PISA Under Examination: Bob Cowan's Response to Hannu Simola's Keynote Speech

Professor Bob Cowan gave an interesting response to Professor Hannu Simola's keynote speech.

Here are the notes:

• UK -- testing makes school/education more efficient -- a myth!
• Hannu Simola demystified the Finnish system
• Contingency -- things we didn't expect, predict; coincidence, accidental happenings, inserted into the historically complex comparative education. A major cause of freedom is accidents, as implied in Simola's paper
• two dimensions of contingency: accident and freedom
• add in convergence, politics
• skeptical about transfer

Accidents can play an important role:

• "Only good teams are lucky" -- Finnish ice hockey coach
• this was not planned
• Vanhanen -- IQ testing -- Finland scores higher in PISA than IQ tests would indicate
• Civil War - Reds thought they would get teacher support, but very low