Toward Better Measures of Student Achievement

Last Thursday, the Fairfax County school board heard the first of two reports on the results of a PISA pilot held last fall in ten of our high schools.  The next report will be on April 4th at the school board’s regular business meeting, 7 pm at Luther Jackson Middle School.

PISA is the international assessment of 15-year-olds that has gotten a lot of press in recent years for its quality and for the consistent list of top international scorers.  Finland, China, Japan and Singapore top the results, with the U.S. consistently lagging around the mean globally http://www.oecd.org/pisa/46623978.pdf.   

Much has been written and debated about the success of the top finishers.  I’m spending spring break reading Finnish Lessons.  I’ll be asking myself, among the host of things that Finland does differently than we do here, what could work for us?  The biggest challenge in comparing Finnish schools to our own has been correcting for social pressures like family poverty.  Finland supports its families in ways we here can only imagine - universal preschool, affordable high-quality child care, paid parental leave, a living wage for all, affordable housing, etc.  When analysts compare Finland’s scores with low-poverty schools in the U.S., we compare well, but that is not much to hang our hats on.

I was pleased to learn that ten FCPS high schools had volunteered for this year’s PISA pilot.  In previous years, a very small number of FCPS students have been randomly selected to participate in PISA, giving the school system too little data to learn from.  This year, 7,400 of our fifteen-year-olds took the PISA exam, along with students from around the world.  The FCPS students in the pilot represent the school system’s demographic diversity.  The pilot is free to FCPS and the data is rich and compelling.  http://www.fcps.edu/pla/ost/_pisa/pisa_index.shtml

We have just begun discussing the PISA data, but there is one early take-away for me.  The PISA test itself is far superior to anything I’ve seen in our VA SOL tests.  The questions require and measure various levels of analysis and the scoring allows for open-ended responses.  The PISA test measures thinking and problem-solving skills, not recollection of facts.  The Virginia Department of Education insists that it has introduced that kind of “rigor” into the new generation of SOL math tests.  My own opinion is that those new SOL math tests are not yet well designed, have only raised a higher English reading comprehension bar to success on a math test, and continue to hide, rather than reveal, a student’s problem-solving skills.

The PISA test is an example of one type of assessment we could be using in FCPS to measure, reliably, our goals for our students.  It is an example of the type of test that would not be given every year, in every subject.  Instead, this kind of test measures critical thinking and problem-solving across disciplines, at intervals in a child’s school career.  Two cautions come to mind: the PISA data is not disaggregated to focus on our traditionally unsuccessful student groups, which I believe we must always do, given the economic inequities of life in the U.S.; and no standardized test is sufficient to give teachers, parents, students and the community the wealth of information we need to make good decisions about policy and practice.  

As the school board and FCPS educators look for better ways to measure our 21st century goals for our 21st century students, I hope we look to PISA as an example.

Pat Hynes

Vice Chair and Hunter Mill Representative

Fairfax County School Board