How the OECD manipulates and exaggerates standardized testing results to pretend as though Socialist countries raise smarter kids…
The list for the Top-Ranked Education systems in the World for 2019 has recently come out—showing Singapore as the winner…followed by eight more Socialist and Communist-leaning countries (do not let Singapore’s free-market economy fool you—Singapore is one of the most highly-surveyed, de-privatized, claustrophobic country to live in, where an extremely small dynastic group owns 90% of all property and housing, and has control of all business stakes¹).
How exactly is the value of a country’s educational system measured with a standardized test? Well, every three years since the year 2000, an international standardized exam called the PISA test measures 15-year-old students from 72 countries on their comprehensive skills in Reading, Science, and Mathematics, as formulated and determined by the OECD. This is what is used to rank education systems worldwide. The countries that are consistently ranked as top-tier are suspiciously enough, from left-leaning, Socialist…even Communist…countries. Oddly enough, countries that are well-known for prestigious institutions of higher education and a high percentage of citizens who hold a Bachelors Degree—such as the United States—and countries that have an extraordinarily deep pool of Nobel Prize winners—such as the United States in the #1 spot with 375.²
Putting all biases as a should-be humiliated American aside, allow me to elucidate as to why the level of accuracy for such a test as the PISA is laughable, at best, when taking in to consideration the fact the nations’ respective departments of education cherry-pick the regions, as well as the specific schools that participate in the exam. For example, in the brilliant Forbes article, “Are the PISA test results skewed,” the evidence backing the argument for imprecise and erroneous statistics is substantial. What we see is that, according to the OECD’s own website regarding PISA, the organization entrusts the education administrators of each country with the responsibility of honestly selecting a sample or so from the nation that “represents a full population of 15-year-old students within the Education System.” Did the children who comprise the 48.73% of Chinese people who don’t live in a city, of which barely 40% have the privilege of attending or access to a school get to take the PISA test, Mr. Authority of Education for Chinese People? Hmmm?
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…NO….
Rather, what happened is that he picked the best of the best of the best schools in wealthy residential areas in Shang-Hai, and used that to falsely portray to the rest of the world the superior educational atmosphere for the People’s Republic of China as a whole. That would be equivalent a biased action to if the United States of America’s Secretary of Education decided that she was only going to distribute the PISA exam to students in Massachusetts and New Jersey (the #1 and #2-ranked public school systems in the U.S., respectively³), and only from Blue-Ribbon schools at that. Instead, students were chosen from the states that had education budgets on the very first spot and very last spot on the budget scale: Massachusetts and Florida.⁴ Although the United States’ results were substandard, the results absolutely reflected a level of integrity and a responsibility to face facts. By not slanting results in order to embellish status, the United States becomes a paragon of self-effacement to the rest of the world as to what it looks like to have a genuine interest in addressing the needs of the people, especially the children and future generations that it delegates and believes in to have a major impact on the advances of humanity in all areas—not just in standardized Reading, Mathematics, and Science.
Here we are given the Slanted Ejewcation 2015 results5 (as the exam is only taken every three years) :
- Singapore
- Japan
- Estonia
- Chinese Taipei
- Finland
- Macao (China)
- Canada
- VietNam
- Hong Kong (China)
- BSJG (China)
How incredibly deceptive is it that these results are simply listed in magazines and spread on social media without cross-referencing? How many people actually read these lists and just accept them, immediately digesting them as fact? Taking a quick peak at them, it seems that the countries that perform well on these are primarily Socialist countries6. It’s almost as though the OECD is trying to persuade governments to take these results facie ad valorem so that they decide to revamp their education systems by means of replicating the top countries’ age-old recipe for academic excellence… whose special ingredient is nothing more than communist LIES. Yes, OECD rankings seem to be yet another ploy to deceive the evil Capitalist countries into actually feeling like the losers…
Please excuse me while I pick on a fellow North American to further expand on other schemes that can develop and be used as a way to either introduce or expedite an agenda. Government leaders in Socialist Canada6 go so far as to trick the politically apathetic Canadian populace into making claims like, “Aha!—Our Immigration reforms are working! By taking in even MORE migrants, our young students’ educational experiences are going to be enriched and enhanced by having to compete with motivated migrant students from China and Middle Eastern countries!”
