Romania records 20-year low in PISA 2025 as over half fail basic math

PISA 2025 results and national rankings

The OECD released its PISA 2025 evaluation on 8 September 2026, assessing approximately 760,000 fifteen-year-old students across 91 countries. Romania recorded its lowest scores in two decades, placing penultimately among European Union member states across all three core testing domains, ahead only of Bulgaria. In mathematics, 52% of Romanian students failed to reach Level 2, the OECD threshold for basic competency, worsening from 49% in 2022. Reading scores fell by 16 points, leaving 48% of students below the minimum threshold, compared to 42% in the previous assessment cycle. In science, 46% of Romanian participants did not attain basic competency, while nearly 60% fell below the baseline in digital problem-solving tasks.

Global rankings placed Singapore and China at the top, followed by Estonia, Japan, and South Korea. Within the European continent, non-EU nations including Montenegro and Albania outperformed Romania. In mathematics, Romania earned 419 points, tying with Mongolia, while scoring 425 points in science, one point ahead of Mongolia's 424 points. In reading, Romanian pupils achieved 413 points compared to 374 points for Mongolia.

Socio-economic divide and presidential response

President Nicușor Dan, a two-time International Mathematical Olympiad gold medalist in 1987 and 1988, addressed the findings from Bucharest. Dan stated that academic achievement in Romania remains heavily determined by family income and geographic location rather than individual potential. He called on political parties and the government to secure substantial budgetary allocations to identify at-risk students early, establish data-driven evaluation tools, reduce school dropout rates, and regulate classroom technology.

The chance of a child in Romania having good school results depends to an unacceptably large extent on the family they come from and the place where they study.

Dan argued that isolated high-performing schools cannot substitute for a functional nationwide framework. He urged state institutions to transition existing pockets of educational excellence into an equitable system capable of supporting national economic competitiveness and defense.

Parental criticism and systemic shortcomings

Parent representatives attributed the decline to governance failures rather than pupil capability. National Federation of Parents President Cătălin Viorel Nan noted that Romanian scores trail OECD averages across all tested disciplines, renewing calls for public education funding to reach 6% of gross domestic product. Nan argued that schools continue to operate on an industrial-era curriculum unchanged since the 1900s, leaving pupils unable to apply knowledge to everyday scenarios such as calculating commercial discounts or understanding promotional advertisements.

This is more the failure of the adults who built, managed, and defended this system. It is not the failure of the children.

European context and policy initiatives

Dismissed Minister of Education and Research Mihai Dimian acknowledged that curricula must be modernized to prepare students for evolving labor markets. At the European level, European Commission Vice-President Roxana Mînzatu pointed out that basic competency deficits affect youth across multiple member states.

Too many young Europeans have difficulties with basic skills such as reading, mathematics or science. It is a signal that we must take very seriously.

Mînzatu announced that the European Commission will present an Education Package in November 2026 to assist national governments with skill acquisition programs.