Long hours, low skills: what Mexico can learn from countries that turned it around

Mexico works more hours than any other OECD country, and its 15-year-olds scored 388 in PISA 2025 mathematics, 75 points below the OECD average. That combination is not a coincidence. It is the signature of an economy that substitutes time for skills.

The good news is that this pattern has been broken before. Portugal, Poland and Peru, and the Brazilian state of Ceará, started from weak or stagnant results and moved them decisively. South Korea cut its legal working week and raised output per hour. None of them had Mexico’s exact problems, but each shows that the trend is a policy outcome, not a national destiny.

The numbers

Mexican 15-year-olds scored 388 in PISA 2025 mathematics against an OECD average of 463.

• 30% reached Level 2, PISA’s baseline for basic proficiency, versus 65% across the OECD.
• 0.5% reached the top levels (5 and 6), versus 8% across the OECD.
• −7 points since 2022, slightly less than the OECD’s −9. The whole OECD is declining; Mexico is declining from a lower base.

Year	Mexico, PISA mathematics
2003	385
2009	419 (peak)
2018	409
2022	395
2025	388

The gains of 2003–2009 have been almost entirely lost. The score is back within a few points of where Mexico stood two decades ago.

On the work side, Mexico topped the OECD for annual hours in 2025 at 2,205 per worker, against an OECD average of 1,736. Output per hour sits at the other end: Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica work over 2,150 hours and produce roughly USD 22–32 of GDP per hour, while Germany, Denmark and Norway produce USD 98–134 in about 1,330–1,400 hours. The OECD cautions that its hours series is better for trends than for precise cross-country levels.

Why weak math and long hours go together

Output per hour depends on what each worker can do with an hour. When most of the workforce lacks basic quantitative skills, firms rationally choose processes that use more labour and less technology, analysis and automation. The shortfall is covered with time.

• Job design. Workers who cannot read a control chart, interpret a spec sheet or work a spreadsheet cannot run modern processes. Firms keep simpler, more labour-intensive operations.
• Technology adoption. Automation and digital tools pay off only when staff can operate, troubleshoot and improve them. Low baseline skills raise the cost of every upgrade.
• Informality. Low-skill, low-productivity work concentrates in the informal sector, which runs long hours at low output and drags the national average.

PISA measures 15-year-olds, so today’s scores are the workforce of the 2030s. A country that leaves 70% of students below basic mathematics proficiency is setting its productivity ceiling a decade in advance.

Countries that turned their scores around

Four systems started where Mexico is now, or worse, and moved their results measurably. Each did it with a small number of levers held for a decade, not with one-off programmes.

Portugal: clear curriculum, frequent assessment, published results

In PISA 2000, Portugal outscored only Brazil and Mexico in mathematics. By 2015 it was above the OECD average in all three subjects, and through 2018 it was the only OECD member with consistent gains in reading, mathematics and science.

• 2001: school exam results made public, creating pressure on low-performing schools.
• 2003: national mathematics and reading exams at the end of 9th grade.
• 2005: mathematics and reading declared priority subjects, with dedicated support plans.
• 2011–2015: a demanding, sequenced mathematics curriculum written with the Portuguese Mathematical Society; standardized tests in 4th and 6th grade; a new assessment institute; extra resources for schools that improved; compulsory support for students falling behind.

The caveat matters. After 2016, two of the four standardized assessments and the teacher entrance exam were dropped, and the share of low performers in TIMSS 4th-grade mathematics rose from 18% to 26% between 2015 and 2019. Gains reverse when the levers are removed.

Poland: delay tracking, add instruction time

Before 1999, Polish students were split into vocational or academic tracks at about 14. The 1999 reform added a three-year common lower-secondary school, delaying that choice by a year, and increased instruction hours.

• The overall PISA score rose from 470 (2000) to 495 (2006); reading went from below to above the OECD average.
• Students who would previously have gone to vocational school gained over 100 points between 2000 and 2003.
• The share of students with more than four hours a week of language instruction went from 1% to 76%, which the World Bank modelled as explaining about half the gain.

Poland abolished the lower-secondary schools in 2017, and PISA 2022 reflected both the pandemic and that reversal.

Peru: make teaching a merit career

Peru ranked last in PISA 2012. It responded with a 2012 law that turned teaching into a merit-based career with higher pay, talent-based hiring and performance-based promotion, plus a full-day secondary school model.

• Mathematics rose from 365 (2009) to 400 (2018), about one extra year of learning.
• Peru was the only Latin American country to improve its PISA scores between 2015 and 2018.
• The OECD now notes that reform momentum has stalled amid frequent leadership changes, and two-thirds of students remain below basic mathematics proficiency.

Ceará, Brazil: pay municipalities for learning

Ceará is one of Brazil’s poorer states, which makes it the most relevant case for Mexico’s states. Since 2007 it has distributed its share of consumption-tax (ICMS) transfers to municipalities partly on education results, with learning as the largest criterion.

• The incentive was paired with the PAIC literacy programme: structured materials, teacher training and technical help for weak municipalities, plus reliable annual testing.
• A difference-in-differences study against the neighbouring state of Bahia found positive effects on Portuguese and mathematics scores.
• Sobral, in Ceará, tops Brazil’s national ranking, and Brazil has amended its constitution to require every state to tie such transfers to education outcomes.

