By S Munirah Alatas
PISA evaluations operate in order to promote the neoliberal interests of the OECD.
There is widespread literature about the close alliance between PISA and Pearson Inc, the largest global provider of educational services and products.
Just look at their website.
This is a matter of grave concern for Education International (EI) which is a global federation of organisations, representing teachers and other educators.
The concern is how PISA is used to further the commercialisation and privatisation of national school systems around the world.
Shouldn’t Malaysians be more concerned? Do more research on PISA itself, to expose its efficacies and fallacies?
This cautionary revelation is similar to my call for a deeper query into the Global University Rankings (GURs), and why so many universities have decided to pull out.
GURs system are led by a few “companies” such as Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), Times Higher Education (THE), Academic Ranking of World Universities (AWRU), US News & World Report, etc. Most are based in Europe and the US.
Leader boards like PISA and QS are in the same “game” of generating profits through the manipulation of people’s sentiments, using education as their bait.
Participating countries PAY; it is not free to be ranked.
Being “ranked” by both costs money. For example, PISA can charge as much as 171,000 EUR spread over three years for some countries. Universities that want to be in the “Gold Star” club of ranked universities also pay.
This is not anything new as far as economic exploitation & ideological manipulation go. It has been done by colonial powers hundreds of years ago, and post-colonial countries (like Malaysia) are no strangers to such exploitation.
However, when will we stop being beholden to these profit-generating capitalist companies based in powerful countries, whose main agenda is to generate profit?
Think too about which other industries those profits might be channelled towards. Defence? Who knows.
I doubt these profits are used to build more libraries, universities, train teachers, fund university undergraduates in e.g. Lesotho, or spruce up dilapidated schools in rural areas in e.g. Sarawak, New Guinea, or Congo, right?
Where is the evidence, if indeed this is the case?
Malaysia is still lagging in its widespread criticisms of PISA and the GURs. We still panic when our PISA scores decrease; just like we panic when our universities are ranked lower annually.
In the Malaysian context, panic should be directed elsewhere.
Whether we rise up or down some ranking ladder, we should realise how our schools and universities are not serving the people well.
We don’t need a PISA or a QS or a THE leader board to tell us how badly our education system is performing….and we Malaysians know quite well why our education quality is rapidly declining.
We need to hold our leaders accountable for mismanaging many aspects of the education system…including politicising it, and the role of corruption…the education sector after all is the biggest recipient of budget 2024. And…our problems go back decades, long before PISA and the GURs started operating their “business” (in the 2000s).
Besides, when we participate in and become emotionally charged by these external bodies evaluating us, we contribute to the domination and economic exploitation of powerful countries over smaller ones, which comprise most of us in the Third World.
Think about it.