PISA scores dropped everywhere this year. Here’s what that means for ordinary parents.
The news broke on a Tuesday, and I nearly missed it. I was standing at the kitchen counter, half-watching my daughter push a green bean around her plate while I scrolled through my phone. The headline said something about PISA scores falling across the developed world, and I felt that familiar twinge of institutional anxiety before I even clicked the link. Then I read the numbers, and the twinge got a little sharper. Not just my country. Everyone. Everywhere.
I looked up from the screen and watched my daughter ask if she could be excused. She’s nine. She has a spelling test tomorrow and a math worksheet somewhere in her backpack that we’ll both forget about until Wednesday morning. The PISA report, I knew, was about fifteen-year-olds taking a two-hour test in reading, math, and science. My daughter was nowhere near that. But the sinking feeling in my stomach said otherwise.
It’s hard not to take a global education crisis personally when you’ve spent the last half hour negotiating over a lukewarm vegetable.
The thing about PISA is that it’s huge. The Programme for International Student Assessment runs every three years, and it tests hundreds of thousands of 15-year-olds across dozens of countries. It’s the closest thing education has to a global report card, and for a few days every three years, journalists and policymakers treat it like a cultural reckoning. This year, the headline was simple and bleak: reading and math scores are down almost everywhere. Not just in countries with crumbling school buildings or crowded classrooms. Everywhere. Finland, the golden child of education reform for two decades, saw its scores drop. Germany, Canada, Australia, the UK — all down.
When my son gets home from middle school, I bring it up casually. He shrugs. He’s got his own scale of academic failure, and a global standardized test isn’t on it. His math teacher gave him a C-minus on a quiz last Thursday, and that felt like the end of the world for exactly six hours. I tell him the PISA scores fell everywhere, and he makes a face like I’ve just told him the sky is blue in a boring way.
But he does say something interesting. He says, “Maybe everyone’s just tired.”
I think about that for the rest of the week.
Here’s what the think pieces don’t always tell you: PISA measures a very specific set of skills, and the drop in scores doesn’t mean the world’s teenagers suddenly forgot how to read. It means that on a particular kind of test, delivered under particular conditions, fifteen-year-olds are performing worse than they did before. The reasons given by researchers are varied and layered. Pandemic disruption is the obvious culprit. So is the rise of smartphones, which have been linked to declines in reading for pleasure and sustained attention. There’s also the less-cited possibility that schools have changed what they teach, and that PISA hasn’t fully caught up. Or that kids are just less motivated to try hard on a test that doesn’t count toward anything.
My son’s theory — that everyone’s tired — is not in the official report. But it might be the most honest one I’ve heard.
The teacher in me (I used to teach middle school English) has another take. PISA reading scores are down in part because kids don’t read for fun anymore, and the kind of reading they do do is different. They’re reading YouTube comments, Discord chats, and captions on short videos. That’s reading, technically, but it’s a different muscle. It’s skimming for relevance, not sinking into a narrative. The PISA test asks kids to read a passage and infer meaning, connect ideas, evaluate arguments. That’s a specific literary skill that requires practice with longer texts. And when was the last time you saw a teenager reading something longer than a few paragraphs voluntarily?
In our house, dinner becomes an accidental laboratory for this. My daughter asks me why the news keeps talking about “the economy.” My son says it’s because money is made-up. They start arguing about whether paper money is worth anything if you don’t have food to buy. I want to husband this moment — this authentic, unstructured conversation about supply chains and value — but I also need to load the dishwasher. So I settle for asking a follow-up question: “Why do you think the government doesn’t just print more money?” He rolls his eyes and says, “Inflation doesn’t make prices go up, demand does,” like he’s never been one to lose socks in the laundry. I have no idea if he’s right, but he’s clearly been thinking about it. And that’s the thing — he’s not a bad student. He’s just not great at showing it on a bubble sheet.
So what are parents supposed to do when the global news is grim and the local reality is just… Tuesday?
From what I can see, the answer isn’t to panic and buy more workbooks. The score decline is real, but the response to it doesn’t have to be more pressure at the kitchen table. Here’s what I’ve been trying instead, imperfectly and inconsistently.
I stopped asking “how was school” and started asking “what was the weirdest thing someone said today.” It’s not a magic trick, but it gets a different kind of answer. It gives us something to talk about that isn’t grades, and it builds a habit of noticing and narrating the world, which is the underlying skill behind most PISA reading questions.
I also put a paper book in my daughter’s backpack specifically for silent reading time at school, and I let her choose it. It’s a graphic novel. It has dragons. I don’t care. Reading practice is reading practice, and the only thing that matters is that she’s doing it.
And for my son, I’ve started leaving the news on a little longer in the morning, not to lecture him about current events, but just to let him overhear the strange and confusing stuff adults are worried about. He pipes up more than I expected. He asks questions that are half-formed. We talk about the news the way we talk about traffic — briefly, shallowly, but present. It’s not a civics lesson. It’s just noticing that the world is weird and worth paying attention to.
None of this will show up on a PISA score. But I’m no longer sure that’s the metric I’m playing for. The scores are down everywhere, and the causes are systemic and slow-moving and mostly out of my control. What’s in front of me is a nine-year-old who loves dragons and a thirteen-year-old who confuses inflation with demand — and that might be okay.
Tonight, I ask my son what he thinks about the PISA results. He says, “Do I have to take it?” I say no, and he nods, relieved. Then he asks if we can get pizza on Friday. I say yes. We eat dinner, and the scores are still bad all over, but here, at this table, the problem is smaller and more manageable.
I don’t know if that’s the right response to a global education crisis. But it’s the one we’re living with.
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