Michael Gove can’t be judged on these Pisa results

While the Pisa results offer some vindication for Tory reforms, the full picture is more nuanced, writes William Stewart
6th December 2019, 12:05am
Correlation Does Not Equal Causation

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Michael Gove can’t be judged on these Pisa results

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archived/michael-gove-cant-be-judged-these-pisa-results

At the start of the decade, it was nigh on impossible for Michael Gove, then education secretary, to make a speech without mentioning the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa).

Back then, the story of England’s “plummet” down the international rankings was education’s “get Brexit done” ; trotted out with monotonous regularity by the government in an attempt to ram home a wider political advantage. It was a narrative that allowed Gove to justify free schools, mass academisation, sweeping changes to the national curriculum and an entirely new set of A levels and GCSEs.

Gove may be long gone from the Department for Education. But this is the week that the global rankings he sought to make so much political capital out of could have come back and bitten him.

Senior figures in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which produces Pisa, have privately referred to the latest edition as “Michael Gove’s report card”. And it could have been a major PR blow to the agenda he set in motion if the reforms had precipitated another plunge down the tables.

They haven’t. England’s maths score has improved by 11 points, taking it up nine places to 17th in a notional league table of the world’s education systems. We are also up in the rankings for reading and science.

The NEU teaching union was quick to assert that it was too early for the Conservatives to take credit for any gains because they “reflect an education system before the [Gove’s] market reforms”. That feels a little unfair. The sample of 15-year-olds who took Pisa tests last year had spent four years studying under the new national curriculum and were working towards Gove’s deliberately tougher, more traditional GCSEs.

But how real were the gains? The National Foundation for Educational Research, which delivered Pisa in England, has cautioned that the reading and science results are less positive than they could have been, given England’s “focus on improving standards in these subjects”. The slight rise in reading was not statistically significant and the science ranking improvement was only relative, with performance falling compared with 2015.

So, just as Mr Gove’s original claim of a plummet down the tables for England was statistically dubious, so would claims of a huge victory for his reforms based on these results. And that speaks to a wider truth about Pisa: it is unwise to give any apparent revelations too much weight. The study has been riddled with correlation masquerading as causation. And that’s just the published findings. Look under the bonnet, and the reasons for scepticism only multiply.

The fundamental but inconvenient truth is that there are real limitations to how useful and accurate the application of a common measure to vastly different education systems can be. A UCL Institute of Education study strongly suggests that Pisa is not actually measuring the efficacy of school systems at all. It shows that East Asian pupils who were second-generation immigrants in Australia performed better in Pisa than almost everyone else in the world, despite being taught in an “average” education system.

Pisa has achieved global influence way out of proportion to the robustness of its conclusions. The world’s education ministers increasingly live or die by the study and revise their policies according to its findings.

While Pisa is undoubtedly a useful starting point for discussion about education policy, it is no more than that. So, as the latest results are digested, everyone - governments included - would do well to stand back from the hype and treat them in the manner that they deserve.

@wstewarttes

This article originally appeared in the 6 December 2019 issue under the headline “Gove survives Pisa ‘report card’, but study is on shaky foundations”

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