PISA's worst-ever results and the causes no one will own up to

PISA falls to its lowest point: neither Spain nor the OECD can turn things around

Four pupils in a small village classroom, a maths exam and a simple linear equation. The answer circulating as a joke — «pa orate tú calva» — captures the state of affairs better than many headlines. But the latest PISA report, the worst in history, goes far beyond a rural anecdote: the collapse respects neither regions nor borders.

It's not just Spain: the slump is shaking the whole OECD

The easy headline blames Spain's education system. The data point to a broader scale: the decline is general across the OECD, not an isolated collapse at home. In that picture, China is cited as the system that best withstands comparison. The uncomfortable conclusion is that the «everything is worse in Spain» argument falls short of explaining what is happening in classrooms across the rest of the bloc.

Screens, AI and the Nokia in the backpack

The most repeated fix costs nothing: banning social media, artificial intelligence and smartphones until students finish ESO (the Spanish secondary education stage). The old mobile phone, the one that only made calls, is being reclaimed as a symbol of discipline. With that adjustment, they promise, the tests will be retaken and Spain will be back at the top within three years. It sounds simple. It also sounds like nostalgia, and nostalgia doesn't pass exams.

The classroom as an ideological battleground

Another school of thought argues the problem is one of priorities: that class time is devoted more to awareness-raising projects than to content. As ammunition, they cite an intervention programme against homophobia in rural secondary schools that was the basis of a doctoral thesis. Some add, without conclusive data, the demographic change in the student body, an argument that circulates but that the comparative tests themselves do not isolate as a cause. None of these variables, on its own, explains the collapse.

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The most repeated prediction is not optimistic. Once artificial intelligence fully matures, they say, even chimpanzees will score better. With that horizon, arguing about mobile phones starts to seem like a waste of time.

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What if the problem isn't the student, but whoever decides what gets taught? The full calculation of what's failing — and who benefits from the debate continuing — doesn't fit in a tweet. Just breaking down why the decline is OECD-wide and not local would take a while. And that's what they discuss, numbers in hand, at the source of this debate.