by Allan Wall, Mexico News Report, ©2026
MySociety (Flickr), Wikimedia Commons, CC by SA 2.0
(Sep. 21, 2026) — PISA is an acronym for Programme for International Student Assessment, a test battery administered internationally every three years by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), a 38-nation group of which both Mexico and the United States are member states.
The OECD recently released the results of the PISA and it attracts attention and provokes discussion as nations see their rankings on PISA.
You can see the OECD report here. The tests were administered in 2025 and included both OECD and non-OECD countries.
I’m about to quote the OECD document, so first I’ll quote its dislaimer: “This work is issued under the responsibility of the Secretary‑General of the OECD, and does not necessarily reflect the official views of OECD Member countries.”
The document reports that “More than 760 000 students took the PISA science, mathematics and reading test in 2025 across 91 countries and economies, representing around 33 million 15-year-olds across the world.”
Besides the traditional math, science and reading tests, there was a computational problem-solving test for the first time, and an optional English-as-a-foreign-language evaluation was offered. But for the rest of this article I’m only discussing the math, science and reading tests.
Here’s what the 2025 results found: “The overall performance of OECD countries declined, with the lowest average levels of performance ever observed in science, reading and mathematics... Overall reading scores saw particularly steep declines in the past three years, including in skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources and thinking critically about what we read.”
So what country “won”? And how did countries compare with each other?
Well, the OECD released separate scores in math, reading and science. But the Education Systems by Country website combined the three to calculate an average of the three tests, thus making a list of the overall results.
Based on that criteria, the winning country was China, with an overall score of 578.7. Well, not the whole country of China, but the provinces/municipalities of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang.
In second place was Singapore, with 552.7. The population of Singapore is about three-quarters ethnically Chinese.
The Chinese scored #1 on science and mathematics while Singapore had the #1 rating in reading.
Read the rest here.
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