Viral Policies: How Progressive Ideology Made the Learning Crisis Worse
Before Covid-19, many countries were already experiencing stagnation or declines in student performance. The pandemic’s disruption exacerbated these problems. This seems to be the case with Finland, a country hailed as a top performer when PISA was first administered in 2000, and one that observers have continued to regard as an education superpower despite the declines revealed by ensuing testing cycles there. The math performance of Finnish 15-year-olds has been deteriorating since 2006, with the proportion of low-performing students swelling from 7 percent in 2000 to 25 percent in 2022. According to PISA estimates from 2012 to 2022, students’ performance declined by the equivalent of an entire school year in all three tested subjects—reading, math, and science.
Finnish policymakers and OECD analysts have been puzzled by the long-term decline in performance and the major drop during Covid. At the PISA 2022 launch, the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture called the downward trend “extremely disconcerting.” Meanwhile, OECD’s director for education and skills Andreas Schleicher, who is widely regarded as the architect of PISA, said in an interview with the Financial Times that “when [PISA] first came out, we thought Finland was the recipe for success, but 20 years later we do not know whether those things have been part of the solution or part of the problem.” These statements reveal a lack of understanding about the real causes of the country’s ongoing decline. This is worrying, mainly because during most of this time the OECD and others have continued to praise Finland as an example for other countries. In the same interview, Schleicher did identify one common mistake: “The lesson for me is that we have to achieve student wellbeing not at the expense of academic success, but through academic success,” he wrote.
Some authors, including myself, have warned of the dangers of ignoring Finland’s decline over time, pointing to several contributing factors: maintaining a very “inclusive” model (that is, treating all students equally) as inequalities in Finnish society have increased; relying on weak accountability systems (no national standardized exams except at the end of secondary school); allowing extensive school autonomy despite clear signs this approach was producing increasingly poor results; and narrowing the content knowledge of the curriculum. It should come as no surprise that, when the Covid disruption hit such a flimsy structure, achievement fell sharply despite short school closures.
Portugal had relatively short school closures in 2020, although a second lockdown led to a new wave of shutdowns in 2021. In both reading and math, Portugal saw learning losses twice as large as those in Ireland and Estonia, countries with similarly brief school closures. Recent achievement trends in Portugal differ sharply from those in Finland. In Portugal, a series of reforms that implemented national standardized exams, improved teacher training, and reinforced the content knowledge of the curriculum led to clear improvements in student performance between 2006 and 2015. However, after the government changed from a conservative to a progressive coalition in 2015, these reforms were reversed, and the 2018 PISA test results showed achievement declines. The new government also implemented a measure limiting grade retention to “exceptional circumstances.” During and after Covid, standards were further relaxed while students’ grades were inflated, creating a distorted picture of rising student performance contradicted by results on international assessments.
Spain, my own country, merits a more detailed examination since it provides a vivid example of policies intended “to leave no one behind” that in practice failed everyone. Spain is among the countries that closed schools for fewer than 50 days and, within this group of nations, it suffered the second-largest drop in performance, after Finland. The magnitude of the decline in Spain rivals countries that closed schools for much longer.
Before Covid, all international surveys showed that student achievement levels in Spain were below the OECD average and had been stagnant for decades. Improvements began around 2015–16 during the implementation of an education reform law, Ley Orgánica para la Mejora de la Calidad Educativa, or LOMCE, that mandated changes similar to the contemporaneous reforms in Portugal. When the conservative government lost power in 2018, the new left-wing coalition undid the reforms. This reversal coincided with a pre-Covid decline in student outcomes on international tests that continued during and after the pandemic. Déjà vu.
But the Spanish system also contains some unique features that cast light on the exacerbated impact of Covid when progressive policies were already in place or implemented in response to the pandemic. Spain decentralized its education system in the ’80s and ’90s after the nation’s transition to democracy and, as a result, regions became responsible for the management of schools. However, no national or regional examinations with common standards were established, despite the fact that degrees are issued by the national Ministry of Education. LOMCE was the first effort to implement national standardized tests. This legislation faced fierce criticism: Regional authorities argued that it represented an attempt to recentralize education, unions refused to accept assessments that could indirectly serve to evaluate teachers, and political parties on the left argued that the tests discriminated against students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who tended to perform poorly. After two years of implementation, and despite evidence of improvement on international assessments, the national exams were scrapped.
During Covid, the central government declared a state of emergency, which empowered it to make uniform decisions for all 17 Spanish regions. The government’s stated priorities in education were “leaving no one behind” and enhancing student wellbeing. To achieve these goals, policymakers lowered standards for all students rather than providing more support for those who were struggling. Curricular content shrank, students progressed to the next grade level even if their grades in specific courses were unsatisfactory, and those who failed several subjects still obtained the national education degree at the end of lower and upper secondary education. (In most of Europe, lower secondary education runs from ages 11 to 15, while upper secondary covers ages 16 to 18.)
What was meant to be a temporary measure turned into “the new normal” with the approval of a new education law, LOMLOE, at the end of 2020. This reform made grade repetition exceptional, not because it spurred measures to ensure that all students reached high standards, but rather because students who failed several subjects (according to their teachers’ criteria) could move on to the next grade and eventually obtain the national degree.
