Why PISA Scores Are Falling Everywhere (And What Parents Can Do About It)
I was standing at the kitchen counter last December, half-listening to the radio while my daughter hunted for her library book. The newsreader said something about PISA scores—the latest round was out, and countries everywhere had dropped. Another thing to worry about, I thought. Then I went back to searching for the book, which turned up under a pile of art projects.
But the news stayed with me. PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment, tests 15-year-olds in reading, math, and science every few years. The headlines were grim: scores down in nearly every country, including places that usually top the charts. Parents read these stories and worry their child is falling behind. Teachers read them and feel blamed. I read them and felt something more complicated.
The thing is, I’ve spent enough time around kids to know that the story behind those scores is not simple. It’s not that children have suddenly gotten lazier or that teachers have stopped caring. Something else is going on.
A few days after the news broke, I watched my son’s math class during a volunteer event. The teacher asked a question about fractions, and several kids froze. They stared at their desks. One boy whispered an answer but wouldn’t raise his hand. Later, I watched the same boy whip through a puzzle game on his tablet, calculating angles and timing jumps with remarkable speed. He wasn’t bad at problem-solving. He just wasn’t practiced at doing it on paper, in a room full of peers, with a clock ticking.
That’s what PISA measures, mostly: school-shaped knowledge. Long reading passages. Abstract problems. Quiet, sustained attention. And those are exactly the things that have become harder for kids to practice in recent years.
Phones are part of it. So are shortened attention spans, crowded curriculums, and the lingering effects of pandemic-era learning gaps. But I don’t think the answer is to panic or to blame any one thing. The answer is to look at what we’re actually asking kids to do all day, and whether it matches how they’re used to thinking.
My friend who teaches middle school puts it this way: “Kids can focus for hours on something they’ve chosen. They just can’t focus for ten minutes on something that feels abstract and disconnected from their lives.” That’s not a moral failure. It’s a mismatch. PISA asks students to sit and reason through unfamiliar, decontextualized problems. It doesn’t ask them to collaborate, create, or persist through a project over several weeks. Those skills are valuable, too, but they’re not what the test measures.
So when people ask me whether PISA scores are a sign that our kids are doomed, I say no. They’re a sign that our schools are being pulled in many directions, and that the kind of old-fashioned academic endurance the test rewards is getting rarer.
What can we do about it at home? Not much that will change a global trend. But there are small, realistic things that can help a specific child feel steadier in school.
The most useful one is also the simplest: read something long and unfragmented, out loud, together. It doesn’t have to be a classic novel. It can be a chapter of a fantasy book, a long magazine article, or even a well-written recipe. The point is to practice following a thread of text for longer than a social media post. My daughter and I started reading a mystery series before bed. She complains every night. She also asks for one more chapter every night. That’s the habit working.
Another thing that helps is doing math out loud in everyday life. I’m not talking about worksheets. I mean saying things like, “If this recipe makes eight servings and we only need six, how should we adjust the flour?” or “The pizza is 12 inches, so how big is half?” It’s not elegant. But it shows kids that the math they learn in school isn’t something you only do in a classroom. It’s the stuff of dinner and groceries and allowances.
I’ve also learned the power of the five-minute rule for homework. When my son sees a long assignment, he freezes before he even starts. So we set a timer for five minutes. He only has to work until it rings. Usually, when it rings, he keeps going because the hard part was starting, not doing. That five-minute threshold is a way to trick the brain into moving past the overwhelming beginning.
Then there’s the phone issue. I don’t pretend to have solved it. But we’ve made one rule that helps: during homework time, phones live in another room. Not in a drawer. Not face down. Another room. The search for a phone is a distraction in itself, so the farther away it is, the less likely it’ll get picked up. It sounds obvious, but it took me a long time to be strict about it.
What about schools? One thing I wish parents understood is that a school can be doing fine, even great, while still dealing with pressure to raise scores that were never meant to capture the full picture of a child. The math teacher who can’t get a quiet answer from the boy with the puzzle game is still a good teacher. She’s just working against a culture that expects kids to sit still and absorb information in ways many of them no longer practice outside school.
There’s also something painful hiding beneath the PISA numbers. The drop affects kids from struggling families the most. When schools closed, kids with internet and quiet rooms kept learning. Kids without them fell behind. The pandemic didn’t create that gap. It just made it more visible. PISA doesn’t tell us children everywhere are less intelligent. It tells us children everywhere spent two years in disruption, and some had far more support to get through it than others.
I keep thinking about a moment at the dinner table last week. My teenager mentioned a headline about inflation. My younger daughter asked what inflation actually means. I launched into a long, messy explanation involving groceries, wages, and a toy she used to buy at the dollar store. She listened longer than I expected. Then she asked if her allowance counted.
For that one evening, she was practicing exactly what PISA is supposed to measure: making sense of an abstract idea and connecting it to her own life. It wasn’t a formal lesson. It was just dinner talk, with a lot of us talking over each other.
I’m not saying a few dinnertime conversations will turn the tide on international test scores. I’m not saying reading one chapter a night fixes everything. The trends are real, and they’re worth paying attention to. But the score that matters most is not the one on a global chart. It’s the small, repeated experience of a child wrestling with a problem, getting stuck, and then finding a way through it.
The news about PISA will fade. The next round of scores will come out in a few years, and there will be more headlines. Meanwhile, the library book will probably be missing again. We’ll tear the house apart looking for it. My daughter will blame her brother. I’ll find it under a couch cushion, flattened and slightly torn.
And then we’ll read it together, one chapter at a time. It won’t show up in any international assessment. But it’s something. It’s what we have right now, and it’s enough to keep doing.
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