The results of the latest PISA tests applied to the Dominican Republic's education system were disappointing, columnist Óscar Medina wrote in an opinion column for Diario Libre. At best, he said, the country's performance has stagnated, which he called unacceptable given that 14 years have passed since the government committed to assigning 4 percent of gross domestic product to the budget for pre-university public education. The 15-year-olds who sat this round of tests, he noted, have spent their entire school careers in a supposedly well-funded public system.
Yet the outcome was so poor that the country showed no change in science and mathematics compared with 2022, and actually fell back in reading comprehension, Medina wrote. Scores across every subject sat far below the average of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and trailed the rest of the region, he said.
Scores far below the OECD average
No Dominican student reached the top level of proficiency in the assessment, according to the column. In both science and reading, only a quarter of students reached the basic competency threshold, while in mathematics that figure was just 9 percent.
The Programme for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, is run every three years by the OECD and tests 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science across dozens of countries, making it one of the main international benchmarks for comparing school systems.
A widening socioeconomic gap
PISA also exposed the scale of socioeconomic inequality running through the education gap, Medina wrote. Students from the wealthiest families outperformed those from less privileged backgrounds by an average of nearly 70 points, he said.
Medina acknowledged that almost every country saw its results decline in this round of testing, but he said that offered no real consolation for the Dominican Republic. He pointed to broader factors often blamed for the global slide, including heavy use of technology and screen-driven distraction, the rise of artificial intelligence as a tool capable of replacing practices essential to learning, and a broader erosion of rigorous measurement and merit in how learning is assessed.
A problem of quality, not excuses
Even so, Medina argued that the Dominican Republic's core problem is one of pure educational quality, without excuses or mitigating factors. He described poorly trained teachers combined with inadequate content, textbooks and teaching methods as producing students who are both deficient in skills and poorly motivated.
He said the pattern amounts to expecting different results while doing the same thing, and that successive governments have kept acting the same way despite spending large sums of money. Much of that spending, he argued, goes toward clientelism, handouts and social transfers, while governments have failed to apply public policies capable of improving teacher quality, modernising the tools teachers use or strengthening the content taught in classrooms.
Teachers' union blamed for blocking change
Medina noted that teachers' pay has increased, but said the union representing them has not matched that with the collaboration, effort or sacrifice needed to drive substantial change. Instead, he described the union as remaining a constant source of conflict and a brake on progress for the education system, unwilling to accept any responsibility and instead blaming the disastrous results on a shortage of classrooms and poor conditions at schools, while saying nothing about its own performance.
Medina concluded that what PISA ultimately shows is that the Dominican Republic is spending an enormous amount of money on education only to produce shameful results, a situation he called as unsustainable as it is intolerable. He said Dominican education must either make a rapid qualitative turnaround, or the country should accept that it is not worth continuing to waste the roughly one-quarter of the national budget currently assigned to it.
