The School of Paradoxes: What PISA 2025 Told Us About Education in Kazakhstan

Imagine an ordinary class of thirty students. All can read, many fluently. But nineteen of them, after finishing a text, will not be able to use it: recount it, identify the main point, understand who wrote it and why. This is exactly what PISA measures. Not what a child knows, but what they are able to do with that knowledge.

By this measure, a 15-year-old in Kazakhstan lags behind the average student in OECD countries by almost four years of schooling in reading, two and a half years in mathematics, and three years in science. The world also declined in the latest cycle, by about a year. But our setback is deeper, and it is woven from contradictions that explain more than any numbers can.

In studies of primary education, post-Soviet countries, including Kazakhstan, perform well. Our children can count, read, and recite. The problem starts later. According to Nurlan Kiyasov, the school starts losing children around fifth grade: “Physically they are with us, emotionally they are not with us.”

Ruslan Karatabanov explains this as a legacy the system has never moved away from. Soviet pedagogy provided strong subject knowledge, but stopped at two levels: knowing and understanding. Analysis, evaluation, and creating something new were left out. We teach the way we were taught, and we were taught to reproduce. To this day, the textbook serves as a source of ready-made correct answers, rather than as a prompt to compare sources and take a position.

The most striking paradox of recent years is this: schools are getting better, but outcomes are not. The national project “Comfortable School” has built classrooms that would not be out of place anywhere in the world. Interactive whiteboards, gadgets, pilot lessons with artificial intelligence: flasks merge on the screen, and the formula appears instantly. It looks impressive. But, as Rakhim Oshakbayev noted, this is knowledge on the “look and forget” principle.

Kiyasov calls this the law of the innovation paradox: if new technologies are layered onto old pedagogy, results decline. Forty-five minutes, thirty children, grades for everyone, and a video clip playing as the pinnacle of digitalization. Karatabanov puts it more succinctly: without tasks that make students think, all of this is “just decoration, a showcase of innovation.”

According to experts, Kazakhstan’s school standards are written in a modern way and are directly aimed at functional literacy. But the system around them operates by different rules. Teachers are attested based on certificates and folders, not on student outcomes. Schools are accredited based on the presence of an interactive whiteboard, not on what children have learned. “All the elements of the system are there, but they are not aligned with one another,” says Karatabanov. And since no one checks the result, no one works toward it.

A separate problem is staffing. Kiyasov describes twenty years of double negative selection: those who had failed to get into other universities entered teacher-training universities, and from teacher-training universities to schools came far from the best graduates. Since 2019, salaries have increased, and so has competition for admission to teacher-training universities, but teachers of that generation still make up the majority today and are already becoming principals.

The most unexpected PISA finding concerns the regions. North Kazakhstan and Kostanay regions, with their small rural schools and modest budgets, consistently rank among the leaders, sometimes outperforming the capitals.

The explanation is not about money. In the 1990s, many regions experienced a staffing shortage: teachers left, vacancies were urgently filled by people without experience, who were studying by correspondence. Northern Kazakhstan weathered this shock more easily and retained strong subject teachers. “A teacher may not know what reading literacy is, but they know biology extremely well,” says Karatabanov. In Kostanay, teachers explain their success even more simply: we have a system for training teachers.

This is an important argument in the debate over skills and knowledge. Critical thinking without a subject-matter foundation, in Karatabanov’s words, is empty: you might just as well “analyze the Moon in the sixth house of Venus” very well. Chemistry remains chemistry under any teaching method.

In a separate sample of schools, Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools showed a world-leading mathematics performance, with a gap of more than eight years of schooling from the national average. Part of this is a selection effect. But Karatabanov, himself a former NIS teacher, is convinced that a child from an ordinary neighborhood who completes the same laboratory work and research tasks will also show the same results. The point is a coherent system in which lessons are built around the expected outcome, and assessment checks exactly that.

The flip side of the same coin is that, according to Kiyasov, the gap between strong and weak schools within Almaty alone amounts to three years of schooling. “As if they were two different cities.” The place where a child is born increasingly determines what they will learn.

All the paradoxes converge in one place: the teacher and the lesson. Reforms in recent years have changed salaries, buildings, exams, and platforms, but have barely touched what happens in the classroom.

The experts’ prescriptions are, strikingly, very down to earth. Karatabanov is not calling for new laws, but for rewritten ministerial orders: to design instruction starting from the intended outcome, to restore the meaning of active methods (stimulating thinking, not running around the classroom), and to overhaul oversight — that is, teacher attestation, student assessment, and school accreditation. Kiyasov is relying on training teachers from the ground up through teacher-training universities, a national reading program for grades 5–9, and work with families. “All of this is very easy, but for some reason we are approaching it in a complicated way,” Karatabanov concludes.

There are also things beyond the ministry’s control. Experts agree that family has a greater impact on a child’s success than school does. The advice is simple. Ask your child to recount what they have read, then ask who wrote it and why. Find ten minutes a day to talk to them as you would to an adult. And sometimes take away the smartphone: “give children back the chance to be bored”; boredom is where independent thinking is born.

There is not much time to waste. The next PISA cycle in 2029 will measure media and AI literacy: the ability to distinguish machine-generated text from human text and to recognize a deepfake. If schools still do not teach children to think critically about what they read, this test will be even more difficult.