PISA: The West Declines, France Collapses

Across all countries covered by the OECD study, performance in mathematics and reading has reached its lowest level on record. Now, one in five 15-year-old students fails to meet the minimum standard in all three core subjects. But this comparison should not serve as a smokescreen, because France is declining even further – and, more importantly, it is declining at both ends of the scale.

In this regard, the OECD’s graphs speak louder than the rankings themselves. France’s problem is not merely one of a falling average. Its system seems to be losing its ability to help the most vulnerable pupils progress, while allowing the standards of the best students to erode.

France is not merely seeing an increase in the number of students struggling. It also has fewer and fewer students capable of reaching the highest levels – which is probably the most alarming indicator of all. An education system can narrow achievement gaps by helping the weakest students improve, but it can also narrow them simply by causing the best students to slip. This is precisely what the OECD observes.

Éric Charbonnier, an education analyst at the OECD, manages to find a way to welcome this and even dares to describe the slight narrowing of social gaps as “almost good news”, while remaining clear-eyed about the exact reason for the phenomenon: the gaps are narrowing less because disadvantaged students are making progress than because the top performers are falling behind. This is no longer a matter of leveling up, but of leveling down: the word “collapse”, used by several analysts, takes on its full meaning here.

The problem is particularly evident in reading comprehension. France’s score shows a drop of about 40 points over the past decade. Yet PISA does not ask teenagers to recite the French school curriculum, since the assessment measures their ability to apply skills in real-world situations – specifically, to understand, compare and evaluate information. When it comes to understanding long texts, cross-referencing multiple sources or assessing the reliability of information, French students are nowhere to be found.

One could, of course, point out that teenagers now spend a considerable amount of time on their screens: this is the explanation favored by the French minister of education. But that is not enough to explain why some education systems are holding up much better than others. England, for example, now ranks among the top 10 education systems in the world and has achieved strong results in math and reading, despite a youth population that is also heavily exposed to social media.

The argument that cell phones are the main explanation therefore falls short, to say the least. If connected children in certain countries continue to learn, we must also look at what those countries teach them, how they teach it and what they expect of them.

Immigration Matters

It would be just as absurd to deny the role of demographic composition.

French data reveals considerable disparities between students with and without an immigrant background. According to an analysis of PISA data highlighted by the Hexagone Observatory, students whose parents were both born abroad score, on average, 53 points lower in mathematics, 47 points lower in reading comprehension and 57 points lower in science than other students.

PISA estimates that approximately 20 points correspond to one year of schooling. Students from immigrant backgrounds therefore sometimes lag more than two school years behind children whose parents are French.

This situation has significant implications for overall academic performance. Teachers report increasing difficulties in teaching classes where children do not have a command of French or do not speak it at home. For a long time, immigration as a factor was deliberately excluded from analyses, but it is finally beginning to be considered.

The Minister Looks the Other Way

Amid this landscape of ruins, the reaction of the Minister of National Education, Edouard Geffray, appears completely inadequate. Faced with these results, he emphasizes the “weapon of mass intellectual destruction” that social media and cell phones supposedly represent, as well as the decline in parental involvement. He claims that children are more distracted and that parents themselves are increasingly so.

All of this may be true, but it dangerously resembles a way of shifting the blame. France’s decline did not begin with TikTok. Difficulties in reading, mathematics, knowledge transmission, teacher training and school authority have been well documented for decades. The minister also acknowledges that middle school has been the blind spot of reforms and that France has lacked consistency over the past 10 years – at the very least.

For decades, the French school system has accumulated educational reforms, curriculum changes and experimental initiatives. The 1975 Haby Reform established the single middle school system, meaning a common middle school for all students through the final year of middle school, by eliminating the former early academic tracks. The goal was allegedly democratic: to provide everyone with the same secondary education.

However, the unification of the school system was never accompanied by sufficiently serious reflection on how to help students of radically different ability levels succeed in the same classroom.

Added to this were pedagogical missteps. The controversy over reading methods is a prime example: as early as 2006, the Ministry officially recognized the need for systematic instruction in graphemes and phonemes, after decades of debate over global or ideovisual methods. Yet, 20 years later, the traditional syllabic method is still not the universal standard for teaching in the early grades.

The problem extends far beyond reading methods alone. It reflects a conception of schooling that has gradually taken hold: mistrust of top-down instruction, suspicion of authority, the proliferation of so-called active teaching methods, excessive personalization of learning paths and a decline in academic selection and high standards.

European Parliament member François-Xavier Bellamy, an expert on education issues, sums up this trend bluntly: “I am part of a generation of young teachers who received a simple directive from the institution regarding all training: above all, you must not impart knowledge.”

Macron Did Not Create the Problem But Accelerated It

Emmanuel Macron does not bear sole responsibility for a disaster whose roots go back to the 1970s. But his two five-year terms have coincided with a further acceleration of the decline.

The teenagers assessed in 2025 have navigated their school years under a succession of education ministers and amid constant reforms. The constant shuffling of ministers, shifts in policy direction, controversies and scandals have created the impression of an institution that no longer knows exactly what it wants to impart, with ministers who are media-savvy but ineffective – such as Gabriel Attal, the current presidential candidate, Pap Ndiaye, obsessed with indigenist and decolonial debates, or Amélie Oudéa-Castera, more concerned with the Olympic Games than with education.

As the new school year begins, nothing has really changed. The institution continues to discuss pedagogy, inclusion, educational pathways and innovation as if the fundamental issue – ensuring that students learn – were secondary.

A teacher’s account circulating on social media sums up the exasperation felt by many educators: “What used to be called high standards has been rebranded as mistreatment and boredom as educational failure. The PISA rankings confirm this. We do not have a problem with resources. We have a problem with the level of academic rigor.”

When the Collapse Becomes Political

The decline in education is not confined to the classroom. It ultimately takes its toll on political life itself.

When Marine Tondelier, a Green Party candidate in the presidential election, struggled to comment on the presidents of the Fifth Republic who preceded Jacques Chirac – admitting, in particular, that she had no memory of François Mitterrand and had little to say about Georges Pompidou – the problem went beyond a mere television gaffe.

A democracy needs citizens capable of knowing its history, understanding texts, reasoning and distinguishing facts from opinions. A school system that no longer adequately imparts this knowledge inevitably paves the way for a society that is less proficient in these areas.

In the face of the PISA disaster, the former Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire is now proposing to move up the start of preschool from age three to age one to reduce inequalities. Compulsory schooling starting at age three was introduced in 2019, and the results have never been worse. And the solution would be to entrust children even earlier to a system that is already failing to teach the basics?

French children do not start school too late. But when they do start, no one – not the children themselves, nor the teachers, nor the parents – knows what they are supposed to learn there or how.

As university professor Gabriel Lattanzio points out, PISA scores have never been lower, while grades have never been higher and advanced degrees have never been awarded more freely. Education in France today is based on a colossal lie that will eventually have to be acknowledged and dismantled.