We live in a global context marked by emotional fragility: more than a billion people live with a mental health diagnosis, according to the World Health Organization. The situation is especially critical in classrooms: one in seven adolescents between 10 and 19 years old suffers from some mental disorder, and suicide is already the third leading cause of death among young people. Faced with this emergency scenario, preventive psychiatry focuses on accessible, zero-cost interventions with an unsuspected biological impact. The most powerful of all comes in the form of a book.

The latest PISA results once again place education at the center of public debate. In Catalonia, however, this time we have an even more elementary problem: we do not even know well enough where we stand. The exclusion of an excessive portion of the student body from the sample of students who took the PISA tests means that the results of Catalan boys and girls are not comparable. It is a significant technical and political fiasco. But perhaps we run the risk that the discussion about who is to blame prevents us from seeing a deeper issue. PISA is talking to us about mathematics, science, and reading comprehension. But it is also talking to us, indirectly, about democracy. The OECD points to a worrying decline in the reading ability of our children and identifies an especially revealing phenomenon: the number of young people who read quickly, superficially, and respond before having understood the text well is growing. At the same time, the use of social networks is increasing, and more than a quarter of the students state that digital devices habitually cause distractions in class.The issue, in my opinion, is not to totally demonize screens. Used well, technology can be an extraordinary learning tool. The problem is another: we are educating a generation in an ecosystem that rewards speed, constant interruption, immediate response, and emotional impact. And then we ask them to read with attention, to distinguish a fact from an opinion, to compare sources, to identify manipulation, and to listen to arguments with which they do not agree. These are not just school skills: they are democratic skills.The temporal coincidence is unsettling. While we discuss the PISA results, in Germany the far-right AfD has just obtained nearly 45% of the votes in Saxony-Anhalt. A year and a half earlier, it had already doubled its support in the federal elections and had become the second political force in the country. Germany is once again asking itself to what extent a democracy can see the values that sustain it eroded from within. It would be absurd, and too convenient, to establish a causal line between TikTok and the vote for the far right. The causes of the AfD's growth are much more complex, but we should not ignore the information ecosystem in which these concerns are transformed into political behavior. Networks do not necessarily invent unrest, but they can amplify it. They do not necessarily create polarization, but they reward content that outrages. And disinformation is especially effective when it confirms what we would already like to believe. That is why the problem of fake news is not just that we do not know how to detect a false piece of news. The most difficult problem appears when we know, or suspect, that information is false and, despite everything, we decide to share it because it reinforces our prejudices, harms the adversary, or reaffirms our identity.We are no longer just talking about digital literacy here. We are talking about democratic ethics. For many years, we have acted as if democracy were an infrastructure that, once built, functioned almost by itself: a Constitution, periodic elections, parliaments, courts, and freedom of the press. All of this is essential. But it is not enough. A democracy needs citizens willing to participate, capable of listening and deliberating, with the judgment to evaluate information and enough democratic resilience to continue respecting rules, rights, and opponents even when they are angry, afraid, or feel like they are losing. And these capabilities do not appear spontaneously when we turn eighteen. They are learned.This is where the school acquires a responsibility that goes far beyond recovering points in PISA. Obviously, we must improve mathematics, science, and reading. In fact, being able to understand a complex text is probably one of the best defenses against manipulation. But educating democratic citizens does not consist of adding an hour of "values" to the curriculum or memorizing how Parliament works. Democracy is learned by practicing it. It is learned when a student has to defend a position with arguments and listen to the opposing one. When they have to distinguish a reliable source from one that is not. When they work with other students with whom they do not share an origin, opinion, or interests. When they participate in a real decision of the school and discover that their voice has consequences. When they have to accept losing a vote. When they verify that being convinced of something does not equate to being right.Perhaps, then, after PISA we should formulate a slightly different question. Not just how many points we want to recover in reading or mathematics, but what kind of citizen we want to emerge from our schools. Someone capable of reading a long text. Of listening to an opinion they detest. Of distinguishing a scientific argument from a slogan. Of not sharing a lie even if it favors their own. Of participating without wanting to exclude. And of defending democratic rules even when the result is not what they would want. If the school does not help to form this citizen, the problem we have is quite a bit more serious than performing poorly in PISA. We need above all to teach how to live democratically in a world that will continue to be digital.

