Educational community around the globe is anticipating the release of the PISA ranking that will gauge the progress in education in various countries based on students’ achievements in PISA test. However, PISA measures of educational quality represent a limited range of educational aspects, and thus there is a threat that PISA might divert attention from unmeasured but crucial educational aims such as moral or civic development. To understand why PISA rankings provide a too simplistic picture of educational quality, it is worth reconsidering the role of education for society. In democratic societies, there is a general consensus that schools must not only prepare children as workforce for the economy but also promote social values and active citizenship (e.g. Biesta, 2014). PISA focuses on how education contributes to economic growth and development. For this purpose, the OECD, organization that administers PISA, assessed math, reading, financial, and science literacy in 2015 which are considered by OECD experts to be the key areas of human capital (e.g. OECD, 2016). Even though knowledge in these academic domains is also important for other purposes of education, active citizenship requires further understanding about such issues as human rights, freedom of the press, or financial donations to political parties. In the “post-truth” era when radical populist movements are on the rise worldwide such civic education becomes even more important. However, such knowledge is not well represented in PISA. An interesting supplement to PISA is the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS; Schulz, et al., 2018). Both studies are based on similar solid scientific principles but they assess different educational outcomes. We conducted simple correlation analyses to compare the average student performance for mathematics (PISA 2015) and civic knowledge (ICCS 2016) for the 24 countries that participated in both studies. Preliminary correlation analyses suggest only a weak association between math and civic education scores. This finding implies that the quality of education cannot be compressed into a single score or a narrow set of indicators because different assessment tests lead to different conclusions about educational performance. Whenever there is a call to copy the educational systems of a PISA top-performer, we are well-advised to take a second look remembering that education is complex and multifaceted in its nature.

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