Results from a recent global assessment indicate that reading scores for American high school students have dropped over the past three years, while math and science performance still falls behind their peers in several other developed countries.
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests 15-year-olds in math, science, and reading proficiency as metrics for college and career readiness, conducted its last tests in 2025.
The initial findings, released on Sept. 8, indicate that children from Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom continue to outperform American public-school children in those three subjects.
PISA has not yet shared comprehensive comparative rankings of the 91 nations that participated in the latest assessments.
China did not participate as a nation; the four Chinese provinces that did also outperformed American 15-year-olds.
About 760,000 children across the world participated, according to the PISA website.
All told, U.S. students still performed above the average of all participating nations in reading and science, and slightly below average for math.
Compared to the 2022 PISA, average U.S. results in science remained the same.
For math and reading, however, the average scores remained below pre-COVID levels and “among the lowest ever observed in PISA in the United States” dating back 26 years.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the nation’s outdated public education needs a major overhaul that begins with universal school choice for all American families.
“The United States of America is a nation built to lead the world, yet our one-size-fits-all federal education bureaucracy has shortchanged our children and stifled our future,” she said in an email to The Epoch Times.
“Today’s international education scores confirm a decade of stagnation and a devastating gap: we successfully propel our highest achievers, but the lowest-performing students are falling further behind—and have suffered a loss of learning in reading equivalent to nearly a year and a half of instruction compared to 2015.
“This moment is a stress test for our nation’s future. To pass it, we must enact a hard reset that stops protecting a failed status quo and instead builds a system that empowers state leaders and embraces innovative learning options through school choice.”
The PISA proficiency levels range from one to six, with level two considered minimum proficiency.
Seventy-four percent of the U.S. students were at level two or above in reading, but only 13 percent were at level five or six.
The results for science were similar.
For math, 65 percent of U.S. students were at level two or above, but only 8 percent were at levels five or six, compared to 54 percent of the four Chinese provinces and Singapore’s 37 percent.
The 2025 program introduced a digital computational problem-solving assessment.
U.S. children scored above the overall average in that category, still falling behind several Asian and English-speaking nations, but outperforming Germany, France, Mexico, and Brazil, according to the PISA report.
Globally, PISA determined that one in five students is considered low-performing in science, math, and reading, up from 16 percent in 2022.
Average reading scores fell by 28 points since 2015, while math fell by 22 points, according to the report.
“PISA 2025 shows that reversing declines in student performance is urgent,” said Mathias Cormann, secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which oversees the PISA program.
“The most successful education systems focus on fewer areas in greater depth, invest in teachers, engage parents, and provide targeted support for the students and schools that need it the most,” Cormann said in the report.
“Technology and AI can strengthen learning and help prepare young people for the future, but only when used purposefully and not as a substitute for attention, effort, and understanding.”
PISA also surveyed participants about their use of artificial intelligence to draft text in writing assignments and determined that those who did not use it outperformed those who said they did.
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