Court declares teachers strike against PISA exams to be illegal
A strike called by teacher unions to coincide with the holding of the country’s first-ever testing program aimed at evaluating whether schools are giving youngsters the education and skills they need has been declared illegal by an Athens court.
In a post on social media, Education Minister Niki Kerameos wrote that Athens Single-Member Court of First Instance “once again ruled the … strike to be illegal and abusive.”
Therefore, “the ‘Greek PISA exams will be held tomorrow, for a better education system, which gives more and better resources to our children,” she continued.
The Education Ministry had filed a lawsuit against primary teachers union DOE and secondary teachers union OLME after they called the strike.
The exams are scheduled to take place on May 10, in 600 schools, which were chosen as a representative sample from all schools in the country.
Designed along similar lines to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s triannual Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which evaluates 15-year-old students, the Greek version of PISA will take place annually and will test pupils in the last year of elementary and middle school.
The aim of the program is to assess performance levels at Greek schools and identify areas where improvements are needed. The initiative comes in response to Greece’s poor performance in the 2018 PISA, where it came, among 78 countries, in 42nd place in reading, 43rd in math and 44th in science.
