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China and Singapore top the list of Pisa (International Program for Student Assessment) unveiled on Tuesday (December 3rd). France for its part is slightly above the average of rich countries, according to this benchmark study on education systems around the world, published every three years by the OECD. Decryption with Georges Felouzis, professor of education sciences at the University of Geneva.
What are the good reasons to take Pisa study seriously?
The Pisa surveys are very successful, they have a lot of resonance in the press, in the opinion, and also in the politics. It is therefore important to understand their value. From the point of view of measuring student achievement, learning, skills, etc., Pisa is an extremely well conducted survey. It is a survey that has the support of a very large number of researchers in very different fields, such as the field of measuring students' skills, because we have to design tests to know what we measure, or in the area of statistical analysis because it is still based on very large numbers of people, and also in the writing of reports. In the reliability of the exercises, in the international comparability, in the translation of the tests, it requires an extremely important work. So from the point of view of making the survey, it is very well done. But do not tell Pisa what she does not want to say. Every three years, it offers a photograph of the level of competence of pupils in different fields.
The methodology of Pisa, especially on student samples, nevertheless raises some questions ...
It's a large-scale survey. We can not question all the students, it's impossible, so we take samples. There have been cases in some countries where samples were biased for various reasons. We can always criticize the methodology of a survey, but the advantage of Pisa is that all the basic data, ie the data, the individual data for each student, are accessible on the Internet and do not anyone can download them and analyze them. It's a strength of Pisa: transparency on data, accessibility and the possibility for researchers in education, sociology, political science, journalists, etc., to retrieve and analyze this data.
So we can always say that the sample is not valid, but in any case, everything is accessible. As a result, many researchers have seized these data and published articles, books on a particular country, or a set of countries, to try to see what this produced in terms of the educational system, in terms of inequalities, etc. Among the international surveys that we know, Pisa is rather of extremely good quality. When there were problems with samples, they were picked up by researchers and the Pisa survey then improved on a particular point. The less positive judgments that can be made about Pisa concern the political role that the OECD can play in the definition of educational policies. The OECD's stated intention is, in a way, to advocate for the improvement of national education systems. Some researchers question the role played by the OECD because it is an international organization, it is not democratically elected by each country, and it wants to give the tone of education systems in different countries. This is where we can discuss the role that this organization wants to play.
What is the real impact of Pisa on educational policies?
There are several types of impact, I would say, for simplicity, that it depends a lot on the countries. In Germany, there was what was called the "Pisa shock" in 2000, because Germany at the time had discovered on the one hand that its education system was not as good as expected and on the other hand that this system was very inegalitarian, in terms of learning inequalities according to the social level, the migratory route, etc., so it sparked in Germany a whole movement which made it possible to reform this system. in particular to standardize the system between the different Länder. The shock was rather beneficial. There have been other countries, such as Poland or Portugal, which from Pisa have rebuilt their education system. Then there are other countries that can take into account the results, but have not reformed their system in connection with Pisa. This is the case of France whose results are rather average, weak, and show extremely strong learning inequalities. These results have confirmed many national surveys, notably that of the DEPP, the Direction of the evaluation of foresight and performance. The advantage of Pisa was to show the position of France in relation to all the other participating countries. However, there are certainly reforms in France, there are often, but we can not say that these current reforms are the result of Pisa surveys. So the impact is very variable from one country to another.
► Georges Felouzis is the author with Saluel Charmillot of the book "Les enquêtes PISA" in the collection Que sais-je?
► The results of the Pisa 2018 report