A PISA-felmérés a Parlamentben
The Pisa Debate in Parliament

Summary/Abstract: In this article, I shall analyse the evolution of the parliamentary debates on PISA in France since their origin, on the basis of a dataset of 226 session accounts that was available online from March 2001 to November 2014. Adopting a social policy approach, my goal is to determine the potential influence of PISA in the French policy-making process, which consists mainly – according to the policy analyst Philippe Zittoun – in propagating and imposing public policy proposals as means via which to restore order in society. This study highlights a double inversion of the predominating PISA communications as we move from a right-wing majority group, one using France’s poor results relating to PISA to legitimate its own reforms (2005-2010), to a left-wing opposition successfully using this study to point to the weaknesses of such reforms (2010-2012), and then moving to a new left-wing majority which regularly uses PISA in its political communications and which deprives right-wing parties of their traditional arguments (2012-2014). The study concludes that there are indeed two different policy proposals on PISA in France: one from the Right, which wants to reduce public spending and adopt a more “qualitative” type of education governance – and another from the Left, focusing on more equality and a stabilisation of public spending. These proposals invite us not to overestimate the capacity of PISA to reorient domestic political debates or to favour any specific policy learning.

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