In Parque Grajaú, on the southern edge of the city of Sao Paulo, Governor Tarcisio de Freitas (Republicanos) stopped during a visit to an Armazém Solidário, a food distribution center, on Wednesday (Sept. 9) to celebrate the state's score in Pisa, the OECD's international exam for 15-year-olds. "We moved up to 2nd place in the country," he said. The state-by-state results, released the day before, put Sao Paulo second among Brazil's 27 states, behind only Parana.

The scores combine public and private school students. Sao Paulo scored 434 in reading, 443 in science and 404 in math. The OECD normally ranks countries, but this round it also published results for Brazilian states. If Sao Paulo were a country, according to an analysis by the newspaper Estadao, it would rank above Qatar in reading, below Ukraine in math and level with Chile and Israel in science, within the margin of error.

What the numbers show

• Sao Paulo's overall average is 427, against 436 for Parana, which led all three subjects. Santa Catarina is third.
• Brazil as a whole scored 408 in reading, 377 in math and 409 in science, ranking 52nd, 71st and 67th among about 90 countries and economies, according to O Globo.
• In reading, its strongest subject, Sao Paulo would place 39th worldwide, near Luxembourg and Slovenia.
• About 2,000 students in Sao Paulo state took the 2025 exam. Nationwide, 30,140 students from 1,053 schools took part.

Tarcisio described the test as internationally recognized and said it measures "logical reasoning, knowledge applied to life situations." State Education Secretary Renato Feder told Estadao he celebrated the results and said the state school curriculum demands content that prepares young people for the future.

"Sao Paulo had an important improvement in Pisa, in sciences as well as reading, and in math too. We moved up to 2nd place in the country. We will keep working to improve these results more and more, but this really motivated us a lot."

A climb that spans administrations

The rise did not start with the current administration. Sao Paulo ranked 11th among the states in 2006, 7th in 2009 and 2012, 6th in 2015 and now 2nd, a trajectory that crosses governments of different parties. Because Pisa tests 15-year-olds, the students assessed in 2025 started school before Tarcisio took office in January 2023, and the result cannot be credited to the current government alone, as Poder360 noted. The figures land in the middle of an election year: Tarcisio is running for reelection against Fernando Haddad of the Workers' Party, who was Brazil's education minister from 2005 to 2012.

The state-level data also expose Brazil's regional gap. Poorer states in the North and Northeast consistently trail those of the South and Southeast, which Ernesto Faria, head of the education research group Iede, said makes the need for greater equity obvious. "It is reasonable to expect a significant association between results and students' socioeconomic level," Gabriel Correa, public policy director at Todos pela Educação, told Estadao. At 15, he added, performance reflects learning opportunities accumulated across a student's whole school life. State rankings carry a larger margin of error, and very close scores are treated as ties.

The results arrive in a hard cycle worldwide: the 2025 round of Pisa, which the OECD applies every three years, gathered about 760,000 students from 91 countries and economies and recorded a historic drop in performance. Brazil has improved since 2006 but remains below the OECD average in all three areas. In the country, 72.4% of those tested were in state schools and 84.7% were in the first or second year of high school. Ukraine, the yardstick in math, took part with only 18 of its 27 regions, according to O Globo.