If your child is a strong reader, the latest international test scores probably did not surprise you, and if your child struggles, they probably did not either. On September 8, 2026, the OECD released the results of its 2025 PISA assessment, and reading scores for American fifteen-year-olds had fallen sharply since the last round three years earlier. The headlines reached for the usual suspects, the pandemic and phones. But the more careful data tells a story that started years before either, and no one studying it has been willing to name a single cause. That gap between the headline and the evidence is worth your attention, because what you do about it at home should not wait on anyone settling the argument.
The PISA 2025 reading scores landed with a wave of quick explanations, and parents are left sorting the news from the noise. Here are the questions coming up most.
Common questions
Did the pandemic cause the drop in reading scores?
Are phones and screens to blame for falling reading scores?
My child is struggling with reading. What should I do now?
How do I find out where my child needs help?
Reading scores fell again on the biggest international test. But the slide started around 2013, before the pandemic and before the phones everyone blames, and no one has named a single cause.
What the new scores show
On September 8, 2026, the OECD released its PISA 2025 results, the once-every-three-years test of fifteen-year-olds across dozens of countries. Reading was the story. In the United States, reading fell 14 points from the 2022 round, a drop the OECD equates to roughly six to seven months of learning. Math and science, by contrast, held steady, statistically similar to 2022. And the slide was not only American: across the OECD, reading fell 28 points and math 22 points between 2015 and 2025.
American reading still sits above the OECD average, behind only Singapore, the Chinese jurisdictions, and Taiwan. But the country also posted the widest gap between its highest- and lowest-performing readers of any system tested, a gap that has also been documented on national tests at other grade levels. Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s Director for Education and Skills, put the longer pattern plainly: “Learning outcomes have stagnated or declined in many countries, in some cases for well over a decade, and gaps in achievement persist across socioeconomic groups.”
One caveat belongs next to that headline number, and most of the coverage skipped it. The OECD flagged the US 2025 sample itself: student and school response rates fell below its minimum targets, and student exclusions ran over the allowed limit. In the organization’s own words, it is “not possible to rule out bias in PISA performance results, nor to determine its most likely direction.” The 14-point figure is the best estimate available, and it rests on a shakier US sample than usual.
Learning outcomes have stagnated or declined in many countries, in some cases for well over a decade, and gaps in achievement persist across socioeconomic groups.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
The decline the headlines missed
The coverage reached quickly for two explanations: the pandemic, and phones. Both are intuitive, and both run into the same problem. The reading decline in the United States did not start in 2020, and it did not start with a smartphone in every teenager’s pocket. It started years earlier.
This is where the sourcing matters, because PISA did not date the decline, and it is worth being precise about who did. Two US domestic measures did. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, the country’s own long-term-trend test, records reading and math for thirteen-year-olds turning downward around 2012. And the Education Scorecard, run by researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth, reports a dramatic decline in student learning since 2013, with a detail that should stop anyone who blames the lockdowns: in the two years before the pandemic, from 2017 to 2019, reading scores were already falling at a pace comparable to the pandemic years themselves. The decline was underway before smartphone use reached the saturation levels usually cited as the cause.
So what did cause it? The honest answer is that no one studying this has been willing to say. Harvard’s Thomas Kane has argued the slide traces to the point when states scaled back test-based accountability. The Education Scorecard names rising social-media and smartphone use as a coincident candidate without choosing it. Others point to chronic absenteeism and the phase-out of pandemic relief funding, and note that states which adopted structured, evidence-based reading reforms have shown relative gains. Several plausible causes, overlapping in time, none separated from the others. When the acting head of the country’s statistics agency released the earlier long-term-trend numbers, Matthew Soldner said the quiet part out loud: “It’s important to remember correlation is not causation. But student experiences are at the very least context for trends we observe.” That restraint is the right posture, and it is missing from most of what a parent reads. What the evidence does support, clearly, is what actually builds a reader, and that has not changed with any test cycle.
Key takeaways
- The news: US reading on the 2025 PISA test fell 14 points, about six months of learning, while math held flat.
- The angle: US domestic data dates the reading slide to around 2012 and 2013, years before the pandemic.
- No single cause: Every serious analyst names several overlapping possible causes and declines to pick one.
What this means for your child
Here is the part the national numbers leave out: whether your own child is reading with confidence. A country-level average is a blunt instrument. Your child is not a data point in a decline. They are a specific reader who is either building the skill or quietly starting to believe they are bad at it, and that second thing is the one that hardens into a self-image if it goes unaddressed.
Which is why our position, and it is a position rather than a research finding, is that a parent should not wait for the system to diagnose the problem and then fix it. The data itself makes the case: the slide was running for the better part of a decade before any of these reports landed, and a child does not get those years back. Waiting for the argument about causes to be settled is waiting for something that shows no sign of arriving.
That does not mean rushing to hang a label on your child either, and this is where a little care pays off. Think of California’s move to mandatory dyslexia screening. It sounds unambiguously good, and whether it helps or harms a given child depends entirely on how the result is used, as a starting point for support or as a verdict that lowers everyone’s expectations. A parent screener works the same way. Used well, it tells you where to start today. If you have recognized your child in any of this, a free parent screener asks what you are seeing at home and points you to a first step, in language that builds your child up rather than boxing them in. It is a starting point, not a diagnosis, and if your child might need formal accommodations or you suspect a vision, hearing, or medical cause, a professional evaluation is the route to those. Either way, the reader at your kitchen table is worth more of your attention than the reader in the aggregate, and that one you already have the power to help.
It’s important to remember correlation is not causation. But student experiences are at the very least context for trends we observe.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
You do not need a national test score to tell you whether your own child is reading with confidence. You already see it, at the kitchen table, every time a book comes out, and that judgment is worth more than any average. You already are the most important teacher your child will ever have. And your child is not a data point in a decline, but a specific reader who is either building the skill or quietly deciding they are bad at it. The villain here is not a test, a party, or a generation of phones. It is the old reflex to wait, to hand the problem to the system and hope a diagnosis and a fix arrive before the school years run out, when the evidence says the slide was underway long before anyone acted. Learning Success was built for the parent who would rather start now. Our All-Access membership opens an assessment that asks about the processing systems your child’s reading runs on, then a roadmap that names which skill to build first, so you are not waiting on anyone else to move.
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Why we use AI, plainly: it writes from a knowledge base our team maintains and audits. We work through it line by line and pull anything the evidence stops supporting. The roadmap you get on Tuesday reflects what we corrected on Monday, and a human still reads it before you do.
Your school district must evaluate your child free of charge if you ask in writing, whatever your income and whatever the outcome (US, 34 CFR 300.111 and 300.301(b)). That route takes time and answers a different question than you do. This one starts today, from what you already know.
Your answers stay yours. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not hand identifiable assessment data to outside AI companies to train their models.
A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations (an IEP or 504 plan), or you suspect a vision, hearing or medical cause, pursue a professional evaluation too. That is the only route to those supports.
References
- OECD — PISA 2025: Students’ reading and mathematics performance declined sharply across the OECD
- Education Week — 3 Takeaways From the Latest PISA Test of Reading, Math, and Science
- Education Week — Reading Ability Craters on International Exam, Both in the United States and Abroad
- Chalkbeat — U.S. ranking on PISA international test improves as other countries decline
- Harvard Center for Education Policy Research — Education Recovery Scorecard
- American Enterprise Institute — Education Scorecard Looks Beyond Recovery
- K-12 Dive — 9-year-olds show some growth as 13-year-olds stagnate in NAEP long-term trends
