PISA: a real disaster
After the most complicated school year in Catalan classrooms, with a final month marked by an unprecedented series of strikes, when practically the entire educational community is already on vacation, a new bucket of cold water arrives. This time on one of the international evaluation pillars. The latest PISA tests taken in Catalonia were a fiasco. It is a real disaster: the selection of students who took them was done incorrectly. In the rest of Spain, it was done correctly.
The OECD already warned the Department of Education of the Generalitat in March, but the ministry has not made it public until now: on a Friday in late July, when teachers and families are far from the school routine. The blunder is monumental. And the way of communicating it, too. Not only because of the delay, but also because the minister Esther Niubó has not shown her face. Will anyone take political responsibility for this debacle? Or will we pretend that nothing is happening and that it is just an unimportant technical error: “A technical incident, isolated and punctual”?
In fact, it's not even clear what happened. Administrative negligence? Technical incapacity? An attempt to improve the PISA level of 15-year-old Catalan students by excluding more than permitted from the test, those who would a priori lower the average? The fact that the PISA coincided with the end-of-stage tests for 4th year of ESO, and that the most lenient selection criteria would have been mimicked, sounds like an excuse from a sore loser. The fact is that the OECD gives a maximum margin of 5% when excluding boys and girls with relevant problems from the tests. Well, in the Catalan case, 23.2% were discarded.
The selection is made by the centers themselves. But shouldn't there be a general review afterwards by the department or the ministry? Didn't anyone control the selection to adhere to the required percentages? How could such a blunder happen? Has there been a control gap in the transition from the Higher Council for Evaluation to the new Evaluation Agency? Many unanswered questions.
The issue now is that the Catalan PISA results, which will be released in September, will have a very relative value and, in any case, will not be representative or comparable with other countries or with the country's own historical sequence. And it must be taken into account that PISA is done every three years. That is to say, evaluatively, three years have been lost. And we are not exactly overflowing with serious records to know how to regain educational momentum. Given the general pessimism and disorientation, this phenomenal oversight was all that was missing.
The PISA scores will be known with the school year just begun. If they are good, we will know why: because, deliberately or not, a biased selection of students was made. And if they are bad, worse: not even with those who succeed are we succeeding. The climate of the school restart, moreover, will be marked by the announced new assembly mobilizations of teachers, with unions overwhelmed after their agreement with the department was not approved by their bases. The spiral of protest seems to have not ended. We are in a virtuous circle. With what legitimacy will a councilor who has been discredited by her team's PISA fiasco lead the pacification of the educational community?