The latest PISA scores are out and Scandinavia didn’t do well. Here in Iceland it’s all anyone talks about (at least for the current news cycle). Various opinions are being floated as to why we did so poorly, ranging from austerity to culture.
One opinion floated recently was that the countries that improved the most in the most recent PISA tests tend to be non-democratic. So maybe we don’t need to worry at all. Maybe we’re suffering at the PISA tests because the tests somehow favour authoritarian education systems.
The above plot, which shows various countries’ PISA maths scores plotted against the Economist’s Democracy Index disproves this theory. Undemocratic countries that do well in the PISA tests seem to be outliers rather than representing a trend. If anything, the trend seems to be the other way around, with countries scoring high on the Economist’s Democracy Index also doing well at the PISA math test.