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

BarcelonaCatalonia's fiasco with the PISA tests has revived demands related to the evaluation of Catalan students. After Education Minister Esther Niubó explained this Monday the error that invalidated Catalonia's results in the OECD tests – having excluded more students than allowed, an error the State had warned about up to seven times and which, according to Niubó, if heeded would have allowed the situation to be corrected – the subsidized school sector has requested that the end-of-stage tests – the old basic competencies – be reintroduced in all centers. The objective, they explain, is to somehow compensate for the information gap that will be left by the lack of reliable results in the PISA tests.

In a statement, the Fundació Escola Cristiana de Catalunya (FECC), which groups two-thirds of the subsidized educational centers in Catalonia, has once again put forward the request for end-of-stage tests to be census-based again, instead of sample-based. That is, that this evaluation 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 those of previous editions, we have the basic competencies tests, and it is necessary to preserve the evaluation 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 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 and 4th year of ESO, would cease to be census-based and, instead, would only be administered in about sixty centers 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 the Evaluation and Prospective of Education – the body that replaces the defunct High Council of 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 enough 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 in order to have 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 school principals and teachers to know where their students stood at the end of primary and secondary education, both academically 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.