The subsidized school urges to re-do end-of-stage tests in all centers after the PISA fiasco

BarcelonaThe PISA tests fiasco in Catalonia has revived demands related to the assessment of Catalan students. After Education Minister Esther Niubó explained this Monday the error that has invalidated Catalonia's results in the OECD tests – having excluded more students than allowed, an error for which the State gave up to seven warnings and which, according to Niubó, if they had been heeded would have allowed the situation to be corrected – the subsidized school has demanded that the end-of-stage tests – the old basic competencies – be conducted again in all centers. The objective, they explain, is to somehow compensate for the information gap that the lack of reliable results in the PISA tests will leave.

In a statement, the Fundació Escola Cristiana de Catalunya (FECC), which brings together two-thirds of Catalonia's subsidized educational centers, has once again put forward the request that end-of-stage tests be census-based again, instead of sample-based. That is, that this assessment be carried out by all schools and institutes in the country. "At a time when Catalonia will not be able to have PISA results fully comparable with previous editions, we have the basic competencies tests, and it is necessary to preserve the assessment tools that offer continuity and allow us to track the evolution of educational results over time," defended the general secretary of the FECC, Meritxell Ruiz. In fact, sources from the Foundation explain that they have already made this request to the department on other occasions, but that they now see it as even more necessary.

The Department of Education announced at the end of last year that the end-of-stage tests, which until then were taken by all students in 6th grade of primary school and 4th year of ESO, would cease to be census-based and, instead, would only be conducted in about sixty centers that would be chosen "randomly with representativeness standards, that is, with scientific criteria according to strata of center complexity, ownership, and size of the center". Both the Government and the newly established Agency for Educational Evaluation and Prospective – the body that replaces the defunct Higher Council for Evaluation and which was not active when the errors in the PISA samples occurred – justified that the change in criteria was made to "be able to introduce anchoring aspects and issues of rigor, representativeness, and scientific and statistical reliability". 

Broadly speaking, they explained that, scientifically, to know the level of Catalan students, it is sufficient to carry out the tests with a careful sample of schools – as the OECD does worldwide with the PISA tests – and, therefore, it is not necessary for all schools and institutes in the country to take the exams to obtain reliable results. Tests that unions and teachers insisted also took up a lot of their time.

Information for schools

From the FECC, however, they argue that, beyond the general level of students in the country, these tests also served the directors and teachers of the centers to know where their students stood at the end of primary and secondary school, both in the academic field and in comparison with the rest of the schools and institutes in the country. "These evaluations provide each center with rigorous and useful information to guide improvement plans, reinforce student learning, and make pedagogical decisions based on objective data," they insist from the institution.