New data shows U.S. students continue to fall behind their peers in reading as the country’s achievement gap widens, according to results from the latest globally recognized international exam.
The 2025 Program for International Assessment, or PISA, found that 15-year-old U.S. students’ reading scores fell 14 points from the last time the test was administered, in 2022. The assessment also found that the achievement gap among U.S. readers in the 90th percentile and the 10th percentile was the largest among any other country included in the report.
The results come as reading scores among U.S. fourth and eighth grade students worsened in 2024, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, dubbed the nation’s report card. The recent plunge has renewed the conversation around the literacy crisis gripping the nation’s education system and the debate over COVID-19 school closures.
The Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, or NCES, which administers both tests to American students, releases the PISA results every three years.
Acting NCES Commissioner Matthew Soldner noted in a press release Tuesday that the performance gap between higher and lower end U.S. students is larger today than it was 10 years ago.
Combined with the NAEP — the largest assessment of U.S. students’ performance in public and private schools across all 50 states and the District of Columbia — Kevin Huffman, CEO of education nonprofit Accelerate, told ABC News the PISA results are troubling.
“People should have been concerned for a while about the direction of scores for older kids in this country,” Huffman said.
PISA — which is organized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD — is the industry standard for ranking students from different countries, according to education experts. More than 700,000 students in roughly 90 education systems worldwide, including more than 30 developed nations in the OECD, participated in 2025.
Despite the sobering data, U.S. average scores in reading and science were higher than the OECD average in those subjects, according to the PISA results.
According to NCES, only Singapore and parts of China scored higher averages that were “significantly different” than the U.S. in both of those subjects.
The U.S. ranked 13th overall in reading and science but fell outside the top 25 in math (27th). There was no significant change in scores for science and math from 2022 and 2015, which is how PISA calculates short-term and long-term trends.