Gabriel Heller

The psychosis of the PISA report and best practices

The enemies of school reform have something of a champion in Finland’s Pasi Sahlberg. In a recent comment piece for the Guardian, he discusses his self-invented bogeyman, the ‘Global Education Reform Movement’ with the evil-sounding acronym ‘GERM’. GERM has failed, he says. In his story, choice, competition, and accountability have spread like a virus around the world, infecting education system after education system. But, according to Sahlberg, there’s no evidence the policies work! Only that they increase school segregation, which in turn may have a negative effect on equality in outcomes. He tries to quote the latest 2012 PISA survey to prove his point.

Except there’s a problem: the OECD report to which Sahlberg refers has nothing, I repeat nothing, to say about effective practices and policies for raising performance. This is because it’s a non-academic report that can’t separate causation from correlation. If one is interested in understanding what works in PISA, an understanding of the academic research is therefore key.

There’s no reason why Coffee Housers should have read Sahlberg’s piece, but it is worth paying attention to because it won’t be long before his errors are cited by those trying to crush Britain’s current school reform experiment.

Comments

Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.

Already a subscriber? Log in