Sir, – Some of the public comment on the Pisa 2012 scores, both here and elsewhere, shows a basic misunderstanding of what Pisa can tell us. The “league tables” show where we stand, on average, relative to other participating countries – no more and no less. So if Ireland moves up the league tables it means we are doing better than others. What it does not mean is that Irish students are performing better in absolute terms. The Pisa data is constructed so that the overall average is 500 every year so it cannot show absolute performance. Hence we have no way of knowing whether our current crop of 15-year-olds know more or less than the previous one.
Some commentators, who should know better, have sought to link our improved ranking to developments here such as changes in the syllabus or education spending. Leaving aside the obvious benefits of hindsight, this implicitly assumes that the rest of the world has, magically, stood still.
Pisa contains a huge amount of information that can help inform debate and change in Irish education but the fetish over our international ranking does little to enable this and diverts us from the important but hard questions. So while it is mildly interesting to know where our average 15-year-old stands relative to the average 15-year-old Belgian or Australian, it is much more important to understand the variation in performance within Ireland and to know what social and educational forces explain this. – Yours, etc,
Dr KEVIN DENNY,
School of Economics &
Geary Institute,
University College Dublin,
Dublin 4.