Reacción a "Interpreting the results of the PISA 2025 report"

The latest PISA results have already sparked numerous reactions, with people attributing the decline to reading habits, a lack of discipline, the LOMLOE or, of course, screens and AI. Simplifying matters in this way may make for a snappy headline, but not if we wish to engage in a serious and measured debate. Reducing everything to a single figure obscures what is essential: embracing the complexity of an issue as multifaceted as education.

Before discussing the results, it is worth asking who conducts this test and for what purpose. PISA is designed by the OECD, which is an economic organisation, not an educational one. Its objective, from a neoliberal perspective, is growth and competitiveness, and its view of schools is in line with this, as it assesses pupils as future workers and countries as economies competing against one another, channelling that competition into the familiar rankings. Preparing pupils for the labour market is one of the functions of schools, according to the tradition of the sociology of education, but it is by no means the only one, even though we have been treating it as such for years.

We must also be cautious about what the test measures and how. PISA shows that teenagers read less well, and this is true in terms of what it assesses. However, the 2025 Reading Habits Barometer states that the 14–24 age group is the most avid of readers in Spain: 76.9 per cent read books in their spare time, the highest percentage across all age groups and six percentage points higher than in 2017. In other words, they do read, and quite a lot. What has changed is not the habit itself, but the ability to sustain attention on long and complex texts as measured by the test – which is only one aspect of what reading entails. It is worth bearing this in mind because the narrative that young people do not read fuels moral panic.

These results will be used by certain quarters to call for a return to content-based schooling. But they are using an exam as evidence that does not actually measure what they claim: PISA assesses whether pupils apply what they know to a real-life situation, not whether they have memorised it. In fact, the competence-based approach that is currently being criticised originated largely from the OECD itself, which points out that the systems that fare best are not those that prioritise discipline or content, but those that cover fewer subjects, yet in greater depth. There is also no shortage of voices attributing the results to Spanish education legislation, but the figures had already begun to ‘deteriorate’ before its implementation, and the decline is widespread across the OECD.

Other reactions unanimously blame mobile phones or AI. Yet those who have seen the sharpest decline in Spain are pupils from better-off families: they have lost 33 points in reading, compared with 15 for the most disadvantaged. The OECD itself admits that social gaps have narrowed because those at the top are falling behind, not because those at the bottom are catching up. Neither mobile phones nor AI can explain this. Nor does this anti-technology narrative explain why Estonia – one of the most digitised systems in the world – is the OECD country with the best results in science after Japan, or why Japan and South Korea, with their hyper-connected teenagers, top almost every table. The decisive factor is not how much technology is used, but for what purpose and with what support.

Finally, the headlines won’t highlight it, but there are variables where Spain ranks among the top, whilst high-performing countries lag far behind: a sense of belonging to the school community, social cohesion, very low levels of bullying, perseverance and curiosity. This is what the rankings do not capture, and it is a large part of what a school does every day. Without a doubt, it should also be a priority objective of education.