Sotiria Grek & christian ydesen Ecer 2018, bolzano Wednesday, september 5th

1. Securing Organisational Survival – A Historical Inquiry into the Configurations and Positions of the OECD’s Work in Education in the 1960s Sotiria Grek & christian ydesen Ecer 2018, bolzano Wednesday, september 5th Network 23, 17:15 – 18:45

2. - The 1960s: An interesting decade to analyse - • An important stepping stone of the “global testing culture” • The shock reverberations from the 1957 Soviet Sputnik satellite launch • The Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) transitioned into the OECD in 1961 • Competing relation between the OECD and UNESCO • Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI),1968. •  In its early years, how did the OECD struggle to launch and secure its work in education?

3. OECD Conference on Economic growth and Investment in Education, Brookings Institution, Washington, October 1961 - The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development -

4. - The 1961 conference - • “May I say that, in this context, the fight for education is too important to be left solely to the educators.” Walter W. Heller, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers • ”Vigorous economic growth in the world of tomorrow will depend largely upon an adequate supply of trained scientists, engineers and technicians.” OEEC, Forecasting Manpower Needs For The Age Of Science (Paris: OEEC Publications, 1960) • OEEC director, Alexander King, described these activities as an “essential prerequisite to the elaboration of sound educational programmes.” In order to secure soundness in the educational programmes “(…) the work should be based on quantitative measurements and relationship between the main "inputs" into the educational system.”

5. - The OECD’s ambition in Education - “Our aim is not simply to have stimulating talks but to clarify ideas which can shape policy and action, ideas with the power to make a beneficial difference in the course of human events” “A potential conflict between education’s obligation to promote the growth and freedom of the individual for its own sake and the necessity to serve the growth and security of society as a whole” Philip Hall Coombs, head of the US delegation, and chair of the conference The challenge for the OECD’s educational agenda was “(…) to obtain a fresh view of the tasks of the educational system seen from the standpoints of economic growth and to obtain the cooperation of the educational sector” Raymond Lyons “The OECD Mediterranean Regional Project”, The American Economist 8, no. 2 (1964)

6. - The Programme for Educational Investment and Planning - • An offshoot of Resolution No. 9 on investment in education passed by the European Ministers of Education at their third conference held in Rome in October 1962. • The programme called for assembling comprehensive statistical data from member countries, especially to use in making prognoses for educational investment  call for comparative and standardised data. • In Denmark, an economic and statistical section was established in the Ministry of Education effective April 1963, in response to the OECD request. • The EIP programme: education needs better planning  apply the latest quantitative methods for the purposes of optimisation as they related to economic growth and winning the technology race with the Eastern Bloc.

7. - The Mediterranean Regional Project - • Aim: to draw up a planning framework for the allocation of resources to education in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, and Yugoslavia in relation to the requirements arising out of economic, demographic, and social development up to 1975 • The establishment of working teams of economists, statisticians, and educational experts in the the six countries in order to prepare detailed reports • The Fourth Conference of European Ministers of Education in 1965 passed a resolution recommending: (…) the establishment of national mechanisms to collect the data required for a policy of expanding and directing educational activities and of integrating them with economic policies and plans. The Committee has noted that the E.I.P. (Educational Investment and Planning Programme) and the M.R.P. (Mediterranean Regional Project) constitute a major existing contribution to such objectives since they are based on national groups established precisely for this purpose.

8. - A struggle for survival - • The OECD put great effort in reinventing itself in the years after it had lost its original purpose at the end of the Marshall plan  education became one of the new points of orientation for the organisation • As pointed out by the OECD operative, Mr. Raymond Lyons, the OEEC from 1959 and later the OECD “(…) aimed at securing recognition and policy action by member governments of the need to plan education, and particularly scientific and technical education, as part of a policy for achieving substantial and balanced economic growth.” In other words, education was a field that could create some leverage for the organisation and boost its very raison d’être. • But, the OECD agenda in education was often not well-received by educators and even in some ministries of education.

9. - Inter-organisational relations - • On November 4th, 1963, a formal agreement establishing relations between the OECD and UNESCO went into effect. • The collaboration between the two organizations would be strictly at secretariat level and would not include exchange of observers at committee meetings.  According to the OECD Secretary-General any such expansion of the collaboration should be avoided by the OECD. • Mr. Hans-Heinz Krill de Capello (1929-2005) of the UNESCO ”foreign office” noted in 1966 ”OECD imitates systematically our work. The situation is very serious, "life or death struggle". Difficulty: OECD Member States are the financing States of UNESCO.”

10. Internal report entitled “Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)”, 330.2 A 01 OECD 18 Part I (Paris: UNESCO Archive, 1969). (…) an analysis of OECD’s invitation procedure demonstrates that UNESCO receives invitations to attend and even participate in OECD’s meetings when UNESCO’s “important activities” in the field to be discussed are unquestionable (educational aid, planning, financing, statistics, science policy, application of education and science to development, etc.). This selective approach of OECD towards UNESCO is in full accordance with the “‘club-character” of this organization; it also corresponds to the spirit and the clauses of the UNESCO/OECD agreement (October/November 1963), which, providing for something like a restricted cooperation, is in fact the weakest agreement which UNESCO has ever concluded with any other intergovernmental organization.

11. Conclusions • The OECD has never wavered from its commitment to act strategically and secure its organisational survival by providing member-states, partners, and decision-makers with sought-after solutions. • Knowledge production was never the monopoly of a single IO or other actor, but rather was most of the times polycentric and thus simultaneously international, transnational, subnational and national (cf. also Paris21 - Partnership in Statistics for Development). • OECD-UNESCO relations were not predetermined, but depended on the agendas and career trajectories of different actors  Examining how actors create alliances and mobilise other actors and institutionsis hence vital in order to understand these relations. • On order to understand the role of IOs in transnational education governance, one needs to bring together two important, interdependent aspects: 1) an empirical analysis of knowledge as produced through the construction of education metrics (categories, methods, numbers) – the setting of norms 2) a sociology of the trajectories and positions of national education actors/experts in IOs that also ‘make’ the global education policy space, by being active mediators between and across IOs and nations