President Nayib Bukele says the strongest message from El Salvador’s AI education pilot is that ordinary students in public schools can achieve academic results once considered out of reach for the country.
The initial education pilot assessed 1,198 students across 171 Salvadoran public schools using PISA for Schools, an internationally comparable assessment.
Their performance in reading, mathematics, and science was comparable with the average results of students in Germany and Sweden, according to the World Bank’s summary of the findings.
For Bukele, the significance goes beyond the scores themselves.
The participating students were not drawn from elite private institutions or selected because they represented the country’s highest-performing students. They attend ordinary public schools in urban and rural communities and are taught by Salvadoran teachers.
The president argued that the findings challenge the idea that a student’s nationality, family income, or attendance at a public school inherently limits their academic potential.
The program provided participating schools with a substantially improved educational environment, including AI tutors, learning platforms, technology, connectivity, teacher support, educational materials, and training.
Bukele emphasized that the pilot does not prove that every Salvadoran student currently performs at the level of students in Germany or Sweden. Nor does it establish that AI alone produced the results.
Instead, he considers the findings evidence that Salvadoran students can reach those levels under the right educational conditions.
That possibility is now being tested on a much larger scale.
With more than 1,000 schools already implementing the program and a nationwide rollout planned, the next phase will determine whether the results achieved by the initial group can be reproduced throughout El Salvador’s public education system.