The Global Education Race

Sam Sellar, Greg Thompson, David Rutkowski

• Editore: Brush Education
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781550597158
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Education General

A global education race now pits countries, regions, and school systems against one another. The racecourse has been created by a small number of influential international testing programs, and the popular media announces winners and losers. Fear of falling behind haunts policy-makers and shapes educational priorities around the world. But are we running in the right direction?

We all have a stake in education, and as informed citizens we need to understand the increasingly influential and controversial phenomenon of international testing and what it means for students and the future of our schools. The Global Education Race provides educators, parents, and policy-makers with a lively and accessible introduction to the most influential international testing program: PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, operated by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The authors draw on the latest research on assessment and education policy to provide a clear account of how the test works and to investigate PISA's influence on educational goals and practice in schools around the world. The book aims to provoke informed debate about the role of testing, data, and comparison in educational change. Includes a foreword by David C. Berliner and Pasi Sahlberg.

1
The PISA Racetrack

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1.1 Fear of falling behind

If you ask a group of school teachers who has the world’s leading education system, it is a safe bet that many would suggest Finland or somewhere in East Asia. Others would proudly nominate their own school system. But if you ask the same teachers to raise their hand if they have heard of PISA, then you might see about half of the group with hands in the air. If you ask what the acronym stands for, then few hands would remain raised (it stands for the Programme for International Student Assessment). People are familiar with stories of educational success and failure but are not always sure where the stories come from.

In late 2010, a flurry of newspaper headlines proclaimed that Shanghai had the smartest students in the world and other systems were in danger of being left behind in the “global education race.” For example, the New York Times announced on 7 December 2010 that “Top test scores from Shanghai stun educators.” The article quoted President Obama as saying that the United States was experiencing a new “Sputnik moment” and had to face the challenge of catching up to East Asian school systems. The Globe and Mail published an article explaining “How Canada is becoming outclassed in school” (8 December 2010). Headlines in other countries, such as England and Australia, also drew attention to the strong performance of Shanghai and expressed a fear that school systems in their own countries were falling behind.

Stories about educational crises capture attention and promote a sense that change of some kind is urgently required. For example, in the early 1980s, the report A Nation at Risk warned that American schools were falling behind other nations in mathematics and science performance; this narrative still has effects today. In 2001, Germany experienced an educational crisis when it placed 22nd in the world for student performance in reading. In 2003, debate was sparked in Japan when the reading literacy of its students was ranked 14th in the world. In 2013, commentators across Canada announced that the country had a mathematics crisis after performance fell significantly in most provinces. We could add many other examples to this list.

But how do we know that students in Shanghai are running ahead of students in the United States? How did Germany discover that it placed 22nd in the world for reading? How does Canada know whether it is falling behind in mathematics? The answer to each of these questions is PISA. While many educators do not know much about PISA itself, it has become the main track on which the global education race is run.

PISA is an international large-scale assessment of educational performance conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). When we read headlines comparing educational performance in one country against others, it is likely that the story started from PISA. But while PISA has arguably become the most influential educational assessment today, many classroom teachers and parents have either not heard of it or know very little about it. This makes sense because PISA does not have a direct impact on students, teachers’ work, or life in schools more generally. However, PISA does shape thinking about education around the world, and the results are used as evidence to justify reforms and interventions that can have far-reaching consequences. This book has been written for educators, parents, and other education stakeholders who may know little about PISA, but who indirectly experience its effects as the assessment reshapes education policy, public debate, and everyday life in classrooms and schools.

1.2 Aims of this book

This book has been written to help people understand what PISA is, what it does, and what it cannot do. Why is such a book needed? The academic literature on PISA has grown dramatically since the assessment was first conducted in 2000 and, along with the newspaper headlines it generates, there has also been a proliferation of commentary on PISA in the form of blog posts, tweets, protest letters, and so on. Much has been written about PISA, offering technical analysis, polemical critique, or uncritical acceptance of the results as exposing educational success or crises. What is still needed is an accessible introduction that enables people (1) to understand how PISA shapes educational thinking and practice and (2) to join the debate about PISA from an informed position. This book aims to meet these needs and to challenge some myths and fallacies about the performance and comparison of school systems that have emerged with the growing influence of PISA.

This is not an anti-testing book.

We are currently witnessing a dramatic growth in the use of data to monitor and evaluate almost every aspect of our daily lives. Facebook now understands who we are better than close relatives, and Target is better than we are at predicting what we need. We are riding a wave of “datafication” that not only looks unlikely to recede, but may also bring many benefits, such as increasing our understanding and improving our decision making in a variety of contexts. Of course, these developments also create new risks and controversies, which is why it is important to understand how data shape our lives.

