We must not panic. Knee-jerk reactions are disastrous in education;bad policy can have flow-on effects that last generations. There is no one thing that has driven the decline of our results as a nation compared with the rest of the world,nor any single thing that can fix it.
Some,like federal Education Minister Dan Tehan,will call on schools to go back to basics. But basics were not examined by PISA,although they may well be contributing to the poor results. PISA tests only examine how students apply what they've learned during their schooling to different situations.
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That's known as higher-order thinking:the capacity to solve problems and think laterally. The data revealed tells us only that Australian students are falling behind those they once considered peers when it comes to those skills,and"the rest of the world is moving away from us",as a senior education official said.
It does not tell us why.
We will hear myriad reasons,as everyone uses the results as an opportunity to push their perspective. Some will say it's due to NAPLAN and the My School website. Others will say it's about funding,or curriculum,or student engagement or a failure to teach critical thinking.