Comparisons over time in PISA

EDUCATION JOURNAL 17 T wo of the three major international comparison research projects – PIRLS and PISA – were published in late November and early December and in this international supplement we bring you detailed reports on these two programmes and analysis of these and some other international surveys. This supplement is a collaborative effort from NFER’s leading researchers and some of our most experienced journalists. Media coverage of PISA in particular has been largely inaccurate, as we report in the media page. This is partly because these major international research programmes are vast and complex, while journalists on daily newspapers have only a few hours to read and analyse them and limited space for their reports. While the headlines about PISA reported the UK’s fall down the international league tables, this was neither true nor the real story. As Ian Schagen, Head of Statistics at NFER, explains below, you cannot compare the UK’s performance over time with the PISA data (though you can compare England and Scotland over time with PIRLS.) On other hand, the evidence PISA in particular contained about the impact of various policies on student performance went largely unreported. Some of the evidence from PISA may be unwelcome news for some politicians, as we report, but it has little to do with places in league tables. Mike Baker looks at the McKinsey report How the World’s Best-performing School Systems Come out on Top, which was produced by a team led by Sir Michael Barber, as well as the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2007. While Baker looks at schools, John O’Leary covers Education at a Glance from a higher education perspective. We have brief reports from Australia, New Zealand and the USA. To round off our international supplement, Martin Rogers reports on his recent visit to China. What all these reports show is that there are things we can learn from what is happening around the world, but the data is complex. There is evidence that policy makers should be guided by, though that evidence will not always be welcome. International Supplement