Reading scores for U.S. 15-year-olds nosedived 14 points since 2022, according to results from the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment released Tuesday.
The decline is equivalent to a seven-month loss in learning, said U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon in a Sept. 8 press call.
While math performance for 15-year-olds showed no significant difference compared to 2022, performance had already fallen 13 points during that cycle when compared to scores prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and 18 points compared to when PISA's math assessment was first administered in 2003.
Those results come amid international performance declines in math and reading that resulted in "the lowest average ever recorded" in both subjects, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which manages the exam.
PISA was conducted every three years between 2000 and 2025, after which it moved to a four-year cycle. Each cycle assesses reading, mathematics and science, with one subject serving as the "major domain" on a rotating basis. In 2025, the focus was on science.
Overall, the U.S. ranked 13th in reading and in science, and 27th in math. The latest round of results included 91 education systems from around the world, including 38 member countries of OECD.
As the world digests the latest assessment results, here are four takeaways to put them in context.
Reading outpaced the OECD average despite declines
Although the U.S. average reading score declined in 2025, students still "performed strongly internationally" in the subject, according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the exam in the U.S. and released an analysis of the results on Sept. 8.
Students scored above the OECD average and higher than the average scores of 75 of the 89 other participating countries.
Compared to the participating countries' average, U.S. students were more likely to reach the highest proficiency levels and less likely to perform below the baseline proficiency level.
Reading proficiency involves the ability to distinguish between fact and opinion, synthesize and interpret texts from various sources, deal with conflicting information across source materials, and assess quality and credibility. Texts include those that are static or continuous, such as books or passages, and those that are dynamic or noncontinuous, such as lists and diagrams.
The average U.S. reading score of 490 was also higher than the OECD average reading score, which was 461.
Gaps wider than average for U.S. students in areas other than math
The achievement gap between students in the 90th percentile and those in the 10th percentile — or the highest- and lowest-performing students — was larger than the OECD average gap in science, reading and computational problem-solving. In math, the achievement gap was not significantly different than the average.
The achievement gap in reading is particularly stark. While only 13% of 15-year-old students assessed in 2025 were high performers in reading, 26% were low performers.
The reading gap in the U.S. has widened by 50 points since 2015 — or the equivalent of 2.5 years of lost learning — making it the largest in the world, said McMahon on Tuesday.
"This is now the largest performance gap between top-performing and bottom-performing students in reading anywhere in the world — a distinction we really don't care to have," she said.
Matthew Soldner, acting commissioner of NCES, said this finding is not unique to PISA, and similar trends have been seen in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a domestic exam that only assesses U.S. students.
However, this disparity isn't necessarily typical on a global scale.
"Students from similarly disadvantaged backgrounds in the U.K. [United Kingdom] do much better than those students would do in the United States, and in the Chinese regions, those disadvantaged students do better than the most privileged students in the U.S.," said Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at OECD and the founder of PISA. "And in fact, that shows us, you know, poverty need not be destiny."
Schleicher works with global leaders to reform school systems. He pointed to East Asian education systems that "offer that magic combination of excellence and equity, where all students succeed."
Science marks a "high point"
The average science score of 502 for U.S. 15-year-olds was not significantly different from the average in 2006, the first year for which scores in the subject were available.
U.S. students’ science performance was also not significantly different from the most recent results in 2022.
However, the U.S. had a larger percentage of high performers in science than the OECD average, at 13% compared to 7%, and a smaller percentage of low performers, at 22% compared to the OECD average of 26%.
"2025 marks the high point of our international ranking in science," said Soldner.
The rise of screen time and AI in the results
Researchers are looking to technology and the rise of artificial intelligence as possible explanations for the significant decreases in reading — and are warning district leaders to be wary of them as potential solutions.
"People quickly turn to explanations, such as the COVID pandemic," said Schleicher. "But you know, if you're honest, this decline started much earlier and it continues. So the pandemic is not a compelling explanation."
Since 2018, he said, reading performance in certain skill areas — such as those involving higher-level processes like evaluation, critical thinking, reflecting, remembering, integrating different pieces of information — have declined notably.
"Success has declined fastest on reading tasks that are particularly important in this AI age," said Schleicher. "So, in this world increasingly flooded with information, our students are less likely to think deeply and separate signal from noise."
According to a survey included in the PISA results, students spent 1.7 hours per day on devices for learning and then another hour for leisure while in school, Schleicher said.
A limited or moderate use of technology for learning was associated with better learning outcomes for students up until a point, the results found. But if students spend more than three hours a day on technology in the classroom, performance starts to decline across countries, the results showed.
"In the U.S., we can also see that the nature of online work has changed. The biggest increase in the U.S. is being in browsing social networks such as Instagram and TikTok now," said Schleicher, "whereas we have seen a decline in students' creative use of digital — and it's a quite troubling shift from creating to consuming, from producing to scrolling."
Jonathan Seiden, assistant professor of early childhood policy at Vanderbilt University, also warned that educational technologies like AI tutoring "are not magic bullets to solve these problems."
"They're not replacements for effective teachers or substitutes for family support for learning at home," he said. "Implementing these technologies without carefully understanding how to bolster student engagement for low-achieving students, in particular, could actually exacerbate the disparities we see between low and high-performing students."
