Measuring Up and Down, PISA 2022: Whatever Happened to the Education Superpower?

Six years ago, a positively gushing August 2017 BBC News story anointed Canada as an “education superpower” on the basis of its recent Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) scores in mathematics, science and reading. Today, after the release of the PISA 2022 assessments, such a claim would be dismissed as preposterous.

On the latest round of tests for 15-year-olds, Canadian students continued to slide in mathematics, reading and science.  In Mathematics, the prime focus of the 2022 global assessment, our students dropped again from 512 in 2018 to 497 in 2022, a 35-point decline since 2003. Concerns about taking a “COVID Hit” raised in my November 29 research report, Pandemic Fallout (Cardus Foundation) were borne out in the latest scores.

Our national education agency, the Council of Ministers of Education (CMEC), demonstrated, once again, its tendency to denialism. Crowing about finishing in 9^th place in Mathematics means little when we are steadily losing ground to the global leaders, the Asian powerhouses of Singapore, Macau, China (Taipei), Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea, and three fast improving European states, Estonia and Switzerland.

What’s more concerning is that the decline is consistent from 2000 to the present right across the board in reading and science as well as mathematics. Canadian student skills in reading mirror the downward trend, dropping from 524 in 2009 to 507 in 2022, a decline of 17 points. It marginally better in science but still consistent with the pattern of steady decline over the past two decades.

Apologists for Canada’s declining performance are running out of rationalizations.  Cherry-picking the mathematics data the best the CMEC communications team could come up with is that some 78 per cent of Canadian students achieved Level 2, signifying that they are functionally numerate. The overall decline in mathematics, reading and science is, rather sadly, explained away because of the “trend seen in the majority of participating countries and economies.”

The PISA 2002 Study report is a rather thick, almost impenetrable, quantitative research study that takes weeks to digest and analyze even for veteran researchers. The Canadian national sub-report, Measuring Up: Canadian Results, OECD PISA 2022, is helpful in summarizing Canadian student performance levels with provincial/territorial breakdowns.

The pandemic fallout was expected, but all the PISA 2022 results did is accentuate and accelerate the longer-term downward slide.  It’s serious when the OECD Education tsar, Andreas Schleicher, describes the Canadian student decline in mathematics as a legitimate concern.

Two Canadian provinces, Alberta and Quebec, are responsible for keeping our PISA results from being a “mission-critical crisis.”   In Mathematics, Quebec students continue to head the class, scoring 514, some 10 percentage points above Alberta. When it comes to Reading, Alberta leads the pack at 525, albeit down from 532 in 2018.  All of the Atlantic provinces tanked on the PISA 2022 tests in Mathematics with Newfoundland (459), New Brunswick (468), and Nova Scotia (470) falling below the OECD average.

Canada’s “learning province,” Ontario is in a slow downward spiral, in spite of its mammoth education budget.  On PISA 2022, Ontario students sunk to new lows in Mathematics registering a 495, down 35 points over 20 years. Reading scores in Ontario were better at 512, but some 19 points below 2009. With the Ontario Right to Read reforms underway in K to Grade 3, student reading competencies should be higher from 2028 onward, when that initial cohort turns 15-years-of age.

Learning loss is real and the pandemic generation has not rebounded.  What the PISA 2022 student scores reveal is that, in Canada, and worldwide, it there is a “significant learning deficit” and it continues four years after the COVID-19 outbreak and massive school disruption. Recognizing the problem is the first step in shattering the complacency and getting past the “pandemic fatigue.”

Getting our students ‘back-on-track’ will take courageous educational leadership, significant changes in school culture, implementation of the “science of learning” in classrooms, and new policies aimed at reclaiming the minds of students far too absorbed in cyberworlds. It’s all a matter of improving the effectiveness of classroom instruction and being better prepared for the next major disruption in the years ahead.

Why does the public release of PISA student achievement results attract so much global attention?  How have the PISA scores in mathematics and reading become proxies for the quality of school systems? Whic are the most important revelations – the actual scores, country rankings, or the longer-term trends?  Do we focus too much on the math and reading scores and miss out on some potentially more significant findings buried in the technical reports?  

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Education Fallout: Where did Canadian School Systems fall short in responding to the Pandemic?

Students in Canada’s K-12 schools have not bounced back.  My latest report, Pandemic Fallout: Learning Loss, Collateral Damage, and Recovery in Canada’s Schools, (Cardus, November 29, 2023) identified the root of the problem and challenged governments, educators, and parents to recognize and respond to the deep and lasting effects of pandemic disruptions on education.  

