The Palestinian territories have achieved a creditable result in their first participation in the PISA Report, the world’s main assessment, which analyzes the skills in mathematics, reading comprehension and science of 15 and 16 year old students (which in most cases countries coincides with the last year of compulsory schooling) and whose eighth edition was published this Tuesday. The exams were held in the spring of 2022. Compared to countries in their geographical and cultural surroundings, such as Jordan or Morocco, Palestinian kids are slightly ahead, despite studying in a context that was already much more adverse, and which In the case of Gaza, Israel’s current invasion of the strip has made it outright impossible. The more than 600,000 children and adolescents who attend primary and secondary education there have not been able to go to school for weeks, and around 60% of the educational centers have been totally or partially destroyed, while the rest are used mainly as shelter by the displaced.
Palestinian students – 50 secondary schools participated, 30 from the West Bank and 20 from Gaza – obtained 366 points in mathematics, 349 in reading comprehension and 369 in science in the international test organized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). . The result is far from the OECD average (472, 476 and 485, respectively) and that of Spain (473, 474 and 485). But what makes sense to compare it with is that of the surrounding countries, says Juan Manuel Moreno, professor of Didactics and School Organization at UNED, who knows the region well because he worked there for 15 years for the World Bank. Looked at this way, the Palestinian territories are 5 points above Jordan in mathematics, 3 ahead in reading, and 6 behind in science. And they lead Morocco by 1 point in mathematics, 10 in reading comprehension and 4 in science. In this year’s edition of PISA – the eighth, since 2000 – other neighboring Arab countries, such as Egypt or Lebanon, do not participate. And despite the economic abyss that separates them, the difference between the Palestinian students and that of Saudi Arabia is not so great in mathematics (23 points, similar to that which separates Castilla y León, the first Spanish autonomous community classified, with the Spanish average ).
Moreno was an education specialist at the World Bank and for six years, between 2013 and 2019, head of education projects in the territories and believes that to say that education in Palestine faces, even before the current conflict, great difficulties on a daily basis, is fall short. “Students lose many days of class a year due to budget uncertainty and, in these last three years, also due to the pandemic. Professors and teachers are constantly subjected to the prospect of not receiving a salary. Or charging only a portion for prolonged periods, because there is no money for payroll. In the last three years, teachers have been earning only 80% of their salary. Labor conflict, in this context, is considerable. And there are frequent teacher strikes, sometimes of long duration,” he summarizes. In the 2021-2022 academic year, in which PISA data was collected, Palestinian students missed almost a quarter of school days for one reason or another.
The Palestinian school system educates – or did, at least, until the start of the last conflict – 1.38 million students in compulsory education, from ages six to 16, through three networks. 65% of the students attend the public school and 10% the private school, with much more weight, in both cases, in the West Bank than in Gaza. The remaining 25% belongs to UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, which is much more present in the Strip. Students from the latter network obtain significantly better results, despite not belonging to a higher socioeconomic class – quite the opposite; Children living in refugee camps attend it―according to a report prepared in 2016 by the World Bank, based on participation data in TIMSS, another international test on knowledge in mathematics and science, aimed in this case at students. smaller than those of PISA ―less than 10 years―, in which Palestine has participated for years. The TIMSS assessment is organized by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), based in the Netherlands and Germany, and made up of official educational authorities and universities from various countries.
Female students lead the way in mathematics
UNRWA teachers have the same initial qualifications as those in the public network, says Moreno, but are differentiated by the fact that they join the job through an “induction period into teaching,” and by having greater development prospects. professional once in the system, he explains. During his period at the World Bank, the UNED professor promoted a program for the training of Palestinian primary school teachers, which included the requalification of teachers who were already active and changes in the training received by future teachers.
PISA highlights some striking features of the Palestinian education system. One of them is that, despite having three fairly developed networks, it has a low degree of segregation, comparable, in Europe, with that of the Nordic countries. Another is that poor Palestinian students, those belonging to the 25% of households with the lowest income, who manage to be among the 25% with the best performance in mathematics, which the OECD considers an indicator of “resilience”, exceeds 12%. A percentage that places it above the OECD and Spanish averages, and in the group of the top 20 countries of the more than 70 analyzed, with a level similar to that of Norway. A third highlight is that it is one of the few places where girls obtain better results in mathematics than boys. And unlike Finland, where the advantage of female students is small, in the case of the Palestinian territories, such as Albania or Jordan, this difference in favor of girls in the subject is high.
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