Comparative EducationVolume 50,Issue 3, 2014Special Issue:Knowledge in Numbers

Rethinking the pattern of external policy referencing: media discourses over the Asian Tigers PISA success in Australia, Germany and South KoreaAbstractThe article compares how the success of the Asian Tiger countries in PISA, especially PISA 2009, was depicted in the media discussion in Australia, Germany and South Korea. It argues that even in the times of today's globalised education policy field, local factors are important in determining whether or not a country becomes a reference society for educational reform. The article aims to uncover some of these factors, identifying the globally disseminated stereotypes about Asian education, economic relations and the sense of crisis induced through the relative position and change of position in PISA league tables in the countries in question. Reprints & permissionsAbstractJump to section Introduction Germany Australia South Korea Conclusion: reference societies and local...The article compares how the success of the Asian Tiger countries in PISA, especially PISA 2009, was depicted in the media discussion in Australia, Germany and South Korea. It argues that even in the times of today's globalised education policy field, local factors are important in determining whether or not a country becomes a reference society for educational reform. The article aims to uncover some of these factors, identifying the globally disseminated stereotypes about Asian education, economic relations and the sense of crisis induced through the relative position and change of position in PISA league tables in the countries in question.IntroductionJump to section Introduction Germany Australia South Korea Conclusion: reference societies and local...Historically, looking abroad for a policy model has been an integral part of the development of modern systems of education. Ever since national educational systems first emerged in the nineteenth century, nation states have closely monitored educational conditions in foreign countries that are perceived as military or economic superiors or competitors. Not only are policy ideas and programmes constantly borrowed cross-nationally but they often become detached from the particular national context of their origin and then widely circulated as international standards in national policy-making discourses (Zymek and Zymek2004). Hence, education policy making has always been highly transnational, with external references or influences always present in the construction of individual nations' policies and programmes.Recently, the patterns of looking abroad have acquired new dynamics. Since the emergence of large-scale assessments of student performance in the 1960s, more and more educational comparisons have proceeded along more or less standardised lines and presented their results in the form of league tables, bringing their units of comparison (often, but not always, nation states) into a hierarchical order.1This unleashes a whole new politics of league tables (Steiner-Khamsi2003), or governance through comparison (Nvoa and Yariv-Mashal2003), generating normative pressure on participating nations towards particular kinds of education reform. Heading an international academic league table, or at least achieving a high position, has become the hallmark of educational excellence. Through this new frame for looking abroad, the organisations producing these international comparisons and the actors determining their shape have come to gain considerable power over international and, by implication, national education reform agendas (Grek2009; Kamens2013; Meyer and Benavot2013; Sellar and Lingard2013; Wiseman2010).Arguably, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been most influential in initiating this change in the pattern of external policy referencing. Lingard (2011) argues that the days are gone when education policy actors' choice of reference societies was conditioned by the particular characteristics of bilateral relations, regional power balance, former colonial relations, and assumed political and cultural similarities. With PISA's league tables triennially constructing the top-performing nations as the global model of education reform, the incessant search for best practices elsewhere is now fully globalised (Kamens2013); it is no longer Swedish education to German policy makers, nor American and British education to Australian counterparts; rather, it is Finnish education, which became the education reform poster boy after its successive top performance in PISA, that has now become the model for education reform in large parts of the globe (Takayama, Waldow, and Sung2013).While it is certainly true that the current international fame of Finnish education would have been unthinkable without its excellent PISA results, the nation's PISA success alone does not explain the referential status that it currently enjoys on a global scale. In fact, other countries and regions have achieved results on a similar level or even outperformed Finland in PISA, yet they have not been able to gain a similar degree of international acclaim. This is particularly true of several Asian countries or regions which achieved outstanding results in PISA, including Shanghai, which participated for the first time in PISA 2009 and was immediately ranked first in all three of PISA's literacy domains (reading, mathematical and scientific literacy), and South Korea, which achieved consistently high placements in all PISA rounds.Intrigued by these different responses of the international community to the recent Finnish and Asian PISA success, we explore multiple conditions beyond the PISA top ranking that contribute to the construction of a given nation as a reference society or, conversely, impede or even prevent that construction. More specifically, the study analyses the media discussion of the success of Asian countries and regions, including Shanghai, in PISA 2009. It focuses on two widely circulated, influential quality newspapers in each country that are different in their political orientations, one centre-left and the other centre-right. The newspapers chosen are theSydney Morning Herald(SMH, centre-left) andThe Australian(TA, centre-right, including its weekend edition,Weekend Australian) in Australia,Sddeutsche Zeitung(SZ, centre-left) andFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung(FAZ, centre-right, including its Sunday editionFrankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung) in Germany andHankyoreh News(HN, centre-left) andDong-A Daily(DD, centre-right) in South Korea (seeTable 1).Table 1. Numbers of articles on Asian education published January 2001June 2012.CSVPDFDisplay full sizeThese newspapers were selected not to compare the centre-left and centre-right newspapers across the three countries. Rather, our intent is to capture the national media discourse in each nation across the ideological range represented by the two contrasting newspapers. Then, using search keywords such as PISA, Asian education and Shanghai, we located all the articles dealing with education in Asian countries published in these newspapers from January 2001 to June 2012 with a particular focus on the articles published after the PISA 2009 results (released in December 2010).Conceptually, this study is indebted to the so-called externalisation thesis in its understanding of how global education policy ideas and programmes are recontextualised as they are inserted into national education policy fields. The term externalisation, going back to Niklas Luhmann's systems theory (Luhmann and Schorr2000), highlights how a social sub-system, such as the education system, instigates and processes external references, including references to foreign examples and international consensus, or what Schriewer (1990) terms externalization to world situations. Externalisation is a discursive formation that can become relevant in the context of borrowing, and lends itself easily to the purpose of producing legitimacy (Waldow2012, 418). Expanding on the idea of externalisation as internally instigated for particular purposes, Steiner-Khamsi (2004), among others, shifts the focus to the politics of externalisation, showing how given policy actors use external references to legitimise preferred policy ideas and values (see also Sung2011; Takayama2010).Informed by this conceptual discussion around externalisation, the subsequent analysis of media representation of Asian PISA success in Germany, Australia and South Korea is guided by the following questions:Which aspects of Asian education get particularly highlighted in the media? Who highlights them?

