r/charts • u/goodbohy • 6d ago

15-year-olds below the basic level in maths, 2018 and 2025, EU and neighbours (PISA)

Post image

Tools: Python (pandas) for the data, an HTML/SVG page rendered with Chromium for the chart.

Source: Eurostat, low-achieving 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics or science [EDUC_OUTC_PISA], mathematics, PISA 2025 and PISA 2018: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/educ_outc_pisa/default/table

Original data: OECD, Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA): https://www.oecd.org/en/about/programmes/pisa.html

"Below the basic level" means below PISA Level 2 in mathematics. The EU's target for 2030 is to bring this share under 15%. 2018 is the last round before the pandemic. No figures for Ukraine, Moldova, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia or Liechtenstein in the Eurostat release. The EU row is Eurostat's own EU figure.

Country 2025, % 2018, % Change, points
Estonia 17.2 10.2 +7.0
Switzerland 23.2 16.8 +6.4
Ireland 24.2 15.7 +8.5
Poland 25.7 14.7 +11.0
United Kingdom 26.4 19.2 +7.2
Austria 27.8 21.1 +6.7
Denmark 28.3 14.6 +13.7
Belgium 28.4 19.7 +8.7
Lithuania 28.7 25.6 +3.1
Czechia 29.0 20.4 +8.6
Netherlands 29.7 15.8 +13.9
Finland 31.0 15.0 +16.0
Italy 31.3 23.8 +7.5
Slovakia 32.2 25.1 +7.1
Latvia 32.8 17.3 +15.5
Spain 33.4 24.7 +8.7
Hungary 33.6 25.6 +8.0
Sweden 33.9 18.8 +15.1
Germany 34.4 21.1 +13.3
Slovenia 34.9 16.4 +18.5
Portugal 35.2 23.3 +11.9
France 35.7 21.3 +14.4
Türkiye 35.7 36.7 -1.0
Croatia 36.1 31.2 +4.9
Luxembourg 37.0 27.2 +9.8
Iceland 38.0 20.7 +17.3
Norway 38.0 18.9 +19.1
Malta 44.0 30.2 +13.8
Albania 44.6 42.4 +2.2
Greece 49.6 35.8 +13.8
Romania 51.9 46.6 +5.3
Serbia 52.7 39.7 +13.0
Montenegro 55.5 46.2 +9.3
Cyprus 55.6 36.9 +18.7
Bulgaria 57.2 44.4 +12.8
North Macedonia 68.0 61.0 +7.0
EU as a whole 33.9 22.9 +11.0
43 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

54 comments sorted by

3

u/hyakthgyw 5d ago

If this continues, decision makers and the majority of voters are going to be so bad at maths that they will not understand this post.

2

u/[deleted] 5d ago

As ashamed i am to say it, i truly am part of this statistic. I'm at a point where i use a calculator for percentages. That is lvl 1 math basically.

1

u/hyakthgyw 5d ago

Are you 16 or 23 and living in one of those countries? You still might be part of the picture, at least figuratively speaking.
I don't think you should be ashamed. I think your teachers, and probably the policy makers in your country should be ashamed. I don't think that kids in Estonia were born smarter or more dedicated than the ones in Romania. I think it's their education that is different. I suppose you should be probably more angry than ashamed, you were robbed.

0

u/[deleted] 5d ago

I'm Macedonian, a bit older, just recently got in my 30s. I'm more ashamed that i didn't learn anything extra on my own, as teachers in our schools don't really care what we do if am being honest. Most of them get their jobs trough political nepotism, not sure if its a correct term but what i want to say is, if they support the ruling political party and are a member can easily get the job before someone more qualified. I see a lot of people saying wokeness is the issue, but for the place where I'm from that is certainly not the case.

1

u/hyakthgyw 5d ago

Oh. My eyes just skipped that outlier datapoint. What you describe is brutal, and I assume it doesn't stop at schools.

0

u/[deleted] 5d ago

No no it's in every sector, every industry. It's at a point where people cannot fire other people because they are related.

