Policymakers are misusing international education rankings
Statisticians call for more subtle analyses of data
In this week’s issue of Science, two leading American educational statisticians argue that, although international large-scale educational assessments (ILSAs) can provide invaluable insights, nations’ obsessions with their rankings alone are unhelpful.
In 2012, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reported that the seven most effective maths education programmes were all provided by schools in East Asia – three in urban parts of China, with Shanghai at number one. The UK appeared just 26th on the list. The UK government’s schools minister Nick Gibb launched a programme, in which ‘mastery textbooks’ were introduced into around 50% of English primary schools, to introduce the approach to mathematical pedagogy found in the Far East to English schools.
It is policy decisions like this, based on inferences from international rankings, that Henry Braun from Boston College in Massachusetts, US, and co-author Judith Singer of Harvard University, also in Massachusetts, find problematic.
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