PISA Results Are Out Today & They Don’t Necessarily Tell Us What The Headlines About It Say They Do

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The PISA results are out today, along with lots of doom-and-gloom headlines about their results.

Be skeptical about those news stories, for multiple reasons, not least of which is the fact U.S. scores are being reported with a literal asterisk because OECD, the test’s sponsor, says the U.S. sent incomplete results.

There are many, many issues with PISA – the role of student motivation around a test that means nothing to their futures, skewed sample sizes, and many others.

The best piece to read about this year’s test scores is, without a doubt, Matt Barnum’s U.S. moves up in PISA test score rankings because other countries are doing worse. It’s also worth reading this Ed Week piece, especially the last section.

You might also want to read The NY Times piece just because of the ridiculous quote from the OECD saying U.S. scores aren’t great because, unlike in other countries, we don’t get the best people as teachers (I’m not joking – he actually said that!).

Here are a few skeptical pieces about PISA from previous years that continue to be relevant to this batch of scores:

PISA as a Mirror? Only If You Look (how student motivation skews international comparisons) is From Experience to Meaning.

Wales Pisa results: ‘Little will be learned’ by Dylan Wiliam at the BBC.

Don’t Read Too Much Into It: What Brexit and U.S. Election Surprises Can Teach Us about PISA by Yong Zhao.

‘Ignore Pisa entirely,’ argues top academic is from tes.

Why Americans should not panic about international test results appeared in The Washington Post.

What the latest standardized school tests really tell us is from The L.A. Times.

Might The PISA Results Finally Stop The Complaining About Physical School Closures?

I’m adding this info to The Best Sites For Getting Some Perspective On International Test Comparison Demagoguery.