PISA 2025 Results Reveal Global Educational Disparities and Regional Gaps

The 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, which evaluated 760,000 15 year old students across 91 countries and territories, show a continued dominance of Asian economies in educational performance. Chinese provinces Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang led in mathematics and science, while Singapore took the top spot in reading. The 2025 edition placed a primary emphasis on science and introduced a new assessment for computational problem solving, where Macau, Singapore, and China ranked highest.

In Europe, Poland emerged as a strong performer, ranking second in the European Union for mathematics and third for reading comprehension. While Polish Education Minister Barbara Nowacka welcomed these rankings, she noted that overall test scores have been declining globally and in Poland, indicating that further work is required. In contrast, Brazil struggled across most categories, ranking 71st in mathematics, 67th in science, 52nd in reading, and 70th in computational problem solving. Brazil's science score of 409 points represented a six point increase since 2022, though it remained well below the OECD average of 482 points.

Within Brazil, the 2025 results provided the first direct comparison between the 26 states and the Federal District. The data revealed a stark internal divide, with Paraná ranking first in all four evaluated areas. The gap between Paraná and Alagoas in computational problem solving was 120.6 points, which, based on OECD parameters, corresponds to approximately six years of learning. Other high performing Brazilian regions included São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Minas Gerais, and the Federal District, while Alagoas ranked last in three of the four categories.