Smarter 15-year-olds?

Are Filipino junior high school students much smarter now than they were eight years ago, or even just four years ago? The much-awaited results of the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) are out, and there is much rejoicing because it would seem that the answer to the question is a definite yes. Indeed, there is good reason to celebrate, and congratulations are due to Department of Education Secretary Sonny Angara and his corps of dedicated professionals in the DepEd. But they know much more work remains to be done to make it truly good news for the broad cross-section of Philippine society and more unequivocally so.

Pisa 2025 shows that unlike in 2018, we are no longer the world’s kulelat (bottom-dweller) or pinakabobo (dumbest) in key education outcomes. Pisa specifically tests 15-year-old students (usually in third year high school) on their knowledge, skills, and attitudes in the now 91 countries participating in this triennial assessment. Filipinos got their first sobering introduction to Pisa when the country participated for the first time in 2018, and emerged with the worst scores worldwide on reading, and second-worst (next to the Dominican Republic) on science and mathematics, out of 79 countries that participated then.

In the 2022 round with 81 participating countries, we inched up somewhat from the bottom, but stayed in the bottom six (sixth lowest in math and reading, but still third lowest in Science and second lowest in creative thinking). While rankings improved slightly, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that runs the Pisa noted that our average scores then were not statistically different from our dismal 2018 scores. And in both the 2018 and 2022 rounds, only around 20-25 percent of our students achieved baseline proficiency levels, meaning the bulk of our 15-year-olds could not identify the main idea in a moderate-length text, or solve basic mathematical equations—truly an education crisis.

But the 2025 Pisa results were genuinely good news overall. The Philippines had the largest improvement in the world for reading performance. We’re no longer in the bottom 10, having outranked 18, 16, and 14 countries in reading, math, and science, respectively. Compared to 2022, basic proficiency levels also increased from 24 to 31 percent in reading, 23 to 32 percent in science, and 16 to 21 percent in math—still a small minority, but significant progress nonetheless.

Still, we remain way below global standards. Our average scores of 367, 373, and 371 in reading, science, and math, respectively, remain far below the global averages of 461, 482, and 463. The proficiency gap remains huge, with up to three in four Filipino students (or 68-79 percent, depending on the subject) still unable to reach minimum proficiency levels. Of particular concern is how the learning gap between rich and poor has further widened. Notably, the Philippines was the only country where this socioeconomic achievement gap widened. In reading, scores for the wealthiest one-fourth of the student population jumped by 41 points, while those for the poorest one-fourth improved by only 15 points, or just about one-third the progress of the former.

Interestingly, private school students seem to perform significantly better in Pisa than those in public schools. The 2018 Pisa results showed private school students averaging 395 points in math, way above the public school average of 343 points. The difference was even larger in reading, with independent private schools outpacing public schools by nearly 100 points. Does this mean that private schools are generally superior to public schools? While many are led to believe so, students from higher income groups are more prominently from private schools, which has generally corresponded to superior Pisa scores. OECD found that once the data are statistically adjusted to account for the socioeconomic profile of the students and their families, the private-public school performance gap disappears. On many other comparable metrics, they found public school students to perform just as well, even slightly higher, than private school peers from identical economic backgrounds.

In the end, then, our persistently wide learning gap that prevents public education from being the “great equalizer” in our society traces to persistent poverty and the inordinately high cost of food. These have led to higher early childhood malnutrition and stunting that permanently impairs our students’ cognitive and learning ability. Inequality will remain (and worsen) for as long as we fail to address this root cause. As I’ve always argued, our education crisis is as much the fault of our Department of Agriculture and local government units in failing to address the high cost of food and malnutrition, beyond DepEd and other educational authorities themselves.

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