This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The publication of the latest results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA 2025) on Sept. 8 prompted the usual flurry of commentary, comparisons and rankings. France has slipped, some countries have improved, while others have proved more resilient.
As always, attention quickly turns to where each country stands. These rankings are useful, but they risk obscuring a more important question: What do we actually make of the years we spend in school? For much of the 20th century, measuring educational progress seemed relatively straightforward.
We counted students, years of schooling and qualifications. There were good reasons for doing so: The expansion and democratization of education were among the major social transformations of the past century. But now that the vast majority of children spend many years in school, the question has shifted.
It is no longer enough to know how long they remain in education. We need to understand what we make of those years and what those years enable us to become. This is precisely the purpose of the work we have undertaken with our colleague Nadir Altinok in Edumetrics: Measuring Human Capital for the 21st century.
By reconstructing comparable measures of the quality and distribution of learning over the long run, we seek to shift the analysis of human capital away from years of schooling toward the skills actually acquired. The PISA 2025 results bring this question into sharper focus. Across OECD countries, average performance is now at its lowest level since PISA began in all three major domains assessed.
Between 2015 and 2025, scores fell by 22 points in mathematics and 28 points in reading. 20% of 15-year-olds are now low performers in all three main domains, compared with 16% in 2022. France scores 483 points in science, almost exactly the OECD average of 482. It performs slightly below the OECD average in reading (456 compared with 461) and mathematics (458 compared with 463).
Extract — continue reading at the source.
