PISA is the acronym for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures the educational attainment of high school students in the OECD.
The new scores are...scary. Educational attainment, especially since the disastrous COVID school closings, has dropped like a rock. The trend is unambiguous, and the scale of the drop is enough to make you sick to your stomach.
We are used to focusing on the poor performance of public schools in the United States, as we should, but the results here are mirrored in most countries around the world, except China. I don't know whether to trust Chinese scores or not, since that country has a long history of juking state-gathered statistics, but if they are even remotely accurate, that alone should scare you.
But the decline in student performance in the West compared to China shouldn't bother you most; it's the fact that young people are becoming more stupid and much less well educated than at any time in living memory. After decades of improving IQ scores, named the Flynn effect, we are seeing a reversal of that trend, with students losing the ability to reason.
Two extraordinary charts from today’s PISA test results:
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) September 8, 2026
1) School test scores continue to collapse internationally, underscoring how this is no longer a Covid effect but sustained decline.
Those falls in reading and maths are equivalent to about two years of lost schooling. pic.twitter.com/Swe6eDqn61
The COVID effect is only one of many reasons why scores have dropped in recent years. Famously, the rise of smartphone use and AI clearly has an effect, as does the flooding of Western countries with immigrants from low-education cultures without traditions for promoting education as a path to success.
Here are two 2025 PISA maps of Europe, one with only natives included and one with only migrants. https://t.co/SBpVdApL62 pic.twitter.com/awnLErPpxP
— Smirkley (@Smirkley) September 8, 2026
But one of the biggest reasons is the shift in focus in our school systems, which have, in many cases, abandoned traditional education for social justice and activism. When reading, writing and arithmetic are replaced by studies in decolonization and gender bending, it's hard to be shocked when students can't read, can't write, and can't do basic math.
Immigrant students score below natives in 37 of 52 countries.
— Smirkley (@Smirkley) September 8, 2026
Finland has a gap of -79 points, Germany -74.
The Gulf: UAE +87, Qatar +77.
US is absent as PISA recorded immigrant status for only 55% of students. pic.twitter.com/nKzivovP14
It's hard not to notice the correlation. Countries that emphasize social justice and work ideology have seen their scores drop even faster than others. And urban school districts, which are the most ideologically driven, unsurprisingly have seen results drop.
The 2025 PISA data is out and the results are alarming, with student performance FALLING FASTER in Canada than the rest of the OECD.
— Eric Lombardi (EricForOLP.ca) 🇨🇦🚀 (@EricDLombardi) September 8, 2026
Before 2018, Canada outperformed the OECD in every single subject (Blue dot)
We are no longer statistically above average in any subject (white… pic.twitter.com/vLNCan8DCS
The 2025 PISA data is out and the results are alarming, with student performance FALLING FASTER in Canada than the rest of the OECD.
Before 2018, Canada outperformed the OECD in every single subject (Blue dot)
We are no longer statistically above average in any subject (white dot) with huge declines in reading and math.
Given what I’ve heard from parents, students, and teachers (and frankly, the observed enshittification of just about everything under Doug Ford) I wouldn’t be surprised if Ontario’s results are worse.
There is no one obvious solution to our woes, but a good place to start is to take the radical step of blowing up our public education system and getting government as far away from education as possible.
My X buddy Eric Lidström has a radical proposal: get government entirely out of education. By that, he means entirely, which is about as radical a solution as you can imagine. But the argument is simple: the situation is dire and getting worse by the day.
Eric is Swedish, but his proposed solution applies equally to all Western countries.
Private education, chosen and paid for by parents, without government insight, oversight, or financing. Such private education is the source of that “good education” that governments supposedly used to provide. It was only because of 2,500 years of trial and error in the market that, in the 18th and 19th centuries, there were good schools. The government took them over or copied them and standardized and homogenized them. Then they began to reform them, and as a result of most reforms, they became worse. Even without government reforms, government education and government-approved education, such as charter schools, gradually deteriorate. That is in the nature of a government function with a monopoly, or near-monopoly.
The solution means banning not only government schools but also charter schools and school vouchers – any form of education that the government finances, regulates, or supervises.
With free, unchained, private education, the US would likely get something like 600–700,000 competing private schools. Sweden might get 10–15,000 such schools. Most of them would be small; based on historical experience, with around 50 students for primary schools and 150 for secondary education (Dunbar’s number). Most primary schools, and maybe also most secondary schools, will be owner-operated. The schools would also be inexpensive, costing about a third of education costs today. Incidentally, one third of the cost of education is the share of the total cost that Thomas Sowell found reached the classroom in a couple of large cities.
Erik is right, although ensuring that theory and practice align as we would want is about as hard as it sounds.
First, and perhaps foremost, public education employees are almost 60 percent of government workers, which makes them a powerful political force. The teachers' unions are so powerful that the Democrat Party is almost totally captured by them, to the point that COVID policies were actually directed by them. When they spoke, Democrats bowed.
Then there is the power of an American tradition that goes back to the Founding, when a belief in the power of education translated naturally into an all-of-government effort to ensure universal access to education through government funding. The Northwest Ordinance, passed at the same time as the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, set aside land to fund universal education.
Our correct belief in the power of education translated into the incorrect belief that government should provide it.
Then there is the genuine, and not wrong, fear that not every cultural/ethnic/racial group holds educational attainment as a necessary good to the same extent that the majority does. The vast difference in educational attainment between some groups and others cannot be explained solely by differences in ability, but clearly has much to do with how education is valued.
Public schools exist partly to coerce groups that don't value education to send their kids to school, although evidence shows that making school mandatory doesn't directly translate into higher educational attainment. When kids can graduate high school functionally illiterate, it's hard to argue that the policy has been a great success. Privatizing education may not be the complete solution to this problem, but it's arguably possible that combining the current coercive practices with the development of schools aimed at enticing students to learn in a way that public schools most certainly do not is an experiment worth trying.
Post-COVID studies don't show that homeschooled kids saw the educational declines in the 2020s seen in kids in public and even private schools, and homeschooled kids consistently perform better than those who go to public schools. They are smarter, better informed, and more prepared to participate in society than kids who have been acculturated in our schools.
One of the more striking social consequences of the Covid response. I'm guessing that the ruling classes did not intend this result. pic.twitter.com/rBEQhUtlth
— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreytucker) September 9, 2026
That's just a fact. For all the talk about the importance of socialization, it's quite clear that the socializing kids get in schools is a net negative, not a positive.
All this is to say that I believe Lidström's argument is correct, but I fear that the prospect of implementing it here or in other Western countries is...remote. Our prejudices, nostalgia for a school system that does not exist, and probably never did as well as we imagine, and the political forces arrayed against real reform are likely to be impossible to overcome.
On the other hand, the Overton Window has moved dramatically over the past couple of decades.
Parents tend to have a better view than the general public. But even their satisfaction is at a new low
— Neetu Arnold (@neetu_arnold) September 8, 2026
Parents, again, aren’t confident that schools are teaching critical thinking skills pic.twitter.com/5ym4xskTxs
What seemed impossible two decades ago is now happening in Red states, and what seems impossible today may be possible in twenty years. The explosion of homeschooling in recent years shows that attitudes have been changing, with as many as five million kids schooled at home and in informal collectives of parents working together.
Massive changes in attitudes and social habits take far longer than they should, especially when you have a massive and well-funded opposition with the tools of propaganda behind them. But that doesn't mean that we are doomed to keep going down the path of failure.
It just means we have to take one step at a time and win the culture day by day.
Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.
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