The disastrous results of the PISA tests in the Spanish state, which are perfectly extrapolable to Catalonia despite not having representative data due to the blunder of student exclusions, have set off all the alarms and place us at a turning point. Basically, because in reality they were perfectly expected and for some time there have been symptoms that the current educational system is failing and not responding to the complexities of today's society. Given this situation, what is needed is to demand from the administrations, the parties, the educational community, and society in general an authentic national pact that serves to reach a consensus on a shared strategy that goes beyond electoral cycles. Education must stop being a political weapon.

Although distorted in the Catalan case, the PISA results we have just learned about will likely put back on the table the low level of our students in mathematics, reading comprehension, and science. We already knew this for some time and it has been discussed a lot. But until now, the attention has focused only on the first two topics, while science has been incomprehensibly ignored by public debate. Will we now see the discussion once again focus on mathematics and reading comprehension while science is left aside again?

If a company, a scientist, a chef, a doctor, or an architect were to fail continuously, would they change the way they work? Probably yes, right? Well, that is what we must urgently do with schools.

Each new edition of PISA causes a small storm. For a few days, the scores, rankings, and comparisons between countries occupy headlines and talk shows. Some use the results to show that the education system is in crisis; others remind us that education cannot be reduced to a test taken by fifteen-year-old students. Both statements contain a grain of truth, but neither one is very useful on its own.Every time we are horrified again by the results we obtain, we list all the evils of the system and we think –with good will– of proposals for improvement and even, as in the previous call, we convene a group of experts to provide a complete proposal of measures. Or we ask for an opinion from the horse's mouth –the OECD– so that it presents a proposal that coincides in large part with that of our experts.What can we say that is new from a first analysis of the PISA 2025 results? To begin with, we cannot ignore the inexplicable error in the selection of the student sample in Catalonia, which has meant that we do not have comparable results. But, furthermore, the results have not been good, despite the problems related to the sample.At a national level, results have worsened over the last decade and the number of students who do not achieve basic competencies has increased. But there is a characteristic that seems even more significant to me: Spain maintains a proportion of students that exceeds minimum levels similar to that of the OECD, but has far fewer students at the levels of excellence. The problem, therefore, does not consist only of preventing some from falling behind. It is also necessary to ensure that everyone advances and that those who can go further also reach there.But the most worrying thing continues to be the results related to the educational and social context. Absenteeism is especially high: 34% of Spanish students report having missed at least one day of class during the two weeks prior to the test, compared to 22% in the OECD. Furthermore, this percentage has increased since 2022.And it is necessary to remember a very significant piece of data from the 2022 report: the disaffection and lack of trust of students towards the school. It must be kept very much in mind that, in the latest OECD studies on teaching quality, the importance of the classroom climate and socio-affective bonding are pointed out as two key aspects for good learning.Another change that PISA studies is the emergence of artificial intelligence. 54% of Spanish students use AI chatbots to learn at least once a week, compared to 46% of the OECD average. They use them to search for information, summarize texts, and even write assignments. The educational question is no longer, therefore, whether students will use AI, but how to teach them to use it without delegating their thinking to it. Denying the problem does not solve it; it aggravates it.What would I do, then, after PISA 2025? Fewer express reforms and more continuity: reinforcing reading, mathematics, and scientific reasoning; acting on absenteeism and classroom climate; working in the classroom to make good use of AI, and rigorously evaluating the policies that are applied.We need, above all, to face the problems without looking for excuses and avoid using PISA as a political weapon, in one direction or the other. The data should not serve to confirm what everyone already thought before seeing it.The educational solution in our country involves –and we will not tire of saying it– reaching a consensus on educational policies that go beyond electoral cycles. Our educational system needs stability and time; it needs global pacts and generosity. Under no circumstances should we use education as an electoral weapon or turn it into a battleground over methodologies.It should be remembered that PISA questions are competency-based: they do not assess isolated content, but rather the ability of our students to apply knowledge and solve new situations. Therefore, we must also move towards more competency-based and relevant learning.Perhaps this is the most important lesson. The goal is not to climb a few places in the next PISA. It is much more ambitious and relevant: to ensure that fewer students are left behind, that many more go far, and that everyone leaves school better prepared and with the confidence to think for themselves.

