Here is a shameful infographic from StudentsFirst.

This is the kind of shallow and superficial rhetoric that encourages people to focus on competitive ranking while ignoring the real lessons of PISA.

I find it sadly ironic that organizations like StudentsFirst use PISA to advance an agenda of privatizing education, high stakes testing, merit pay, union busting, closing schools and firing teachers when in fact PISA shows us that not one of these strategies is supported by evidence.

Organizations like StudentsFirst need to keep people frantically distracted with a kind of hysteria and fetishization of international test scores so they can dupe us into their cancerous education policies. Desperate people can be convinced to make desperate decisions. Infographics like this are nothing more than fear mongering that distracts people with clawing over each other so we can chant "We are number umpteenth!"

While Canada has been able to avoid some of these fruitless distractions, it's disappointing to see John Manley, CEO and president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, get duped into thinking the sky is falling. "This is on the scale of a national emergency,"this ridiculous response from Manley is eerily similar to some of the hysteria Americans have exhibited when they compared America's low PISA scores with theattack on Pearl Harbor.

Organizations like StudentsFirst only get away with spreading the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) if people limit their knowledge of PISA to infographics like this. The real lessons are found from researching how each nation achieved their results. According to PISA, Finland and Asian countries are high achievers, but they became high achievers by focusing on very different priorities. While you will see StudentsFirst make their own infographics like the one above, you will never see them share PISA reports with titles like Excellence Through Equity: Giving Every Student the Chance to Succeed.

I hope we can all look past shallow and superficial infographics like this one from StudentsFirst and fear mongering from John Manley so that we can find the real lessons of PISA. I'm not saying its going to be easy, but it's going to be worth it.

Looking for the real lessons of PISA. Start with this video: