Missing PISA Scores: Oops! We Forgot To Include China and India!

Sometimes the truth hurts.  And sometimes the truth is buried in colorful charts that happen to have glaring omissions.

Bob Compton, the executive producer of the education documentary, Two Million Minutes, posted on his blog about the recent release of test scores collected by PISA–Programme for International Student Assessment.

You can read about the US scores (brace yourself) here.

Bob’s post includes a colorful graph released by PISA that manages to exclude nearly one half of the world’s population in its data.  That’s right.  They forgot to include India (1.2 billion people) or China (1.3 billion people) in the data presented on the graph.

Wow.  Is this head-in-sand syndrome?  A simple oversight?  Manipulation of data? 

Well, we know this: it’s misleading.  And for an organization which is focused on its mission to test and  “facilitate an effective international dissemination of the results” this indicates a rather dubious attempt to investigate and inform.

It was bad enough when PISA had to announce prior to the test results release that they’d had to invalidate the US reading scores for 2006.   

Now, we’ve got charts missing huge chunks of the fastest-growing populations in the world. 

I must be missing something here.  How can a test lead to increased awareness based on country-to-country comparisons of standardized test results if the information is invalidated or not included in the graphs? 

I’m sad to think of the time US teachers and students spent preparing for and taking these tests which have yielded very little in the way of useful, relevant information.

Tagged as: Bob Compton, China, global education, India, international rankings, PISA, reading scores, standardized testing, Two Million Minutes