Lessons for the OECD's baby PISA from Mexico's baby large-scale assessment

• In Event: Assessing Learning Worldwide: Cross-Cultural Evidence, Discourse, and Policy Implications

Proposal

In 2018 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched its International Early Learning Child Well-being Study (IELS) which it reported on in 2020 (OECD, 2020), arguing that the lack of comparative data limits the capacity for peer learning amongst OECD countries. According to the OECD (2020: 13), the overall purpose of the IELS is to ‘put a spotlight on how children are faring at five years of age’, based upon a set of key indicators of learning. In this first round of data collection IELS focused on three OECD countries; England, Estonia and the United States. The 5-year-olds in the study were all located in either registered in a school or early years learning centre.
Not surprisingly, early education researchers have registered their concerns over Baby PISA (cf. Moss et al., 2016; Moss and Urban, 2017, 2019, 2020; Urban and Swadener, 2016). Their voices add to wider conversations and critiques over the OECD’s expansion of its PISA machinery (see Auld and Morris, 2019; Delaune, 2019; Diaz-Diaz et al., 2019; Lin and Lin, 2019; Roberts-Holmes, 2019; Sousa et al., 2019; Urban, 2019).
The main purpose of this article is not to examine the outcomes of the field trial of the OECD’s Baby PISA. Rather, we suggest that there is much to be learned from the implementation of a similar survey aimed at pre-school learners launched in 2007 in Mexico – the Educational Quality and Achievement Test for Pre-school (its Spanish acronym is EXCALE Preescolar). Moreover, the results of EXCALE were consequential for the development of a local policy in northern Mexico aimed at pre-schoolers we call the Pre-school Assessment Culture Initiative (PACI) which we examine here. EXCALE shares many of the features of the OECD’s IELS. Given too that EXCALE for pre-school data was collected over several rounds in Mexico, first in 2007 and latter in 2010–2011, a comparison between the two assessments enables us to draw robust conclusions around the possible effects of the OECD’s Baby PISA programme for education policy and practice going into the future.

Authors

• Israel Moreno Salto, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California

• Susan Lee Robertson, The University of Manchester