The results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA 2025), announced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), showed a clear improvement in the performance of Jordanian students compared to the 2022 results. It may be tempting to view these results as evidence that school education in Jordan is beginning to recover. However, a more accurate academic reading requires placing the results within a longer temporal trajectory extending to before the COVID-19 pandemic, so that we can answer the most important question: Is Jordanian education truly progressing, or are we merely recovering what we have lost?
Jordan's participation in PISA tests dates back many years, and the results show that the trajectory was not one of continuous decline. In reading, for example, Jordan scored 401 points in 2006, then 405 in 2009, 399 in 2012, and 408 in 2015, before reaching 419 points in 2018. As for mathematics, it moved from 384 points in 2006 to 387 in 2009 and 386 in 2012, then dropped to 380 in 2015, before rising notably to 400 in 2018. In science, performance was 422 points in 2006, 415 in 2009, and 409 in 2012 and 2015, then rose to 429 in 2018. Thus, the 2018 results, across the three domains, were among the best results achieved by Jordan in its participation in PISA.
Then came the 2022 results to reflect a sharp drop, significantly linked to the educational disruption accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic, school closures, and the shift to distance learning. Therefore, taking 2022 alone as a reference point may give a misleading impression of the magnitude of the current improvement.
In PISA 2025, Jordan's score in mathematics rose to 388 points, an increase of 26 points from 2022, and science rose to 407 points, an increase of 32 points. Reading performance also improved compared to 2022. The OECD confirms that Jordan's performance improved in all three domains between 2022 and 2025.
This is undoubtedly a positive development that deserves recognition. However, the picture changes slightly when the comparison is made with 2018 instead of 2022. In mathematics—the subject in which the OECD confirms that long-term temporal comparison can be reliably made—Jordan scored 388 points in 2025, compared to 400 points in 2018. This means we have regained a large part of the loss, but we have not yet surpassed the pre-pandemic level. The OECD itself states that the 2025 mathematics result remained below the 2018 result, even though it was close to the results achieved by Jordan in previous PISA cycles.
As for reading and science, caution should be exercised in making a direct numerical comparison between 2018 and 2025; Jordan transitioned to computer-based testing in the 2022 cycle, and the OECD considers that comparability in these two domains with previous cycles cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, the official trend line for reading and science begins from 2022. This is an important methodological note, because numbers should not be used to prove an improvement or decline that the test methodology itself does not permit.
Yet the more important problem lies not in a few points up or down, but in the level of competencies reached by the Jordanian student. In PISA 2025, only 48% of Jordanian students reached Level 2 or higher in science, compared to 74% in OECD countries. In mathematics, the percentage reached only 31% compared to 65%, and in reading 26% compared to 69%. Furthermore, the percentage of students reaching top proficiency levels in mathematics and reading is almost nonexistent, and in science it reached only about 0.3%, compared to about 7.2% in OECD countries.
There is another indicator that I find more alarming than the grades themselves: the 2025 data places Jordan among the countries with the lowest scores on the scientific curiosity index; only 60.2% of students said they like to know how things work, which is among the lowest percentages among participating countries. This suggests that the issue is not just memorizing curricula, but the school's ability to foster curiosity, critical thinking, problem-solving, and independent learning.
Herein lies, in my view, the real issue for Jordanian education. We are not just facing a problem of averages or international ranking, but a problem in the ability of a large proportion of students to use what they have learned. The PISA test does not measure how much a student memorizes from the textbook, but rather their ability to read and understand a text, use mathematics in a new situation, analyze scientific evidence, and reach a logical conclusion from it.
At the same time, it is only fair not to ignore the positive signal in the 2025 results. The percentage of students below Level 2 decreased compared to 2022 by 14 percentage points in mathematics, 6 points in reading, and 17 points in science. This is an important improvement because it means a tangible segment of students moved from the lowest performance levels to a better level.
Therefore, I believe that describing Jordanian education as "in continuous decline" is inaccurate, just as saying it is "steadily progressing" is not yet supported by evidence. The picture closer to reality is that the Jordanian educational system showed notable improvement up to 2018, then suffered a major setback, and is now in a genuine, though incomplete, recovery phase.
The next challenge should not merely be recovering the 2018 figures. If Jordan were to return only to the 2018 level, we would have compensated for the losses of several years without having brought about the transformation that Jordanian education needs. What is required is to surpass that level, especially in deep reading skills, applied mathematics, scientific inquiry, and problem-solving.
In an era where artificial intelligence is capable of providing information in seconds, a school that contents itself with rote memorization becomes less valuable than ever before. The true value of the school and the teacher will lie in teaching the student how to ask, how to verify, how to analyze, how to distinguish between information and opinion, and how to use knowledge to solve a problem they have not seen before.
Consequently, the PISA 2025 results carry two messages for Jordan simultaneously: the first is positive, which is that an important part of the past years' loss can be recovered and that improvement is possible; and the second is cautionary, which is that recovery should not be confused with reform. We have begun to recover what we lost, but the question that educational policy should now be preoccupied with is not: Have we returned to what we used to be? Rather: How do we take Jordanian education to a level we have never reached before?
This, in my estimation, is the true test of the coming phase.
