The Meaning of PISA

OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests 15-year-olds on their knowledge of reading, maths and science. Publication of the latest test results has raised much alarm in the UK - and in other countries that we think of as “advanced” - because our students seem to be flat-lining  in a world apparently being overtaken by the likes of China and  the Asian Tigers. Some of the dismayed rhetoric emanating from the Education Secretary has sounded eerily like an updated version of a terror known in the late nineteenth and a good part of the twentieth centuries as the “yellow peril”, namely that the West was about to be overrun by hoards of ill-intentioned folk from the Far East.  Ghengis Khan, thirteenth century founder of the fearsome Mongol Empire, provides the proto-type.
“Do PISA scores matter?” was  the introductory topic  on  BBC’s December 5th edition of Question Time.  All three politicians on the panel concurred that they do, along with that self-important purveyor of prejudice Nick Ferrari (formerly of Fox News,  deviser of  Topless Darts  and the News Bunny - you get the picture).  Professor Mary Beard, sole educator on the panel, found herself alone in questioning the validity of PISA scores; but though she was clearly the most knowledgeable of those present, she was also the least articulate, possibly because she was less accustomed than her fellow-panelists to the soundbite world of instant opinion. Even though her intervention may have lacked impact, however, its thoughtfulness  provoked me to dig a little deeper into international educational comparisons.
Finding PISA sceptics proved easier than I expected.  A  Huffington Post article by Diane Ravitch, professor of education at New York University dismisses international test scores as worthless. While the US  has never been first in the world, nor even near the top, on international tests, Ravitch claims, it has done pretty well economically, and in terms of scientific invention and business creativity - in fact better on many measures than any other nation. She bases these assertions partly on her own observations but more on a paper by Keith Baker, a retired researcher at the US Department of Education, entitled Are International Tests Worth Anything?.
Baker’s  paper begins with his main conclusion: “...for the top dozen or so most-advanced nations in the world, standings in the league tables of international tests are worthless.”  He then goes onto analyse how well the First International Comparison Study (FIMS) - administered in 1964 to 12-year-olds in 11 countries - predicted national success in the first decade of the 21st century. [1] That he focuses his analysis on the US should not concern us unduly since of the eleven country participants in the 1964 FIMS, US students came second last, just ahead of Sweden.
Politicans wringing their hands (or gloating) over their nation’s PISA performance tend to think in simple terms of economic growth. Baker goes both deeper and wider. His measurements cover Wealth Creation, GDP growth, Productivity, Quality of Life, Democracy, and Creativity; and his results do not simply cast doubt on the validity of international comparisons of student performance, they are in some cases, starkly counterintuitive. He demonstrates convincingly, for example, that “the higher a nation’s test score 40 years ago, the worse its subsequent economic performance”.
In an analysis of a more recent PISA exercise incorporating 27 countries,  Bakers reaches similar conclusions :”...the nations that scored at the PISA average generally outperformed those scoring above or below average….   Mediocre test scores correlate with better, more successful countries than do top scores (or lower scores)”.
Rather than worrying about PISA, Baker argues, policy-makers would to better to concern themselves with issues that UK readers might recognise:  “run-down schools in the nation’s inner cites, misdirected parental interference in schools, …. the lack of parental and administrative support for teachers.” ...and assisting students to pursue the dreams and ambitions that really matter: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.[2]
Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang comes to a remarkably similar conclusion about education in his entertaining “23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism”.  In Thing 17,  subtitled “More education in itself is not going to make a country richer,”  Chang provides a plethora of examples to illustrate the point. Education is valuable, he maintains, not for raising productivity or GDP, but  for helping us to “...develop our potentials for living a fulfilling and independent life.”
The table below offers a comparison of selected countries by PISA score,  Nobel prizes (as a simple proxy for intellectual creativity) and GDP per capita. In the first of the two Nobel columns, I have counted solely Nobel prizes awarded since the beginning of the century so as to allow for the recent developmental advances that have occurred in the Far East.  The second column accounts for all Nobel prizes as a proportion of each country’s population. Israel and Finland are included on account of their reputation for educational quality.

