Public Education Is Not a Job Training Program

There is a piece at theconversation.com on the uselessness of using comparative PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) scores to assess the state of any individual nation's education system.  In a brilliant summary of the problems with looking to PISA results to justify particular educational reform, education lecturer Graham Birrell points out:

The results released by the OECD would be more useful if they helped us to identify how to improve, but the countries ahead of us have such radically different approaches that anybody can pick and choose almost any educational approach and say there is “evidence from PISA” that it would work.

 Birrell is referring to Britain, but he could be making the same statement about the United States.  It is amusing to think about the vicissitudes of education reform in this country when considering Birrell's next statement:

Do you favour long hours and rote-learning? Well apparently they work, since countries in the Far East do very well in PISA. Perhaps you prefer shorter hours, very highly qualified teachers and light-touch accountability. Well PISA tells us they work too, as can be seen in the success of Finland, which, despite a dip in the 2012 results, has historically always been at or near the top. The data you cherry pick from the PISA results is likely to tell you far more about your own political inclinations than something meaningful about educational answers for the UK.

Certainly one could substitute 'USA' for 'UK' and the statement would apply equally well.

What is particularly interesting about Birrell's piece is the revelation that the PISA examinations are not what everyone assumes them to be.  In short,  

Children in each country only take a small sample of each of the three tests, with their total score being estimated using a mathematical model that David Spiegelharter, Professor of Statistics at Cambridge University, has declared “demonstrably inadequate”.

Of course this aspect of the PISA methodology is rarely reported when (typically) conservative alarmists tout the results as reason to commodify and privatize public education.

Birrell does note that PISA scores can be useful to evaluate education within a nation.  For example, in Britain the results demonstrated that "state schools did much better than private schools" when socioeconomic status was controlled for.  Not surprisingly the tests also showed that economically challenged areas serve disproportionately high percentage of "disadvantaged students."  However, Birrell accurately notes:

However, this more useful side to the results does not justify the central flaw with the whole PISA approach, which is the fact that the scores are used as a tool to reconfigure education according to economic goals.

Much like the UK, we too have abandoned the notion that education has "intrinsic self-worth" and instead consider it little more than an instrumentality to "prepare children for the world of work and the 'global race.'" I for one loathe the idea of public education as job training, which, it must said, ought to be the responsibility of the private sector and not the public schools.  Not only is this wholly instrumental approach to education depressing in an existential way, it also functions in a perverse manner as justification to devalue education.  Rather than focusing on the right to a decent public education, which would entail a broad-based approach to learning with concomitant expenditure of resources, education reformers in this country want to focus solely on whether students leave school ready to find a job.  When this is the focus, education suffers because so much of what we have historically considered valuable in education (the arts, music, physical education, competence in a wide range of subjects) becomes so many useless expenditures to be cut (at least for public schools - if you can pay for an elite private education then you can have all the arts and useless humanities that you want).