Top Performing Countries

The Center on International Education Benchmarking provides information about and analysis of the education systems in top performing countries around the world. With the release of the 2015 PISA results, CIEB has identified a new list of top-performing countries. We identify this group of countries by looking at achievement in all three tested subjects. We also eliminate any top performers who did not perform at or above the OECD average on 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 (below level 2 on PISA).

The new list is: Canada, China (including the provinces of Shanghai, Beijing, Jiangsu and Guangdong), Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Profiles of the new countries on this list — Germany, Netherlands, and New Zealand — will be posted shortly. Archived profiles of top-performing education systems on previous PISA administrations can be found here. 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.

Learn about the world’s best performing education systems and what sets them apart.