Abstract:

Equity has been and still is one major challenge for educational systems around the world. Since its inception, in 2000, OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) aims at providing countries and policy makers with comparable quality information and analyses about educational systems to inform their decision-making process. A key PISA message is the need to address educational inequity within each country. For this, PISA reports systematically feature analyses on equity indicators and highlights on countries’ educational systems, thus providing policy makers — according to the OECD — crucial information on how to tackle this fundamental challenge. To be sure, the OECD promotes PISA as a tool for assessment and monitoring of countries’ educational equity, suggesting its potential to gauge the impact of the implementation of policy measures on equity change.

In this presentation, we reflect on the possibilities and pitfalls of using PISA data to assess and monitor socioeconomic related equity (SRE) change, using the Portuguese context as a case study. We begin this work with the presentation of Portugal’s (quantitative) results on several equity dimensions (e.g., equality of opportunities, inequality of outcomes, segregation) across all PISA waves (i.e., from 2000 till the present).

Additionally, we present a timeline detailing the main SRE policies enacted within the Portuguese educational system, approximately since 2000 until now.

To identify these policies, two separate strategies were followed:
(i) desk research, including the screening of the main educational legislation pieces for equity related terms, and
(ii) interviews and focus-groups with several high-profile policy makers (e.g., former education ministers) and educational SRE experts within the Portuguese context.

We then juxtapose the timeline of the policies with the evolution of the equity indicators over the last 2 decades, attempting to establish connections between changes in SRE indicators and policy implementations. Furthermore, the perspectives of the policy makers and SRE academic experts on the relation between the policies they have identified and the evolution in Portugal’s equity indicators throughout the years will also be presented.

The presentation ends with a discussion of the challenges and frailties of using PISA longitudinal data to assess and monitor the success of the implementation of specific policies within educational systems.

Keywords:

Policy assessment, PISA, equity, Portugal, socioeconomic inequalities.