AprendES — El Salvador's World Bank-Financed AI-Tutor Pilot Claims PISA Scores Rivaling Germany and Sweden, but Selection Bias Clouds the Comparison

AprendES ('Acelerando el Aprendizaje en El Salvador con Innovación Digital') is a US$501 million World Bank-financed education modernisation project approved in March 2026, run by El Salvador's Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MINEDUCYT) under Minister Karla Trigueros.

Bundle devices, connectivity, digital platforms, teacher and principal coaching, pedagogical materials and an AI tutoring tool that generates exercises, answers questions and adapts to each student's level, with a government ambition to reach all public schools within 18 months.

The pilot began in mid-2025 in a small set of schools and had expanded to more than 1,000 public schools by September 2026. In June 2026 the OECD's PISA-for-Schools instrument was administered to 1,198 volunteer students across 171 participating schools, chosen for infrastructure readiness, connectivity and willingness to participate rather than at random.

President Bukele announced that participating pilot schools scored above the national average in reading, mathematics and science, comparable to Germany's and Sweden's PISA 2022 averages. The government's own nationally representative PISA 2025 exercise (7,073 students across 278 schools) showed scores stable in mathematics and reading, with improvement only in science — a far more modest picture.

No independent evaluation has isolated what share of the pilot schools' gain, if any, is attributable to the AI tutor specifically versus the other bundled inputs or to the non-random selection of better-resourced, willing schools. Bukele himself acknowledged the results 'do not prove that every Salvadoran school has been transformed,' and the World Bank called them 'encouraging' while cautioning that scaling to the full system remains 'an immense effort.'