Peter Wilby is correct to challenge the dependability and relevance of the Programme for Worldwide Student Assessment (Pisa) tests (Do not let a dubious check dictate how we educate, two December). Likewise when he writes that behind the tests “lies an ideology that accepts financial development and competiveness as the sole aims of schooling”. No shock, because Pisa is run by the OECD, which was established in 1960 to attain “the highest sustainable economic growth”. Given that then it is apparent to many that financial development is a prime driver of worldwide warming and “sustainability” has been lost in financial chaos. As Wilby says, “May well justice, social harmony and a clean atmosphere be just as essential for our children’s long term as economic prosperity?” It is time that the OECD not only drops the farce of Pisa tests but realigns its aims with the demands of a planet that is obtaining warmer, hungry and angry at injustice.
Professor Michael Bassey
Newark, Nottinghamshire
• Why have these tests at all? Most teachers can tell us, quite cheaply, how properly young children are carrying out, who is doing nicely, who needs much more assistance, with out the difficult, expensive and typically invalid rigmarole of formal testing. Nowhere in the workplace are men and women topic to this kind of regimes. Employees are not sat down in serried ranks and provided unseen papers to check how well they do their jobs! Such a method would be preposterous – and it is no significantly less preposterous when applied to students.
Roy Boffy
Aldridge, Walsall
• The news that British schools have not improved their position in the Pisa league tables will come as no surprise at all to any person who has read Fiona Millar’s post on the folks who advise political parties in their education policies (Who has all the large suggestions?, three November). As the bulk of advisers and members of thinktanks are privately educated with Oxbridge degrees, they are hardly most likely to have the knowledge and skills to come up with suggestions to boost the top quality of schooling in our principal and secondary state colleges. On the other hand, the Pisa results are surprising in see of the dramatic improvements in educating, the elevated enthusiasm of the teachers and the enormous boost in pupil effort I have witnessed in over 40 years of teaching. Perhaps the continuous adjustments to curriculum, “greatest practice” and the Ofsted criteria for judging schools and teachers may possibly have something to do with it?
Bernie Evans
Liverpool
• Twenty-five years of the national curriculum, political micromanagement of the syllabus and pedagogy, a lot more than a decade of dismantling the reforms of extensive schooling, and many years of a punitive Ofsted regime, and what has all this upheaval, anxiety and coercion actually attained? Unfortunately, the government response appears to be: “the beatings will continue right up until morale improves”.
A cheerier way of reading the outcomes, however, may possibly be to see them as a triumph for those teachers, pupils and families who have managed to maintain specifications regardless of the ideological havoc unfolding close to them.
Professor Donald Gillies
York
• I have made a mini league table for mathematics (dividing real scores by five.54 to give Korea a hundred): Korea 100 Japan 97 Germany 93 France 89 United kingdom 89. I think we did quite well and our students appreciate college: they also have a lifestyle outside it. Can we please cease beating ourselves up and vilifying our teachers.
Trevor Randall
Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire
• Michael Gove claims that England’s “mediocre” ranking is the fault of Labour schooling policies to which existing 15-year-olds had been subjected, and Tristram Hunt retorts that the benefits demonstrate that England demands to emulate large-ranking nations this kind of as Singapore (Report, two December).
Both interpretations are fallacious. We do not know what qualities of the English, Singaporean or any other program may possibly be accountable for its efficiency. Even if a single is ready to assume that these exams are valid, and there is excellent investigation proof to query such an assumption, it is clear that nations will do better than other individuals for a myriad of feasible motives. These consist of cultural distinctions, economic status, emphasis on test tactics, as nicely as genuine differences in functionality. The benefits of the P tests inform us nearly nothing about the brings about of nation differences.
The ideal point to do with these results would be for policymakers to shrug their shoulders, end making simplistic comparisons, ignore the hype and perform out no matter whether Pisa is value for money.
Harvey Goldstein
Professor of social statistics, University of Bristol
• More than 25 years in the past the Guardian said “a succession of scientific studies have shown that the Uk lags far behind German [sic], Japan and France in mathematical education” (Editorial, 24 February 1988) and that “there is no longer 1 study but numerous displaying British children lagging behind their German contemporaries. The bottom 40 per cent are now two many years behind their German contempories [sic] at 14″ (Editorial, 23 March 1988).
I decided, for my dissertation, to investigate the provenance of these claims. I identified that they had been based on extrapolations of doubtful validity on unique data that have been of questionable value. Leeds University awarded me a distinction for my pains, and supplied its facilities to get my “astounding” findings published. Alas, none of the related journals would accept my article and even the Guardian failed to publish a summary. A colleague explained that it was hard to get publication for articles that were not “trendy” (ie supported rather than criticised British education). So the area you have offered to Mr Wilby is a welcome sign of altered instances.
Peter Wrigley
Birstall, Yorkshire
• We must not base our training method on a leaning tower.
Stan Labovitch
Windsor
Britain"s ranking in the global education league
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