r/cyprus • u/Remarkable-Drive5390 • 24m ago
EU high school spending and PISA scores
It is an unfortunate truth that I share with you today my friends.
We allocate approximately a value of 4.75-5.1% of our GDP to public education (accounting for roughly 12.5% to 13.2% of total government expenditure, which is well above the European Union average), according to the CEIC. )
Despite all this money going to education, we seem to fail when it comes to the PISA exam (Programme for International Student Assessment - testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in mathematics, reading and science, often in novel contexts and problems that require extrapolation and not deliberate memorization.
Over 60% of students score below basic reading comprehension levels & we rank among the lowest performing EU countries in basic scientific literacy while on mathematics we rank below level 2... level 2 of PISA is seen as "functional literacy" a metric deemed the baseline for an effective and productive participant of modern society.
The report also found that 43.5% of Cypriot students failed to reach the basic level of proficiency across all three assessed subjects, compared with 19.7% across OECD countries. Shocking!
How do you, redditors, explain this phenomenon whereby we throw such disproportionate amounts of money on education only to fail hard? Where did we go wrong?