U.S. reading scores on PISA fall 14 points and sit near a 25-year low

Reading scores for American 15-year-olds fell 14 points from 2022 on the Programme for International Student Assessment released on Tuesday, landing near the lowest U.S. result in the 25 years the test has existed. The drop matches the average decline across OECD countries. Math slipped two points to 463, below the OECD mean. Science rose two points to 502. More than 760,000 teenagers in 91 systems sat the exam last year, including about 4,600 in the United States.

Singapore led reading. Japan and Korea sat near the top in several subjects. Four Chinese provinces, Shanghai, Beijing, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, again posted the highest math and science scores, with 54 per cent of that sample at the top math level. Only 8 per cent of U.S. students reached that band, against 37 per cent in Singapore, 23 per cent in Korea and 22 per cent in Japan. The Chinese sample is limited to wealthy coastal provinces, a caveat the OECD itself records.

Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education and skills, tied the global reading slump to screens and to generative tools. Between 2015 and 2025 the OECD average reading score fell 28 points in member countries and 16 points elsewhere. Twenty points is roughly a year of schooling. He said students now answer faster and with more errors, and called reading the mother of all skills because systems that lost the most in reading also lost ground in math and science.

The U.S. ranking improved even as its raw scores did not. American 15-year-olds sit 13th in reading and 13th in science and have moved up to 27th in math, because other countries fell faster. Seventy-four per cent of U.S. students reached basic reading proficiency, against 69 per cent in the 38 richer OECD members. The league table is flattering for a reason that should worry state chiefs: the field sank.

The United Kingdom is the clear exception among large rich systems. British scores rose in all three subjects and entered the top ten in each. That result will be picked over in Westminster and in U.S. statehouses that have spent three years rewriting early reading curricula around phonics. PISA tests 15-year-olds, not third graders. The science of reading push in American elementary schools has not yet shown up in this cohort.

The U.S. file has a further technical stain. Response rates fell below the PISA minimum. Exclusions ran past the allowed band. More than 40 per cent of participating American students never received the background questionnaire because some states tested early, while the student survey was paused nationally. The OECD published the scores anyway and flagged the gaps. Comparisons that treat the U.S. sample as clean should not.

This cycle added a new domain, computational problem-solving. The United States scored 513, above the OECD mean. That is the one American bright line in the release. It does not offset a 14-point reading loss or a math score that remains the country’s weakest subject on this test.

The practical takeaway sits in the item design. PISA reading now leans on longer passages. National gauges of U.S. 13-year-olds have already shown the same pattern: nine-year-olds recovered some ground after the pandemic, teenagers did not. Schools that rebuilt decoding in the early grades still have a secondary-school problem with stamina and with texts that do not fit on a phone.

State superintendents will be asked why a generation that grew up with one-to-one devices is worse at reading a long page. Schleicher’s answer is already on the record. The scores do not prove that answer. They do set the size of the hole: 14 points in three years, in line with the rich-world average, and a ranking that looks better only because others fell further.