The morning the PISA results came out, I was standing by the copier in the school office, holding a permission slip for a field trip to the science museum that half the kids hadn’t returned yet. My principal walked past and said, “Did you see the scores? It’s pretty bad everywhere.” I nodded like I’d already read the coverage. I hadn’t. I spent the next ten minutes reading the same three op-eds in bits and pieces between questions about who needed a bus lunch.
For anyone who missed it, the Programme for International Student Assessment—which tests 15-year-olds in reading, math, and science across dozens of countries—released its 2022 results, and the short version is that scores have dropped almost everywhere. Not just in the United States. In Germany, Finland, Norway, Japan. Some of the countries we think of as having everything figured out. The headlines called it a historic decline, and they weren’t exaggerating. Reading scores fell by the equivalent of about a year of learning compared to a decade ago. Math dropped even more.
But standing in that office with the copier clicking, the word “historic” felt abstract. What wasn’t abstract was my second-period class later that day. There’s a boy I’ll call Ethan, a quiet ninth grader who sits near the window and spends a lot of time drawing small geometric patterns in the margins of his notebook. He’s bright, but he’s slow. Not slow in a way that matters, but slow in a way that schools don’t have room for. When I gave the class a word problem about train speeds and departure times, Ethan wrote the answer in two lines after staring at the page for six minutes.
I should have been happy. He got it. But my curriculum pacing chart said I was three days behind, and I felt the familiar pressure to move on. This is what the gap between real learning and test scores looks like from the inside. The numbers go down, and the response is usually to speed things up, to cover more ground, to drill harder. But if the scores tell us anything, it’s that speed was never the problem.
I think about what Ethan’s parents would make of the PISA headlines if they saw them. His mom works nights at a hospital. His dad is a welder who’s gone most of the week. They’re kind people who ask him every night whether he did his homework, and the honest answer is that they don’t have much time to wonder whether the test scores in math dropped three points or four. They want him to graduate and maybe go to community college and figure it out from there. I don’t blame them for not knowing what PISA is. I didn’t know what it was until I got my teaching license.
But I do know what I saw this year. A lot of kids who can’t focus for more than six minutes. A lot of kids who can text three friends simultaneously but freeze when asked to write two paragraphs about a book. A lot of kids who, when the Wi-Fi goes down, literally don’t know what to do with their hands for ten minutes. Do these kids have lower IQs than kids ten years ago? No. Do they have less knowledge? Not exactly. But they have what my colleague calls “shallow roots.” They know fragments. They’ve skimmed summaries of books instead of reading them, watched explainer videos instead of wrestling with a problem, and developed a deeply practical skill for getting answers without doing the work.
Here’s what I’ve started telling parents at conferences, because I figure it’s more useful than asking them to read the OECD’s executive summary. When you hear that test scores are dropping, the tendency is to do something dramatic. Buy a new curriculum. Hire a tutor. Download an app that promises to make your kid “college-ready.” But the data from PISA doesn’t actually point to any one academic subject that’s failing. It points to a more basic problem: kids are increasingly uncomfortable with sustained, boring, difficult cognitive work.
I had a parent say to me, “So what do I do, make him do long division by hand?” And honestly, that’s not a bad place to start.
It doesn’t have to be long division. But here’s what I would suggest, and it’s not a system or a program, because programs are the other thing that always seem to make things worse. First, put the phone somewhere that requires effort to retrieve. Not in your pocket, not on the desk, not in a charging station ten feet away. I mean in another room. In a drawer. The research on “mere presence”—a phone sitting face-down on the table—showing reduced cognitive capacity is about a decade old, and it was true before the apps got smarter. It’s just true now at a slightly louder volume.
Second, talk about your own intellectual struggles out loud. When my daughter was in eighth grade and frustratingly stuck on an algebra question, I sat down with my old community college math textbook and got stuck with her. Not as a show of solidarity. Genuinely stuck. I don’t remember the last time I solved a quadratic equation before that night. We spent forty minutes on a single problem and eventually watched a Khan Academy video at half speed just to get through it. That experience—both of us feeling dumb together—was more valuable than any worksheet. She saw that being confused is a normal stage of learning, not a sign that she’s bad at it.
Teachers can do something similar, but it requires bucking the system a little. In my classroom, I’ve started doing fewer problems but with more follow-up questions. Instead of assigning 30 equations and checking the answers, I assign eight and then walk around asking each student to explain their process out loud. The kids who got the right answer for the wrong reason get caught early. The kids who got the wrong answer for the right reason get validation instead of a red X. It’s slower. It eats class time. My pacing chart is perpetually behind. But I’ve seen more genuine mathematical reasoning in twenty minutes of conversation than in a week of silent worksheets.
I also want to mention something about reading, because reading scores are dropping even faster than math in some countries. The problem isn’t the difficulty of the texts. Every teacher I know will tell you the same thing: the problem is stamina. Kids will read a paragraph and then reach for their phone. They’ll get to the end of a page and realize they can’t remember what the first sentence said. This is a neurological response to constant fragmented input, and responding to it with more reading requirements at school while allowing endless scrolling at home is the definition of working against oneself.
So what we do at our house is simple and unglamorous. Reading time is physical. Books live on shelves, and the phone lives in the kitchen. If my daughter wants to read in her room, she takes a physical book to her physical room and her physical phone stays behind. It sounds boring because it is boring, and that’s precisely the point. Boredom is the soil. The ability to sit with an uncomfortable lack of stimulation is what allows a child to tolerate the early, confusing chapters of a book or the first fifteen minutes of a math problem with no obvious path forward.
The PISA results are a national and international story that will be analyzed by economists and education ministers for years. But they’re also a neighborhood story. They’re about what happens in kitchens at six in the evening when the homework is too hard and the child is tired and the parent has to decide whether to get frustrated or get curious. They’re about what happens in classrooms when a kid raises his hand and the teacher has to decide whether to give him more time or move to the next slide.
This time last year, I would have moved to the next slide. Now I’m more comfortable being behind. Ethan handed in his train problem yesterday with three different solution paths, one of which was ineenvisioned. It took him the whole period. The class didn’t get as far as I’d planned. But I watched that boy smile down at his own work, and I figured we’d just have to make up the lost time somewhere else. The test scores will probably still drop next year. I’m not arguing that everything is fine. But I’m realizing more and more that the metric that matters in my classroom isn’t the one that gets printed in the paper. It’s the one that happens when a kid decides it’s worth being confused for a little while longer.
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