It was the idea to apply the rigors of scientific research to education policy that nudged the OECD to create PISA in the late 1990s. Now every three years, hundreds of thousands of 15-year-olds from over 90 countries sit down to answer questions in the global PISA test. They do not revise for it, nor do the results affect their grades. Yet ministers scrutinise the outcomes, newspapers splash them across their front pages, and education systems are praised or questioned accordingly.
This is because the PISA measures of student learning outcomes are the most reliable measure of the quality and effectiveness of school systems, and thus one of the most powerful predictors for the long-run success of economies and societies. Researchers at Stanford University estimate that if all 15-year-old Americans achieved at least a basic level of performance in PISA (baseline Level 2), this could add over US$ 40 trillion to the US economy over their working lives.
Yet, on average across OECD countries, 20% of 15-year-old students do not reach this threshold in any of the PISA subjects – up from 16% in 2022. In science, this means they struggle to interpret simple data or identify evidence in a graph. In reading, they will find it hard to understand simple texts, while in maths they could have trouble deciphering the relationship between units and price - the kind of tasks embedded in everyday life, from grocery shopping to reading a utility bill. This isn’t about calculus. It’s about basic competence. And these are not students in war zones or in nations without infrastructure. They live in the high- and middle-income countries of the OECD. They have had nine or ten years of formal education. By global standards, they are among the lucky ones.
But PISA was never meant simply to point out what is going wrong. Its ambition has always been to raise expectations of what is possible. The idea was straightforward: assess what young people know and can do, using an internationally agreed yardstick; connect those results with data from students, teachers, schools and parents to understand why performance differs; and then turn comparison into a force for improvement.
When one country succeeds, it becomes a reference point for others. Policymakers start asking “What are they doing differently, and what can we learn from it?” And when results disappoint, they are rarely just numbers in a report. They provoke national debate, challenge long-held assumptions and, at their best, become the catalyst for serious reform. In that sense, PISA is not a league table, it provides a compass.
PISA also offers powerful reminders that change is possible. Germany transformed the wake-up call of the 2001 PISA shock into a far-reaching programme of reform. Brazil showed that greater equity and higher quality can advance hand in hand, dramatically expanding educational opportunity while improving PISA outcomes. And Türkiye demonstrated how quickly progress can happen, lifting science performance by almost 70 PISA points in a decade – the equivalent of adding more than three years of learning.
PISA tells us that the world is no longer divided into rich countries with great schools and poor countries with weak ones. Some of the most remarkable educational progress is now happening in places with far fewer resources. Cambodia, for example, is beginning the kind of educational transformation that once propelled economies such as Korea and, more recently, China and Vietnam onto a path of sustained economic growth and rising prosperity. Equally important, good policies and wise spending choices are far stronger predictors for performance on PISA than just how much countries spend per student: At USD 288,521 per student, Luxembourg is by far the biggest spender on education, but it posted lower average science scores than Ireland, France and Italy – all of which invested less than half that amount per student.
Perhaps most importantly, PISA helps countries navigate the future together. This latest edition lays out the space for policy action on two fronts: first, the steady erosion of reading skills – the foundation upon which almost all learning is built – and second, the extraordinary opportunities and risks created by artificial intelligence.
Between 2018 and 2025, reading performance fell in three-quarters of education systems with comparable data, across the OECD by 25 score points – more than a year of learning. The biggest surprise is who fell furthest behind. It was not the most disadvantaged students, but those from wealthy families. This finding points to a much broader challenge than inequality alone.
Most troubling is the decline in the very skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources, and thinking critically about what we read. In turn, the share of "hasty readers" – students who rush through texts and give quick but incorrect answers – almost doubled between 2018 and 2025. In a world increasingly flooded with information, our students are less likely to think deeply and separate signal from noise.
People quickly turn to explanations such as the impact of the COVID pandemic, but a decline in reading was already visible well before the pandemic hit. We cannot say for sure, but declining levels of reading for enjoyment and the shift towards digital reading – skimming social media feeds and rapidly processing information – may be compromising the ability of students to engage with complex texts and data.
Perhaps not surprisingly then, while limited or moderate use of digital devices for learning at school is often associated with better outcomes, when they are used for leisure during school, the relationship reverses sharply, with substantially lower levels of student performance. This raises questions about whether devices such as smartphones – designed to maximise a user’s attention – are compatible with sustained academic attention.
Is the arrival of GenAI changing the equation? At first glance, the PISA data aren’t positive: Students who are using AI chatbots for specific tasks such as summarising texts get lower scores in science, on average, than those who don’t.
The patterns are complex, and depend a lot on how GenAI is used, but the bottom line is simple: In the same way that we do not become fit by watching sports but by doing sports, learning does not occur through the consumption of content, but as a productive cognitive struggle of the mind with new material. Where technology enables or enhances that cognitive struggle, students will advance. Where technology short-circuits the productive struggle of learning, it will undercut students’ development. If we get this right, AI becomes a scaffold, not a crutch. A tool for thinking, not a substitute for it. And education remains what it has always been at its best: a human endeavour, powered by judgment, relationships and trust.
For policymakers looking to strengthen digital literacy, the lesson is clear: Digital readiness does not begin with devices, it begins with helping young people cultivate the ability to concentrate, interpret, synthesise and reason – capacities that are deeply tied to the habits of deep reading. This is not a call to turn back the digital clock, but to find balance. Technology can be a powerful amplifier of learning, but only if students are equipped with the cognitive and metacognitive tools to use it wisely. That means protecting time for reading in the school day. It means designing digital learning platforms that reward reflection, not just reaction.
In a world of shrinking attention spans and rising information overload, policymakers have a crucial role to play in shaping an educational culture that nurtures the depth of thought necessary to thrive. The future belongs not just to those who can access information – but to those who can interpret it, connect it and make meaning from it. Some countries are taking this insight seriously. In France, reforms to the national curriculum have reemphasised literature and reading comprehension as core competencies across disciplines. In Singapore, despite its high-tech classrooms, students still spend substantial time with print texts, and reading remains a centrepiece of early education. Sweden, long admired for its education system, promotes reading through libraries, national reading campaigns, and pedagogical practices that value depth over speed.
But perhaps the greatest challenge facing education is not how to use new technologies in the classroom. It is deciding what knowledge, skills and values students will need to flourish in a world of AI. These days, it is tempting to see AI as a force that steadily erodes human agency. If machines can mimic our abilities and take over our tasks, what will be left for us? But at their best, humans are far more than the sum of isolated, automatable tasks. We make sense of the world, spot connections and make moral choices.
The rise of AI should not shrink that space – it should expand it. If machines increasingly master the routine, then education must double down on the irreducibly human. On our ability to think about our own thinking. To zoom out and see the system behind the symptom. To build and navigate complex social relationships. To make ethical judgments when the data run out. To create what has never existed before. Those are not soft skills; they are survival skills in the digital age. They are what allow societies to deliberate, economies to innovate, and communities to hold together when the ground shifts beneath them. If education fails to defend and cultivate those capacities with clarity and courage, AI won’t just automate our tasks – it could quietly erode some of the foundations of our civic life.
All of this brings us back full circle to PISA. If PISA is to remain a compass for the future, rather than just a mirror of the past, it must continue to evolve. It must keep redefining what it means to flourish – not in the world we grew up in, but in the world today's young people will inherit and shape.
Andreas Schleicher
Director for Education and Skills
Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General