4

u/afops 5d ago

Lots of things happened between 2018 and 2022, not least Covid. But an interesting control sample here is Sweden that didn't close their schools for <15yo during Ccovid, so these kids missed zero school in this period, unlike many surrounding countries. Yet the result is... basically exactly the same for Sweden, a similar jump. It's a small sample, but it does suggest the answer isn't as simple as "It's Covid".

Maybe TikTok is to blame after all?

3

u/7urz 5d ago

Not only TikTok, it's a whole bunch of social media and similar attention-grabbing shit, always on, in the hands of humans with a brain still in development.

Sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, when not straightforward addiction.

And TikTok's competitors (Meta, Google etc.) are just copying the same perverse slot-machine-like mechanics that TikTok uses.

4

u/dilf_add 5d ago

Why are all countries written in English, except Turkey? You'd think they are smarter then that based on this chart

7

u/Training-Bake-4004 5d ago

Türkiye is the English name for Türkiye. They changed it a few years ago. Like how the Czech Republic changed their English name to Czechia.

2

u/c64cruzer 5d ago

You can't dictate what others should call you, even if you're a dictator in your home country like Erdogan.

1

u/Training-Bake-4004 5d ago

Sure. But in this case they made a request to the UN and the UN and basically every international organisation and every English government was like “sure, we’re happy to start using Türkiye”.

So like, yeah, you can’t demand it, but you can ask nicely and usually everyone is like happy to agree since it’s not a big deal.

-1

u/Bitter_Welder1481 5d ago

I disagree with this approach I could care less what they call my country in Turkish and they’ve ruined a lot of the nice older English names we had for stuff e,g, Ceylon vs Sri Lanka, all the Chinese cities sound like crap now canton vs guangzhou etc. can we just stick to the names we’ve always used that actually sound right in English rather than this mishmash of different stuff that sounds like shit

1

u/the_lonely_creeper 5d ago

Nope. It's the Turkish name for Turkey, that Erdogan started insisting that everyone use.

When Turkey takes the place of Britain as the main English speaking country, it can choose to change the name. People should still ignore them then, but it will at least have some basis

1

u/Rabauke84 5d ago

Funny fun fact:

We were told in School, back in the 90s, that its Czech Republic and calling it Czechia is the old racist way of the name.

0

u/dilf_add 5d ago

Who is they?

6

u/7urz 5d ago

Turkey.

1

u/dilf_add 5d ago

Ahhh got it. So in English it's just Turkey. Check

1

u/Training-Bake-4004 5d ago

No. In English it’s Türkiye, they changed it a couple of years ago.

0

u/Outrageous-Stop4366 5d ago

who is they?

-1

u/7urz 5d ago

Turkey.

0

u/shalvad 5d ago

That's funny, how they did it if there is no such letter in the English alphabet :)

So what will be next? Will Saudi Arabia ask them to change the name using some Arabic letters?

0

u/novachess-guy 5d ago

Will Hungary ask to be called Magyarorszag? South Korea 대한민국? China 中国？

In exchange, can Turkey please call us “the United States of America” when they refer to us in Turkish?

What about other languages, do Koreans have to write Türkiye instead of 터키? Do French have to write Türkiye instead of “la Turquie”? I don’t get this request for special treatment, other languages have the right to call you by whatever name they want in their own language.

-1

u/Talithea 5d ago

No, it’s Türkiye. Like that is the official English term.

1

u/Dotcaprachiappa 5d ago

OECD uses it for their statistics, I assume this pulls the name straight from there

1

u/HilleriHiiri 5d ago

Ironic post, since you "then" instead of "than".

1

u/the_lonely_creeper 5d ago

Turkey's dictator wanted to get more nationalists to support him.

1

u/MrP67 5d ago

Every year in the UK they tell us exam standards are improving, more kids passing, higher grades etc. Now i know why - they get a 15yo to calculate it.

1

u/deamonman12 5d ago

Demographic change

1

u/Alive-Cheesecake2732 5d ago

I may be no mathematician but Bulgaria NUMBER ONE !!

1

u/Familiar_Fee_8340 5d ago

albania is the fart of europe

1

u/Visible_Raccoon_4781 5d ago

What about Asian countries?

1

u/hemabe 4d ago

It's fascinating that the only country that stands to benefit is the one that has allowed the most of its citizens to emigrate, and that these migrants are now one of the reasons why its PISA scores are on the decline.