A week later, my essential analysis and conclusions were borne out in the latest Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) report (December 5, 2023)  testifying to the serious decline in the performance of Canadian students in mathematics, reading and science from 2018 to the end of 2022.

Nearly four years after the first COVID outbreak, my report shrugged-off the prevailing ‘pandemic fatigue’ and tackled a few important questions: How much learning loss have students suffered, and how can we respond? How did the pandemic impact students’ social development and mental health? How was the response of schools different across the educational spectrum? How can we do things better next time? 

What happened during the education disruption?  Surveying the comprehensive, albeit admittedly dense, heavily footnoted study, these were the essential findings:

• Learning loss is real, and a substantial learning deficit arose early in the pandemic and has persisted over time.
• The ‘knowledge gap’ is affecting students from elementary grades through high school, and is more pronounced in mathematics than in reading.
• Children with special needs and those from marginalized communities suffered the most and continue to do so.
• As many as 200,000 Canadian students went missing from school at the height of the first COVID-19 wave of infections.
• Lower-income families were disproportionately affected, increasing the knowledge gap between students from affluent households and those from disadvantaged households.
• Smaller and more autonomous schools fared better and provided more consistent, mostly uninterrupted, learning.
• No one emerged unscathed and but students in some settings were cushioned, challenged, and better supported.

Canadian provincial and district education authorities, the report demonstrates, were caught completely off-guard by the pandemic crisis, minimized the potential impact of prolonged school closures, abandoned system-wide student testing and generated little or no data on its impact on students, teachers, or families. Compared to most other OCED countries, Canada suffered from what I termed “data starvation” – flying blind though the pandemic while closing schools for extended periods of time, averaging 130 lost days (more than 25 weeks) from province-to-province across Canada (UNESCO 2023).

Large-scale assessment research—which is used to draw reliable and comparative measures of student achievement and system-level judgments—was either suspended or limited during the pandemic across Canada. This is both shocking and critical, as without the benefit of aggregated student data, researchers and policy-makers are left to piece together the pandemic’s impact on student achievement. Importantly, this has damaged Canada’s longstanding reputation as a global leader in education.

Instead of stopping with a diagnosis, the report does review best practice in implementing immediate learning recovery programs and in addressing the critical need for a broader future ‘education crisis’ response strategy.

Best Practice in Implementing “Catch-Up” Initiatives

Recognizing the problem is the first step, but tackling learning recovery is a greater challenge. Three immediate responses come highly recommended by leading experts (Srivastava, 2021, McKinsey & Company, 2020):

1. Revamp the entire K–12 curriculum to facilitate students catching up.
2. Focus on the core competencies of reading & literacy as well as pro-social skills.
3. Initiate targeted interventions, including intensive tutoring & summer catch-up sessions.

Best Strategy for Longer-Term Recovery

First and foremost, Canadian education ministers and school leaders need to be much better at tapping into research and strategies from elsewhere, and, in particular, from leading systems and research institutes in the EU, the UK, and the United States.  

Our overall strategy, modelled by UNESCO and World Bank researchers, should be informed by a “crisis-sensitive approach” (Srivatava, 2021). Effective, evidence-based pandemic educational-policy planning recovery should involve four key considerations:

1. managing a crisis and instituting first responses
2. planning for (interrupted) reopening with appropriate measures
3. sustained crisis-sensitive planning, with considerations of assessing risks for the most vulnerable
4. adjusting existing policies and strengthening policy dialogue

Most important of all – break down the silos and get to the heart of the problem. Cage-busting leadership will be needed to disrupt established routines jealously guarded by the institutional gatekeepers. Collective planning exercises with cross-sectoral collaboration and community engagement from marginalized groups should be a sustained part of pandemic-recovery planning exercises.

Conclusion: Prepare Now for the Next Global Disruption

Consistent, reliable, and evidence-based data is needed if we are to effectively respond to the full range of the pandemic’s longer-term impacts on children, teachers, and families. A new Canadian education-research agenda will be necessary for that to happen. Tackling pandemic learning loss, tracking student progress, and getting students back on track are of vital and immediate strategic importance because we are still engaged in a recovery mission, with no room for complacency. Those are the biggest lessons of the pandemic education fallout for education policymakers, school district leaders, parents, teachers, and families.

Where did Canadian education authorities go wrong in responding to the global pandemic?  How well did we prepare for such a calamity?  Who really called the shots – provincial public health authorities?  In hindsight, were schools closed for far too long?  How well did we address the widespread “learning loss” and its collateral damage affecting students, teachers, families and schools?  What have we learned and will we be better prepared the next time?

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