The latest 2025 round of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), released Tuesday, has laid bare persistent academic gaps for 15-year-old students in the Dominican Republic, with performance in mathematics, reading, and science remaining well below Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) averages and stagnant since the 2022 assessment cycle.
The standardized global assessment, which benchmarks student proficiency across 91 participating countries and economies, recorded average scores of 339 in mathematics, 346 in reading, and 361 in science for Dominican test-takers. All three figures fall significantly short of the collective average posted by OECD member nations.
A closer look at proficiency levels reveals the depth of the challenge facing the Dominican education system. Just 9% of Dominican 15-year-olds reached at least the baseline proficiency threshold in mathematics, a stark contrast to the 65% average across OECD countries. In reading, only 23% of Dominican students hit or exceeded the basic proficiency mark, compared to 69% among their OECD peers. For science, that share stands at 26%, versus 74% across participating OECD nations.
Most notably, the report found that nearly no Dominican students achieved the highest tiers of proficiency in any of the three tested subjects. For comparison, the OECD average of top-performing students is 8% in mathematics, 7% in science, and 6% in reading.
Beyond overall performance gaps, the PISA analysis identified two key contributing factors: socioeconomic disparities and elevated rates of school bullying. The assessment confirmed a clear performance divide tied to students’ socioeconomic backgrounds: Dominican students from the top 25% of socioeconomic households outscored peers from the bottom 25% by 69 points in science alone. While this gap is substantial, it is actually narrower than the 85-point average socioeconomic performance gap recorded across OECD countries.
On school climate, the report raised particular alarm about bullying prevalence in the Dominican Republic. Thirty-seven percent of surveyed Dominican students reported experiencing at least one form of bullying multiple times per month or more, a figure 7 percentage points higher than the OECD average of 20%.
As one of the most comprehensive global studies of secondary school student performance, the 2025 PISA assessment tested more than 760,000 15-year-old students across all participating regions. The data is designed to provide policymakers with internationally comparable insights into education system performance, learning outcomes, and contextual factors shaping student success.