But, as is evidenced by the high percentage of high school drop-outs in Canada, we can see that this is quite the contrary! Native Canadian students already feel uncomfortable by not being able to relate to the schools’ pro-diversity-pedaling agendas and by being made to feel like foreigners in their own schools… err, in their own country. For example, the province of Québec, which has an astounding immigration rate of 53,0007 people per year, mostly from Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and China, has a drop-out rate that rivals that of the province of Nunavut, a place that’s 100% Inuit and frozen (literally) in time. In Québec, 1 out of 3 boys and 1 of 5 girls will drop out of high school.8 This cumulative percentage of 74% may initially come across as “not so bad,” that is, until one takes into consideration the fact that the Canadian government gave a pass to Québec for slanting its statistics (Québec has a system different from the rest of Canada, in which a High School Diploma is based on national standards; furthermore, Québec counted receiving an alternative diploma after dropping out as attaining a High School Diploma)8. In actuality, Québec’s true graduation rate would be right above Nunavut’s, which is 34%.8 Could you guess which young Quebeckers are more prone to quitting on themselves, due to the fact that their province has quit on them? – It should come as no surprise, that it’s the White, native-French-speaking Quebeckers.9
What can be concluded from this, besides the obvious point that the results are very misleading to promote some sort of agenda, is that it is yet another punch to the American Educational System. I can tell you, by and large, that the United States produces some of the best and the brightest of students in the world—consistently. More universities on American soil are within the Top 100 schools than in any other nation. Comments on social media made by our neighbors to the North confirm a troublesome readiness to believe that, despite the levels of economic insufficiency and an almost non-existent level of individualistic passion to become completely self-reliant and self-educated beyond the measures of a school system, they are winning. Wow!– what a great reason for Canadians to cry out a big, ol’, “In your FACE, America!”– despite the loonie predicted to fall to an all-time low… despite being given some of the lowest salaries out of all industrialized nations… despite having the third-worst healthcare system in the First-World… despite a decrepit infrastructure which is perpetually under construction…despite, despite, despite, ad nauseum…Canadians are content to be told that their brand of Socialism is working. Alas, the comments celebrating this kilometer-stone (ha, see what I did there…), which are saturated with an alarming rate of spelling and grammar mistakes, tell another truth.
The Truth is that Socialistic forms of government are not only manipulating or even going so far as to falsify student test results in order to deceive their people about their educational progress, but they are also refusing to divulge one particular and very pertinent reality to their people. It is that while places like the “stupid” United States and Switzerland are more interested in giving a proper education to the population at large, meaning overall literacy rate that exceeds 99% and a high school graduation rate that is edging 90%—among all demographics and geographical point—the Socialistic countries are more interested in pedaling political agendas and ignoring the fact that winning at a standardized test shows only one thing: that their students are being indoctrinated with a modulated, one-size-fits-all education that stifles their intellectual growth… a story which reads like a science-fiction novel in which students are programmed to recite information given to them, but when told to think outside the box, they fall into a cognitive shut-down.
Thinking “outside the box” or, rather, for oneself, is seriously frowned upon within societies that are or are approaching Communistic levels. You see, when you climb outside the container filled with the expected ideas and notions that Communism has pre-fabricated for its people, and can view yourself from outside “yourself,” as an individual capable of creating your own reality, all sorts of possible solutions emerge right before your very eyes— a solution that allows us to see that Communism is nothing more than like a living, breathing cliché, where everything is made to fit within a box that is cute on the outside, but is still nothing more than a stark existence of tasteless cardboard on the inside. Do not confuse these comparisons with me touting the American educational system as a paradigm.
Besides the fact that I do not believe that any educational system is guiltless in failing to prepare our children for real life matters or protecting our children from matters of greater importance, such as degeneracy (rather they promote it).
However, the point that I am trying to bring to light is that the American education system stands out in something very crucial to a young mind that many programs, most notably Socialist and Communist programs, fail to do: provoking our students to think outside the box, instead of mindlessly preparing them for an exam that measures how well they’ll live a life inside a box. This equates to a mind that is being groomed in the skill of not simply accepting and settling on what our government tells us. It means that we confront Life using unique situational problem-solving skills that we learn by being raised in a varied educational system, one that uses curve-balls to force us into either second-guessing —or— having confidence in our own abilities. We house a learning environment that encourages us to develop atypical strategies around problems… and to arouse in Americans the actual desire to challenge the status quo… to Think for Ourselves … to propose the questions to the answers, as opposed to being given four pre-set multiple choice options for our answers to a boxed question.
Works Cited
¹ https://boingboing.net/2018/03/11/capitalist-ideal.html
²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country
³ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/…states-best…schools/1079181001/
5http://www.matholympus.kidsgo.ca/pisa-test/
6http://blog.peerform.com/top-ten-most-socialist-countries-in-the-world/
7https://www.immigration.ca/quebec-welcome-near-53000-immigrants-2018
8http://www.the10and3.com/the-vast-disparity-in-canadas-high-school-graduation-rates-00016/
Works Referenced
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/whose-used-for-inanimate-objects
