PISA Scores Fell Again. Here’s What One Teacher Noticed in Her Classroom
The staff room coffee machine was doing that thing where it sputters like it’s about to give up, and I was staring at it when Janet walked in holding her phone like it was a dead bird.
“Did you see the PISA scores?” she said.
I hadn’t. I’d been up late grading essays on the Dust Bowl, and the only international comparison I cared about was whether my sixth period could tell a primary source from a secondary one.
“They’re bad,” she said. “All over. Not just us.”
She turned the screen toward me. There was a graph, red arrows pointing down across multiple countries. The headline said something about a “historic decline” in math, reading, and science. Janet has been teaching for twenty-three years. She let out a short laugh, not a happy one.
“So all that time we spent on test prep last spring was for this?” She tossed her bag onto the table and sat down. “My kids can’t even read a clock anymore. But sure. PISA.”
I didn’t have a strong opinion about PISA. I knew it was the OECD test that compares fifteen-year-olds from different countries. Every three years, a new round of hand-wringing follows. But standing there in the staff room, watching Janet scroll through takes from education Twitter, I felt the familiar pull of wanting to explain something I didn’t fully understand myself.
That afternoon, I had a parent meeting scheduled with a mom named Danielle. Her son, Marcus, was in my seventh-grade English class. He was not a standout student by any metric. His reading comprehension was about average. He never raised his hand unless he was sure of the answer. His essays were straightforward, sometimes bordering on bland. But he was one of the most curious kids I’d had in years. He’d stay after class to ask me questions about the 1960s because his grandfather had a story about meeting a civil rights worker. He read the news on his phone, not for school, but because he was genuinely trying to figure out why gas prices were so high.
Danielle sat across from me at a small desk, her coat still on. She looked tired.
“I saw that report,” she said, before I could bring up Marcus’s latest essay. “The international one. Is Marcus behind? I’m trying not to Google it but I keep seeing articles about how kids can’t think anymore.”
“He’s not behind,” I said. “He’s actually a really thoughtful reader. We’re working on his sentence variety, but the ideas are there.”
She didn’t look convinced. She pulled out her phone and showed me a graph she’d found—another one, with a line that went down. “Every country is dropping,” she said. “So is this just what parenting is now? We all just accept that our kids are going to be worse off?”
I didn’t have a neat answer. I told her what I tell myself on days when I read too many op-eds: The PISA test measures a narrow slice of what we do in school. It’s a snapshot taken on one day, in a quiet room, with a booklet of multiple-choice questions and short written responses. It doesn’t measure whether Marcus can explain why a historical event matters. It doesn’t measure whether he can listen to a classmate argue the opposite side and then change his mind. It doesn’t measure the moment, earlier that week, when Marcus stayed after class to ask me what “inflation” actually meant because something his grandfather said didn’t match what he read online.
I’m not saying the scores are meaningless. They’re not. They show that reading fluency and basic math skills have slipped in many places, and that’s worth paying attention to. But there’s a difference between noticing a trend and letting that trend become a story we tell about every kid in every classroom.
Danielle put her phone away. “So what do I do?” she asked. “He’s not in AP classes. He’s not struggling, but he’s not excelling either. Am I supposed to be drilling him with extra workbooks?”
I told her no. I told her the most useful thing she could do right now had almost nothing to do with a workbook. It was to keep doing what she was already doing: asking him questions about things that mattered. When he brings up something he saw online, ask him who made the video and how they might know. When he complains about a history chapter, ask him what part felt slow and why. Those small conversations build more comprehension skills than any test-prep packet ever will, because they teach a kid that reading and thinking are connected to his actual life.
I also told her about the one small change I was making in my own classroom. I used to assign reading for homework: thirty pages, answer these questions. But more and more, my students were skimming, copy-pasting answers, not actually reading. So this year, I started doing something different. I gave them ten minutes at the start of class to read something they chose—a magazine, a graphic novel, a sports article. No questions attached. Just reading. Then we spent a few minutes talking about what they read, not as an assessment, but as a conversation. The goal wasn’t to analyze theme or identify foreshadowing. It was to get them back into the habit of finishing a page and wanting to turn it.
It’s early, but I’ve noticed Marcus gravitates toward articles about science and space. He told me the other day that he read about the James Webb telescope. “I didn’t know the universe was expanding that fast,” he said. That’s not on the PISA test. But it’s the kind of moment that tells me the curiosity is still there. The scores don’t measure that. They can’t.
The real problem with PISA isn’t that the scores are bad. It’s that we’ve let a single international ranking become the dominant story about what our kids can and can’t do. When the headline screams “Decline,” parents feel anxious and start Googling tutoring programs. Educators feel defensive and start justifying their curriculum. And kids, who sense the panic, start believing that school is a series of numbers they need to improve so someone else feels better about the economy.
But learning has always been messier than a line on a graph. It’s a kid reading the same paragraph three times because the words don’t make sense yet. It’s a teacher abandoning her lesson plan because a student asked a question no one had ever asked before. It’s a parent sitting at the kitchen table, not drilling flashcards, but listening to her son explain why the price of eggs is confusing him. That stuff won’t show up in a dataset. But it’s the work that actually matters.
Danielle left the meeting looking a little less tense. She said she was going to start asking Marcus questions about what he reads on his phone during breakfast. I said that sounded perfect.
I still don’t love the PISA results. I wish our students in the U.S. had scored higher. But I’m also not going to let a global average tell me that Marcus is behind when I’ve seen him light up describing the size of a nebula. He’s not behind. He’s just learning at the pace and in the ways that make sense to him. The test will come around again in a few years, and the scores will maybe go up or maybe go down. In the meantime, there are thirty minutes of stolen reading time each day, a classroom full of kids who are slowly remembering that books can be doorways, and a parent who now knows that asking one good question matters more than finishing one more worksheet.
The coffee machine still sputters. I’ve learned to live with it.
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