GEW Hessen: PISA is the wrong way!

For good education – against the production of test knowledge!

On occasion of the starting signal for PISA 2012 – as from next Monday about 6,250 fifteen-year-old students will be tested again at 250 schools in Germany – the Education and Science Workers’ Union (GEW) in Hessen/Germany criticized that the PISA studies were directed by interests, scientifically unserious and forced reorganization and downsizing of public education.

“For years, the schools have been transformed into production sites of testable knowledge. Instead of good education they have increasingly been concerned with controlling assisted by alleged “success metrics” that were borrowed from business management: No matter how and by which health costs for example, what is important is the so-called “performance” the students provide. This should then be the indicator of good education.

Bulimia-learning: learn, pass the test, and forget

However, the reality is different: Instead of a good education, which always requires socially defined clear objectives as well as time to understand and to question, we can observe a phenomenon everywhere which pupils’ representatives call “bulimia-learning” and which goes hand in hand with the gradual shifting away from curricula. More and more it is about the triad “learn, pass the test, forget” and less and less about content, reflecting, questioning and understanding. Clearly spoken, what is forced by the managerialism of schools must concisely be identified as education cuts”, said Jochen Nagel, Chairman of the GEW Hessen.

All this is also attributable to the PISA survey, which almost all politicians in the country refer to as positive. To use the words of the Pisa-makers themselves, “You have to be well aware that the PISA tests with their abandonment of transnational curricular validity [...] and the concentration on the acquisition of basic skills, carry a didactic and educational theoretical concept, which is normative.”¹

Bankruptcy of the state education system

In fact, PISA is about the international standardization of education – while reducing it to so-called “basic competencies”, which are additionally based mainly on economic utility interests. “That may please big companies, especially those that are behind Pisa and are waiting to satisfy a large commercial assessment and testing market in Germany.2 It does not please us as Education and Science Workers’ Union and as part of the alliance ‘Right to good education for all’!” Nagel continued. “So it is high time that political leaders finally begin to critically question this process of deforming the system of public education forced by PISA which they repeatedly supported themselves.”

The famous PISA-critic and professor of mathematics education Wolfram Meyerhöfer seconded: “10 years ago you would still be called a heretic, if you revealed that PISA does not test what you want it to test or if you showed that the theory behind PISA was devoid of any theory, and if you saw that testing served as an instrument of dominating the teachers and breeding an entire test industry. Today we see that this industry affects our thinking, that schools may increasingly be strangled, and that the practicing of multiple-choice-rituals is possible in civilized countries if the test industry proceeds with enough marketing power.”

“We have long known that PISA is not just testing the ability to acquire know-ledge, but the ability to guess the tester’s thinking. We know that this thinking is always narrow, tends toward mediocrity and punishes creative thinking, that the testers frequently think in an absurd manner – and never notice it. We know that the statistical constructs of PISA and the final presentation of country rankings could as well have been determined by throwing the dice. We know that test results are easy to manipulate. And we know that testing prevents us from thinking. We will lose nothing if we simply abandon PISA”, Meyerhöfer concluded.•

^{1 Deutsches PISA-Konsortium (Ed.) PISA 2000, Basiskompetenzen von Schülerinnen und Schülern im internationalen Vergleich, Opladen 2001, p. 19
2 The interests behind PISA, see for example: “Knatsch um Pisa – CDU fordert den Rauswurf des Pisa-Koordinators”, available at: http://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=2807}

^{Source: http://bildungsklick.de/pm/83348/pisa-ist-der-falsche-weg/ 21.4.2012
(Translation Current Concerns)}