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View all search resultsPISA gains belie Indonesia’s persistent education crisis
Indonesia continues to struggle with the uneven distribution of teachers, both in numbers and qualifications, particularly those capable of teaching the higher-order thinking skills assessed by PISA.
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Elementary school children use a bamboo raft to cross the Citarum River on their way home in Saguling, Bandung, West Java, on Sept. 1, 2026. (AFP/Timur Matahari)
I
ndonesia’s modest gains in the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) offer little cause for celebration, as students continue to lag far behind international peers, with persistent learning gaps and unequal education quality raising concerns over misplaced policy priorities.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently released the 2025 edition of its PISA, which measures the reading, mathematics and science literacy of 15-year-old students.
More than 760,000 students completed the assessments across 91 countries and economies, including around 14,000 students from 419 schools in Indonesia, which represented nearly 4 million students in the same age group nationwide.
Indonesia scored 389 in science and 365 in reading, up six and seven points, respectively, from 2022, when the assessment was last conducted. Its mathematics score, however, fell two points to 364.
The government has since highlighted the improvements, with the Government Communications Agency (Bakom) describing the results as evidence of “stability” in Indonesia’s educational performance.
But Indonesia remains in the lower half of the assessment, while its scores remain below those recorded two decades ago.
Read also: What Indonesian classroom never received
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