Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The
University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
In our August 28 commentary in the Times Colonist (“Balancing graduation rates and educational quality”) Jerry Mussio and I observed a paradox in British Columbia about student learning outcomes. We said that rising graduation rates are accompanied by declining performance in key areas like reading and mathematics, prompting our concern about the effectiveness of the education system. While Canadian 15-year-olds, including students in British Columbia, generally perform above the PISA average, a closer examination reveals that these averages might obscure more troubling trends. We pointed to the decline in PISA scores in British Columbia before and during the pandemic.
A colleague who read our article suggested that we read the appendix in Measuring Up: Canadian Results of the OECD PISA 2022 Study. Following our colleague’s advice, we discovered that exclusion rates and potential non-response bias suggest that the overall performance of Canadian students may be worse than we thought.
Just as British Columbia’s increasing graduation rates are overshadowed by a growing number of students failing to meet international and provincial standards, the PISA data may be presenting an overly optimistic view of student achievement across Canada. The underrepresentation of students with disabilities or limited language proficiency in the PISA assessments could mean that the national averages are artificially inflated, much like how British Columbia’s graduation rates may be masking deeper issues in educational quality.
If lower-performing students are underrepresented, as appears to be the case, the data might falsely suggest that Canadian students, including those in British Columbia, are performing better than they are. This disconnect between reported outcomes and the underlying realities is evident in British Columbia’s declining PISA scores and the increasing number of students struggling to meet basic literacy and numeracy standards.
The
increasing graduation rates in British Columbia, like the seemingly positive
PISA scores for Canada, may be misleading indicators of educational success.
The true test of an education system’s effectiveness lies not in its ability to
graduate students, but in its capacity to ensure that all students, regardless
of background, achieve mastery of essential knowledge and skills. The
disconnect between graduation rates and educational quality in British
Columbia, and the potential biases in the PISA data, both point to the need for
a more nuanced and critical analysis of educational performance and outcomes. Policymakers
and educators in British Columbia and across Canada must take these warning
signs seriously and take steps to address them.