PISA (The Program for International Student Assessment)

The PISA scores for 2012 were recently released, and the social networking sites and blogs are abuzz with the results, so I'm giving them a mention here. I hate to do so, since I hate that standardized tests were used to formulate this data, but since the data does exist, and others are using it, it makes sense to point out how well Connecticut continues to do. You can get more info about PISA and what it all means here.

"What Is PISA?
"The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a system of international assessments that allows countries to compare outcomes of learning as students near the end of compulsory schooling. PISA core assessments measure the performance of 15-year-old students in mathematics, science, and reading literacy every 3 years.

"Reporting PISA 2012 Results
"This report presents performance on PISA 2012 in mathematics, science, and reading literacy from a U.S. perspective. Results are presented for the 65 education systems, including the United States, that participated in PISA 2012 and for the three U.S. states—Connecticut, Florida, and Massachusetts—that participated as separate education systems. These three states opted to have separate samples of public-school schools and students included in PISA in order to obtain state-level results."

You can see from the lower right of the chart that Connecticut scored 514. And that puts us in 18th place out of the 65 systems that were tested. And if we take into account that there were ties, we are in the top quarter. Of the world.

So clearly what we are doing is working. We just need to get it to work for everyone in the state, since the problem we have in Connecticut is not an achievement gap, but a resource gap.

My 13yo recently came home from 7th grade to exclaim that his school recently got a "huge pile of money" and so everyone is getting his own Chromebook. Personally, I think that "huge pile of money" would have been better spent on a few more teachers in a hard pressed area like Bridgeport. THAT is how we fix our problem in Connecticut, not futzing around with our Curriculum.