What is the function of these representations, especially which policy changes are legitimised or rejected by the particular accentuation?

What are other discursive characteristics of Asian PISA success as represented by the media?

We first present three separate discussions of the national media discourse of Asian PISA success in Germany, Australia and South Korea. Then we synthesise in the conclusion section the findings of these analyses to identify a set of factors that facilitate or prevent the construction of Asian tigers as reference societies for education policy in the three nations.Studying mass media discourses can provide important insights for understanding the dynamics of educational reform. According to Luhmann (2000), the mass media do not just represent, but actuallyproducewhat constitutes our shared social reality, from which follows what constitutes the past and what are relevant hopes and expectations for the future. Mass media choose modes of presentation that resonate with underlying patterns of interpretation among their audience (framing; see Scheufele and Tewksbury2007). Thus, the study of media discourses is a fruitful way of examining the underlying patterns of interpretation in a population (Volkmann2004). These patterns of interpretation are, in turn, important for how educational references to elsewhere are inserted into domestic educational reform discourses, i.e. for how externalization to world situations operates in concrete national contexts.Comparing the media reception of the Asian PISA success in Germany, Australia and South Korea is particularly interesting because of their varied levels of success in the last four rounds of PISA (seeTable 2) and thus different ways in which PISA has influenced their education reform discourses. Germany underwent a major crisis in education which was triggered by the fact that the results of the first round of PISA were well below the country's general expectations. Reform-minded political figures used the mediocre performance of Germany's 15-year-olds to scandalise the system and then legitimise a set of radical reform initiatives thereafter (Tillmann et al.2008). Since then, German PISA performance has registered an upward trend, improving its status from horrendous to average (Ulla Burchardt as quoted in Guttenplan2010). In contrast, the performance of Australian students in the first two rounds of PISA placed the country among the top-performing nations, exceeding the general expectation of the public. However, the celebratory media reporting suddenly changed once Australian students' rankings dropped in PISA 2006 and 2009. Nonetheless, the sense of urgency for reform was nowhere near the intensity witnessed in Germany in the immediate aftermath of PISA 2000. In clear contrast to these nations, South Korea has been one of the best performing nations, along with Finland, since the inception of PISA in the early 2000s. Despite its consistently high PISA rankings and the international fame that it enjoys elsewhere, many Korean observers use the PISA scores to identify a crisis in its education system. These contextual differences, coupled with their varied geographical distances from and cultural and economic relationships with some of the top-performing Asian nations, might shape the divergent representations of Asian PISA success in these nations' media reporting.Table 2. PISA ranks of Germany, Australia and South Korea.CSVPDFDisplay full sizeGermanyJump to section Introduction Germany Australia South Korea Conclusion: reference societies and local...Compared to economic and political topics, education has been a side issue in the media representation of East Asia in Germany; still, there has been a steady trickle of articles on education in East Asian countries over the years. Similar to the way the Nordic countries are sometimes lumped together and treated as more or less interchangeable in educational matters (Waldow2010), South Korea, Japan and China (and, to a lesser degree, Singapore and Taiwan) are often viewed as possessing a shared, Asian educational culture. Some slight nuances are distinguished between countries but, on the whole, it is possible to discern a repertoire of stereotypical images that characterise the way in which education in all of these countries is presented. To a very high degree, these stereotypes are shared by theFAZand theSZ. The presentation and discussion of education in East Asia including East Asian countries' results in large-scale assessments such as PISA is conditioned by these stereotypes.Central to the image of Asian education in Germany is the notion that the Asian educational systems are characterised by rote learning, excessive drill and gruelling examinations. Parents coach children like professional athletes to secure their success in examinations (school entrance, school leaving or university entrance examinations) that are decisive for their future career. In addition to regular school, children cram in institutions of shadow education or with private tutors. A large part of what pupils learn for examinations consists of mindless rote learning. This merciless routine leaves children and youths very little time for play and leisure, or even sleep. Many pupils crack up under the pressure and take their own lives. The good results in international large-scale assessments thus appear as the result of barbarous drill and bought at too high a price. Dissenting voices that do not subscribe to or try to differentiate this picture are very scarce.Although the discussion is heavily dominated by aspects that bear negative connotations, the image of Asian education as it is painted in German media is not totally dark: particularly in relation to the Korean case, a number of articles stress that in Korea there is less variation between achievement levels of pupils than in Germany, especially that there are fewer pupils at the lower end of the achievement scale. Korea thus demonstrates, as Joseph Hanimann (2003/FAZ) remarked already after the publication of the first round of PISA results, that it is possible to combine producing an elite with a solid strategy of lifting the average pupil. Also, the fact that the achievement gap between Korean pupils from different social backgrounds is smaller than in Germany is mentioned repeatedly. The high respect learning enjoys in East Asia sometimes arouses envy and is mentioned in a positive light, although some articles add that respect for learning easily turns into an obsession with learning, leading parents to pressure their children into excessive hours of study.The stereotypical images of Asian education are fairly stable over time and were firmly in place long before the publication of the results of PISA 2009 or even before the publication of the results of the different rounds of the TIMSS study from the late 1990s on, in which Singapore, Japan, Korea and Hong Kong were among the top-performing countries (see e.g. Aznarez1993/SZ; the title of the article is When discipline crowds out creativity). TIMSS created a certain fascination with the purported problem-centred approach of Japanese mathematics teaching (Sddeutsche Zeitung1997), but was not able to change the stereotypical image of Asian