

Guest Column: Test scores are apples-to-oranges comparisons

3:41 PM, Jan. 9, 2014  |  Comments
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There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth since the release of the Program for International Student Assessment scores, also known as PISA. As math professor Solomon Friedberg pointed out in a Los Angeles Times article, the United States did not perform in the top 20 countries in any category. Michelle Rhee, former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor, wrote an incendiary op-ed piece in Politico about how Common Core will fix all these ills. Even the Lafayette Daily Advertiser had an opinion piece claiming this was just the shock the nation needed to wake it from its complacency.

My response to all this hysteria: Take a chill pill.

First of all, PISA scores do not provide a full picture of the U.S. and its unique situation. Veteran teacher Mercedes Schneider wrote a devastating, fact-filled article on her blog that pointed out that simply because countries like Latvia, Estonia and Vietnam are out-performing the U.S. on these tests does not signify some superpower triumvirate takeover of the world. Perhaps we should do like China, which only tests the city of Shanghai. Yes, Ireland and Poland outscored us, but what exactly does that mean?

The U.S. is still No. 1 in patents, has the world's largest economy, and is in no danger any time soon of falling into some secondary status compared to these countries.

What exactly would these professors, chancellors and editorial boards like us to do? Become testing hells as in certain Asian countries that place so much emphasis on high-stakes tests that their students crumble under the pressure and commit suicide?

Often many of them have simply parroted the tired statements that the rigor of Common Core will solve all problems, even though there is no empirical evidence that this will be the case.

What PISA also does not take into account is the crushing effect poverty has on a nation's scores. The U.S. has a poverty rate higher than 20 percent, yet countries like Finland have rates less than a quarter of that. When you look at the scores of those portions of the U.S. that have comparable poverty rates, our students rank first.

What we need to do is address the poverty problem, and while I am not advocating that such things are easy or that education needs no improvement, it gets tiresome to hear oft-repeated mantras in the hopes that they will turn fiction into fact.

So, when the next set of PISA scores comes out three years from now, remember that it's not a terribly useful tool, producing apples-to-oranges comparisons.

Oh - and take the chill pill.

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