As politicians and policy-makers need to understand and make decisions about complex education systems, there is likely to be growing demand for new kinds of data analytics that make things simpler. While those who oversee large education systems might be moved by stories about how a particular school turned around the learning of one child who had trouble with reading, these stories do not help them make decisions about where to spend their limited budgets or how to intervene if the system is not giving all students a fair chance. While recent movements to reduce or opt-out of standardized testing have had success in some jurisdictions, it is difficult to imagine education systems completely rejecting standardized testing. Rather than opposing testing in principle, we favour a pragmatic approach to understanding how educational testing works and how it might be improved. This pragmatic approach requires that teachers, parents, and other education stakeholders be supported to engage with testing in meaningful and insightful ways.

This is not an anti-PISA book.

Governments make use of PISA in many ways, and it is not the aim of this book to argue that PISA, or the OECD’s education data more generally, cannot have useful applications. PISA is a sample test that has direct impact on the time of a very small number of students, and it is not high stakes for these students. In many respects, PISA reflects the state of the art in educational measurement. Beyond mean scores and rankings, the tests generate a vast amount of information about education systems, including data relating to equity. The use of well-designed measures to “take the temperature” of education systems inexpensively and effectively is a sensible approach to testing.

However, PISA has become high stakes for some people. The assessment now acts as a report card for education ministers (Breakspear, 2014), who sing the praises of their government when performance is good or point the finger of blame when performance is poor. Politicians and media commentators are often willing to overlook the limitations of the tests, or do not have the technical expertise or time to consider these limitations, in the rush for headlines and simple political messages. People most often encounter PISA through media reports that focus on national rankings, and these are often treated as the most important outcome of PISA. Many of the crises mentioned above were prompted by rankings that did not match expectations. But there is a great deal of overpromising about what PISA can tell us and a great deal of misunderstanding about what it cannot.

This book will not offer simple solutions.

There are already enough people profiting from public education by selling simple solutions to complex problems. PISA results are often made complicit in these simplifications, including by people who are closely involved with the program. In contrast, this book aims to make educational matters more complex, but without making them more difficult to understand. We aim to help educators, parents, and others understand how PISA works in order to make critical assessments of the stories told about their schools based on PISA results. This might increase opportunities for people to engage meaningfully with what PISA can tell us and to join the debate about how the results should inform policy and practice. We aim to provide an antidote to PISA envy. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. There is an obvious question that must be answered at this point.

1.3 What is PISA?

PISA was developed by the OECD to measure reading, mathematical, and scientific literacy. PISA assesses what young people who are 15 years of age and who are enrolled in school know on a given day about content that the OECD has determined to be important for participation in the global economy. The assessment was first conducted in 2000 and has taken place every three years since then. Each cycle gives specific emphasis to one of the three domains that are assessed—reading, mathematics, and science. In PISA 2015, the major domain was scientific literacy. Later in this book, we provide an in-depth explanation of the domains and why it is important to understand the rotation of domains when interpreting and using the results.

PISA is conducted with a representative sample of 15-year-olds in each participating country or education system. The test takes two hours to complete and includes a mix of open-ended and multiple choice questions. The purpose of the test is to assess how well students can apply their knowledge and skills to solve problems based on real-life situations. PISA does not aim to test how well students have learned what is taught in schools. As well as completing the assessment, students are asked to complete a questionnaire after the test that collects further information about them, their family background, and their attitudes toward learning. School principals complete a questionnaire about their school, which enables analysis of relations between educational performance and other factors such as gender, socio-economic status, and resources. PISA also includes an optional parent questionnaire, which provides context about family, home, and learning environments.

PISA has become one of the OECD’s most successful programs and has grown significantly since it began. Forty-three countries participated in PISA 2000 compared to more than 70 countries in PISA 2015. The OECD has also used PISA as a model for the development of several related programs, including PISA tests for schools, PISA for developing countries, and PISA for five-year-olds (the International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study). While we focus specifically on the main PISA in this book, much of the discussion is relevant to these other OECD education assessments.

Countries and education systems choose to participate in PISA (although they may be encouraged to do so by the OECD) and must pay to cover the costs of their participation. OECD countries can make decisions about the development and implementation of PISA as members of the PISA Governing Board, but non-OECD participants generally have less input in decision making. This gives the OECD significant influence in education beyond its membership. And this brings us to the next question.

1.4 What is the OECD?

The OECD now hosts the main event in the global education race. The OECD, or the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, is an intergovernmental organization that promotes economic growth, trade expansion, and social well-being. Established in 1961, the OECD has 35 member countries, and its work covers many of the policy areas managed by governments. The United States is the dominant member and contributes the largest share of the organization’s budget. Members are mainly European or Anglophone countries, with the exceptions being Chile, Israel, Japan, Korea, Mexico, and ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: PISA—A good servant but a bad master
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Running the wrong race?
• 1 The PISA Racetrack
• 2 Stories
• 3 Rankings
• 4 Tests
• 5 Comparisons
• 6 Validity
• 7 Politics
• Conclusion: Helping policy-makers find the right track
• References
• About the Authors