Pinging Carol Atherton, Mary Cadle, and Carol Goodall, inter alia: From Todays Guardian, a comment from DisappointedIdealist Biddlemon 02 December 2013 12:19am I recognise that as this is an education thread, nobody is interested in facts, especially the woe-is-me-hell-in-a-handbasket crowd. However, as I was the DFE civil servant who represented England at the OECD meetings which designed PISA, I do think I might be slightly more accurate than some when I say that the way the findings are presented in this country is so far from the reality of what the survey sets out to do, and so badly misrepresented by politicians, that they may as well be talking about a completely different survey. PISA does not - it cannot : the language issue alone prevents true comparability - rank students across countries as if all have sat the same questions at the same time. Its use as a league table is a dreadful misuse of otherwise valuable data. What it does do quite effectively is enable us to draw conclusions about the impact which different factors have on outcomes in education systems. So you can reasonably argue that PISA can help us to identify links between outcomes such as school structures, teacher qualifications, socio-economic background, non-native speakers and so on. But it is, was, and always will be, nonsense, to suggest that this is some sort of international GCSE league table. Its not, and the fact that it is presented as such by an ignorant press with an agenda is just such a waste of potential. It allows mendacious ideologues like Gove to use what it doesnt say (British kids less able than foreign kids) to obscure what it does say (inequality and systemic fragmentation are associated with lower standards). Anyway, carry on....
Posted on: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 12:37:18 +0000
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