education in any fundamental way. Japan did not become a reference society to any larger extent. Instead, Japan's success was, at least in part, explained according to the stereotypical image, i.e. as a result of drill and rote learning, sending children through an examination hell (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung1999). As a result, Heike Schmoll (1997/FAZ) saw no reason for envy for Germans:There is little cause to direct an envious glance to the Japanese educational system and to throw the strengths of the European educational tradition overboard, which is not to say that there is nothing we might learn from the Japanese system.The quote also points to another characteristic of the image of Asian educational systems as they appear in German mass media which will be discussed in more detail below: the educational traditions of Asian countries are constructed as the Other against which the purported European educational traditions are asserted.Turning from TIMSS to PISA, in which again East Asian countries scored very highly, the picture changes very little. As in the case of TIMSS, the success of countries such as South Korea and Japan did not significantly alter the image of Asian education; the heterostereotype of Asian education remained firmly in place. Education in South Korea, which had not been discussed to any larger extent before PISA came out, now began to receive a certain (though limited) amount of media attention. However, despite the fact that South Korea's results were on the same level as Finland's, South Korean education was far from becoming a media sensation like Finnish education (see Takayama, Waldow, and Sung2013).When the results of PISA 2009 were published in December 2010 and Shanghai led the league tables in all three literacy domains, a certain stir was generated in the media studied. The publication of the results of PISA 2009 (OECD2010) came at a time when there was considerable insecurity in Germany about its relation to what is seen as its main industrial competitor, China, and the Shanghai results were often extrapolated to the whole of China as an indicator of China's economic power and potential. Already before Shanghai's PISA success, articles had appeared showing how China was catching up, e.g. in terms of the number of engineers educated (Heiser2007/SZ). Again, however, Shanghai's results were interpreted according to the existing image. In a long report on Chinese education, Henrik Bork (2011/SZ) claimed that a Chinese childhood or youth is like running the gauntlet from one examination to the next. Even more clearly than in the case of Japan after TIMSS, the Chinese way is not the path to be followed by Germany according to Bork.The discussion of Shanghai's success in PISA 2009 became articulated with the discussion on the Chinese Tiger Mom, American Chinese professor of law Amy Chua's book (2011a,2011b) and the education of her children. When Chua'sTiger Mombook was published early in 2011, it instantly became a bestseller, both in the US and in Germany. In this book, Chua describes how she educated her two daughters the Chinese way, forcing them to work very hard and threatening to punish them severely when they did not meet her expectations. Soon after its publication, Chua's book became articulated with the discussion of Asian education more generally. The book created quite a stir, but Chua's educational principles met with universal rejection, even from the conservative side of the political spectrum. Some authors expressed a certain degree of understanding for Chua's methods, acknowledging the hardships connected to raising and educating children, but these authors, too, hastened to distance themselves from Chua's educational principles (e.g. Schaaf2011/FAZ). The book resonated strongly with perceptions of Asian education and seemed to corroborate existing stereotypes. However, some authors alluded to other possible readings, such as interpreting the book more as a sign of the insecurity and ambition of an immigrant to the US than as a representation of Asian education (Steinberger2011/SZ).The unanimous rejection of Asian education by observers from different parts of the political spectrum fills a political function in educational policy making, as the non-desirability of Asian education provides common ground for very different actors in educational policy making.SZandFAZoccupy different, sometimes even contrary positions concerning contentious aspects of education policy in Germany such as the comprehensivisation of secondary schooling (see Takayama, Waldow, and Sung2013). Yet, in their portrayal of Asian education, they are very close. This is also true for other policy actors: even the conservative academic secondary teachers' association (Philologenverband) warns against an Asian culture of learning and drill (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung2010), thereby sharing the stance of voices in the debate that lean more towards the political left. If it is difficult for actors to agree on what they want, in this way they can at least agree on what they donotwant.The Othering of Asian education is effected by dichotomisation. This can take the form of positing Asia against Europe or against selected European countries, such as PISA top performer Finland:Two different educational traditions turn out to be equally successful in the international PISA-tests: on the one hand school cultures building on performance and industriousness or even drill, such as China and South Korea. On the other hand more liberal, progressively inspired school systems such as Finland. (Schultz2010/SZ)It is not difficult to guess on which side the author's sympathy lies. Elsewhere, we have argued that Finland has come to serve as a projection screen for everything that is seen as good and desirable in the educational policy-making debate in many national contexts (Takayama, Waldow, and Sung2013; Waldow2010). Asia fills a somewhat complementary position in the German discourse: while Finland serves as the image of an educational utopia, Asian education provides the dystopian mirror image. This includes the imagery used: where Finnish education is connected to metaphors of redemption like paradise in the North (Taffertshofer and Herrmann2007/SZ), Asian education is connected to metaphors of damnation and torture (examination hell, running the gauntlet).AustraliaJump to section Introduction Germany Australia South Korea Conclusion: reference societies and local...Traditionally, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) have been the key reference societies for Australian education policy makers. As Seddon (quoted in Whitty et al.1998, 40) rightly points out, Australia in general has displayed a dependent and subservient preoccupation with developments in the UK and USA. This trend continues up to today, as seen in the Kevin Rudd Labour Government's (20082010) so-called education revolution: a national curriculum, national testing and accountability on the basis of the publication of test results. As Donnelly (2009) maintains, Australia's education revolution copies what has been tried in Britain over the past 12 years.While the Australian dependency on the UK and the US for new