--without wide differences between children from wealthy and disadvantaged families--
so now singapore has the magic pisa bullet. previously it was found in shanghai.
but when shanghai's scores were critically reviewed, they were found to be
biased by oversampling of students who attended schools that were above
average. thus, since most below average students were not tested, test scores
were high and highly misrepresented shanghai and china. this is considered a
"sampling error" by the folks who do the statistical development and analysis
(apparently something schleicher missed). it's also a form of gaming the
system, probably by chinese officials who want to look good.
we are supposed to believe that schleicher got it right this time and singapore
has palmed the magic bullet. oh, brother. i don't have time to look at this in
depth, but let's look at what makes a "disadvantaged family."
here's berliner from 2014:
...Investigations of the poverty-test score relationships in PISA 2012 (OECD, 2013) relied on two variables...First, they used a family social class measure...combining three factors: the highest occupational level of either parent; the highest educational level of the parents; and home possessions (particularly, books in the home). This family index of social class standing is not income...
...[the second variable was] information obtained from school principals about the school attended by each child in the sample...wealth and the poverty of the student body, housing patterns, values in the school catchment areas, the qualities of the teachers assigned to the schools the children attend, the funding of the schools, and a number of other school level variables...
[pisa statisticians then turn these subjective reports into numbers
that may or may not reliably indicate whether or not a family is in
the 'disadvantaged' range. we need to know the reliability of this
categorization in order to know whether any related finding is
legitimate. but instead of asking this question, folks just assume
schleicher is right (this time) and naively make conclusions. the
truth here is that making international comparisons is not as simple
as just looking at two numbers and saying this one's higher. the
number may be higher only because the stats are erroneous.]
more berliner:
...PISA looked at “resilient students,” those who are in the bottom quartile of the social class distribution, but in the top quartile in the achievement test distribution. These are 15-year-olds who seem to break the shackles imposed by family and neighborhood poverty. In the USA, about 6% of the children do that. So 94% of youth born into or raised in that lower quartile of family culture and resources do not make it into the top quartile of school achievers. Admittedly, poverty is hard to overcome in most countries. But why is it that Belgium, Canada, Finland, Turkey, and Portugal, among many others, produce at least 40% more “resilient kids” than do we? Could it be because the class lines are more hardened here in the USA? Whatever the cause, given these data, the mantra that “Poverty is no Excuse” seems weak, and easily countered by the more rational statement that comes directly from the PISA data, namely, that family poverty and its sequelae severely limit the life chances of most children in the lower quartiles, quintiles, and deciles on measures of social class standing.
dianeravitch.net
i don't know whether singapore's scores are inflated by gaming, but statistical errors are
a concern and may be in play here. when academic test scores are interpreted properly,
they can provide guidance. unfortunately, international academic test scores have
become a privatization battering ram used by neoliberals to reduce costs. the analyses
released in the press are nearly always on politic and have little to do with improving education. |
