PISA Scores Are Down Everywhere. Here’s What Parents and Teachers Can Actually Do
It’s a Tuesday night, and the kitchen table is covered in homework remnants—a pencil without an eraser, three crayons, and the reading comprehension worksheet that has been sitting in front of my nine-year-old daughter Ana for the past twenty minutes. The passage is about the water cycle. There are six questions. She’s stuck on number three: “What is the author’s purpose in this passage?”
She looks at me. “I don’t know. To tell you about the water cycle?”
“Yes,” I say. “That’s correct.”
“So why is it wrong?” She points to the answer box, where she’s already written “to tell you about rain.”
“Because it needs to be a full sentence,” I say.
She sighs so loudly that the cat leaves the room. Just then, my phone buzzes with a news alert. PISA scores are out, and they’re bad. Not just in our country. Bad all over.
I stare at the headline, then at the worksheet, and it feels a bit absurd.
Last week at the parent-teacher conference, Ms. Chen had brought up those same PISA results. A few parents in the district had gotten a letter from the school board, and someone had posted a panicked message in the group chat. Ms. Chen tried to reassure us. “These are international scores from 15-year-olds,” she said. “They measure a very specific kind of skill under very specific conditions. They don’t tell me how your child is doing in my classroom.”
I appreciated her saying that. But I also couldn’t shake the numbers. The OECD had tested hundreds of thousands of students across dozens of countries. Reading scores fell. Math scores fell. Science scores fell. Everyone was in the same boat, which was somehow comforting and also terrifying at the same time.
What do you do with a global test result that everyone seems to be failing? There’s no parenting manual for that.
Back at the kitchen table, Ana had abandoned question three entirely and was drawing a sun in the corner of her worksheet. I decided not to push it. Instead, I asked her one of the questions differently. “Okay, so why does the author write about the water cycle?”
She put her pencil down. “Because teachers make them?”
“Sure. But why this author? Why this passage?”
She thought about it, then said, “To explain where rain comes from. And why it goes back up into the sky. I just don’t get why I can’t write that.”
“You can,” I said.
“Then can I stop trying to make it into a whole sentence?”
For a moment, I weighed the cost of insisting. The school wants “full sentences,” and I get it—that’s a skill. But the literal answer to the question was in her head already. She knew what the author was doing. The problem wasn’t comprehension. The problem was that she was being asked to perform comprehension in a way that was so rigid, it had stopped making sense to her.
I said fine, and she moved on to the next question.
The more I’ve thought about the PISA results since that night, the more I keep coming back to that small exchange. When scores drop across the entire world, the instinct is to blame big things: remote learning, smartphones, changing curriculums, the erosion of attention spans. All of those are real. But there’s also something smaller going on.
Most kids don’t actually lack the skills these tests measure. They lack the patience—and sometimes the ability—to decode what the test is even asking. A global reading assessment is a very particular genre, and most adults I know would struggle with it, too, or at least find it deeply irritating.
That doesn’t mean the scores are meaningless. It means they need context.
I hear a lot of expert takes about how we need to “rethink education.” But in the real world, parents and teachers don’t get to redesign the system. We just have to get through a Tuesday night. And the good news is, the small things do help.
For reading, I stopped making Ana finish every question on her reading log. Instead, I asked her teacher if we could swap the assigned book for one Ana actually picked out. I phrased it carefully: “She’s reading, but she’s bouncing off this book. Can we try something she chose at the library for a few weeks and see what happens?” Her teacher agreed. That one conversation changed our evenings more than any test score ever did.
These aren’t big moves. They don’t show up on an international assessment. But the daily reality of a kid learning at home is built from small moves. When your child is stuck, the single most effective thing is to lower the stakes—not to remove them entirely, just to make the task feel less like a trap.
A few weeks after the water cycle incident, Ana was practicing fractions. She was melting down over a worksheet full of shaded circles. I knew the concept was somewhere in her head because I’d seen her split a chocolate bar with her sister the week before, exactly in half, without hesitation. She knew what fractions were. She just couldn’t see them in the abstract circles.
I put the worksheet away and brought out the measuring cups. We made muffins.
There is something about measuring ingredients that is genuinely educational. You have to read, you have to reason, you have to understand that a half-cup and two quarter-cups are the same amount. She did the math without being told to. The muffins were okay. The fractions stuck.
I’m not saying every parent should bake muffins to teach math. I’m saying that the worksheet was not the problem, but it also wasn’t the solution. When a child is stuck, she’s not usually stuck on the ion itself. She’s stuck on the presentation. If you can change the presentation, you can often unstick the learning.
It’s easy to look at global test scores and conclude that today’s kids are somehow behind—that there’s a crisis and something needs to change at the policy level. There might be. But at the dinner table, policy is just background noise. What matters is whether you can get through the next twenty minutes without anyone crying, and whether your child can learn something that feels real to her.
Ana still doesn’t love school. Some mornings she asks if she can stay home. Some days she forgets her homework folder twice in a row. Her reading log is still sparsely filled, and there are still worksheets that make her sigh. But she talks about the books she’s actually read. She can explain, in her own words, why clouds form. She knows what a third of a cup looks like.
I don’t know if she’ll be part of the cohort that turns around the PISA scores in six years. The truth is, I don’t much think about that when I’m standing at the kitchen counter, measuring flour for no reason except that the worksheet isn’t working. I think about her, and what she needs, and what I can actually do.
That’s all any parent or teacher can do, really. Pay attention to the scores, sure. But then come back to the table, and look at the kid in front of you. The scores will tell you something about the world. The kid will tell you something about tonight.
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