Gunda TIRE: "Estonians believe in education, and this belief has been essential for centuries"

Caucasian Journal is starting new program of interviews "BEST NORDIC AND BALTIC PRACTICE" with high-level practitioners from Western Europe who share their knowledge in areas relevant to South Caucasian region, which can be used to improve quality of life in our countries. We welcome comments and will publish all views.

22.02.2020 (Caucasian Journal). It is symbolic that the first interview which we publish under this program is about education - something which is basic for achieving progress in other directions. How South Caucasian students compare with peers? How well can they read?

It is our pleasure to introduce Ms. Gunda TIRE, PISA National Project Manager at Foundation Innove. PISA is the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment, and Innove is an education competence center in Estonia. The reason why we invited an expert from Estonia is simple: Because Estonian students are the best in Europe
Read the Georgian language version here.

Alexander KAFFKA, editor-in-chief of CJ:  Indeed, according to recent PISA worldwide student assessment results, the Estonian 15-year olds have the Europe’s highest scores in all disciplines. First of all, please accept our sincere congratulations to Estonian friends with this excellent achievement! I know it was not unexpected, since Estonia’s results have been going up for some time, but anyway how was the top achievement perceived - by ordinary people and by professionals?

Gunda TIRE:  Thank you very much for the kind words, and we really appreciate your invitation to share the Estonian PISA experience with your readers!

Before the PISA data is released, it is very difficult to predict in what direction to expect the results. Our hope was not to show a decline to our prior results. As PISA is very poplar and well known in Estonia, the new data for 2018 was expected with certain amount of curiosity.