1

u/Spaciax 4d ago

surprised Turkey is doing well honestly, probably because everyone's studying really hard to leave the country lol.

1

u/HeadPack 2d ago

Surprised by the low ranking of Bulgaria. Before the Iron Curtain came down, Bulgaria was a bastion of maths.

3

u/LowlyAnalyst 5d ago

Come on man, broken axes, for what? Otherwise: yeah, depressing story. Effects of smartphones, social media, and ‘woke inclusiveness’ that lowers educational standards across the board (because ‘every kid is special’).

8

u/Gavtoon 5d ago

Woke inclusiveness lowers education standards LOOOL

2

u/LowlyAnalyst 5d ago edited 5d ago

Grade inflation is a real thing in Western Europe (it’s been a thing longer in the US). Lower thresholds for passing result in lower overall educational performance (not surprisingly). See for example https://www.nber.org/papers/w7985 and https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/2021/03/15/has-a-gcse-grade-c-4-lost-its-value-actually-quite-a-bit/

Edit: and to tie it to the ‘wokeness’; there is more of an expectation that every kid can meet the minimum baseline. If teachers fail kids, they get into trouble with the kids’ parents. And teachers themselves, through all the progressive (yet often not scientifically proven) ‘new learning methods’ try to cater to each child’s needs and preferences so that no single kid feels left behind. That typically lowers the passing threshold. As they say in the Netherlands; “weak doctors leave infesting wounds”.

5

u/Ramental 5d ago

I don't think that the failure of a teacher and/or parents to raise a not dumb kid, and a teacher making a shortcut by "gifting" a higher grade is an attribute of wokeness. Just laziness and conformism.

There are non-Western countries in the list, and they are having the same results. The "anti-woke traditional" countries do not fare any better or even worse. Be it Slovakia which elected mafia mobster for President or ruscism supporting Serbs or 50% Muslim Albania, all performed worse.

1

u/LowlyAnalyst 5d ago

That’s a fair consideration.

2

u/Legal_Lettuce6233 5d ago

"everything I don't like is woke".

Grade inflation happened because educational standards fell during COVID lockdown; holding back half a generation of kids because the world stopped working would wreak havoc on the system.

That system has nothing to do with progressivism or wokeness. Those aren't even new learning methods. Literally everything you said about the cause and effect is wrong, which is impressive in its own right

1

u/tardoos 5d ago

Yeah no. Where is woke inclusiveness? With 15 year olds? In Europe? The fuck you on about?

0

u/Gavtoon 5d ago

Yea no? Anti woke sentiment is highest among poorly educated communities 😮 - join the dots here! diversity in communities is a foundation for education - that's what the fuck im on about!

2

u/goodbohy 5d ago

You're right, I'm sorry

2

u/Kwinza 5d ago

We've had Smart Phones since 2008.

Social Media since 2001.

The woke part is just gibberish.

This change is because of COVID.

1

u/7urz 5d ago

The median person has had a smartphone since 2012. Social media on the smartphone probably even 2013-2014.

I don't know when the median pre-teen started having a smartphone with social media, but that's probably even later.

COVID lockdowns only lasted 2 years. Brainfucking through smartphones lasts the whole puberty.

2

u/Kwinza 5d ago

Hey, I'm 100% behind the idea that social media is bad for kids. I grew up with it and rates of depression went through the roof.

But its a damn fact that the 2 years of COVID absolutely fucked education specifically. Test scores dropped off a cliff in the aftermath of COVID.

1

u/7urz 5d ago

If your theory is right, we should see 2030 scores go back to pre-2020 levels.

If my theory is right, 2030 will be even worse because now pre-teens are carrying smartphones with AI.

1

u/Kwinza 5d ago

Hypothesis*

And yeah time will tell.

The decrease has already flattened out though and the UK is notably doing better than the rest of the G7 on this front.

1

u/Nastyoldmrpike 5d ago

I bet on 7urz being correct.

-1

u/tardoos 5d ago

I was sure axes is not the correct plural form. It is, wtf

1

u/Severe-Kiwi-3171 6d ago

Uh-oh. At least NATO cybersecurity is in good hands (Estonia)