The PISA Scores Are Bad All Over. Here’s What I Tell Parents at Conferences
Lisa sat down across from me with a folded printout from the internet. It was the same graph the principal had shown during our morning staff meeting—a column of red numbers, country after country, sinking lower than they had in decades. Lisa pushed the paper across the table. “My son’s in seventh grade,” she said. “I read this thing about PISA scores. Is he going to be okay?”
The hallway hummed behind us. A parent laughed somewhere near the gym. I had four conferences left and a cold cup of coffee that was probably too old to drink. I looked at the graph, then at Lisa. Her son is a kid who, during our unit on ratios, spent twenty minutes arguing that the best deal at the convenience store was the 2-liter bottle of soda because “you get more for your money.” That’s not in the curriculum guide, but it’s math.
I told her the truth. “I don’t know if PISA scores are going to go back up. Honestly, they’re bad all over. But I know what your son does when he sees a question he doesn’t understand. He asks a friend. He tries something. He gets frustrated and then he tries again. That’s not what PISA measures, and it’s not what most tests measure.”
We sat there for a moment. The printout stayed on the table between us, a little wrinkled from her purse.
PISA, I explained, tests fifteen-year-olds from around the world on problem-solving in reading, math, and science. It doesn’t ask kids to recite formulas. It gives them scenarios, like “You’re planning a party for thirty people and need to adjust a recipe for 12 servings—how do you do it?” and asks them to reason. It’s a good barometer of how well schools teach flexible thinking. But it’s also a snapshot of a single test administered on a single day, and the results come out two years later. The children in this year’s report are currently seventeen, halfway through high school, possibly not thinking about party recipes at all.
So when the internet says PISA scores are falling everywhere, the real story is more textured. It’s not that kids are getting dumber. It’s that they’re getting better at looking things up, worse at sitting with a hard problem, and increasingly practiced at the kind of shallow answering that gets you through multiple-choice tests. It’s that many schools—including ones in countries with high scores—have spent the last decade narrowing instruction to what can be tested quickly. It’s that the pandemic disrupted learning in real ways, but we’re now blaming a graph for things that have been building since before 2020.
The morning staff meeting had not been about that nuance. The principal pointed at the red columns and said we needed to “double down on rigor.” The math department head said we should add more timed practice tests. I had sat in the back, thinking about the boy who remembered every basketball statistic for the past three seasons but froze when I gave him a worksheet with twenty consecutive division problems.
Lisa’s son is that boy sometimes. He hates the timed multiplication quizzes. He looks at them like they’re personal attacks. But when we baked brownies in class to learn about fractions, he was the one who figured out that we could double the recipe by simply using the 2-cup measuring cup twice instead of doing any math at all. That was learning. That’s the messy, real, un-PISA-friendly kind.
What I didn’t tell Lisa is that I’ve started doing something a little weird in my classroom. I’ve started giving permission to think slowly. On Thursdays, I put a single problem on the board—no worksheet, no timer, no grade attached. I call it the “one problem” day. Kids can talk to each other. They can write on the board. They can be wrong in public. The rule is that nobody can say “I’m done” for at least ten minutes. The first week, a girl stared at the ceiling for six minutes and then solved the problem in a way I hadn’t seen before. The second week, the same girl asked if she could stay after class to try another one.
I’m not sure that fixes PISA scores. But I know it fixes something.
“Here’s what I’d do at home,” I told Lisa. “Next time you’re at the store, and your son wants something, don’t just say no. Say, ‘Okay, you have five dollars. There are three options. Figure out which one gives you enough left over for the chips.’ And then walk away. Let him think.”
She laughed. “He hates it when I walk away.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s the point.”
I gave her another suggestion. When he says “I’m bad at math,” ask him to show you the last problem he got wrong. Ask him, “What did you try before it went wrong?” That’s a different question than “What did you get?” It shifts the focus from the right answer to the thinking. It’s a low-friction thing—no apps, no tutors, no flashcards. Just a few questions at the dinner table.
I also told her to stop using the word “smart” for a while. Not forever. But when he does something well, say “That took some thinking” or “You stuck with that even when it was hard.” It sounds small, but over time it changes how a kid sees himself. Smart is a trait. Persistence is a behavior. One is fixed; the other is a choice you can make tomorrow.
Lisa folded the printout and tucked it back into her purse. “So what do I tell him?” she asked. “PISA scores are down. Should he care?”
I thought about it. “Tell him the truth. PISA scores are down because kids all over the world are getting better at moving fast and worse at paying attention. Tell him that’s not his problem. His problem is learning to think carefully about something he doesn’t understand. That’s a skill. You can practice it in the car, in the grocery store, at dinner.”
She nodded. The next parent was waiting outside the door, a man checking his phone and bouncing his knee. We stood up. The cold coffee stayed on the desk.
Two weeks after that conference, Lisa’s son came into class early. He had a crumpled receipt in his hand. “My mom made me do the sale thing,” he said. “There was a clearance rack and everything. I figured out the original price on the jeans without a calculator.”
“Was it hard?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “But I got it.”
He didn’t ask if it was going to be on the test. That might be a good sign.
I don’t know what PISA will look like in 2025 or 2030. I don’t know if the scores will rise again or if we’ll keep chasing them like a dog after a flying disc. What I know is that a kid stood in my classroom doorway holding a crumpled receipt and smiling about a math problem he solved for no credit, in the real world, because he wanted to. That’s not a graph I can point to. But it’s something.
Maybe I’ll keep doing the Thursday one-problem thing. Maybe I’ll try walking away more, the way I told Lisa to. I don’t have a plan. It’s still evolving, like most of teaching. But the printout is gone, and the coffee is in the sink, and there’s another conference starting. This one’s a dad who wants to talk about homework. I’ll probably mention grocery stores to him too.
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