Clearly the countries with the worst PISA scores are those with the most impressive  Nobel record. Equally significant, the correlation between PISA performance and GDP per capita is, as both Baker and Chang suggest, rather weak (less than 0.5).  Admittedly, the GDP comparison does not allow for a dynamic element of growth; but it does suggest the enormous distance China still has to travel in order to achieve a GDP per capita level similar to that of the “developed” world. Rather than fearing China’s progress we should be urging her on as well as applauding the achievements of countries like Korea and Taiwan that, in economic terms at least, have already reached the promised land.
Education Secretary Michael Gove has given no sign that he might be aware of the ambiguities inherent in PISA comparisons. What he has evidenced repeatedly - as Seamus Milne outlines in a corruscating critique - is a remarkable degree of political incompetence allied to an uncritical belief in his own genius, characteristics that would make him a figure of fun were his role in public life less important. On hearing him speak, I find myself irresistibly drawn to the thought that he might be an incarnation of Thomas Gradgrind, Dickens’ teeth-grinding, flint-hearted headmaster, for whom all that matters in life are “facts and calculations.”  Gove’s own words suggest he would probably welcome the likeness. Were he alive, would Dickens despair at this re-emergence in the flesh of what he had satirised on the page?
We should not be surprised then that Gove interprets the PISA results as indicating national failure. Rather, he gives the impression of relishing what he considers to be evidence of our scholarly mediocrity because it provides ammunition for his assault on two of his pet hatreds: state education and the Labour Party. Naturally, in the Education Secretary’s smug universe, the excellence of teachers, which he is ever quick to note for fear of an unwelcome riposte from the profession, is entirely a consequence of Tory (meaning his) policies, whereas our PISA results are a product of Labour ineptitude.
Among the current crop of parliamentarians, Gove is far from alone in preferring facile opinion to critical thinking. Today’s politicians would doubtless all claim to be well educated. Yet  in the matter of PISA, as in so many other matters, most display a remarkable lack of curiosity about the data they are fed. What might cause us to doubt the quality of our educational system  is their apparent inability to apply their minds to anything not addressed in their Party instructional manual. If at some stage they were trained to think for themselves, they seem to have deposited that faculty at the door of Party Central Office - hoping perhaps to pick it up when they retire and not realising that brainpower left in storage tends to atrophy for lack of exercise.
“In science,” Einstein once remarked, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” [3] Gove and many of his fellow parliamentarians appear to believe the opposite. Readers may judge which of the two is more likely to be right.

[1] He justifies the choice of decade  on the grounds that  “Today’s world is largely a world created and operated by the now 55-year-old FIMS generation”
[2] It is worth emphasizing that Baker does not claim (and nor do I) that educational standards and scores within nations are not valid and useful.
[3] Interview with George Sylvester Viereck, Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929

