PISA Scores Are Dropping Everywhere. What It Actually Looks Like in My Classroom
The essays were due at the start of period three, and by the time the bell rang, twelve of my twenty-eight students had handed something in. That’s not unusual anymore. What was unusual was the stack I was carrying home that night. The essays were fine—maybe a little short, but fine. But as I read them, I noticed something that had been building for a couple of years. Most were constructed in short, choppy paragraphs. Sentences were clear but simple. Complex ideas were flattened into a sentence or two. And when a point required sustained reasoning, most students stopped after two steps.
I thought about this the next morning when I saw the PISA results in my news feed. PISA—the Programme for International Student Assessment—has been testing fifteen-year-olds around the world since 2000, and by almost every measure, scores have been sliding. Reading is down. Math is down. Science is down. And the decline isn’t just one country’s problem. The U.S. had its lowest scores in a generation. Germany, too. Finland, which used to be the benchmark, has been dropping for years. Even Korea, famously at the top, saw its math scores dip.
Headlines called it a global crisis, an alarming decline. And I don’t want to dismiss the numbers—they do point to something real. But the scores don’t tell you what the decline actually looks like in a fluorescent-lit classroom on a Tuesday morning.
What it looks like is stamina.
A few days before the PISA news broke, I had my ninth graders do a fifteen-minute free write. Not a complicated task. I gave them a prompt and asked them to keep going until the timer went off. Most of them stopped writing in the first four minutes. Not because they were done, but because they had run out of momentum. A few sat staring at their pages. One folded his paper into a tiny square. I had told them fifteen minutes, and in their heads, “keep writing” meant “write until you feel like stopping.”
That’s what I’ve noticed more than any other single thing. The students aren’t less capable. They’re less practiced at sustaining effort. When I’ve talked to teachers from other subjects in the staff room, they describe the same thing. Kids who can read a one-page assignment but can’t read ten pages. Kids who can use a formula in isolation, but on a five-step problem, they hit the third step and shut down. It’s not that they can’t do the math. It’s that their brains get tired. The research on PISA decline points in a similar direction. Students haven’t lost basic skills, necessarily—many are still fine at the basics—but they struggle with the kind of complex, multi-part problem-solving the test has always rewarded.
When I started teaching eleven years ago, I had a student named Marcus, a quiet kid who sat in the back and read his science textbook during down time. I don’t see that very often anymore. The reading now is shorter and lighter. Students mostly read what’s on a screen, which is usually an excerpt, a summary, a listicle. There are exceptions, and they stand out. This year I have two students who regularly read entire novels on their own. One carries around a thick fantasy book with a battered spine. It’s genuinely startling to see in the hallway.
I don’t say this to blame technology or to stand on some moral high ground. I scroll as much as anyone. The point is that PISA tests aren’t measuring technology. They’re measuring reading stamina, computational stamina, the ability to sit with a hard problem and press on before frustration gets too loud. And stamina is a habit, which means it needs to be practiced. Most kids just aren’t getting that practice.
So the question becomes what to do about it.
Yesterday, instead of assigning the usual worksheet, I put a single word problem on the board. It was about a phone plan and a data cap—something they could all understand. The twist was that they had to work with their neighbor, and they couldn’t touch a calculator. I walked around and listened. Some argued about which operation to use first. A few made mistakes and had to start over. One girl, Aaliyah, said, “Let’s just skip the first part and do the easier part.” I ignored the comment and asked her neighbor, “Can you explain to her what you just did?” He shrugged, then walked her through the first step, awkwardly. That was ten minutes of thinking, out loud, with no correct answers visible anywhere. Nobody got a grade. It didn’t look like much. But it was practice at the exact thing the PISA test rewards: holding a problem in your head and working through it slowly.
Here’s what I end up telling parents at conferences, because a lot of them ask what they can do at home. The panic-inducing version of this advice is “make your kids do practice tests,” and I’ll say plainly: don’t do that. Practice tests are fine for test-taking strategy, but they won’t build what’s actually missing, which is the ability to think about something complicated for more than five minutes at a time.
What I actually suggest is low-stakes thinking. If you’re eating dinner and your kid tells you about a problem at school, ask them what they’d do first, then ask what they’d do if that didn’t work. It’s problem-solving rehearsal, and it takes about sixty seconds. On homework night, ask them to “show me how you got that”—not to check their work, but to have them walk through it out loud. The act of explaining is where the thinking deepens. And for reading, I don’t care if it’s a book, a graphic novel, or an article from their favorite athlete’s website. Try to get them reading for a straight twenty minutes once or twice a week, and ask one question afterward: “What surprised you?”
None of this is going to directly change a PISA score in the next few years. And everyone worth listening to knows the global drop in scores also has to do with household stress, school funding, and the lingering aftereffects of the pandemic years. But the small daily habits do build something. Not because they’re big or clever, but because they’re repetitive.
It’s midway through the school year now. Last week I tried the fifteen-minute free write again, with a more open prompt than usual. A few still stopped early and got distracted. But a handful kept writing past the timer, which I let go silent on purpose. I don’t know if that counts as progress. On the next PISA test, maybe the scores will still be bad. Maybe they’ll be worse. I don’t think unilaterally fixing international test scores was ever something I could do from my classroom anyway. But the kid who writes past the moment they think they’re done, the kid who can explain the second step of a problem to a stuck classmate—that’s a skill I can see. For now, that’s what I’m paying attention to. I’m going to keep nagging about the rough early drafts, keep letting the timer run a little longer, and keep asking the follow-up question instead of accepting “I don’t know” as the final answer. Whether that shows up in the next round of numbers is anyone’s guess. But it’s showing up in the classroom. And that’s where I’m looking.
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