American 15-year-olds lost significant ground in reading on the 2025 Program for International Student Assessment, a global exam taken by more than 760,000 students across 91 countries and economies. The results, published by the OECD, show a sharp decline in U.S. reading performance since the test's previous cycle in 2022, though math and science scores held relatively steady. The 2025 administration marks the largest PISA assessment since the test first launched in 2000.
U.S. reading scores fell considerably between 2022 and 2025, while average results in mathematics and science stayed roughly flat over the same period. Science performance has remained relatively stable across all PISA testing cycles, with only minor, statistically insignificant fluctuations. Math and reading scores, however, now sit below their 2018 levels and rank among the lowest the U.S. has ever recorded on PISA. The achievement gap between struggling and high-achieving students didn't widen significantly in any subject compared to 2022, but looking back a decade to 2015, the share of low-performing students increased by six percentage points in math and seven points in reading. Despite the reading drop, the U.S. still scored above the OECD average in 2025, trailing only Singapore, Chinese jurisdictions, and Taiwan. But the U.S. recorded the widest gap in reading performance between its lowest- and highest-achieving students among all participating education systems. In math, U.S. performance landed near the OECD average, ranking around 27th—notably weaker than its standing in reading or science. About eight percent of American students reached top performance levels in math, compared to 54 percent in B-S-J-Z China and 37 percent in Singapore.
The OECD's report comes with an important caveat: student and school response rates in the U.S. fell below minimum targets, and student exclusions exceeded allowed limits, so it's "not possible to rule out bias" in the reported performance results. U.S. scores could be somewhat higher or lower than published figures. The response-rate problems also prevented the OECD from breaking out U.S. results by race or family income this cycle, since more than 40 percent of students didn't complete the accompanying questionnaire. U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon called the scores "a stress test for our nation's future," saying the country successfully propels its highest achievers but that "the lowest-performing students are falling further behind." The decline wasn't unique to the United States—across OECD countries, student performance dropped, with math and reading averages hitting the lowest levels ever recorded.
Pinpointing what drove the reading decline is difficult, but technology may be part of the explanation. OECD Director for Education and Skills Andreas Schleicher pointed to the drop in reading for pleasure and a shift toward skimming and shallow processing common on social media, which could be weakening students' ability to engage with longer, more complex texts. Test data revealed a rise in "hasty readers"—students who moved through texts quickly and got answers wrong as a result. PISA also found a negative link between using AI for writing and reading scores: about half of students reported using AI at least weekly to help with schoolwork, and one in three said they've used it to draft writing assignments. Matthew Soldner, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, suggested COVID-19 school closures as a potential U.S.-specific factor, noting students likely developed foundational literacy skills but faced interruptions at the next level. While the national focus on literacy has pushed states to enact early literacy reforms like Minnesota's READ Act, "far fewer states have designed comprehensive plans for older readers," the report notes. With one in five 15-year-olds across the OECD now a low performer in all three subjects—up from 16 percent in 2022—the question remains whether American students are actually improving or simply appearing better because other countries declined faster.