None had any discourse around what the PISA scores measure and if there's any problematisation warranted around the methodology etc. So, in the end, it just serves as a regular outrage topic for the news cycle, but because no-one understands what the scores mean, no-one can do anything about them.
People mostly blame it in the lack of consideration for teachers, with teacher salaries being among the lowest in the country compared to other communities.
I am a little pissed, lol, because for example Germany is the only country which includes so called "Sonderschulen", special schools for disabled peoples. And I learned that some country's told some people to don't go to school in the test time.
So I think shouldn't be labeled as a "competition" but more like something to learn from other people and countries..
Do you think the countries that are more inclined to tell students that are behind to not show up to school have an education ethos that will hel long term?
It's ways good to compare but we should measure what's being compared too.
It's been a discussion in Norway for a long time. Particularly interesting to me is the fact that high-school students in Norway typically appear to be equal to or above their peers, while the top university students seem to be world class, so somehow they seem to catch up in later studies.
Romania: PM uses poor results to justify cancelling promised raises to teachers' salaries, raises that were negociated after protests earlier this year.
Education Minister pretends the results are excellent, despite them being worse than previous ones.
As a Canadian, being so high on the list kind of makes me sad for humanity. So many people are worse than us? We aren't exactly impressive, in my opinion.
The same goes for other countries. Germany, for example, has 16 different school systems. But I know from the media coverage that there is more detailed data. I think it's just to simplify the image.
Poland: not much surprise. These have just proved how the previous government destroyed education here.
Note: one of the first decision the new government is to make is a significant raise for teachers, but all the damages done over last 8 years won't be that easy to fix.