PISA 2025 Results: Spain, Korea and OECD Decline

This week the PISA report was published, which assesses student performance across various OECD countries, and the results have not been good: in most cases, they have worsened compared to the 2022 results. But not everyone has changed equally.

Goguma, what are the most important points?

Being Spanish myself, I can’t help but focus on the results from my own country, and they have been especially bad. PISA assesses science, mathematics, and reading. Well, it has worsened in two of them: Mathematics and Reading. The situation is serious, as these are two of the most important fields for working life. This affects everything, even democratic quality down to corruption cases: a more educated population is harder to manipulate. But let’s get into more detail.

The problem with Spain is clear if we compare to 2015, not 2022

This can be good and bad (or very bad) at the same time. If we compare to 2022, the results indicate there has been a decline, but if we look at 2015, the situation is worse: almost the equivalent of two academic years in the case of reading scores, although the “academic year” comparison is illustrative, not literal; it’s a huge drop. In other words, the problem goes back further.

And what do you think the problem is?

There aren’t enough teachers. In the end, it’s a resource problem; it’s really a structural issue tied to a lack of teaching staff, and perhaps some of them don’t have sufficient quality. And of course, if the education system doesn’t work well, it will be harder to train teachers with more knowledge and skills to solve the problem.

Changing the education law every other day doesn’t help

I graduated before 2015, and even back then people were saying that quality and standards in education were dropping. And the thing is, in Spain one of the problems is the constant politicization of education, where every political party, as soon as it comes to power, wants its own education reform, and that just doesn’t work. The system needs to be shielded, and only what doesn’t work should be changed. A student who is in primary school now should fundamentally have the same education system by the time they graduate from university. To give you an idea, here’s a list of the education reforms of recent decades.

More autonomy for schools with problems

There are schools with many problems, whether due to immigration (and yes, this is a huge issue, let’s not be hypocritical about it), or difficulty understanding the content, or because students come from countries where studying isn’t culturally valued. Or also schools in, let’s say, troubled neighborhoods. That said, that’s not really where the core problem lies; those are relevant factors, but not decisive ones. Resources need to be focused on struggling students to address these problems, and support should also be given to schools that need it; that’s where teachers should be assigned if necessary. For that, one thing is needed: money. Well, two things: money and staff.

I also don’t like that it’s becoming easier and easier to move up a grade despite failing subjects. If there’s a failing grade, it means there’s a significant gap in knowledge; new content shouldn’t keep being added if the previous material hasn’t been mastered. But there’s one more thing to discuss.

In Catalonia, the test was invalidated because they tried to cheat

It turns out that the autonomous region where I grew up tried to cheat, excluding more students from the test than allowed. For those who don’t know, in Spain the regions are called autonomous communities, and there are 17 in total. Each one manages its own region’s education system, except for Ceuta and Melilla, which are handled directly by the central government.

The Catalan government says it was a mistake, but (and this is my personal opinion) not even they believe that themselves. They tried to cheat, it didn’t work out, and they had to come up with some excuse. They’ve tried to downplay the issue by pointing out that they can assess performance using regional and national tests, but if you can’t benchmark against the rest of the world, the results of those tests are irrelevant. In short, making a fool of themselves internationally once again.

Okay, and what about Korea?

Well, I haven’t experienced the Korean system firsthand the way I did the Spanish one, and I think that’s worth mentioning before anything else. What I do see is that, on the surface, students seem to have much more respect for the figure of the teacher. All the kids bow when they arrive; it’s something that, as a Spaniard, really surprised me when I saw it. Very different from Spain: here, the teacher’s role apparently gets more respect, at least in principle. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

In Korea there’s also a much stronger culture of sending kids to study at hagwon after school; these are private academies. Culturally, there’s much more emphasis on kids studying. You have to take one thing into account: this is a country that is technically still at war, and it has nothing else going for it. There aren’t abundant natural resources, and (until just a few years ago, thanks to K-pop) it barely had any tourism. The only option left was industry, and to be internationally competitive, they needed two things: money (which the government provided) and engineers. But not just any engineers—they needed the best. And this is made clear to students from school onward. Hence this culture of effort.

That said, it’s true that reality isn’t as extreme as some sensationalist media outlets portray it. Although there are cases of students who study insane amounts to get into prestigious universities, nowadays it’s not quite like that.

Get to the point, how has Korea done?

Well, so-so. If we look from 2015 onward, the problem is similar to Spain’s: there’s been a drop in reading, while mathematics and science hold steady or improve. That said, keep in mind they start from a much higher level than Spain, and the proportion of the decline isn’t anywhere close to the same.

It’s possible the problem is (and this is opinion, mind you) that teenagers in Korea are reading less and getting used to consuming more short-form content in social media formats. On top of that, it seems they focus heavily on passing exams and being competitive with each other, so overall, less reading is done for pleasure.

There will also be a problem in the future, and that’s AI. It can be a fantastic tool for learning. Even so, if it’s used, for example, to summarize texts, it means kids won’t be able to do it on their own.

And what happened globally?

Well, bad news: what happened in Spain is happening globally. There’s been a clear decline in reading and mathematics, although science has held steady. That’s bad, very bad. If future voters are less educated, it’s much more likely that the system won’t work and we’ll end up with less capable people in charge.

It seems like a very deep shift, and the worsening trend only seems to keep getting worse. I don’t think it’s solely because of social media and phones, but I do think they don’t help. Too many algorithms working to make us dumber than we already are. Although in my generation, the same thing was said about video games, and before that, about comics. Maybe forcing tablets and screens into classrooms wasn’t such a good idea, and maybe it’s time to go back to pen and paper.

It’s a complex topic, but what do you think? Do you believe we’ve become idiots, like they said in Back to the Future? What would you change? I’ll be reading your comments.

You can check out the full OECD report here: PISA 2025 Results (Volume I).

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Cover photo: Pexels.