What they had in common

Country	Core lever	Measured result	What reversed it
Portugal	Sequenced curriculum + frequent national tests	Bottom of PISA 2000 to above the OECD average by 2015	Tests and standards dropped after 2016
Poland	Delayed tracking + more instruction hours	+25 points overall, 2000–2006	Lower-secondary schools abolished in 2017
Peru	Merit-based teacher career	Mathematics 365 to 400, 2009–2018	Leadership turnover, stalled reform
Ceará	Transfers tied to learning + literacy support	Sobral first nationally; model adopted by Brazil	Still in place

The pattern is consistent: clear expectations, regular measurement, and incentives for the people who run schools, sustained across governments.

Countries that cut hours without losing output

Shorter legal hours are not a productivity policy on their own, but the countries that have cut them show that the economy adapts when firms are forced to use time better.

South Korea cut its maximum legal week from 68 to 52 hours between 2018 and 2021, 40 regular plus 12 overtime. Average annual hours fell from 2,163 in 2010 to 1,833 in 2025, and the government targets about 1,700 by 2030. The Korea Development Institute attributes most of the decline to rising productivity, with the 52-hour cap as a secondary factor. The order matters: skills and capital came first, and the cap locked in the gain.

Chile is moving from 45 to 40 hours between 2024 and 2028, and Colombia completed its move from 48 to 42 hours in July 2026. Both are too recent for clean productivity evidence, but they show that Mexico’s peers chose gradual schedules to give firms time to reorganize.

Cutting hours without raising skills risks more overtime, more informality or lost output. Cutting hours while raising skills turns the cap into pressure for better processes.

Where Mexico stands today

Mexico has moved decisively on working hours and in the opposite direction on measurement.

Hours. A constitutional reform published in the Official Gazette on 3 March 2026 cuts the maximum week from 48 to 40 hours, two hours a year, with no cut to wages or benefits.

Year	Maximum weekly hours
2026	48
2027	46
2028	44
2029	42
2030	40

Measurement. The INEE, the autonomous education evaluation institute, was abolished in 2019. Its successor, Mejoredu, ran only diagnostic tests and was itself eliminated in 2025. National tests such as ENLACE, EXCALE and PLANEA stopped or became irregular, and between 2022 and 2025 Mexico left the ICCS, TALIS and ERCE international studies; only Nuevo León took part in ERCE 2025.

Former INEE president Eduardo Backhoff notes that no direct causal link can be drawn between these closures and the PISA 2025 result. The practical effect is still clear: PISA, taken by 15-year-olds every three years, is now close to the only comparable signal Mexico has on what its students learn. Portugal lost ground after dropping the testing that underpinned its gains.

A practical agenda for Mexico and its states

The case studies point to six moves. None requires a new national consensus; most can start at state level, which is how Ceará did it.

Action	Proven in	Who can act	First results
Restore an independent, annual, public learning test in mathematics and reading	Portugal, Ceará	Federal or state	1–2 years
Guarantee foundational numeracy by 3rd grade with structured materials and coaching	Ceará (PAIC)	State education ministries	3–4 years
Tie part of state-to-municipal funding to measured learning gains	Ceará	State governments	3–5 years
Make teacher hiring and promotion depend on subject mastery and results	Peru, Portugal	Federal, with state input	5+ years
Increase protected mathematics instruction time in primary and lower secondary	Poland	Federal curriculum, school directors	3–5 years
Use the 40-hour transition to push process upgrades and workforce training	South Korea	Employers, industry chambers	From 2027

What this means for the Bajío

The Bajío’s manufacturing clusters will absorb the hours cut first. Firms that treat 2027–2030 only as a compliance problem will pay more overtime. Firms that use it to automate, standardize work and train staff in basic data and quantitative skills will come out with higher output per hour.

Guanajuato and Querétaro can move on education without waiting for federal policy: fund a state-level learning assessment, pilot results-based municipal transfers, and partner with employers and technical schools on applied mathematics and dual-training programmes. Nuevo León’s decision to join ERCE 2025 on its own shows that states can buy back the measurement the federal system dropped.

The bottom line

Mexico’s 388 is not a fixed trait. Portugal, Poland, Peru and Ceará started from similar or worse positions and gained roughly a year of learning within a decade by setting clear expectations, measuring learning every year, and rewarding the people who delivered results. Each also showed that gains fade when those levers are removed.

Mexico has already committed to working fewer hours by 2030. Whether that becomes a productivity gain or just a cost depends on whether the next cohort of workers can do more with each hour. That is being decided in classrooms now.

Sources: OECD, PISA 2025 country note: Mexico, Sep 2026 · OECD Education GPS, Mexico, PISA 2025 · Education by Country, PISA 2025 comparison · Korea Herald, OECD working hours 2025 · Randal Olson, hours worked vs. productivity (OECD data), Jun 2026 · Nuno Crato, Math curriculum matters, EMS Magazine, 2022 · Marôco, Portugal: the PISA effects on education, Springer, 2021 · World Bank, Successful education reform: lessons from Poland · RISE, seven lessons on systemic education reform (Peru) · CGD, the politics of transforming education in Peru · OECD, Education and skills in Peru, Feb 2026 · World Bank, Ceará as a role model for reducing learning poverty · Petterini & Irffi, ICMS reform evaluation in Ceará · OECD, Korea’s 2018–2021 working time reform · KDI, annual hours worked in Korea · Prodensa, Mexico’s 48-hour workweek, Sep 2026 · Holland & Knight, Mexico enacts the 40-hour reform, Mar 2026 · El Universal, Mexico’s discontinued learning assessments, Sep 2026 · Expansión, the Nueva Escuela Mexicana without evaluations, Apr 2026

Bajío Ventures — a Mexican energy-infrastructure investment group based in Guanajuato: capital, a data platform on the region’s industrial base, and a German industrial channel, with its own advisory presence in Berlin.