Moorfield and the NHS

A year ago I developed an unsightly lump on my left eyelid. At first, I thought it was a stye but when, after a month, it was still in place I consulted my doctor. He told me it was a chalazion cyst caused by a blocked tear gland, could last as long as six months but required no treatment. It lasted seven. Two months later it re-emerged in the same place, larger than ever and this time with a slight but discomforting addition of pain and blurred vision.
Further back in time, when I was living in Mexico, I was a regular dinner guest at my girlfriend’s family home. Other guests would often be present, one of whom, an elderly uncle, had a habit of launching on one of a seemingly infinite store of anecdotes with the phrase “Cuando yo mataba a la gente…” which roughly translates as “In the days when I used to kill people…” It took me a few dinners to inquire - nervously and in the uncle’s absence - whether I had correctly understood the meaning of such an alarming prolegomenon. When the initial burst of laughter had given way to appropriate sobriety, I received an explanation.  Uncle Luis had been a doctor but had ceased to practice while still a young man because his beloved wife had fallen seriously ill and he had been unable to save her. He had thereby concluded that doctors do more harm than good and people should stay away from them - a view that Moliere the great satirist of the medical profession might well have approved.
It is perhaps under these twin influences - the one literary the other experiential - that I have tried to steer clear of serious engagement with doctors, and though  my efforts have not always been successful, I am only too happy to find reasons for ignoring their counsel or simply not seeking it. Armed thus with my doctor’s original advice, namely to wait it out, I opted this time not even to bother him with a visit. I would simply do nothing.
So matters would have remained had an old friend who had suffered a similar problem not advised me to pay a visit to London’s Moorfield Eye Hospital.
“They cured me in no time, “ she said, adding by way of reassurance for my pocket that Moorfield is NHS and I wouldn’t have to pay.
At first I demurred on the grounds that I would have to get a referral from my doctor and then wait for months for an appointment.
“No, you just walk in.”
“?”
“You might have to wait, but they’ll see you for sure.”
My partner  plus a couple of other friends were listening to this conversation and now, with one voice, they urged me to seek treatment. What after all had I got to lose?
My reluctant answer: nothing very much.
So I followed the advice and, one Friday morning last September, walked into Moorfield Eye Hospital unannounced. To my surprise, the receptionist treated my sudden appearance as perfectly normal and directed me to the out-patient’s department where, after a ten-minute delay, my details and the purpose of my visit were noted and I was directed to an adjacent waiting area where some twenty others were already seated. I had brought the Penguin edition of Boethius to console me during what I was sure would be a near eternity of enforced faineancy, but had barely had time to read through the opening verses  of Book 1 before being interrupted by a nurse who bore me away for a preliminary assessment of my state of health. Then came a second period of waiting in a different area, before I was once again led away, this time, for an eye test. Third and fourth episodes of waiting and examination followed - each in a different location of the out-patients’ department whose layout is sufficiently bewildering to dispel any confidence the uninitiated might entertain about their navigational skills. This first visit lasted for about four hours, long enough for my sense of direction to abandon me entirely so that, despite a respectable amount of signage, I had to ask for directions to the exit. Nevertheless,  when I finally made my way out, I carried with me, in addition to  the news that I would need minor surgery, a brace of appointments, the first for a preliminary medical check-up, and the second for the main event.
The last of these took place a few hours ago and I am now  seated before the computer, minus an unpleasant cyst and with a very large patch over one eye, held in place by numerous lengths of white tape which I am instructed not to remove until the morrow. En route home, I felt like the very incarnation of Dickens infamous headmaster of Dotheboys Hall  because,  in addition to having only one (visible) eye, the blank side of my face was much wrinkled and patched up, which gave me a very sinister appearance, especially when I smiled.
None of that matters, of course.
What does matter is that the manner in which all the staff of Moorfield Eye Hospital dealt with me could not, in my view, be bettered. The organization works not so much like a well-oiled machine - for machines are impersonal  and can offer no tenderness or humour, still less awareness of pain - as the epitome of what one imagines a hospital should be: a place where skill, compassion and efficiency combine in the service of the people. This is the same, magnificent NHS that is odiously hounded by the right-wing gutter-press and repeatedly traduced by Tories bent on breaking it up and delivering the pieces to private profiteers. Both have seized with delight on the problems at Stafford Hospital, thereby fostering the patently false idea that it represents the NHS as a whole. By contrast, when it comes to awarding fat contracts to the private sector, our coalition government studiously avoids drawing a generally adverse conclusion about  the likes of G4S and Serco, companies under scrutiny for over-charging the government and false accounting.
Before embarking on my recent brief experience of the NHS at Moorfield, I harboured no small degree of scepticism, if not about the level of expertise, then certainly about the waiting times, bureaucracy and quality of patient-care I would encounter. Instead,  I have come away proud and grateful to live in a country capable of offering such exemplary service to someone who, literally, walks in off the street. In a world that continues to be driven by crass neo-liberal values, NHS is something rare and precious. We must do all we can to keep it; and if, by the next election, it has been largely sold off, then we must fight to take it back.

First published by Open Democracy.