reform ideas persists, these two nations no longer monopolise the external referential authority in Australian education reform discourse. Since around 2009, for instance, Finnish education has been extensively featured in the Australian media, though the implications drawn from the Finnish PISA success differ depending on the political agenda of those who make use of the representation. Many observers across political lines, but those in the centre-left in particular, criticise the Rudd and Gillard Labour Governments for blindly following UK and US quasi-market reform models and maintain that they should have learned from Finnish education which has achieved the best international academic outcomes (Takayama, Waldow, and Sung2013).The Asian model is the most recent addition to this mix of reference societies in the Australian education debate. However, until around 2007, Asian high achievers had been largely absent from the media discussion apart from a quick reference to the success of some of the Asian countries in PISA (e.g. Doherty2004/SMH) or a descriptive account of new curricular reform in Hong Kong (Chong2002/TA). This was despite the fact that Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan had performed just as well as, if not better than, Finland in the earlier rounds of PISA or in other international academic testing (e.g. TIMSS).This initial inattention to Asian high achievers might reflect Australia's self-perception as educational exporter to Asia and the associated sense of superiority vis--vis the less modernised region. The majority ofSMHandTAarticles identified through the use of such keywords as Asian and education concern Asian international students in the Australian education system, the marketing of Australian educational products in Asia, and Australia's foreign aid to educational development in South East Asian and Pacific nations. Furthermore, the high educational aspiration of Asian immigrant families in Australian metropolitan cities was much featured in both newspapers throughout the 2000s. They were often presented as a problem, as in their excessive use of academic coaching and the overconcentration of Asian-Australian students in selective high schools in places like Sydney. Until the late 2000s, therefore, the overall media discourse around Asian education had left little room for an alternative view of Asia as a source of educational ideas and innovation and a possible model for education reform (Singh2010).This picture changed around 2007 and particularly after the publication of the PISA 2009 results, wherein the aforementioned Asian nations and regions dominated the highest rankings of the PISA league tables. Four out of the total of nine articles collected fromSMHand 12 out of 16 fromTAwere published after the publication of PISA 2009 in December 2010. The attention to the Asian success in PISA was further promoted by the declining performance of Australian students, both in terms of mean test scores and rankings. In the immediate aftermath of the PISA 2009 data release, Prime Minister Gillard (2010present) stressed the need for Australia to win the education race against its Asian neighbours (Patty2012/SMH). Reflecting this sentiment, bothSMHandTAstarted using the top-performing Asian students' PISA performance as a benchmark against which the performance of the Australian students was to be assessed and debated (e.g. Jensen2011a/TA,2011b/TA; Patty2012/SMH).Behind this sudden media attention to the Asian PISA success lay the emerging recognition of Australia's economic dependence on the rising Asian economies.2Within a year of the publication of the PISA 2009 results, Prime Minister Gillard (2011) commissioned a White Paper onAustralia in the Asian Centuryto help Australia navigate the Asian Century to seize the opportunities it offers and to meet the challenges it poses. This particular circumstance of the Australian economy in Asia, combined with the declining international placements of Australian students, contributed to the view of Shanghai's PISA success as a wake-up call for Australia (Harrison2012/SMH) and legitimised the subsequent characterisation of Asian education as a model for Australian education reform.In the immediate aftermath of the publication of the PISA 2009 results, bothSMHandTAextensively featured the PISA success of Asian nations, with a particular focus on the Shanghai miracle. However, Shanghai's success was explained in a contrasting manner. Some observers, on the one hand, highlighted the Confucian reverence for education which supposedly explains why Chinese and north-east Asian students do so well and also why many are so unhappy (Garnaut2010/SMH). Perpetuated in such reporting is the stereotypical image of Asian education as a symbol of damnation and torture; driven by intense competition, rote-memorisation and testing. Though painting the Asian educational success not as negatively, Marginson (2011/TA) and Slattery (2011/TA) promoted a similar culturalist explanation, when they explained both the Asian nations' PISA success and theTiger Mum's stance towards education in terms of Confucian values of respect for work, diligence and authority especially parental authority (Slattery2011/TA).On the other hand, other observers avoided or went as far as to dismiss such a culturalist explanation and drew specific policy implications concerning Australia from the Asian success. To Donnelly (2007/TA), the success of Asian nations and regions (e.g. Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) in TIMSS was due to the coherent national curriculum, regular testing and feedback, the value placed on competition, and the more traditional approaches to teaching (thus the rejection of outcome-based education), all the things that he claimed were absent in Australian education. Former OECD education officials and Australian academics such as Barry McGaw and Richard Sweet highlighted the successful curricular reform in the Asian nations, suggesting that what goes on in Chinese classroomsis a process of teaching kids to think and not a process of just drumming in facts (Sweet quoted in Patty2012/SMH, see also McGaw in Garnaut2010/SMHand Schleicher in Harrison2012/SMH). More detailed descriptions of Asian schools were provided a few years later by Harrison (2012/SMH) and Ferrari (2012/TA), both of whom highlighted the concerted effort of Shanghai and other Asian nations to improve the quality of teaching and learning in classrooms.Ben Jensen, the director of the education programme at the Grattan Institute, a Melbourne-based think-tank, was particularly influential in changing the rather simplistic and often negative representation of Asian education in Australia. The Grattan Institute was established by Prime Minister Rudd in 2008 as a think-tank for his government (Crook2008). Backed by the political and media visibility of the institute, Jensen was extensively featured in bothSMHandTAin the post-PISA 2009 debate over Australian education reform. In the immediate aftermath of the release of the PISA 2009 results, Jensen provocatively asked readers what is Australia's long-term economic role in Asia when students in Shanghai, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore all