Prime Minister Edi Rama began Wednesday with a live broadcast to his followers on Facebook, announcing that Albanian students had climbed dozens of places in the “PISA 2025” rankings, a result he described as an “extraordinary report card” for the work carried out by the Ministry of Education.
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At first glance, the 2025 testing data show a dramatic improvement compared with the results of the last assessment, conducted in 2022, placing Albania first in the region.
But Albania’s result has a problem: it is classified by the OECD as “limited reporting” because the data sample was not compiled in accordance with the organization’s standards.
Unlike in previous years, Albania submitted performance data for only 76% of schools, well below the 85% standard required by the OECD, while small schools with fewer than 21 students among the 15-year-old population were excluded from the testing.
As a result, Albania’s data are accompanied in the report by a note stating that the lack of sample coverage constitutes “a structural gap” that cannot be corrected through statistical data.
“The selected schools that did not participate in the assessment are likely to be disproportionately concentrated in rural and socioeconomically disadvantaged areas, serving populations with historically lower academic performance,” the note says.
The Ministry of Education and the Educational Services Center, which organizes the testing, had not responded by the time this article was published as to why these schools had been excluded and whether this exclusion had contributed to the increase in the final results.
Oliver Clavet, an OECD spokesperson for statistics, told BIRN that these methodological changes were the responsibility of the participating country and had not been made with the OECD’s approval.
According to him, the note in the report served to inform readers that the data should “be treated with due caution.”
Civil society organizations and education experts in Albania challenged the data reported by the government as unrepresentative and described the selection of the school sample as an attempt to “manipulate” the results.
Qëndresa Qytetare, in a public statement, called on the ministry to provide full transparency regarding the sampling process and publish all documentation explaining why some Albanian schools had been excluded from the testing.
How did the sample affect the results?
PISA is the world’s largest international comparative survey in education. It assesses the extent to which 15-year-old students have acquired knowledge in mathematics, reading and science. In 2022, Albania recorded its lowest result ever, while three years later the country achieved an average of 435 points in science, 408 points in reading and 433 points in mathematics.
The averages are around 50–65 points higher across the three assessment areas, but according to statistics experts, this difference is not sufficient to prove an improvement in Albanian children’s learning.
Enkelejda Havari, a lecturer in Economics at IESEG School of Management in Paris, and Erand Llanaj, a researcher at the University of Bielfeld in Germany, both representatives of the Academic Diaspora group, conducted an independent analysis of the data to answer the question of how much of the difference from 2022 reflects improved learning and how much is related to the change in sampling.
According to them, the sample taken in 2025 included significantly more schools in urban areas.
“The share of rural schools fell from 51% to 18%, while the share of schools in cities or larger areas rose from 18.5% to 46.6%,” the lecturers assessed, emphasizing that small schools tend to be more disadvantaged and have fewer resources.
The change in the sample limits the comparison between the two cycles.
Nevertheless, to examine the sensitivity of the results to the composition of the sample, Havari and Llanaj reweighted the 2025 results according to the rural and urban composition of the 2022 sample. In this exercise, the averages were around 13–14 points lower in mathematics, reading and science.
The authors emphasize that this is neither an estimate of Albania’s “real” result nor a measurement of the impact of the schools that were not included, but rather an illustration of how a change in the composition of the sample can affect the averages.
The analysis also identifies an increase in students’ self-reported effort during the test: from 8.35 in 2022 to 8.90 in 2025, on a scale from 0 to 10. According to the authors, this indicator merits further examination, but it does not prove that the change in effort caused the increase in scores.
Describing their exercise as “limited” but “clear,” Havari and Llanaj emphasize that “the results do not prove the absence of progress,” but that these results nevertheless do not allow “its magnitude to be measured reliably through direct comparison with 2022.”
An inaccurate picture of reality
According to experts, the exclusion of small schools, particularly those in rural areas, has changed the components that the PISA test aims to measure.
“The principle of PISA testing is inclusiveness,” Ndriçim Mehmeti told BIRN, arguing that a test intended to provide an overview of the education system must be comprehensive.
According to him, excluding these schools risks leaving out of the picture some of the students who face more unfavorable educational and social conditions.
In this way, Mehmeti said, the result may reflect more the performance of the part of the system that remained within the sample than the state of education as a whole.
For expert Fatmir Sejdiu, this selection was deliberately made by the ministry, resulting in figures that do not show the full picture of Albanian education.
“There is a very important methodological issue here, which Kumbaro is deliberately concealing, while the distributors are acting blindly: the OECD says that in PISA 2025, schools with fewer than 21 PISA-eligible students were not contacted, creating a gap in the coverage of the Albanian sample,” Sejdiu emphasized.
For Sejdiu, this is precisely where the main problem lies. If certain parts of the system are left out, he stressed, a better result cannot automatically be interpreted as evidence that the entire education system has made the same progress.
Experts point to a paradox between institutions’ attempt to present a good but non-inclusive result and the real measurement of those results for the purposes of future education policies.
Fiqiri Çifligu, an expert on the education system, said that although it cannot be proven that the “purpose” of excluding small schools was to achieve higher results, what should concern the public is what we “gain” from producing such a result.
“If, hypothetically, such a selection were made to improve the result, the benefits would be mainly short-term and related to public communication,” Çifligu said.
According to Çifligu, although the results may be presented as a “success story” in the public debate, they carry costs in the long term.
“An education system benefits more from an accurate picture of its condition than from a somewhat higher but less representative result,” Çifligu concluded./BIRN
