Education for Sustainable Development and International Student Assessments: Governing Education in Times of Climate Change
| Author | Astrid T. Sinnes,Christoffer C. Eriksen |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12256 |
| Date | 01 February 2016 |
| Published date | 01 February 2016 |
Education for Sustainable Development and
International Student Assessments: Governing
Education in Times of Climate Change
Astrid T. Sinnes
Norwegian University of Life Sciences
Christoffer C. Eriksen
University of Oslo
Abstract
At the end of the UN’s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development there are few, if any, indications of comprehensive
educational reforms meeting the challenges of sustainable development. Rather, a central aim for current educational reforms
appears to be improvement of student performance on national and international educational assessments, such as the Orga-
nization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)’s Programme for International Student Assessments (PISA).
Against this background, this article explores the relationship between the UN’s measures to promote education for sustain-
able development (ESD) and the OECD’s measures to assist the development of education policy through PISA. The article
finds that there are asymmetries in the ways these two different measures shape education systems. Moreover, the article also
finds tensions between the educational practices associated with ESD, and those associated with ambitions to improve scores
on PISA and other tests.
Policy Implications
•In times of climate change, the OECD’s PISA initiative and similar student assessments are insufficient for measuring edu-
cational quality. Such assessments do not measure students’ability to contribute to sustainable development.
•Education must be recognized as crucial in all sustainable development policy, including the new sustainable development
goals.
•International initiatives seeking to promote ESD should develop criteria for measuring countries’ability to educate for sus-
tainability.
•International organizations should be equipped with sufficient resources for performing evaluations and rankings of edu-
cation systems according to sustainability criteria.
In the early 1970s, scientific reports and experiences of
accelerating environmental degradation gave rise to a wave
of international measures aimed at environmental protec-
tion. Several of these measures included international decla-
rations and resolutions that considered education as
essential for the protection of the environment. This also led
to the development and inclusion of environmental educa-
tion in curricula and textbooks internationally and across dif-
ferent educational levels (Sterling, 1992; Palmer, 1998;
Bromley et al., 2011; Pizmony-Levy, 2011). Most countries
have undertaken a legal obligation to recognize the protec-
tion of the natural environment as an educational goal, and
several states have committed themselves to developing
and promoting educational programmes on education for
sustainable development (ESD). The most comprehensive
international effort to date is the Resolution of the General
Assembly of the UN, proclaiming a Decade of Education for
Sustainable Development from 2005 to 2014. The UN Educa-
tional, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) was the
lead agency for this decade, and engaged in a range of dif-
ferent activities to promote ESD.
Since 2005, the increasing scientific knowledge on human
emissions of greenhouse gases leading to global warming
has demonstrated that the challenges facing environmental
protection and sustainable development have become more
urgent, not less (UNEP, 2012; IPCC, 2013). However, at the
end of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Develop-
ment there are very few, if any, academic analyses of com-
prehensive educational reforms that have met the
challenges of sustainable development (Huckle and Wals,
2015; Hursh et al., 2015)
Recent academic studies do, however, report significant
educational reforms in the course of the last decades aiming
to improve student performance on national and interna-
©2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2016) 7:1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12256
Global Policy Volume 7 . Issue 1 . February 2016
46
Research Article
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