significantly outperform Australian students? (Jensen2010/TA), maintaining that we should turn east and learn from the world's best school systems (Jensen2011b/TA). Later in the same year, under Jensen's leadership, the Grattan Institute published a reportCatching up: learning from the best school systems in East Asia(Jensen et al.2012), which closely looked at what were seen as the four successful school systems in Asia: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea. The report enjoyed extensive media coverage at the time (Hall2012/SMH; Jensen2012/TA) and then continued to be discussed in the subsequent media commentary on educational matters (e.g. Ferrari2012/TA; Gittins2012/SMH; Harrison2012/SMH; Kelly2012/TA).The central thesis that Jensen developed through his research into the four Asian education systems is that educational attainment has less to do with money thrown at the system or class sizesthan an unerring focus on teacher performance (Jensen cited in Walker2012). Downplaying the role of culture (e.g. Confucian reverence for education) and excessive focus on academic success as the decisive factors for Asian PISA success, Jensen (2010/TA,2011a/TA,2011b/TA,2012/TA) highlights various strategies implemented in the four Asian nations that, he claims, have contributed to the improvement of teaching and learning in classrooms: teacher mentoring and modelling, lesson studies (lesson observation and research), the allocation of the most talented teachers to the most disadvantaged schools, and rigorous initial teacher education. He goes on to argue that the effectiveness of these strategies for improving teachers' instructional quality has been well recognised in Australia and yet never enforced in classrooms. While their findings are nothing new to those who are familiar with these practices in some of the Asian countries (see Fernandez and Yoshida2004; Howe2008), they were probably new to the general Australian readership and thus helped disprove the widely held notion that Asian education systems were based on rote learning (Harrison2012/SMH).The political impact of Jensen's promotion of the Asian model was carefully calculated with a view towards influencing the education reform debate thereafter. Notably, Jensen's report was published on the eve of the release of the government-commissionedReview of Funding for Schooling, the so-calledGonski Report named after the chair of the commission, David Gonskithe biggest review of Australian schools funding in more than 30 years (Hall2012/SMH). Gonski recommended a $5 billion a year injection of funding into public and private schools (75% to public schools) and an overhaul of the funding scheme to ensure money goes where most needed (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations2011). His recommendations were quickly endorsed by teachers' unions and progressive academics despite their criticisms of some aspect of the recommendations (e.g. Bonnor2012; Zyngier2012).Jensen's report counters the underlying logic of theGonski Report, its diagnosis of Australia's declining academic performance as resulting from the inappropriate funding scheme that fails to provide resources to disadvantaged students and schools. As Jensen and others drawing on his findings maintain, his study of four high performing Asian education systems shows that there is no clear link between school funding levels and good test results, with South Korea spending less than Australia on students and performing better than them in a range of subjects (Hall2012/SMH). Though Jensen largely endorses the Gonski recommendations, his message is clear: the funding issue, which has dominated the education reform debate in Australia for the last few decades, is not the main game (Jensen quoted in Hall2012/SMH), the point further reinforced by journalists and conservative political figures who draw on his study (see Gittins2012/SMH; Hall2012/SMH; Pyne2012). Hence, as Bonnor (2012) rightly criticises, Jensen's articulation of the Asian educational model is characterised by the problematic separation of educational standards from macro-structural issues in educational systems.South KoreaJump to section Introduction Germany Australia South Korea Conclusion: reference societies and local...Since the first release of the PISA results, Finland and South Korea have attracted global attention for their consistently high performance in international league tables. However, these two nations receive contrasting media responses in Korea; while the media applaud the Finns for their outstanding achievement in the PISA and tout Finnish education as the global reform model, they downplay their own PISA success (Y. Lee2010b). Regardless of their political stances, the Korean media dismiss their students' PISA success, attributing it to excessive competition, exam hell, shadow education and education fever in the Korean education system (Kwon2009b). This self-perception echoes the stereotypical image of Asian education as a symbol of educational damnation and torturehighlighted in our German and Australian reportswhich has been perpetuated by Western media and some scholars (Finkelstein, Imamura, and Tobin1991; Stevenson and Stigler1992).The tendency to downplay the Korean PISA success is more apparent among writers in centre-leftHankyoreh News(HN). Writers such as Kwon (2009b/HN), Y. Lee (2010b/HN) and Park (2010/HN) tend to caution readers about the South Korean PISA success, which they perceive as a corollary of the Asian model of education. They are reluctant to view the exceptional performance of Korean students as a testimony to the merits of the South Korean educational system. If any, some of theHNwriters (Choi2007/HN; Kwag2008/HN; Park2010/HN) discuss the Korean PISA success in a way that justifies their rejection of market-inspired educational reforms. In their minds, the excellent PISA scores verify the strength of South Korean public education characterised by egalitarian policies which increasingly are under attack by the government. OtherHNwriters draw particular attention to negative indicators from the PISA data to highlight the systemic malfunction of Korean education. Kwon (2009b/HN) and Kwag (2008/HN) highlight the low level of South Korean students' interest in the subject matter despite their high performance. Eujin Lee (2010a/HN) maintains that South Korean students are not autonomous learners, as evidenced by the fact that their use of control strategies (self-regulating learning) is the lowest among all the PISA participating countries. To such progressive observers, then, the Asian, including Korean, PISA success results from all the wrong reasons: excessive academic competition and long hours of study in private tutoring andhagwon(for-profit cram schools after-school or at night) with serious consequences for the high suicide rates of secondary students and the loss of motivation for learning (Lee2008/HN).Likewise, writers in conservativeDong-A Daily(DD) are equally sceptical about the Korean students' top performance in PISA but their reservations reflect different educational concerns. ManyDDwriters quote experts from government-affiliated research institutes now acting as local PISA administrators to justify more policy