PISA Scores Are Out. Ours Are Not Great. So What?

PISA Scores Are Out. Ours Are Not Great. So What?

PISA Scores Are Out. Ours Are Not Great. So What?

It’s PISA Day, the day when the Programme for International Student Assessment scores are released by OECD (The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). This is traditionally followed by a great deal of hand-wringing.

A typically glum assessment was written by Dana Goldstein for the New York Times this morning. “The performance of American teenagers has been stagnant since 2000,” Goldstein reports. As education historian Diane Ravitch notes every time PISA scores come out, the U.S. results have always been mediocre. There has never been a golden age when the U.S. led the world in PISA results.

The top scores this year come from the usual batch of test takers, including the Chinese, who give the test to students from wealthy provinces who could not* be remotely considered a cross-section of the nation as a whole. PISA day is also the one day that some folks hear about Estonia, the tiny nation that somehow has not conquered the world even though their students do well on the PISA.

PISA coverage tends to overlook one major question—why should anyone care about these scores? Where is the research showing a connection between PISA scores and a nation’s economic, political, or global success? What is the conclusion to the statement, “Because they get high PISA scores, the citizens of [insert nation here] enjoy CONTINUE READING: PISA Scores Are Out. Ours Are Not Great. So What?