PISA 2014: Nothing new in Bulgarian education

A year ago, I devoted an entire study to the various quantitative and qualitative criteria for evaluating secondary education, and the most interesting data and conclusions came from the international representative surveys - PISA, TALIS and PIRSL. The reason for this is mainly the fact that they allow us to compare the product of our educational system with that of different countries around the world, and they also provide data on a variety of indicators that domestic statistical institutions do not deal with. Although the latest edition of the OECD PISA study was released a few months ago, it seems to me that Bulgarian analysts have paid unreasonably little attention to its results.

The first result that should be taken into account is the overall performance of Bulgarian students in the main PISA criteria - in the study released this year, these are reading, mathematics, natural sciences and, added for the first time, "problem solving". They form the main measure of the results achieved by a given education system. According to these values, Bulgaria ranks last in the EU, and with comparable results are Cyprus and Romania. The only European country that achieves worse results than Bulgaria is Albania. Although our country has not reached the lowest levels of the countries studied by PISA, where countries such as Peru, Indonesia and Colombia are ranked, its results bring it much closer to them than to the leading Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong.

If we compare the results in the Bulgarian education system with those achieved at the beginning of the millennium, we find that no particular progress has been made in recent years. Compared to 2000, the result in the “reading” category of Bulgarian students has increased from 430 to 436 points. Compared to 2000, the result in natural sciences has decreased from 448 to 446 points, and in mathematics it has increased from 430 to 439. The data show that as of 2012, 39.4% of Bulgarian students fall into the group of functionally illiterate, and 43.8% cannot cope with basic calculations. About 4% fall into the group of those who do excellently in both areas. And although the data taken by itself indicates a slight trend towards improvement, it would not allow our education system to compare with the better ones in the EU within the next half century, even if they stopped developing at the current level.

The most worrying are the results in the new PISA component - "problem solving", which includes a number of everyday situations such as buying tickets in the subway and a model of the operation of a self-propelled vacuum cleaner. In this component, Bulgarian students achieve some of the lowest results in the world, with only Colombians achieving a worse ranking. This result is symptomatic of one of the most fundamental problems of the Bulgarian education system - despite all the attempts of the state to "reform" it, it continues (as we saw above, at a relatively low level) to provide only abstract, theoretical knowledge, but not to prepare for dealing with even basic life situations.

The focus of this year’s study is on mathematics results. The breakdowns by various criteria highlight the thesis that Bulgarian education provides almost no practical education. The study divides the tasks set for students into two types – formal and practical. While Bulgarian students often encounter the “formal” type of tasks, only 30% of them state that they are given “practical” type tasks at school, the purpose of which is to connect the theoretical knowledge provided in school with real life.

Bulgaria is one of the few countries where girls perform better than boys on the PISA comparative tests – while on average in the countries studied boys score 11 points higher than girls, in Bulgaria there is a slight advantage for girls. This also coincides with one of the characteristic features of the Bulgarian education system – in it girls traditionally achieve higher results on all exams and comparative tests.

Unfortunately, the current edition of PISA does not provide detailed data on the relationship between demographic characteristics and the results demonstrated by students. To the extent that such data are included, they confirm the conclusions of previous studies, according to which in Bulgaria there are extremely large differences in performances between students from large and small cities as well as between specialized high schools and ordinary secondary schools. The most significant differences are again between students from different ethnic groups, and the most significant factor in achieving good results is not the education system itself, but access to information and the family environment.

Let us summarize – the results of PISA 2014 do not indicate any significant change in the state of the education system in Bulgaria. To the extent that any real reforms are being carried out in the sector at all, they have no visible result on the skills and abilities of students (which, after all, are the meaning of the education system). The new data once again confirm the inability of the education administration to deal with the problems of its department and the urgent need to remove state control in the sector.

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