The gap
you voted for.

Two posts crossed my feed in the same week. One was a table: PISA scores, Malaysia fourth in Southeast Asia. The other was a launch: a relaunched national learning portal with a fresh acronym. Read together, they explain the next twenty years of the wealth gap better than any economics lecture.

The scoreboard, without the excuses

PISA tests what 15-year-olds can actually do in reading, mathematics and science. Malaysia’s 2022 results: 388 in reading, 409 in maths, 416 in science. Against 2018, that is a fall of 27, 31 and 22 points — the steepest drop among our neighbours who sat the same test through the same pandemic. Vietnam, with a fraction of our spending power per student, scores 462, 469, 472.

Here is the number that kills the usual excuse: education is the largest allocation in the federal budget, every single year — RM66.2 billion in 2026, up from RM64.2 billion. We are not fourth because of money. Vietnam proves poverty is not the barrier; our budget proves funding is not the fix. What is failing is not the input. It is the system converting it.

The portal reflex

And the response? A relaunched learning portal, now running on the “3A” approach — Awareness, Access, Adoption — under the AI Nation 2030 agenda.

Let me be fair first, as always: a digital learning hub is not a bad thing, and the people building it are probably sincere. But I have watched this movie before — the scoreboard counts announcements, not transactions. A portal is an announcement-shaped solution. It photographs well at a launch event, it produces a registration KPI by year end — and it does not touch the classroom where a 15-year-old just scored 388 in reading. Awareness, Access, Adoption: notice that none of the three A’s is Ability. Same recipe, different ribbon.

The gap machine

Now the part that actually matters for the next twenty years: this combination — falling foundations plus self-serve portals — is a wealth-gap machine.

A portal rewards precisely the child who needs it least: the one with a laptop, home broadband, educated parents who push, English good enough to navigate, discipline nobody had to install. That child was already going to be fine. The T20 family does not wait for the system anyway — tuition, enrichment, international school if the stream disappoints, and now private AI tutors that cost less than a textbook.

The B40 child gets the same portal link. No device that is not a cracked phone, no quiet room, no adult with the spare capacity to sit beside her. The foundation the school was supposed to install — the 388 — stays broken, and everything built on top of it wobbles. AI then multiplies the divergence instead of closing it: for the equipped child it is a gym; for the unequipped one, a wheelchair, if it is anything at all.

The gap does not appear at the payslip. It is manufactured at fifteen — the payslip just publishes it twenty years later.

I stopped waiting

I will be honest about where I have landed personally: I have given up expecting the system to fix this. Not out of anger — out of pattern recognition. The people deciding how to fix education have mostly never operated one — never owned a classroom outcome the way an operator owns a P&L. It is the same distinction I keep coming back to in AI: operators versus announcers. Announcers ship portals. Operators ship ability.

So I act where I have control. At IMA, we hire for capability and train on real work — the degree is a data point, not a gate. I have hired AI-capable people with no paper and watched them out-produce the credentialed. My children, my staff, my own learning: none of it waits for a ministry. That is not a boast. It is a survival posture — and every parent and business owner quietly running the same private education system knows exactly what I mean.

To be fair, and to be honest

The counterweights, honestly stated: PISA is one test, the 2022 round carries pandemic damage everywhere, and there are excellent teachers fighting this decline daily inside underpowered schools — the failure is systemic, not personal to them. Budget 2026 does put real money behind reform, and reform takes longer than one cycle.

But here is the honest part that cuts the other way. In a democracy, an education system is not weather — it is downstream of choices, and choices are downstream of votes. The system that produced the 388 was elected, cycle after cycle, by adults who then complain about the gap it produces. So my unpopular conclusion: stop blaming the gap. It is the outcome of the vote. That is not despair — it is the one lever that is actually in the rakyat’s hands. Use it. And between elections, educate as if no one is coming, because on the current evidence, no one is.

The bottom line

For parents: your child’s foundation is your project now — reading, numbers, and AI as a gym, not a babysitter.

For business owners: hire for capability, train on real work, and treat the education system’s output as raw material, not finished goods.