U.S. records lowest reading score since 2000 in PISA 2025
Latin America’s education performance declined in the 2025 Program for International Student Assessment, with no country in the region reaching expected proficiency levels and several posting historic drops in mathematics and reading, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported Tuesday.
The 2025 assessment encompassed 91 countries and economies, including 38 OECD members. Thirteen Latin American countries participated: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay.
The OECD report showed that school systems across the region have failed to recover from the pandemic and pointed to socioeconomic inequality and growing digital distractions in classrooms as continuing challenges for student achievement. The agency said more than half of students in countries including Chile, Mexico and Argentina failed to reach minimum proficiency levels.
Argentina posted its worst-ever performance in mathematics. Only 24% of Argentine students reached basic proficiency in the subject, compared with an OECD average of 65%. The country also lost ground in reading and science.
Mexico’s mathematics score fell from 2022, with 69% of students failing to reach the minimum proficiency level. Mexico also declined in reading, though it remained among Latin America’s better-performing countries.
Chile continued to lead the region overall, but recorded its worst-ever mathematics result. Chile’s scores fell in mathematics from 2022, with 59% of students failing to reach basic proficiency in math.
Uruguay posted mixed results. The country achieved its best-ever performance in science, with 64% of students reaching basic proficiency, while continuing a decade-long decline in mathematics and reading. Only 42% of Uruguayan students reached the minimum mathematics proficiency level.
Peru recorded a statistically significant decline in mathematics, placing the country fifth among the 13 participating Latin American nations. Education systems in Brazil, Colombia and Costa Rica showed little progress. Although Colombia and Costa Rica have expanded access to education, both remained well below international standards. In Colombia, only 29% of students demonstrated basic mathematics proficiency.
At the other end of the global rankings, East Asia dominated. Singapore emerged as the world’s top performer in all three subjects, followed closely by Japan, South Korea, and the Chinese regions of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Students in those top-performing Asian countries were ahead of their Latin American counterparts by the equivalent of three to four years of schooling.
The OECD report also examined aspects of daily school life, including what it called “digital distraction” related to technology and artificial intelligence. In Uruguay, 57% of students said classmates were distracted by cellphones or screens during science classes, more than twice the OECD average of 28%.
The growing use of artificial intelligence was also evident across the region, with 53% of surveyed students reporting that they used AI chatbots to study at least once a week.
U.S. results in the assessment also raised concerns. The United States recorded a historic decline in reading, its lowest score since the test was introduced in 2000. The decline extended to mathematics, where the country scored its lowest level on record. Science was the only area where U.S. performance remained stable, though the OECD cautioned that the results should be interpreted carefully because U.S. student response rates fell below required technical standards and an unusually high number of students were excluded from the samples.
Rather than testing memorization of school curricula, PISA assesses students’ ability to apply knowledge to real-world situations in three key areas: mathematics, reading and science.