If the Children Aren't the Problem, What Is?

New PISA results are in, and they are worse than ever. 44% of Icelandic fifteen-year-olds don’t meet the baseline standard in reading. No country in the survey has fallen further since 2015 than Iceland.

These are the numbers everyone is talking about today.

But there was something else in the report that made me stop and think.

Icelandic children are more curious than their peers across the OECD. They tend to try harder when tasks get more difficult, and their persistence has increased since the last survey. They are more likely to ask their teacher for help. Fewer see school as a waste of time.

Parental involvement in learning has increased.

And 83% of children say their teacher shows interest in each student’s learning. The OECD average is 69%.

This is not a small thing.

The children want to learn.

The parents are showing up.

The teachers are doing their part.

And still, we are in freefall.

If the people aren’t the problem, there’s only one place left to look.

A system that doesn’t hold on to its people

The OECD has repeatedly pointed out that Iceland’s national curriculum is too broad and its goals too unclear. At the same time, we are weakening standardized measurements of whether children are actually mastering the fundamentals.

That makes it easy for a child to fall behind without anyone noticing in time.

On top of that comes the shortage of teaching materials I’ve written about before. Iceland’s Textbook Development Fund now has about 39% of the funding it had in 2007. Iceland spends around 8,500 krónur per student on developing learning materials each year. Finland spends around 30,000 krónur. About 70% of teachers say they make their own teaching materials because nothing else is available.

The new survey adds one more number to this picture. A quarter of students are now in schools where a teacher shortage limits instruction. Three years ago, that figure was 11%.

Put it all together, and the result is a teacher who can sense that a child is falling behind, without the data to prove it, the materials to respond to it, or the time to do either.

The care that 83% of children feel doesn’t make it all the way. It simply has nothing to work with.

The gap we can’t stay silent about

Children of foreign origin are at a greater disadvantage and report some of the weakest support compared to other countries. Their growing numbers affect the overall figures.

But that doesn’t explain the decline. Children whose mother tongue is Icelandic have also fallen sharply.

We need to do better by both groups. If a child grows up in Iceland and the school fails to teach them good enough Icelandic, that is a problem we have to solve.

This doesn’t start when children turn fifteen

When 44% of fifteen-year-olds don’t meet the baseline standard in reading, that’s a reading problem that spreads into every other subject.

A child who struggles to read struggles with history, social studies, and science, to name just a few. And later, with finding their footing in a world where the ability to acquire knowledge on your own becomes ever more valuable.

Foundational skills are built between the ages of five and ten. That’s where the real work happens.

Strong language development in preschool. Reading difficulties identified in first and second grade. Intervention right away. Progress measured regularly. And no stopping until the child reads with confidence and their reading comprehension is above the benchmark.

Not another campaign

I’ve written this before, and I’m going to say it again.

Since the turn of the millennium, at least seven major literacy initiatives have been launched: the 2000 Reading Campaign. The Path to Literacy. Time to Read. The White Paper. The National Literacy Agreement and Ævar the Scientist’s Reading Challenge. Reykjavík’s Literacy Campaign. Cooperation on Literacy.

Over that same period, the share of children who don’t meet the baseline standard in reading rose from 15% to 44%.

I’m not dismissing these initiatives. Behind every one of them were good people with good intentions.

But after 25 years of this result, we have to be brave enough to say it out loud.

A campaign is temporary. Reading isn’t.

A campaign has a start, a launch event, temporary funding, and an end date. The goals were rarely measurable, no baseline assessment was ever done at the outset, and no one measured what remained once the funding ran out. Most die within three years.

The word itself tells us what’s coming. A campaign is something you take on for a while and then set aside. Maybe we should simply stop using that word for education.

Reading is daily life for ten years, at home and at school. It isn’t strengthened by a campaign that runs out.

Three things that need to happen now

First, we need to measure earlier and more often. The new standardized assessment from MMS (the Directorate of Education and Child Welfare) is a big step, and it needs to be used to its full potential, so schools know where each child stands long before PISA tells us three years later.

We also need more measures than the ones tests give us. Digital reading games can measure things no one could measure before: a child’s natural reading pace when no one is watching over them, whether they keep reading of their own free will, and how long they stay engaged with the material. Until now, reading enjoyment has been something teachers and parents had to go on gut feeling. It doesn’t have to be that way anymore.

Second, we need to put well-made, varied Icelandic content into the hands of teachers, parents, and children, and create real room for the people already building these solutions.

What’s missing is more of every kind of content that sparks children’s interest in reading.

Teachers and parents can’t afford to wait five years. The children even less so.

Third, we need to follow through for longer than one election term and measure the results honestly, even when there aren’t any.

The education minister’s focus on standardized expectations, measurement, and literacy as foundations is the right one. The real test will be whether it survives longer than three years.

This can be done

There’s no reason to despair over Icelandic children.

We are a nation of 400,000 people with curious kids, parents who want to be involved, and teachers who care.

In a country this small, we can measure where children stand early, test solutions quickly, see what works, and roll it out to nearly every child in the country within a few years. That’s a head start bigger nations don’t have.

We know what the problem is.

We also know what needs to be done.

The children who will sit the next PISA survey are already in their classrooms.

They don’t have three years to wait for us.

The author is a father of three and the founder of Lesa.