Associate Professor of Public Administration and Political Science at Istanbul Medipol University Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Dr. Faik Tanrıkulu wrote about Turkey's rise in PISA 2025 results and the long-term transformation in education for AA Analysis.
Education discussions in Turkey are often stuck between two extremes. On the one hand, there is an approach that rejects all progress based on the deficiencies in the system, and on the other hand, there is an approach that interprets positive results as all problems being solved. However, a healthy evaluation of education policies requires clearly presenting new goals while acknowledging success. The real importance of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025 is that it offers us this opportunity.
Turkey's rise in PISA is not a coincidence
Education in Turkey has been one of the areas most intensely discussed by the public for many years. Criticisms on the examination system, curriculum, teacher policies and the quality of schools are undoubtedly important for the development of the education system. However, conducting discussions solely on daily experiences and political evaluations may lead to the long-term transformation being overlooked. The PISA 2025 results of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) offer an important opportunity to re-evaluate Turkey's education performance with comparable data, independent of perceptions.
The results of education investments appear in a much longer time compared to other public policies. The success of a 15-year-old student today is not only the result of the last few years; It reflects the cumulative effect of teacher qualifications, family opportunities, educational infrastructure and teaching processes, starting from pre-school. For this reason, PISA results should be read not as the political balance sheet of a single period, but as one of the indicators of Turkey's long-term investment in human capital.
Türkiye writes a global success story in education
While following the PISA 2025 results in Bratislava, I thought that the most remarkable development for Türkiye was not only the rise in the rankings. What is really important is that a country that has been criticized for many years for its educational performance is now seen as an example of progress worth examining in international education circles. OECD Education and Skills Director Andreas Schleicher's description of Turkey's success as a development that other countries should also carefully evaluate shows the response of this change at the international level.
A country's true power in education is measured not only by how many points its most successful students get, but by what any student can do in the face of a problem he has never encountered before. Memorizing information is one thing, being able to use it to produce a new solution is another. OECD's PISA 2025 results show that Turkey has made progress in this second area.
While student performance is declining in many developed countries of the world, Turkey's continued rise shows that a long-term and determined transformation in education is possible. Türkiye is no longer a country that only follows the education systems of developed countries; With his own experience, he is moving towards a position where he can contribute to the debate on international education policies. This is an important success that should strengthen Turkey's self-confidence in education. Today, Turkey's educational experience is entering a new era in which it can benefit from its own experience while closing the gap between itself and developed countries.
Long-term investment in education pays off
The resources allocated to education, teacher employment, classroom infrastructure and investments made in schooling over the last twenty years under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have constituted a decisive public policy priority in expanding Turkey's educational capacity.
As a matter of fact, as pointed out in the PISA 2025 Türkiye Report, while the average share allocated to education from public resources in OECD countries is 10.1 percent, this rate has reached 10.6 percent in Turkey. The fact that Turkey allocates resources above the OECD average shows that education has been considered a strategic public policy area for many years. When evaluating today's success, it is necessary to acknowledge this long-term investment will.
Strong educational performance despite the pandemic and earthquake
When evaluating PISA 2025, we should not forget the extraordinary conditions that Turkey has faced in recent years. While the pandemic disrupted learning processes around the world, Türkiye was faced with the responsibility of maintaining and reorganizing educational services after a very heavy disaster such as the February 6 earthquakes.
Continuing learning processes under these conditions, reactivating schools, supporting students and enabling teachers to continue their duties required significant institutional capacity. PISA results alone do not measure the impact of post-disaster practices, but the performance achieved after a difficult period makes it necessary to further investigate the resilience of the education system. Turkey's crisis management experience can turn into an important policy area that can be shared with other countries.
From corporate experience to skills-based training
It would be incomplete to read the PISA 2025 results only as the result of decisions taken in the last few years. In education policies, results emerge in the long term and success depends on implementation capacity as well as institutional continuity. In this respect, it is an important advantage that the Minister of National Education Yusuf Tekin has knowledge of different periods of the Ministry. Tekin's position as the Undersecretary of the Ministry of National Education in 2013 allows him to evaluate today's education policies not only from the perspective of a political decision-maker, but also from the perspective of a manager who knows the functioning of the bureaucracy and the implementation in the field. Because in a huge education system like Türkiye, which includes approximately 20 million students and teachers, making reform is as decisive as ensuring that the reform reaches the classroom, teachers and students. This finding essentially points to an important but often overlooked dimension of education policies: Designing a good reform alone is not enough; Unless there is harmony between political will and bureaucratic implementation capacity, it is very difficult for reforms to reach the classroom.
One of the topics that makes the Tekin period more important for the future is the aim of a more clear orientation from knowledge transfer to skill development in education with the Türkiye Century Education Model. Model; It places competencies such as problem solving, critical thinking, questioning, interpretation, inference, mathematical reasoning and data-based decision-making directly at the center of education programs.
This transformation is particularly significant in terms of PISA. Because PISA measures not only how much information the student has memorized, but also how he uses, interprets and analyzes the information he has in the face of a new problem. From the structure based on memorization and knowledge transfer, which has been discussed for many years in Turkey's education system; For this reason, it is of strategic importance to focus on a model that prioritizes reasoning, problem solving and transferring knowledge to life skills.
New goal: Transforming potential into productive power
Turkey's next task is to transform the rising success into a broader social and economic capacity. The increase in the rate of students with high performance in science in PISA 2025 to 7.4 percent indicates that the human resources with advanced skills are expanding. Exceeding the OECD average with 494 points in environmental science also offers remarkable potential in the fields of energy, engineering, agriculture and sustainable technology.
However, the main goal in education is not only to identify successful students but also to expand the opportunities available to them. Supporting disadvantaged students, professional development of teachers, university-industry cooperation and research infrastructure cannot therefore be considered separately from each other. Türkiye will increase the return on education investment to the extent that it strengthens the environments in which its talented young people can participate in scientific and technological production.
PISA 2025 offers Turkey an important basis for success and self-confidence. It is necessary to appreciate the contribution of our teachers, students, families and the political will that has prioritized education policies for many years. Now is the time to take this gain further. Turkey's new goal in education is not just to rise in international rankings; To be a country that shares its successful practices with the world, develops the potential of every child, and gains a stronger place in the knowledge economy of the future with the people it educates.
