2026-09-07

As the reform reaches more and more schools, national assessments will allow everyone, including our critics, to judge whether the gains observed in the pilot are spreading throughout the system. If they aren’t, we will have to understand why and fix it. If they are, then we keep going. That’s how evidence based public policy should work. So no, these results do not prove that El Salvador already has the educational outcomes of Germany or Sweden. They don’t prove that every Salvadoran school has been transformed. And they don’t prove that every element of our reform works equally well. What they DO show is that ordinary Salvadoran children in ordinary Salvadoran public schools, when given a radically improved educational environment, can achieve results that most people would have …

Now, what DO these results tell us? 1. They tell us that 1,198 students in 171 ordinary Salvadoran public schools participating in this program were independently assessed using an internationally comparable instrument. And their results in reading, mathematics and science were comparable with the average results of students in Germany and Sweden. That is a fact, supported by an internationally recognized OECD assessment and reported by the World Bank. 2. They tell us that achieving those levels of performance in Salvadoran public schools is POSSIBLE. This is perhaps the most important finding. For decades, we have been told that transforming education takes generations. That poverty determines educational outcomes. That our public schools simply cannot compete with schools in dev…

A few days ago, I shared the World Bank’s summary of the results of the PISA for Schools assessment conducted in 171 Salvadoran public schools participating in our education pilot. Since then, I have seen some legitimate questions about what these results mean, as well as some claims about what they supposedly don’t mean. So let’s be very precise. First, what we NEVER claimed: 1. We never claimed these results represent the national average. They don’t. This was not the national PISA assessment. It was PISA for Schools, conducted specifically in the 171 public schools participating in our pilot program. That is precisely why my original post said: “These are the results of our pilot program, which includes AI tutors and has been running in 171 public schools for just over a yea…