PISA—the international test, the Program in International Student Assessment—has set off an insane competition among nations to lift their ranking. Only one country can be #1, and the rankings have political consequences. Rich countries always get higher scores than poor ones. Nations with less poverty get higher scores than those with more poverty.
The US typically ranks in the middle, not because it is a poor country but because it has very high rates of child poverty. But the news media always report the results like a horse race and blame the schools because we are not number one. We have never been number one on international assessments because of the 20-25% of our children who live in poverty. Yet neither the federal nor state governments have adopted a goal of reducing child poverty.
The media simply refuse to acknowledge that the tests tell us that poverty matters. Instead, they produce raw meat for demagogues with simple solutions, like Michelle Rhee, Campbell Brown, and Arne Duncan, now DeVos. When the PISA results are released, it is another opportunity to moan about “a Sputnik moment” and dreams of becoming more like South Korea or Shanghai.
Why don’t the media or the politicians say it is time to emulate Finland, which has high rankings, low child poverty, and no standardized testing?
William Stewart of the British TES (Times Educational Supplement) reports that teachers are feeling anxiety over national rankings.
Why are the nations of the world bothering to participate? Maybe it is a matter of national pride, even though most are doomed to “fail.”
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if nations opted out?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There are only 45 countries on the list, so many others have already opted out !
The PISA was originally intended only for the OECD countries and any other countries that voluntarily applied to be included.
The 34 original OECD member countries are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, …
Today, approximately 50 industrialised and emerging-economy countries have joined the OECD as members or adherents.
https://www.oecdwatch.org/oecd-ncps/about-the-oecd/
But there are 195 countries in the world today. Almost 26 percent of the world’s countries belong to the OECD.
Then there is this:
David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge wrote: “Pisa does present the uncertainty in the scores and ranks – for example the United Kingdom rank in the 65 countries is said to be between 23 and 31. It’s unwise for countries to base education policy on their Pisa results, as Germany, Norway and Denmark did after doing badly in 2001.”
According to Forbes, in some countries PISA selects a sample from only the best-educated areas or from their top-performing students, slanting the results. China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore and Argentina were only some of the examples.
According to an open letter to Andreas Schleicher, “OECD and Pisa tests are damaging education worldwide”.
The unhealthy preoccupation with rankings and scores can be very misleading. The national scores represent an average. Diverse nations with significant amounts of childhood poverty will not be on the top of the list, but these rankings say nothing about many individuals in the mid-range scoring countries. Great Britain and the US have some of the best students in the world. These students achieve at high levels. These countries produce a great number of patents, technology and scientific discoveries. Significant amounts of childhood poverty bring down the national average, but it does not imply these nations aren’t producing achievers.
Access to technology is feeding our data mania. People need to understand that test score data can be misleading as well. People should look at the Great Schools’ data with skepticism. A diverse community with some poor students will not score as well as a homogeneously affluent community. A district with lower scores may be just as good or better than one with higher scores. People look to move into an area should visit schools and talk to some people in the community and not rush to judgment based on a “Great Schools” rating.
“People need to understand that test score data can be misleading as well.”
Not can, but is.
All standardized test score data is complete horse manure as it is due to the GIGO principle-Garbage In Garbage Out.
retired teacher,
You made two MOST IMPORTANT POINTS:
“The unhealthy preoccupation with rankings and scores can be very misleading.”
“Access to technology is feeding our data mania.”
Far too many people think “technology” solves all problems by measuring the snot out of everything. Technology is limited.
Understanding the LIMITS of what technology can and cannot do is the challenge in addition to FOLLOWING the money.
Beware the technocrats.
And beware politicians and big business bringing promises and pushing their wares/solutions. They have no clue and neither do those temporary workers scoring “high stakes tests” across the country.
When a crazy person, who repeatedly gets fired from jobs, is banned from places of businesses, and is plain nasty and hates kids and teachers can get hired as a temporary worker grading high stakes tests …. I KNOW THIS COUNTRY has LOST ITS MIND.
While I describe only one example of this kind of chicanery, we know that this is not an isolated case.
Another situation: I actually had an immigrant (I have no objections to immigrants for most who live in America come from immigrant families), I do have problems when an immigrant who came here as an adult tells me that our education system sucks because this person was basically told that s/he cannot be hired to be a substitute teacher, because need verification of education and work history.
We know about articles like the following. Maybe one proactive act we can do is to make copies of articles and place them in doctor’s offices, dentist’s offices, and other places where people may read them?
Buy Diane’s new book and give them to friends and family.
If pornography is so easily available, so should information like the following information:
http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/case-standardized-testing/
http://neatoday.org/2014/06/17/the-high-stakes-testing-culture-how-we-got-here-how-we-get-out/
http://neatoday.org/2018/04/04/daniel-koretz-testing-charade/
As many of you know, there’s MORE. It’s not as if this “ELEPHANT in the room” hasn’t been discussed and pointed out.
I had to smile when I saw this blog post. About twenty years ago, in my twenties, I decided to make a career change to education. I remember writing a report for a class and quoting PISA scores, in relation to the poor performance in the U.S. I thought I knew a little “something about something” after reading the PISA report. After more than 10 years in an elementary classroom along with the wisdom of Diane, and many other bloggers and authors ~ oh how my understanding and interpretation of published data has changed! I wish everyone who made policy decisions, or administrative decisions, were required to teach 5-10 years, in a public school, in the grades they were impacting. And to read your books and blog. Thank you Diane for your tireless work.
“The media simply refuse to acknowledge that the tests tell us that poverty matters.”
The tests tell us nothing worth caring about. You see, since the test results are completely invalid (as per Wilson 1997), nothing valid can be inferred from the data. Or as Wilson puts it the results are “vain and illusory”.
Now I would agree with:
“The media simply refuse to acknowledge that poverty matters” in a student’s learning.
I disagree. Without the international rankings how would anyone know that we should emulate Finland, with its small classes, plenty of recess, shorter school day and year and little to no standardized testing?
Could we do that with simple observation? Since observational study is as reliable as testing, we could take the anecdotal evidence of those whose experience teaches us to accept ideas that are sensible and thereby achieve the same thing without seeking to stack countries, which leads inexorably to stacking children. The next step is a sort of caste system whereby some are untouchable.
Having an external influence on national and state policy, especially such an inaccurate one, harms our governments’ ability to make sound policy judgments. International testing might lead a country into emulating the PISA exam with mandatory annual nationwide testing, and might call it NCLB, for example. That same country which used to have smaller classes, plenty of recess, shorter school days and years in many cases, little standardized testing and teacher autonomy might fall for some sort of Race to the Bottom score-based privatization scheme, since after all the sky appears to be falling on said “nation at risk”. India Opted Out of PISA due to cultural opprobrium. The U.S. should Opt Out too. We should set ourselves free.
The fact of a world test says something about the standards movement and the desire to compare educations. While comparison of understanding of specific techniques in engineering or medicine might make some sense, it would only be one part of an evaluation on the part of a country that wanted to see how to improve.
The standards movement gave us testing as a stacking mechanism.