More Reasons Not to Believe the Hype About International Test Scores

Diane Ravitch has a great piece on the OECD PISA scores at commondreams.org.  Of note, Ravitch points out the common misconception that U.S. students scored well on these tests in some halcyon past.  The fact is that U.S. students have never scored particularly well on these tests.  It is also true that the U.S. student performance on PISA tests has had no relationship to the economic success of the nation.  Ravitch summarizes and quotes Keith Baker who has written extensively on this issue:

Baker wrote that a certain level of educational achievement may be "a platform for launching national success, but once that platform is reached, other factors become more important than further gains in test scores. Indeed, once the platform is reached, it may be bad policy to pursue further gains in test scores because focusing on the scores diverts attention, effort, and resources away from other factors that are more important determinants of national success." What has mattered most for the economic, cultural, and technological success of the U.S., he says, is a certain "spirit," which he defines as "ambition, inquisitiveness, independence, and perhaps most important, the absence of a fixation on testing and test scores."

Unfortunately for school age children, their teachers, and anyone else who has firsthand knowledge of the education process, the education reform movement (or, as Ravitch dubs it, "The Bad News Industry") seems to lack the very spirit of ambition, inquisitiveness, and independence that matters most for our economic, cultural, and technological success. 

For a nation that has risen to be the world's leading economic, military, and cultural power, one would think that those with an interest in education would be asking themselves, "how can we ensure that we continue to get it right?"  Of course this would mean that we would have to address the profound negative impact that growing income disparity has on education, the profound negative impact poverty without adequate social safety nets has on education, and the profound negative impact diverting resources away from public education has on education.  (The fact that I had to write that last clause both shocks and nauseates.)  I am not betting that the corporate interests that pervade the Bad News Industry has any interest in tackling these problems.  It is much easier to bemoan our students' performance on a meaningless international examination than to actually do something that would make education better and stronger.

I will leave the last word to Ravitch:

Let others have the higher test scores. I prefer to bet on the creative, can-do spirit of the American people, on its character, persistence, ambition, hard work, and big dreams, none of which are ever measured or can be measured by standardized tests like PISA.