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 Organization 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 sustainable 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.