As countries around the world have moved closer to achieving the quantitative goals of universal schooling and mass education, a more fundamental question has emerged: As people spend more years in school and compulsory education expands, how effective is the education they receive, and what value does it actually create for individuals, societies and economies? It was against this backdrop that international organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) sought to better understand the relationship between education and economic development and to provide countries with a comparable measure of the effectiveness of their education systems. One of the most influential outcomes of this effort was the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Over the past quarter-century, PISA has evolved into a global education phenomenon, one powerful enough to trigger what have come to be known as "PISA shocks” in a number of countries, prompting intense public debate and, in some cases, major education reforms.
First conducted in 2000, PISA assesses 15-year-old students approaching the end of compulsory education. Rather than simply testing whether students can reproduce what they have learned at school, it examines whether they can interpret knowledge, reason with it and apply their knowledge and skills to real-life situations in science, mathematics and reading. In this sense, PISA asks a deceptively simple but consequential question: What can young people actually do with what they have learned? Conducted every three years, PISA reached a record scale in 2025, with more than 760,000 students from 91 countries and economies participating in the assessment. Yet the results also reveal that education systems around the world are still struggling with the learning losses and disruptions associated with the COVID-19 period. The first major signs of this deterioration had already become visible in PISA 2022, and there was good reason to expect that its effects would persist into 2025. They did. The latest results show a historic deterioration in the average performance of OECD education systems. Across the 38 OECD countries, the downward trend remains striking, with the sharpest decline occurring in reading. This should concern us for reasons that extend far beyond rankings. If mass schooling was one of the great educational achievements of the 20th century, the defining challenge of the 21st is increasingly clear: not simply how long young people remain in education, but what intellectual capacity they acquire during those years.
From 2003 to 2025 Türkiye’s PISA Journey
Türkiye’s decision to participate in PISA for the first time in 2003 followed its earlier entry into Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 1999. The decision to assess the Turkish education system against international benchmarks was an important step in itself. Yet PISA soon came to occupy a much more influential place in Türkiye’s education policy landscape. Over time, PISA results became part of the policy debate surrounding curriculum reform, assessment practices and the skills expected of students. Türkiye’s curriculum reforms introduced from 2005 onwards, as well as subsequent changes in national assessment systems, most notably the growing emphasis on reasoning and so-called "new-generation questions” in examinations such as the High School Entrance Examination (LGS), can, to some extent, be understood in the context of Türkiye’s PISA experience. Across successive governments and policy periods, PISA results have been closely followed by education policymakers. This sustained attention, together with the gradual integration of the competencies emphasised by PISA into curricula, teaching practices and national examinations, is arguably one of the factors behind Türkiye’s long-term improvement.
This makes the PISA 2025 results particularly noteworthy. At a time when the world is confronting one of the most serious declines in student performance in the quarter-century history of PISA, Türkiye has moved in the opposite direction. It was the only participating education system to increase its scores in all three core domains: science, reading and mathematics, between 2022 and 2025. This is not merely a statistical curiosity. It deserves to be understood as part of a much longer trajectory of educational investment and institutional change.
Over the past two decades, Türkiye has invested heavily in expanding the capacity of its education system. The number of teachers has more than doubled, significantly improving the human-resource capacity of schools. At the same time, more targeted policies have sought to address persistent structural challenges. One example has been the effort to increase teacher retention in regions such as eastern and southeastern Türkiye, where historically high teacher turnover has made it more difficult to establish continuity in teaching and school culture. Such policies matter because educational quality depends not only on access to schools, but also on the stability, experience and institutional continuity of the professionals working within them.
Türkiye’s recent performance becomes even more significant when considered against the extraordinary disruptions its education system has faced. Like countries around the world, Türkiye experienced the unprecedented interruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which severely disrupted face-to-face education. Before the system had fully recovered from the consequences of the pandemic, the country was struck by the devastating earthquakes of 6 Feb. 2023. The disaster affected a vast region of the country and disrupted the education of millions of children, adding another layer of difficulty to an already challenging period for learning.
Against this background, Türkiye’s PISA 2025 performance deserves careful attention. Despite these considerable disadvantages, Türkiye has now surpassed the OECD average in science and reading and essentially reached the OECD average in mathematics. These results should not be interpreted as the product of a single reform, policy intervention or government initiative. Educational outcomes of this magnitude develop over long periods. They are better understood as the cumulative result of nearly a quarter-century of investment in educational capacity, greater attention to learning outcomes, stronger alignment between curriculum and assessment, and the maintenance of national standards across a very large and diverse education system.
Public vs. Private Schools
Another important indicator to consider when assessing Türkiye’s PISA 2025 results is the performance gap between public and private schools. The general expectation is that private schools would outperform public schools in PISA. However, in both PISA 2022 and PISA 2025, public schools performed better than private schools, and in 2025, the performance gap widened further in favour of public schools.
These findings indicate that education in Türkiye continues to be provided as a broad-based, publicly funded service, and that the education system retains considerable potential to serve as a vehicle for social mobility. The PISA data on the relationship between socioeconomic background and student achievement reinforce this picture. Despite coming from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, 12.6% of students in Türkiye are classified as academically resilient, slightly above the OECD average of 11.9%. In other words, a notable share of disadvantaged students are able to overcome the constraints associated with their socioeconomic circumstances and reach high levels of academic performance.
The achievement gap between students from the lowest and highest socioeconomic backgrounds also provides an important perspective. While this gap stands at 85 points across the OECD on average, it is 81 points in Türkiye. Although an 81-point gap remains substantial and should not be underestimated, Türkiye’s comparatively smaller gap, together with its relatively high share of academically resilient students, suggests that socioeconomic background is not necessarily educational destiny. Taken together, these findings indicate that a new chapter should now begin in Türkiye’s PISA journey. In this new chapter, Türkiye’s benchmark should no longer be the OECD average or PISA itself, but rather high-performing education systems that have demonstrated sustained excellence and consistency over time while remaining firmly anchored in justice and a moral vision of education.
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Dr. İpek Coşkun Armağan is the General Coordinator at Institute Social