehm  21:56
Participate in the knowledge-based economy sort of idea?

Christian Ydesen  21:59
Yeah.

Will Brehm  22:00
Right. So, the idea is that  if you raise your PISA scores by a certain amount, your economy will be a higher GDP per capita, you will be entering a knowledge-based economy, not relying on agriculture. This notion of what development is.

Christian Ydesen  22:21
Exactly, exactly. And perhaps it’s not so surprising that the OECD has this take on education, because it is essentially an economic organization for development, right? So, I mean, it would perhaps be even more surprising if it didn’t have that approach to education. But of course, it’s always important to remember that the OECD is not just the OECD. It’s a complex organization and you do find other sort of sub programs and initiatives within the OECD that might have different outlooks. For instance, the one called Governing Complex Education Systems, where you will find sort of very balanced conclusions in terms of accountability. But then again, you’ll find some of the main publications like Education at a Glance and some of the PISA reports where the statements there are a bit sort of more black and white. So, it’s the question of nuance. And what does the OECD actually say? Because you can find many, many voices from within the OECD. So, I think it’s necessary to think about so what are the main voices, or the main publications in order to be able to really say what the OECD does or thinks or plans?

Will Brehm  23:34
Beyond publications does the OECD advise governments? Like are there OECD officials that are working inside non-member states to tell them how they can interpret the data and what policies and programs would be best to implement?

Christian Ydesen  23:55
Well, that’s a tricky question. I mean, to some extent, but normally, the way it works is that a government would ask the OECD to evaluate its education system, and then the OECD will compile a team of inspectors. And those can be academics or researchers from universities that sort of team up and then go to that country’s education system and will write a report about it. And sometimes these reports might also very much reflect the views of this inspection team. For instance, in Denmark, there was a big debate about national tests back in 2006. And there was an inspection by the OECD in 2004. Calling for a sort of strengthening of the evaluation culture of the public school system. But what the head of that inspection team that was Peter Mortimore, he was very clear in saying do not produce league tables on your national test data. But there were people within the Ministry of Education, high ranking people, who thought it would be a good idea to have like a national testing system. So, there’s also this sort of, sometimes disjuncture and sometimes alignment between what the OECD says, what the OECD inspection teams say, and what national authorities say, or high-level officials or politicians. So, talking about policy making or policy reform, it becomes really quite complicated and you can’t just go from A to B. There are a lot of stops on the road to policy reform, right?

Will Brehm  26:01
Yeah, and there’s a lot of global symmetry, and there’s a lot of conversations and interactions with people in other institutions that sort of influence how decisions are made. And it might not be so direct, as you said, from A to B. So, the OECD is known in the world of education. You know, PISA is the big product, but you’ve also brought up this Education at a Glance, these other sort of country reports, these inspection teams, these other sort of reports and documents that probably aren’t produced regularly, and show very diverse opinions and perhaps conflicting opinions from some of the main reports coming out of the OECD. So, it’s a real diversity of ideas in a sense or products coming out of the OECD. Are there other big education products that the OECD has or is promoting at this point?

Christian Ydesen  26:59
Well, there are, of course, other international large scale assessments. But I think if we look at PISA, it’s a really interesting case because it’s also a site of product development. So, you get all this kind of offspring programs, or what you would call them. For instance, like PISA D, PISA for development, something that’s sort of tailored for developing countries because the OECD had to realize that having all this standardization of “flat world” ontology, or whatever you would call it – that PISA actually creates doesn’t really always make so much sense for developing countries or the global South. So, they had to create this sort of sub-program but that actually, in a way, goes against the whole ideology of PISA because the whole ideology of PISA is that it’s like a globalization ideology that you need the same kind of competences in Buenos Aires as you do in London and in Copenhagen, or in Beijing. So, in that sense, it’s about globalization. So, making this kind of distinction is actually contrary to the whole idea of PISA. So, now they’re working on how can they actually get PISA-D data back into the big fold of PISA. But you also have something like PISA for U, a program that’s targeting individual teachers, where they can now be PISA certified teachers. So, the OECD provides the learning materials, it’s an online course. So, you get a little emblem or something on your shirt saying PISA certified teacher, and that should sort of heighten the prospect of your employability or something like that.

Will Brehm  28:44
And is that for teachers of any grade?

Christian Ydesen  28:48
Normally just compulsory schooling.

Will Brehm  28:51
Yeah, right. Oh, my gosh!

Christian Ydesen  28:53
And you have PISA for schools, also, a program that allows the OECD to interact directly with individual schools, and individuals, schools can then benchmark up against OECD standards completely circumventing national authorities. And that’s often sort of funded also by, for instance, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So, they get kind of private money. And then you have PISA for five year olds also, which is also known as Baby PISA. It’s associated with the international early learning and child well-being study. So, you have a whole range of sort of offspring programs springing from the old PISA tree. And I think it’s fair to say that it’s an expression of the OECD trying to stay relevant, trying to stay in the game, trying to remain a provider of sought after solutions with decision makers. So, it’s definitely not a standstill within the OECD. It’s always there to develop and expand. And even PISA is changing also in its content, of course.

