Our PISA Scores Are Dropping Everywhere. A Teacher’s Take on What Actually Matters.
The principal didn’t even try to dress it up this year. Usually, there’s a slide show, a few charts, some gentle spin about “areas of growth.” This time, she just stood at the front of the staff room and said, “The PISA results are out. They’re bad. Everywhere.” She paused, and I heard a few sighs around me. “So we’re going to talk about what we do next.”
I sat in the back, stirring my tea, watching the math teachers exchange the same worried look they always exchange when the news is bad. I understood the urgency. I did. But I couldn’t help thinking about the class I’d just come from.
The students had been working in pairs on a story about a missing bike. They weren’t solving a global crisis. They were trying to figure out why the main character wouldn’t just ask his neighbor for help. One girl, Maya, was arguing that the neighbor had “bad energy,” and her partner, a normally quiet boy named Jonah, was writing down evidence to prove her wrong. I watched them for a minute. They weren’t doing well on a standardized test. But they were thinking about motivations, character flaws, and how people hide things. It felt like learning.
When I got home that night, I couldn’t shake the disconnect. I knew the PISA scores were important. When the whole industrialized world sees reading scores fall to twenty-year lows, that’s not a blip. That’s a signal. But the conversation in the staff room felt like we were treating our students as data points in a crisis rather than as the kids I’d just watched debate the inner life of a fictional neighbor.
A few days later, I was sitting at dinner with my friend Priya. She has a daughter in fifth grade, and she was worried about a message from the teacher. Her daughter, Sophie, had been given a list of vocabulary words to study. She had a test on Friday. That’s normal, right? But the teacher had added a note: “With the recent national scores, we’re reinforcing key literacy benchmarks.” Priya asked me if Sophie was falling behind.
I told her the truth: I didn’t know. But I asked her a different question. “Does Sophie read for fun? Does she talk to you about the stories she reads on her tablet?”
Priya thought about it. “She reads a lot of graphic novels. And she tells me about them, but mostly she just shows me the pictures and tells me which characters are ‘toxic.'” She laughed a bit. “I don’t know if that’s reading.”
It is reading. It’s the messy, engaged, often annoying kind of reading. And this is the part that gets lost when we talk about PISA scores like a fever that needs breaking.
Here’s what I’ve realized after fifteen years in the classroom: PISA measures a very specific set of skills. It tests reading comprehension in an academic register. It asks students to parse dense, unfamiliar texts and answer gridded questions about them efficiently. It rewards speed, patience, and a particular kind of cognitive endurance. Those are useful skills, to be clear. But they are not the only skills, and they are not even the most important ones for a child figuring out who they are in the world.
What I see in my classroom is that the kids who are “behind” on the PISA-style assessments are often the same kids who can tell you everything about a YouTube creator’s video series, or who can quote dialogue from a favorite show, or who can explain a complex family situation with alarming clarity. They are not thoughtless. They are just not being asked to think in the way the test expects.
So what do we actually do about a global decline? We don’t panic. And we absolutely don’t make our kids nervous about it.
Here are a few concrete things that have made a difference in my classroom and at home, with my own children.
First, I stopped asking kids “what did you learn today?” and started asking “what was confusing today?” Confusion is where learning actually happens. If my son tells me he doesn’t understand why the Romans built aqueducts, we can look it up together. We can find a video, read a comic, even build a silly model. That moment of “I don’t get it” is gold. And it’s the exact opposite of the PISA environment, where confusion is something to be avoided at all costs.
Second, I read alongside kids. Not to them, not for them, but with them. At home, that means we have a family reading hour on Sunday afternoons. No one is allowed to use their phone. I read my own book, my husband reads a mystery novel, and my kids read whatever they want. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Scholastic book fair graphic novel or a fantasy series with a questionable cliffhanger. The point is to normalize the act of sitting with a text.
In my classroom, I’ve started a “genius hour” once a week where students can bring in an article, a podcast transcript, or even a Reddit post about a topic they care about. We read it aloud together. We wander. We get off track. It’s not efficient. But it’s real.
The third thing is the hardest one for parents and teachers alike: I’ve had to make peace with boredom. Kids don’t have enough unstructured time to get bored, and boredom is where the slow, reflective thinking lives. A PISA test doesn’t have time for a kid staring out a window wondering if the main character’s dog will find him. But a real reader does. So I’ve started building “wondering time” into my lessons—ten minutes at the end of the week where kids can write a question that has nothing to do with the curriculum. They stick it on the wall, and we pick one to explore. It sounds goofy, but it works.
Now, I’m not going to pretend the scores don’t matter. They do. When my colleagues look at those numbers and worry about our school’s reputation, or when a district decides to overhaul its reading program, that has real consequences. But the score is a symptom, not a disease. The disease is the speed at which we expect kids to learn, and the narrowness of the things we call “learning.”
Sophie’s test on Friday went okay, by the way. Priya texted me a picture of the study sheet, with little stars next to the vocab words Sophie had mastered. But what I noticed in the photo was the doodles in the margin. Sophie had drawn a tiny dragon eating a dictionary, with a speech bubble that said, “more pages please.” She was bored. But she wasn’t broken.
Maybe that’s what I want parents to walk away with. The global PISA decline has been blamed on everything from pandemic school closures to smartphones to the erosion of homework culture. There’s some truth in all of that, I suppose. But in my experience, the kids are still curious. They still want to figure things out. They just don’t always recognize the version of thinking that we—as adults, as policymakers, as schools—have been measuring.
I don’t know if the numbers will bounce back in my lifetime as a teacher. I’m not sure they should be the only measure we care about. What I do know is that tomorrow morning, I’ll go back into my classroom and ask Jonah what he thinks about that missing bike. And he might say something brilliant, or he might just shrug. Either way, I’ll be there, listening. That’s the work that doesn’t show up in a score. And I still believe, quietly, that it’s the work that counts.
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