Once again, the PISA test results do not invite optimism across the Spanish state, nor on an international scale. They are falling for the third consecutive time, consolidating a trend that for now seems difficult to reverse.

Look: today, as everyone knows, the school year was supposed to start, and it has not started due to the teachers' strike. Just as they ended the last school year, groups of teachers have cut off traffic on the Barcelona ring roads first thing in the morning. With the difference that today was a very special day for the students, the first day of school. The one in which there is anxiety, excitement, nerves, emotions, expectations… That is why I think that, regardless of how we have arrived here, a country that begins the school year with a teachers' strike is a country that has hit rock bottom. Denying the first day of excitement at school may be a preparation for the disappointments that will come with adult life, but it is a failure for everyone, that is already understood.It is a failure for everyone, with shared responsibilities. There are foresight problems: if Catalonia goes from 6 to more than 8 million inhabitants in 25 years, the school system must be sized accordingly. If the school is to be inclusive, that is, to cater to students with special needs, more hands are needed. If it is to be in Catalan, it must be taken into account that today we are a multilingual country, which makes immersion difficult. If it is also desired, logically, that students leave school knowing how to read, write, calculate, reason, and speak well, then teachers must be excellent and, therefore, one must be demanding in access to the teaching profession. And teachers must be paid well. There is a problem of political authority. The mess of the PISA tests and these two wasted months of summer holidays have shown that there is a functional problem in the Department of Education. All the ministers have had problems with the unions, but now we have gone from the unrest of the Cambray era to that of the Niubó era, as if they did not master the teaching civil service and did not understand the effects of the decisions they make, such as agreeing to that reduction of the power of school principals, and doing so with minority unions in the sector. The unions cannot give many lessons either. The USTEC approved an agreement with the Department of Education last May and asked for a vote in favor of the pact, but the majority of teachers voted against it. The result is a Government without authority and unions whose representativeness has been damaged. But, look, on a morning like this, taking an inventory of responsibilities is not enough. We must be able to break this negative vicious circle. And we must break it by affirming that we can do it. Catalonia has a very long pedagogical tradition. The department has resources (they are never enough, but they are not few, and it is promised that there will be more). The first ones who would not want to strike are the teachers. And in Catalonia, the school is under Spanish judicial and political attack. If there are so many of us who want to get out of this, we must be able to get out of it. And making a great country agreement for education, thinking about the students and the future of the country, is increasingly necessary.Look, today the results of the PISA tests have been published, from which Catalonia has been excluded because the sample was not valid. Well then, Spain as a whole obtains the worst results in its history. For example, the Spanish results in reading have plummeted.If we apply the results of Catalonia, with this invalid sample that was apparently better designed to produce better results, we find that the Catalan results remain below those of Madrid –which heads the state ranking with 477 points– and surpass Castile and León (472) by only two points and Cantabria (470) by four. Catalonia also remains ahead of the Spanish average (457) and of the European Union and the OECD (both with 463 points). Even so, this unreal Catalonia would still be very far from the international top 5, which ranges from 488 points in the United Kingdom to 525 in Japan. A first day of school without classes must call us to a commitment so that it never happens again. We must be able to do it, shaking off selfish and defeatist approaches. Good morning.