focus on elite students. Seong-Yul Kim, the president of the Korean Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation, is quoted as maintaining that the highest performing 5% of South Korean students lag behind other Asian countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, and that this seemed attributable to the lack of elite education (Kim2010/DD). The conservatives' identification of the PISA ranking for this small highest fraction created a sentiment of crisis and was used to legitimise their agenda to promote elite high schools (Sung2011). Endorsing conservatives' policy focus on the best and brightest students, elite school supporters have insisted that competitive elite schools are essential for the nation to respond to global economic competition (e.g. Kim2011/DD).While the South Korean media demonstrate strong interest in the way other countries praise their educational performance, the different political orientations have generated varied responses to the foreign appraisal. A case in point is the media sensation caused by US President Barack Obama's remarks on South Korea's educational success (Hong2011/DD; Jung and Koh2011/DD; Kim2011/DD). An influential columnist, Tae-Sun Kwon (2009a/HN) criticises Obama for ignoring the factthat (Korean) parents are pouring a large sum of money into private education to the extent that it threatens their livelihoods, and that well over 100 Korean students are taking their own lives annually due to the exhaustion from the academic battle.In contrast, the columns, op-ed and editorial pieces inDDare more accepting, or at least less critical, of the US appraisal of the Korean educational success. They either accentuate Obama's praising of the Asian educational model (e.g. South Korea and Shanghai) to justify the ongoing quasi-market reform in Korea and elsewhere or to highlight the central role of competition and accountability in Obama's reform plan and the regrettable lack thereof in Korea (Hong2011/DD; Kim2012/DD).In response to the political left's idolising of the Finnish success as a symbol of educational quality and equality, the conservative writers inDD(Kim2004/DD; Nam2010/DD) criticise progressive observers for appropriating the image of Finnish education to achieve their pre-existent education policy agenda: noiljegosa(national testing), free school lunches, free public education, and no teacher evaluations (Nam2010/DD). Sun-Deok Kim (2004/DD), an influential conservative columnist, admonishes that blindly adopting the Finnish system of equal education without consideration of the Nordic country's unique education environment will turn out futile. Along the same line, Nam (2010/DD) identifies distortions in what progressive educators report about Finnish education.It is in this context of the conservative attempt to demystify the Finnish PISA success that the Asian PISA success is asserted as an alternative counter-reference point, a trend which has become increasingly apparent after the release of the 2009 PISA results. Sung-Hee Jung (2010b/DD) suggests four possible explanations for Shanghai's success in PISA 2009. According to her, first, China has an educational system that designates particular schools as achievement-first schools, and Shanghai has 100 of these schools. Second, Chinese students spend the longest study hours in the world. Third, every school provides a differentiated curriculum according to students' academic abilities and thus promotes special classes for gifted students. Fourth, entrance examinations into middle schools encourage academic competition at the early primary stage. Many of these characteristics are analogous to what South Korean conservative observers have stressed as their vision of improving the competitiveness of education.Notable about theDDwriters' discussion of the Shanghai PISA success is their appropriation of it to confirm South Korean education's outcomes and effectiveness. In this process, just as we saw in the case of Germany, the media representation of Shanghai's miracle becomes closely articulated to the supposed superiority of Chinese, or more broadly Asian, education projected by Amy Chua (2011a)'sBattle Hymn of a Tiger Mother(Hong2011/DD; Jung and Koh2011/DD; Kim2011/DD). These writers endorse Chua's highly regulating parenting methods which they see as effectively fostering children's confidence and ability to compete in the future. In featuring Shanghai or Chinese education, theDDwriters see the PISA success of Shanghai and South Korean education as proof of the merits of competition-based education and educational fever driven by competitive parents. In contrast, it is interesting to note thatHNrarely draws attention to Shanghai's success in PISA 2009. A possible interpretation is thatHNis less inclined to highlight the competition-based Asian model of education, which is represented as negative self-perception.The overwhelming endorsement of Shanghai's success amongDDwriters is set against their contrastingly negative assessment of the recent Japanese reforms underyutori(low pressure/no cramming) education.3DDcommentators' reservations about the recent change in the Japanese education policy has much in common with Japanese conservative reactions to it after the PISA 2003 shock, a manufactured crisis causing a return to the past of Japanese education allegedly characterised by academic competition, teacher-centred instruction, strong emphasis on academic basics, and strict law and order in schools (Takayama2008, 393). Many Korean writers in the conservative newspaper believe that Japan'syutorieducation, which involved the 30% reduction of curricular content to spare more student-centred learning time and more focus on constructivist learning, was modelled after the child-centred, progressive education of the 1970s in the US. Jung (2010a/DD), for instance, sees the student-centred progressive education as Americanized education that, he thinks, has already proved to be ineffective in the US and Japan. These writers discuss Amy Chua's best-selling book to question the child-centred, soft pedagogic approach and warn the Korean public not to model education after the failed pedagogic experiment. Not surprisingly, Japan's lower PISA ranking compared to South Korea is used as a ground against the introduction of any reform measures designed to lessen academic pressure and competition. Hong (2004/DD) argues that Korea should not give up its own merits embedded in a historically constructed competitive system. He goes on to explain that Japan could stop the deeper decline of achievement by doing away withyutorieducation and turning back to the past path.The rise of Japan as the counter-model reflects the South Korean government's new plan to promote creativity andinsung(personality/character) education, announced in 2011. Facing the criticism that South Korean students have excessive study loads, the plan, proposed to be implemented in 2014, includes the 20% reduction of curricular content and more curricular focus on constructivist teaching practice. In response to this announcement, the conservative writers claim that this streamlining of curricular content has already caused public fears over the deterioration of scholastic