PISA 2025 report released

The results from the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) are now in. Coordinated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), PISA asks 15 year olds to apply their knowledge in reading, mathematics and science so participating jurisdictions can compare their education systems. In 2025, more than 760,000 students in 91 countries and economies participated in the assessment.

Alberta students scored 520 in science, 499 in reading and 489 in mathematics. These were the highest provincial results in Canada for science and reading, and the second highest in mathematics (behind Quebec). Compared internationally, Alberta’s raw mean scores place the province within the global top ten in all three domains. That remarkable result belongs to students and those who support them in our public schools. Without question, Alberta remains one of the world’s strongest-performing education systems.

As we look at the results more closely, though, one fact deserves emphasis: Alberta’s teachers and school leaders have once again done extraordinary work through their professional judgment, skill, care and attention to creating world-class learning experiences for our students. More notable, they achieved these strong results in an underfunded system with increasingly complex student needs and the erosion of professional conditions of practice. 

The educational polycrisis

What makes this achievement especially significant is the context from which it was achieved. Alberta teachers and school leaders are working within an educational polycrisis: interconnected pressures that are intensifying one another. Larger and more complex classes, shortages of teachers and specialized supports, rising aggression and student absenteeism, acute-on-chronic mental health needs, unsupported new curriculum and rapid assessment changes, technology disruptions in the form of artificial intelligence (AI) and pandemic aftershocks are all converging on Alberta classrooms.

The Alberta Teachers’ Association’s (ATA) continuing research has documented this reality. The ATA study on the OECD’s 2024 TALIS findings, Teaching in Tension, reports that 42 per cent of Alberta teachers were experiencing stress “a lot” at work, compared with an international average of 19 per cent. This is recorded as the highest occupational stress in the world. Further, class size and complexity, reduced inclusion supports, policy churn and aggression contribute to work intensification and moral distress.

PISA 2025 should therefore not be used as evidence that our teaching and learning conditions are acceptable. Strong results do not mean the system is adequately resourced and that teachers and students are reasonably supported. Instead, it demonstrates how much professional effort Alberta teachers and school leaders continue to contribute while barely holding on in an increasingly strained education system. Their commitment is a strength, but this model is unsustainable, as it is predicated on a decline in teachers’ personal and professional well-being. 

Broader trends in reading, screentime and AI

The broader PISA story also contains a serious warning. Across Canada, reading fell 17 points since 2022, while science remained broadly stable. Canada’s reading result is now its lowest in our history of the PISA assessment. Internationally, reading has experienced the steepest decade-long decline across countries. Students increasingly struggle with longer texts requiring sustained attention, careful interpretation and the integration of evidence. Fast but inaccurate “hasty reading” has reportedly doubled across OECD systems between 2018 and 2025.

Thirteen years ago, I wrote a Calgary Herald opinion piece entitled “Kids should know reading is also for enjoyment,” warning of this very result and speaking on the vital importance of “cultivat[ing] in students both proficiency and life-long enjoyment of reading.” This argument is even more urgent today. Reading enjoyment is not a soft alternative to literacy proficiency; it helps create and sustain it. Measuring reading, through PISA or provincial assessments, cannot be allowed to displace the very act and enjoyment of reading itself.

This decline in reading is also occurring within the “always on” culture of 24-hour social media access. Attention is becoming one of the scarcest resources in education as the attention economy rewards and incentivizes constant engagement with our devices. Pervasive screentime has become normalized, and its effects on attention, engagement and reading are now impossible to ignore.

In PISA 2025, 32 per cent of Canadian students reported that classmates were frequently distracted by digital devices during science lessons. Students also reported more than an hour of leisure device use during the school day. Technology can expand access and support creativity, collaboration and inquiry; however, it can also fragment attention and displace the important cognitive work of deep reading, writing, reasoning and problem solving. As our ATA policy affirms, teachers’ professional judgment must guide when devices are useful and when they should be put away.

AI sharpens this challenge. In Canada, 38 per cent of students reported using AI chatbots at least weekly to help them learn. Most strikingly, Canadian students who did not use AI to draft assignments outperformed those who used it regularly or daily by 29 points in science.

The practical principle is clear: AI may be used as a tool to support learning, but it must never become the thinker. Students need to develop not only AI literacy to question outputs, verify sources and identify bias, but also AI fluency to know when to use these systems in a way that does not surrender their unique and authentic voice or supplant the creative power of their own ideas.

The takeaways

PISA is one measure of one group of students at one point in time. It is not a verdict on a student, a teacher or a school, nor does it determine their future or a society’s relative health and success.

What we can take away from the results are the following:

• Protect time for children and youth to engage in sustained, enjoyable and deep reading.
• Be mindful about the use of devices, ensuring that they enhance, not distract, from learning.
• Give students regular opportunities to write, solve problems and evaluate evidence without outsourcing to AI the struggle that produces learning.
• Most of all, give teachers and school leaders the conditions of professional practice that make this deep learning possible: manageable class sizes, adequate preparation time, educational assistants, access to specialists, supports and resources for classroom complexity, and properly funded classrooms.

Alberta students continue to perform among the best in the world. That is worth celebrating. It is also a reminder that our public education system’s greatest strength remains the people who create the conditions for students to learn.