No single indicator explains the whole reality: GDP does not summarize a country's well-being; unemployment does not describe the entire labor market. But no one would stop measuring unemployment because it is an imperfect statistic. The value of an indicator is not to be perfect, but to allow us to see if we are advancing or regressing, and, from there, to decide. That is why the tools that measure reality are a governance infrastructure. PISA tests are one of them. And this week we have learned that Catalonia has lost the possibility of comparing its 2025 results with those of other countries and the past.PISA has known limitations. It neither measures everything that matters in school nor does everything it measures depend exclusively on what students know. But these limitations do not nullify the value of comparison. Precisely because they remain stable from one edition to another, the value of PISA is not a snapshot of a single year, but rather the ability to know if an educational system improves or deteriorates over time. And a trend can only be interpreted if all the snapshots have been taken with the same criteria.Well, this time comparability has gone out the window. The OECD allows for the exclusion of some students in very specific situations, such as certain disabilities or a very recent enrollment without language proficiency, but it sets a ceiling: a maximum of 5%. In Catalonia, 23% have been excluded, almost five times more. But the irregularity is not excluding anyone; what breaks the sample is having done it massively and without anyone checking. There's no need for bad faith: it is enough not to supervise. And the result is that Catalonia has lost precisely what made the test valuable: the possibility of rigorously comparing itself with its past and with others.

The Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, is appearing this afternoon in Parliament to explain the Generalitat's incredible failure to organize the PISA tests. As we know, the story could not be more lamentable, no matter how you look at it: the OECD warned in March. No information was given until July, until a Friday at the end of July, to be exact, when they sent a director general to face the music and not the minister, and they describe an error in the sample of students examined, which far exceeds any explainable decimal error, as a specific and technical problem.As we explain today, the alteration of the PISA sample in Catalonia far exceeds that of any country in the latest report. It reminded me of the day when the Generalitat, under the presidency of Pere Aragonès, did not know how to correctly convene a competitive examination. With the difference that this PISA issue is an international embarrassment. And I prefer to believe it was a (serious) fiasco rather than have to think it's a way to circumvent results that will be poor given the problems that have been affecting Education in Catalonia for years. It is enough to remember that we finished the course amidst strikes and we will start it the same way. The problem with Education is in the classrooms, which are a reflection of all of society's problems, in the training of teachers, in the authority of principals, in the tension of an inclusive school that lacks the means to be worthy of the name, in a Catalonia that has been getting poorer, etc. But something is happening in the Department of Education and, by extension, in the Government, when it signs a union pact that inflames the unions, closes an agreement with the OECD to improve teaching, and, one year later, makes a big mistake in the sample for the PISA tests. And in another order of indignation, we have the multitudinous demonstration yesterday in Palma de Mallorca against the excess of tourism that has led the island, like the rest of the Balearic Islands, to collapse. There is no need for many explanations as to why the protest, because in Catalonia we know well what tourist collapse is, which affects ecology, mobility, housing, culture, language, etc. The manifesto of the call has a quite explicit paragraph on the effect of tourism: “It invaded our coasts, then our towns and our cities and is currently occupying our homes. Mallorca cannot fit any more hotels, cannot fit any more coffee franchises, fast food or cheesecakes, and cannot fit any more tourists! Mallorca at its limit! Less tourism, more life!” Such a demonstration is a sign that must be listened to and attended to with urgency. But everything suggests that it will not be so, for now, because the Balearic government and tourist interests are one. The proof is what happened in the end:

Bertrand Richet is a leading expert in School evaluation council, The French School Assessment Council. He was the Inspector General of the French Ministry of Education for almost a decade. His main task on the assessment council has been to design the new framework for evaluating schools and institutes. He is visiting Catalonia at the invitation of the Catalan Government through an Erasmus+ grant.

"I collapsed trying to do Innovamat problems with my daughter"; "Innovamat makes difficult what used to be easy"; "Students haven't grasped basic concepts and get overwhelmed with addition." These are just some of the thousands of comments made on social media since the publisher's materials were released in 2017. Innovamat began to land in the mathematics classrooms of CataloniaNow, eight years later, the Catalan company's methods are used in more than 800 schools and institutes in Catalonia—approximately a third of the centers—reaching almost 200,000 students in primary and secondary education. The growth of the mathematics teaching publisher has not been limited to Catalonia; it has also reached 2,600 educational centers in nine different countries, exceeding half a million students worldwide. Furthermore, in recent days Innovamat has entered the United States and has become one of fifteen publishers—Innovamat is the only one not based in the US—authorized by the California government for use in classrooms in that state's schools and institutes.