Learn about the world’s best performing education systems and what sets them apart.
NCEE provides information about and analysis of the education systems in top-performing countries around the world. With the release of the 2022 PISA results, NCEE will be identifying a new list of top-performing countries, combining the new PISA results with a set of other measures as we continue to modernize our benchmarking. Stay tuned to this space for further updates.
The list of top performers below was generated from the PISA 2018 results. We identified this group of countries by looking at achievement in all three tested subjects. We also eliminated any top performers who did not perform at or above the OECD average on at least one of two key equity measures: percent of resilient students (students from the lowest socio-economic quartile who perform at the highest levels) and percent of low performers (those who perform below level 2 on PISA).
The PISA 2018 list is: Canada, China (including the provinces of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang), Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Our objective is to learn from countries and economies and adapt those lessons for use in the United States at the national, state or district levels.