achievement (Hong2004/DD; Jung2010a/DD; Kim2012/DD). In sum, the underperformance of Japanese students relative to Korean students in the last rounds of PISA has rendered Japan a convenient counter-reference society for Korean conservative observers. In all these debates, PISA's national ranking powerfully functions as a criterion upon which particular countries are chosen for reference and counter-reference with their characteristics highlighted for domestic political consumption.Conclusion: reference societies and local configurationsJump to section Introduction Germany Australia South Korea Conclusion: reference societies and local...It has become a stock phrase among those who study education policy that large-scale assessments such as PISA have profoundly changed the processes of educational policy making. The politics of international league tables provide ample possibilities for scandalization and glorification (Steiner-Khamsi2004drawing on Phillips2004) and have sparked new processes of externalisation and policy borrowing and the reconstitution of reference societies for national education systems (Lingard2011, 369; see also Grek2009; Nvoa and Yariv-Mashal2003). Hence, much of education policy scholarship in recent years recognises the emergence of a globalised education policy field through the creation of the globe as a commensurate space of measurement of the comparative performance of schooling systems (Sellar and Lingard2013, 201). In particular, PISA plays a critical role in institutionalising a new mode of global education governance wherein state sovereignty over education is increasingly replaced by the influence of large-scale international assessments, and the key features of top-performing nations in such international assessments are widely circulated as the global panacea (Kamens2013; Meyer and Benavot2013; Wiseman2010).While our findings certainly support some of these claims, they also help us nuance the existing discussion of the globalized education policy field and reference societies. The near-universal endorsement of Finnish education among many nations, including those studied here, seems to verify the observation that countries that are high up in league tables produced by large-scale assessments become global reference societies. However, the specific implications that local media of varying political orientations draw from Finnish success considerably differ from country to country (Takayama, Waldow, and Sung2013). Furthermore, the responses to equally high performing Asian tigers, when compared to Finland's global acclaim, seem to suggest a need to explore other factors in order to understand the way a reference society becomes selected and constructed in the globalised policy field.In what follows, we draw on the findings thus far presented to identify three connected sets of factors shaping how a country becomes a reference society and what prevents it from becoming one. These are: (1)national auto- and heterostereotypesand their interplay; (2)economic relationsbetween countries; and (3) thedecline or increase of the results of a countryin large-scale assessments relative to potential reference countries. This discussion of factors is necessarily exploratory, given that it is based on as few as three national cases. Its potential limitations withstanding, it is warranted, we believe, with a view towards initiating a more nuanced conceptualisation of the construction of reference societies and the globalized education field.Stereotypes condition the way in which an observer's own nation as well as other nations are perceived (Williams and Spencer-Rodgers2010). Many comparative education scholars specialising in Asian education have long identified the existence of negative stereotypes about Asian education. Much of comparative education scholarship on Japanese education, for instance, has consistently challenged the dismissive characterisation of Japanese education as didactic teaching, education mama (excessive parental pressure for academic success) and examination hell (e.g. Finkelstein, Imamura, and Tobin1991; Stevenson and Stigler1992). Despite the effort of such scholars to paint a more nuanced picture, the overly negative stereotype of Asian education persists today.This was clearly demonstrated in the case of Germany, where this sort of dismissive image is well established and thus effectively blocked the use of Asian countries as reference societies in educational policy making. Stereotypes of individual countries or regions are part of the larger stereotype of the whole region, hence the German media constructing the monolithic representation of Asian education. In Australia, too, there is an overarching Asian heterostereotype spanning several countries. However, the Australian heterostereotype of Asian education is more contested than in Germany. During the period discussed in this article, actors such as the Grattan Institute successfully altered the existing Australian heterostereotype of Asian education, shifting the focus away from aspects such as strict discipline, intense academic competition, and didactic rote learning to effective teacher professional development, innovative pedagogic work and targeted resource allocation to underperforming schools. The privileged media and political access that the Grattan Institute enjoys was certainly a decisive factor in this dramatic shift of the referential status of Asian education in Australia.The Korean autostereotype remarkably resembles the negative heterostereotypes of Asian education in Germany and Australia. Irrespective of their political orientations, the Korean media continue to view Korean education as characterised by intense academic competition, excessive private tutoring, test-driven rote learning, and drill at the expense of creativity, curiosity and humanity. At the same time, there is a difference along political lines as concerns whether these characteristics of Korean education are viewed as strengths of the Korean education system or as oppressive features to be reformed. The Korean self-perception also places Korean education in the context of a larger Asian model, which (perhaps not surprisingly) is more nuanced than in Germany and Australia. Conservative Korean observers, who affirm the competitive Asian educational system, see Japan'syutorireforms as a deplorable departure from the Asian path that, according to them, has caused a decline in Japanese PISA results, the message being that Korea should not digress from this path.In all the nations studied here, the stereotypes of Asian education closely interact with another powerful heterostereotype, Finnish education [see Takayama, Waldow, and Sung (2013) for an analysis of the media representation of the latter]. In Germany, the near-universal, dismissive stereotype of Asian education is complemented by a near-universal, affirmative representation of Finnish education, which in addition is part of a generally positive larger image of the North deeply rooted in history and going back at least to the Romantic Period. The existence of a strong, favourable image of Finnish education is often pitted against and thus serves to stabilise the unfavourable heterostereotype of Asian education. As long