Before we celebrate PISA 2025
We hate to rain on everyone’s PISA 2025 parade, but before we celebrate, we need to ask an uncomfortable question: Are we actually doing better, or are we simply looking better because everyone else is doing worse?
The latest PISA results have understandably generated optimism. After years of confronting disappointing international assessments of Philippine education, any sign that Filipino learners are improving is welcome. Genuine gains should be acknowledged, and our teachers and students deserve credit for progress made under difficult conditions.
But before the results are turned into congratulatory graphics and declarations that Philippine education has finally turned a corner, the numbers deserve closer scrutiny.
The first problem is our fixation with rankings. Moving several places upward sounds impressive. Getting out of the bottom group sounds even better. But rankings are relative. A country can climb because its own performance improved, because other countries declined, or because both happened at the same time.
That distinction matters greatly in PISA 2025 because the international context is itself troubling. Many education systems have experienced declines in reading and mathematics over recent assessment cycles. Against such a backdrop, an improvement in rank does not necessarily mean that the underlying learning crisis has been resolved.
This is why we are much more interested in proficiency than position.
The Philippine figures remain sobering. Only 21 percent of Filipino students reached at least Level 2 proficiency in mathematics. In reading, the figure was 31 percent, and in science, 32 percent.
Level 2 matters because it represents baseline proficiency. We are not talking here about exceptional or advanced performance. These are foundational competencies that 15-year-olds should reasonably be expected to demonstrate.
Turn those percentages around and the picture becomes much harder to celebrate. About four out of five Filipino students assessed were below baseline proficiency in mathematics. Roughly seven out of ten were below baseline in reading and science.
That, to us, is the more important PISA story.
We can certainly say that we have improved. What we cannot reasonably say is that we are already doing well. There is a crucial difference between the two.
Imagine a student who previously scored 35 percent on an examination and now scores 45 percent. The increase is real. Something may have worked, and it is worth understanding what contributed to the improvement. But no responsible teacher would look only at the gain and conclude that the student has already mastered the subject.
We should apply the same discipline when interpreting the performance of an entire education system.
There is also a danger in allowing the poor performance of other countries to make our own performance appear more acceptable. If learning outcomes are declining globally, that should concern us rather than reassure us. Our national aspiration cannot simply be to catch up with an international average that is itself falling.
This is precisely why PISA should not become a public relations exercise every three years. Its real value lies not in giving governments something to celebrate or critics something to attack, but in providing evidence that helps us understand what learners can and cannot do.
The more productive response to PISA 2025 is therefore not celebration, but investigation: Why, despite the improvement in scores, have we remained at Level 2 out of six proficiency levels across three consecutive PISA cycles (2018, 2022, and 2025)? More importantly, what will it take to move more students beyond Level 2?
Answering these questions requires us to look beyond the national averages and examine where the gains are actually occurring and what might be driving them. Which learners actually improved? Did gains occur across socioeconomic groups, regions, school types, and other important categories? Were improvements concentrated among students who were already performing relatively well, or did our lowest-performing learners improve too? The Philippine PISA 2025 Country Notes offer one particularly important clue: 11 percent of disadvantaged Filipino students were able to perform in the top quarter in science within the country, making them academically resilient despite their socioeconomic disadvantage. We should be asking what enabled these students to succeed and whether those conditions can be replicated more broadly. Which interventions introduced after the pandemic appear to have made a difference? What happened in schools that improved substantially? What kind of professional development did teachers actually receive, particularly in subject-matter content and assessment literacy? What can we learn from their teachers, school leaders, and communities?
These questions matter far more than whether the Philippines moved several places up an international ranking.
At the same time, caution should not be mistaken for pessimism. If Filipino students performed better than in previous PISA cycles, that deserves recognition. An upward trajectory matters, especially after years of stagnation.
But intellectual honesty requires us to hold two ideas at the same time: we have made progress, and we remain in a learning crisis.
Those statements are not contradictory.
In fact, acknowledging both gives us a more useful basis for policy. If something is beginning to work, identify it. Evaluate it. Strengthen it. Scale it where appropriate. But modest gains should not lessen the urgency of addressing the enormous proportion of Filipino learners who still cannot demonstrate baseline competencies.
Perhaps PISA 2025 is also a reminder that we need to improve the way we communicate educational data. Rankings make excellent headlines because they are simple. Learning is not.
We need to move beyond communicating whether we went up or down in the rankings and instead communicate what students can actually do, what they still struggle to do, and which indicators require focused intervention.
Celebrating improvement is important, but it should not obscure the areas where greater effort is needed. We need to balance the story of progress with a clear account of the learning gaps, proficiency levels, and underlying competencies that require acceleration.
The goal of educational data should not simply be to make us feel better about our position in the rankings. It should help us identify where we need to act.
That is precisely why rankings must be kept in perspective. A movement upward in an international table tells us something about where we stand, but much less about where the real learning gaps remain. It tells us something. It just does not tell us enough.
So yes, the PISA 2025 results give the Philippines something we have badly needed: evidence that improvement is possible. That is worth recognizing.
But celebration should not come at the expense of perspective.
The question is not simply whether we performed better than before, or whether we now look better partly because other countries performed worse. The more consequential question is whether Filipino learners are acquiring the knowledge and competencies they need to thrive in further education, work, and society.
When only around one in five reaches baseline proficiency in mathematics and roughly one in three does so in reading and science, the answer remains painfully clear.
We are doing better. But we are nowhere near doing well enough.
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Allen A. Espinosa ([email protected]) is a professor at the College of Advanced Studies and director of the Graduate Research, Creative Endeavors, and Examination Management Office of the Philippine Normal University. Ivy P Mejia ([email protected]) is a science education specialist at the University of the Philippines National Institute for Science and Mathematics Education Development. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the institutions they represent.
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