Italy Holds Its Ground in OECD Education Survey as Peers Slip

Italian students performed above the international average in mathematics, reading and science in the latest OECD Programme for International Student Assessment survey, The Local Italy reported this week, even as many other countries recorded sharp declines in their own results.

The finding places Italy among the more stable performers in a round of testing that the outlet describes as marked by widespread slippage elsewhere, a contrast that education analysts in several European capitals have seized on as evidence that pandemic-era learning losses were not evenly distributed.

The same survey, however, records a large and persistent gap between Italian and non-Italian students, a divide the outlet presents as the central unresolved problem beneath the headline ranking.