Many countries around the world participate in the Programme for International Student Assessment, the cross-national test administered by the OECD. Today we look at the economic costs for a country to participate in PISA. My guests are Laura Engel and David Rutkowski. They followed the money through publicly available budget documents in the United States to uncover exactly how much the test costs both the federal and state governments.

Through this complicated web, they found a host of contractors and sub-contractors hired to implement PISA and call for a full cost-benefit analysis in order to determine if PISA is worth it.

Laura Engel is an Associate Professor of International Education and International Affairs at the George Washington University and David Rutkowski is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in Educational Policy and Educational Inquiry at Indiana University School of Education. Their latest co-written article published in the journal Discourse is called “Pay to play: What does PISA participation cost in the US?”

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