For years, global education debates have leaned on familiar markers — enrolment ratios, digital classrooms, skills buzzwords. But the clearest comparative mirror still comes from one place: The latest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data on mathematical literacy, drawn from its most recent global assessment of 15-year-olds. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022, released by the OECD, tests not syllabus recall but whether students can apply mathematics to real-world problems. Visualised recently by Voronoi, the data has resurfaced in 2025 and its message is sharper than a simple league table.
Asia tops the table, but the real story is the gap
The most telling feature of this ranking is not that Singapore ranks first, but how far ahead it sits. With a score of 575, Singapore is 103 points above the OECD average — a gap so large that it places the country in a different performance universe. In PISA terms, this is not incremental advantage; it suggests a system where the median student demonstrates levels of mathematical reasoning that many countries reach only among their top performers.What follows Singapore reinforces the point. Ranks 2 to 6 — Macau (China) at 552, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) at 547, Hong Kong (China) at 540, Japan at 536, and South Korea at 527 — form a tight East Asian band. The range across these six systems is just 48 points, but the entire band sits comfortably above most of the world.This clustering matters. It signals that success here is systemic rather than exceptional. These systems prioritise early numeracy, tight curriculum sequencing, and classrooms where difficulty is treated as instructional material, not failure. PISA rewards exactly that: reasoning, modelling, and interpretation. The result is not just high peaks, but a strong centre that lifts national scores consistently.
Europe’s quiet counterpoint
Europe enters the table at rank 7, with Estonia scoring 524 — just three points below South Korea. This is the table’s quiet revelation. Estonia is not a large system, nor a test-prep culture. Its performance reflects long-term investment in teacher autonomy, curricular coherence, and early foundations that prevent gaps from compounding.Below Estonia, Switzerland at 508 and the Netherlands at 493 still sit clearly above the OECD average. But the step-down is visible. From Singapore’s 575 to the Netherlands’ 493 is an 82-point drop, even though both occupy the “top 10”.That gap exposes a recurring misreading of global rankings. Being in the top tier does not mean living the same educational reality. Europe’s strength lies in consistency and stability, not in the kind of system-wide intensity that defines East Asia’s top performers.
The United States: Strong at the top, weak in the middle
In this ranking, the United States sits near the bottom of the pack: 33rd out of 35 in the Voronoi cut, with a PISA 2022 mathematics score of 465, below the OECD average of 472. The number is not an argument that America lacks mathematical talent. It is an argument that the system struggles to make mathematical literacy widespread. PISA is designed to test whether 15-year-olds can apply mathematics to real-world problems — reasoning, modelling, interpreting. National averages fall when large shares of students remain stuck at the lower end.The most recent domestic evidence points in the same direction. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2024 report shows Grade 4 mathematics scores rising slightly compared with 2022, but still below 2019, and the recovery is uneven: students in the middle and higher percentiles improved more, while lower-performing students saw little progress. That long tail — a large cohort that does not regain mathematics footing — is exactly what drags down a national PISA mean even when the top end remains competitive.Internationally, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2023 assessment places the United States above the international average at Grades 4 and 8. This matters because it prevents a simplistic collapse narrative. Read together, the picture is not “America cannot do mathematics”. It is that America is mathematically uneven — capable of excellence, but unable to translate it into system-wide confidence by age 15. In PISA terms, the ceiling is not the constraint. The floor is.
Why India does not appear in the ranking
India’s absence from this list can look like an error until you realise it is a choice, not a score. For a country that exports engineers like oxygen, runs an exam economy the size of a small planet, and can turn teenage mathematics into a national sport, India simply didn’t participate in PISA 2022. No participation means no rank. The cost of that absence is subtle but significant: without a benchmark against peer systems, strengths cannot be located precisely, weaknesses cannot be diagnosed cleanly, and reform risks proceeding without an external reference point.
What the ranking leaves unsaid
Strip away the ranking thrill and the real story sharpens. Mathematics performance is not an inheritance of talent, it is a consequence of system design. The countries at the top did not get there by celebrating outliers but by lifting the ordinary student, year after year. Those sliding down are not collapsing — they are leaking learning quietly, letting gaps harden into norms. And those missing altogether avoid judgment, but also forgo clarity. Global comparisons like this are uncomfortable precisely because they puncture self-belief. But they also offer something rarer: an external mirror that shows whether systems are building confidence at scale — or merely producing brilliance at the edges.
