Could also be the consequences of schooling during a lockdown.
Luckily we have the control-group of Sweden, that spent a large part of the pandemic proclaiming that not closing schools was going to have a fantastic positive effect on children's learning.
The actual result: Sweden's PISA results declined much more steeply than countries who used distance-learning during the pandemic.
Those things don't necessarily have any relation, but clearly many countries with strict CoVID responses are still doing well in education.