Will Brehm  30:06
So, in what ways is the PISA test changing in its content?

Christian Ydesen  30:10
Well, the OECD is trying to add some more soft skills. It started with reading, and arithmetic, and science. And over the years, additional skills have been added. For instance, like financial literacy that was added in 2015. You know, the part is that the OECD, in its own view, is the organization guaranteeing better policies for better lives. And that was a new slogan that was adopted in 2011. So, in the sense that they can sort of argue that what they’re doing is creating better policies for better lives, it allows the OECD to move also, from a perspective centered very much on economic conditions to a sort of a much broader sense to a more sort of all-encompassing perspective that allows the OECD to engage with any agenda really. And when you visit the OECD, like I did when I did my archival work there, once you passed through security, and you enter into the lobby, you get all these big screens with all the discussions that take place in the plenary rooms. And it really gives you the feeling that you are now standing in the epicenter of globalization, I would say, because it’s all sorts of issues that are being discussed within the OECD. So, it connects very, very broadly with so many topics. So, in education, you now have the OECD Learning Framework 2030 that was launched in 2018. Here you have something like student well-being and happiness also included. So, it’s a moving target -the OECD.

Will Brehm  31:53
They’re very dynamic, and they sort of change with the times as well. And the times in every location in the world potentially.

Christian Ydesen  32:01
Yeah.

Will Brehm  32:02
So, where to next for the OECD do you think?

Christian Ydesen  32:05
We do you see some signs of PISA fatigue, which is a challenge, of course, to the OECD. And you see that, for instance, in research articles questioning the cost of participating in PISA. And it’s a very negotiable thing for each country: how much do you pay in order to be part of PISA? And so just the mere idea of raising that question, “Is it really relevant?” is dangerous to the OECD, and I think part of the explanation for all these offspring products must be found in that reason. And you can also raise the question: What will happen when Andreas Schleicher retires? He, as an actor, has been very, very prolific, energetic and done so much work on the promotion of PISA. Can he be replaced? I mean, that’s also an issue that might have some bearing for what the OECD will be tomorrow. But looking at it historically, I think we can see that the positions of actors in education has sort of reshuffled over time. So, international organizations are reshuffling but now we also have the edu-businesses, edtech businesses, different partnerships. So, I think in order to answer your question about what will happen with the OECD tomorrow, I think the best way to look at that is to explore what kind of partnerships are the OECD engaged in. What kind of edu-businesses, what kind of countries, organizations are chipping in or connecting with the OECD. And you see the OECD for instance, partnering a lot with Harvard University but also the American Educational Research Association. So, there’s also almost like a Bourdieusian sense, you know the sense about capital, the symbolic capital of these different organizations, and can they get some authority by partnering? It can be a win-win situation for different organizations to enter into partnership with each other. And so, I think that will be one way of exploring, if you’re keen to know about the trajectory of the OECD in the future.

Will Brehm  34:46
Well, Christian Ydesen, thank you so much for joining FreshEd today. It was really a pleasure to talk and I guess we’ll have to keep reading the tea leaves about OECD in the future.

Christian Ydesen  34:55
Thank you very much Will. I agree.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Related Guest Publications/Projects

Re-reading the OECD’s roles in education: the becoming of a global governing complex

Securing organisational survival: A historical inquiry into the OECD’s work in education during the 1960s

Accountability implications of the OECD’s economistic approach to education: A historical case analysis

The OECD’s historical rise in education

Mentioned Resources

Marshall Aid

European Productivity Agency (EPA)

Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC)

Sputnik: The shock of the century

Mediterranean Regional Project

1983 Nation at Risk Report

Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)

Indicators of Education Systems (INES) Program

Education at a Glance Report

“Governing by numbers” The PISA ‘effect’ in Europe

OECD’s work in education

The exhausted futures of neoliberalism: From promissory legitimacy to social anomy – Jens Beckert

Governing Complex Education Systems 

PISA for Development 

PISA4U Network for Teachers 

PISA For Schools

Baby PISA- International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study

OECD Learning Framework 2030

Related Resources

From the Marshall Plan to global governance: Historical transformations of the OEEC/OECD

The OECD and phases in the political economy, 1961-2011

The OECD and global shifts in education policy

From “Club of the Rich” to “Globalization là Carte”?: Evaluating reform at the OECD

Standardizing and disseminating knowledge: The role of the OECD in global governance

PISA and global education governance – A critique of the project, its uses and implications

PISA for development: How OECD and the World Bank shaped education post-2015

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com