Why Are PISA Scores Falling Everywhere (And What That Really Means for Your Family)
The headline came across my phone at 7:45 on a Tuesday morning, just as I was pouring coffee and mentally bracing for the day ahead. “Global test scores show historic decline.” I didn’t even have to open the article. I knew what it was about. Another round of PISA results had arrived, and the news was grim—for every country, in every category, the same downward trend.
What struck me wasn’t the data itself. It was that I’d witnessed that exact decline the afternoon before, in real time, in my own classroom.
A student named Marcus was working through a word problem about train schedules. The math was simple—comparative rates, nothing beyond eighth grade. But he wasn’t even trying. He was scrolling on his phone under his desk, and when I asked him to set it aside, he gave me that look. Not defiance, just flat indifference. “Why does this even matter?” he asked. “I’ll just Google it later.”
That moment, in many ways, is the PISA crisis. Not just Marcus, of course—there are a million factors. But the decline in reading, math, and science scores across the world’s wealthiest nations isn’t a mystery. It’s happening right in front of us, at kitchen tables and in classrooms, every single day. And understanding that can actually help you, as a parent, do something about it.
Let me back up. PISA—the Programme for International Student Assessment—tests 15-year-olds in 80-some countries every three years. It’s not about memorizing facts. It asks kids to apply what they know to unfamiliar situations. Solve a budget. Interpret a scientific study. Read a dense passage and understand the author’s argument. The results are a proxy for how well a country is preparing its teenagers to think for themselves.
And for the last decade, those results have been sliding. The 2022 results were the worst on record across the OECD countries. Reading has been declining for years; math fell off a cliff in most places; science isn’t far behind.
You’d think a global crisis this big would have a simple culprit. A single villain we could blame and fix. But that’s not how learning works. It’s never one thing.
The first thing I notice as a teacher is attention. Or rather, the lack of it. I’ve been teaching for fifteen years, and I can tell you: teenagers today do not read deeply. They skim. They scan. They check out. The average 15-year-old gets a ping from a notification every few minutes. Their brains have adapted to that rhythm, and everything else—a page of text, a complex geometry proof, a scientific passage—feels unbearably slow by comparison. Attention is the raw material of learning. When it’s fragmented, everything else fragments with it.
But that’s not the only thing driving the scores down. My colleague Sofia, who teaches math, points to something else: the way homework gets done at home. “I ask a kid to solve six quadratic equations,” she says. “He takes a photo and gets the answers from an app in thirty seconds. He doesn’t even read the worked solution. He just copies it down.” She’s not angry when she says this. She sounds tired. Because she knows that the kid isn’t cheating—not really. He’s doing what our culture teaches him to do: optimizing for completion, not learning.
And the kids feel it too. Parenting has become a kind of performance, full of enrichment and schedules. Zoom school hollowed out an entire cohort. By the time they hit high school, many of them are exhausted. They’ve been tested, evaluated, and ranked their whole lives. When they hit a genuinely hard problem, their first instinct isn’t “I can figure this out.” It’s “I’m not good at this,someone just give me the answer.”
I remember a conversation with a mother after parent-teacher night last fall. Her daughter, Ava, was a bright kid who always did her homework, never missed a deadline, and had a 4.0 GPA. And yet, on the last district benchmark, she scored in the 40th percentile. The mother was frustrated. “She works so hard. What’s wrong with the school system?”
I had to be honest with her. “The system isn’t perfect,” I said. “But Ava’s problem is that she’s never actually had to struggle, in the right way. She gets home, opens her laptop, and immediately searches for how to do the assignment step-by-step. She’s never had an hour where she just sits with a hard problem, gets frustrated, tries something, fails, and tries again. That’s the skill that shows up on a PISA-style question. And she hasn’t practiced it in years.”
The mother went quiet. She looked at her own phone, lying face-up on the table. “We don’t let her watch TV,” she said. “But she’s always on her computer for school. I never thought about where she goes when she’s done.”
It’s a hard conversation to have, because nobody wants to hear that they’re doing it wrong. And you’re not. You’re doing your best.
But here’s the hopeful part, and I want you to hold onto this: the fix is not dramatic. It doesn’t require a national curriculum overhaul or a government task force. The skills that matter on these tests—years of decline masking the real, unglamorous work of childhood—are built in small, mundane, ordinary moments.
Let me give you a concrete example. Last month, I started doing something different with my own daughter, who is eleven. On Sunday afternoon, we baked bread together. No timer, no video, no phone. She measured flour, and the recipe called for half a cup—but we’d lost the half-cup measuring cup. So she had to figure out how to get half a cup using the one-cup measure. We talked about fractions in a way that was real and tactile. Then she doubled the recipe. I watched her write down the new numbers, screw up, and start over. She was frustrated for a minute, but she got there.
This is what math looks like when there’s no app to help you. It’s slow. It’s error-prone. And it’s the only way to build confidence.
Similarly, when I talk to parents about reading scores, I always suggest an easy shift: get a physical book into your kid’s hands and turn off the Wi-Fi for twenty-five minutes. Not because screens are evil, but because the way we read on screens is different. On paper, you have to hold the whole story in your mind. You can’t scroll back for a summary. You have to do the work of comprehension yourself.
If you want a phrase to use at home when your child gets stuck on homework, something like: “I don’t want to help you yet. Show me what you’ve already tried. Let’s look at where you got stuck.” Then wait. The silence is uncomfortable, I know. But it’s in that silence that the learning happens.
At school, we’re trying too. I now give kids half a class period to struggle silently with a problem before they’re allowed to ask for help. We call it “think time,” and the kids hate it at first. They say it’s cruel. A month in, some of them start to see the point.
So what does this all mean for the PISA scores? Honestly, it means they’ll probably drop again next time. OECD countries are in a period of adjustment. We let attention and convenience hollow out a generation’s capacity for deep work, and that’s not going to repair itself in one election cycle. But the decline isn’t destiny—it’s feedback. It’s a mirror showing us exactly what we’ve built. And once you see it clearly, you can start making small moves at the kitchen table.
Last week, at the end of the day, Marcus stayed behind. He told me he’d tried the train problem again the night before, without his phone. “It took me like twenty minutes,” he said. “But I got the right answer.” He shrugged, like it was no big deal. But I saw the look on his face.
It wasn’t pride, exactly. It was something more valuable: the feeling of figuring something out under his own steam.
We still have a long way to go—for Marcus, for Ava, for every kid learning to put their phone in another room. The next PISA report will probably make headlines again. But when those stories run, I’ll think of that afternoon in the kitchen. The flour on the table. The quiet minutes of struggle. And I’ll remind myself that the scores are just a snapshot of the big messy process of growing up. We’re not done yet.
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