Time Once Again for the Annual Misinformation Campaign About American Education!
Today has been designated as "PISA Day" by the U.S. Department of Education and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—the day that results of the 2012 math, reading and science tests are released by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA tests 15-year-old students every three years in more than 65 countries and issues reports of the data, which are then used to compare the education systems in the tested countries. Then, journalists and politicians with little understanding of how statistics work and with strong ideological agendas will make proclamations about the data—and propose policy solutions—that are not only inaccurate, but are often thinly disguised attacks on teachers, students and parents.
AFT has prepared a video and a brochure to address the real story of the PISA data and how policymakers should respond to the information learned from the tests. AFT's director of field programs in the educational issues department, Rob Weil, cautions against rush judgments on the data: "We want teachers, AFT leaders, policymakers and citizens in general to go beyond the page in the report that has the rankings," he said. "When they turn the page, they will quickly see that rankings and raw spending figures do not tell the whole story."
Weil's call for caution is expanded upon by a report from the Economic Policy Institute's (EPI) Richard Rothstein and Martin Carnoy, who shatter most of the methods used by pundits and politicians to explain the numbers:
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In actuality, international data are complex, and even a day or two’s advance look at a summary report would be insufficient to make an intelligent evaluation. It takes many months for careful scholars to analyze the data. Sometimes, this analysis requires examination of more detailed data, including disaggregated scores by social class, gender or race. These are eventually available on the testing organization’s website, but often considerably after the initial public release of a government summary report. Careful analyses of these detailed data can often undermine early assertions.
In January, we published an analysis based on such detailed examination of the previous round of PISA data, from assessments administered in 2009 (What Do International Tests Really Show about U.S. Student Performance?). Our analysis showed that conventional interpretations of these scores can be glib and misleading. Our chief conclusion was that an accurate interpretation of these scores cannot easily be reduced to the kinds of sound bites favored by many commentators and education policymakers.
Patricia Keefer, director of the AFT's international affairs department, concurs with the EPI analysis and notes the major impact of poverty on school performance: "That means that Americans should not only look at where our students rank against the kids in other mostly highly developed nations, but they also should consider how the day-to-day lives of those students vary from one country to another," Keefer said. "For example, among