Louisiana Educator: PISA Results Used to Justify Continued Attacks on Public Schools

Louisiana Educator: PISA Results Used to Justify Continued Attacks on Public Schools:

PISA Results Used to Justify Continued Attacks on Public Schools

Last week the latest round of PISA test results were released showing that academic achievement of U.S. students compared to other nations continued to rank only about average. Arne Duncan and other reformer leaders however, had carefully pre-briefed commentators and orchestrated news stories by national opinion makers designed to cast our public schools in the worst light possible. So the pundits solemnly proclaimed that the PISA results had confirmed their worst fears that U.S students were totally unprepared for the jobs of the twenty-first century and for competition with the Finns, the Koreans and the Chinese. (Here is an article about "stagnant" U.S. scores) Never mind that Diane Ravitch and leading researchers have demonstrated with actual statistics that American students have steadily improved their basic academic skills over the last 20 years as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Statistics also show that the U.S. students are still doing about the same relative to other countries as they had been doing all the way back to the dawn of international test comparisons. Even so, the opinion makers concluded and announced that our once great education system has declined.

The gloom and doom expressed by Duncan and his fellow reformers were the same conclusions that were expressed in the Nation at Risk Report over 30 years ago. Soon after the Nation at