as there is an alternative path to salvation, the Asian countries' successes seem to provide less of a challenge to education in Germany.A similar contrast between Finnish and Asian education was observed in Korea and Australia, though their stereotypes tend to be more varied and contested. In Korea, conservatives actively try to demystify the progressives' idolisation of Finnish education and see the PISA success in Shanghai and South Korea as proof of the merits of the Asian competition-based model. In Australia, progressives highlight the humane and egalitarian nature of Finnish education and pit it against the Asian education model in order to keep the focus of the ongoing education reform debate on equity issues including a reform in the inequitable funding scheme in Australian education. In all three countries, thus, the contrastive representation of Asian and Finnish education shapes much of the media discourse on high performing nations in PISA, often reflecting the existing political dichotomy in the ongoing education debate.Another noteworthy factor is the significance of economic relations for the construction of reference societies. In the German discourse, the Asian Tiger countries, especially China, are perceived as important economic competitors; yet, they did not gain referential status in the German education policy discourse. Perhaps, coupled with the deeply ingrained, dismissive view of Asian education, the existence of a prominent counter-stereotype in the shape of Finland that is seen as highly successful, not just in educational but also in economic terms, makes it easier to shrug off another educational/economic challenge from the East. Contrary to the German case, the acute awareness of economic challenges that the Asian century poses to the Australian economy certainly helps legitimise learning from the Asian neighbours campaign, despite the presence of the powerful counter-reference, Finnish education. While the privileged media and political access that Jensen (the Grattan Institute) enjoys is surely a major factor, another reason for his success was the fact that his insertion of the Asian model as a critique of the ongoing education debate that had largely focused on macro policy issues (e.g. funding issues) enjoyed considerable conservative political support. This also explains the disproportionate media appearance of Jensen in the centre-rightTA, with his writings appearing in the newspaper four times between 2010 and 2012 while none of his writings appeared inSMHduring the period under study. In the case of Korea, though all the high performing Asian nations are certainly critical economic competitors and partners to the country, the internalisation of the unfavourable autostereotype of Asian education effectively discourages observers of the political left to consider Asian education as a reform model for the Koreans. By contrast, the Korean conservatives tend to use the Asian PISA success as a legitimation of what they perceive as the Asian model. The competitive economic relations with other Asian Tigers are certainly part of the backdrop against which they assert staying on the Asian path (thus the rejection of the constructivist curricular reform).Finally, the decline or improvement of the PISA ranking of the country of an observer relative to potential reference countries may play a role. Here, a comparison of Australia and Germany is instructive. While Australia's relative results declined over subsequent PISA rounds, Germany's PISA results slowly increased after the PISA shock in 2001. Hence, by the time that Asian PISA success became a media sensation, Australia was recognised as in a serious crisis and Germany as stepping out of a crisis (while in absolute terms, Germany still performed considerably less well than Australia, seeTable 2). This may contribute to a general feeling of losing ground to the Asian Tigers in Australia, producing a sense of urgency to react and possibly to borrow reforms from Asian countries, while in Germany the improvement of the relative position leads more to a sense of catching up, with less pressure to borrow reforms as a consequence. The same explanation applies to the case of Korea, where the declining ranking of Japan in relation to Korea contributed to the centre-right media's construction of Japan's education reform of recent years as a counter-reference not to emulate. At the same time, the superior performance of Shanghai to Korea encouraged the same media to view the former's educational characteristics as something we must preserve or return to.The way in which Amy Chua's (2011a) Tiger Mum book was received in the three countries throws into relief their differences in terms of their perception of and reaction to Shanghai's success in PISA 2009. In Korea, conservative writers praised Chua's supposedly Chinese methods of raising her children; Chua's methods represent part of what they consider as the good old Korean education which they fear will be eroded by the proposed reduction of the curricular contents and student-centred instruction. By contrast, in Germany, the book corroborated the already prevalent view that the PISA success of Asian children is bought at too high a price and provided an opportunity to affirm across political camps where we do not want to go. In Australia, although the book was extensively featured by the media, only one author (Marginson2011/TA) articulated the book with Shanghai's PISA success, stressing the Confucian cultural heritage as the common cause of Shanghai's PISA success and the success of Amy Chua's educational methods. Instead, the book was discussed more prominently in terms of the high academic aspiration and success of Asian migrant families in Australian metropolitan cities (e.g. Taylor2011/TA).In sum, we hope to have shown that while prevalent patterns of externalization to world situations have certainly changed and a globalized policy field may be emerging, local configurations, including local patterns of political controversy and problem perception, still considerably influence whether or not and in what ways countries become reference societies. A high ranking in international large-scale assessments may have become a necessary condition for achieving the status of a global reference society, but it still is far from being a sufficient condition. The emergence of an increasingly globalised education policy field, therefore, entails simultaneous processes of global standardisation and national and regional diversification. The former necessarily involves the production of policy localism/nationalism with the latter constantly invigorated through the domestication of the international policy discourse.Notes1. Standardised large-scale assessments of pupil achievement are just one example for this type of study (although perhaps the most prominent one). Another prominent example is constituted by rankings of higher education institutions, such as the (in)famous Shanghai ranking.2. Australian political leaders have consistently called for deeper engagement with Asia since the 1990s, often translated into the demands to introduce Asian languages and culture to school children. 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