Credit: (AP Photo/Joshua Bessex, File)
American kids are falling behind in reading, according to the latest results of a global exam.
Every three years, a random sample of 15-year-olds across the world take the same test in reading, math and science, known as PISA.
The scores released this month are “extremely concerning,” says Tracey Burns, who studies top-performing education systems around the world for a Washington-D.C. based nonprofit, the National Center on Education and the Economy.
Countries like China, Canada, Estonia, Ireland and South Korea are doing a better job of educating the most disadvantaged students, she says, and deploying the best teachers to struggling schools that need them the most.
Burns spoke to New Jersey Spotlight News about why these countries are outperforming the U.S.— particularly in serving the neediest kids – and what we can do to catch up. Here is a lightly edited transcript.
Q: First, what’s the purpose of this test?
A: At the time the test was started, it was heavily debated. But the idea is, essentially, with a much more global world – including the labor markets, and much more movement between countries – it’s actually quite interesting to see not only how well you’re doing within a particular state or country, but how well you compare to the countries around you.
These are the countries you’re competing with economically, and as an individual student, you might be competing with personally for jobs. Ninety-one different countries and economies took part in the 2025 version. It’s been going on since 2000, so at this point, we have more than 25 years of data.
Q: The reading scores of American teens have dropped sharply since 2022 and are near their lowest point in 25 years. How concerning is that?
A: Extremely concerning. The good news is, math and science did not drop significantly; the U.S. was one of the outliers on the test in that regard, so it’s not all doom and gloom.
But that 14-point drop in reading scores is a major one. It’s estimated that around 20 points on their test is equivalent to about a year of schooling, so a 14-point drop is two-thirds of a year. American kids are roughly six to eight months behind where 15-year-olds were in previous testing cycles.
Reading is not only important on its own. It’s also considered sort of the mother of all skills, because to do math and science, you also need to be able to read.
‘Very intentional’
Q: Why are American teens being outperformed by students in Singapore and parts of China?
A: That has been the question for many years. There’s a lot of suppositions about why that might be. Singapore is a great example: They are very intentional about how they are designing the education experience for their students. Their systems are coherent; they’re very aligned. And that means everything from thinking about classrooms to lessons to teacher quality to leadership. Singapore’s a high performer, ever since it started taking the test. Estonia is another example.
Q: Can you explain how Singapore designed its successful system?
A: What you see is a stronger teacher cadre, coupled with a highly functioning recruitment and retention system for teachers, and a strong set of leaders and policies that help the functioning of the system.
Singapore has the luxurious position of the best students applying to be teachers. They are selected into initial teacher education programs that are state-of-the-art. They are deployed into some of the poorer schools that need the best teachers, so they have that experience before they get into the job. And when they’re in the job, they get coaches, mentors, so all along, they’re building a pipeline that attracts, retains and keeps the skills of the teachers growing.
Q: Which countries are doing a better job serving the most disadvantaged students, and why?
A: China, Canada, Estonia, Ireland, Japan, Korea and Macao, which is a territory of China, show high levels of performance paired with equity.
As to why, that’s a tough one. Education is not going to be able to solve for everything. The students furthest from opportunity are not always in safe housing, they don’t have clear transport; their parents may be working two or three jobs so they’re not able to bring them to school. Those education systems that are doing a good job are able to join forces with other sectors that make a difference: health, nutrition, safety. They’re able to provide an environment where these students are supported. They have food, their brains are being fed, so when they’re in school, they’re in a better position to learn.
Need to belong
Q: Yes, what about social factors outside of schools, like a breakdown in family structure, or drugs? How does the U.S. compare to higher-performing countries like Canada?
A: The U.S. will always have examples that are the brightest of the brightest, schools that are doing a great job. But with a system as large and diverse as the U.S., it’s hard to actually bring to scale those pockets of excellence. And what you see in countries that do a good job is that they are able to do that. They’re able to say, “Well, we want to make sure that every single child has access to health care,” for example. And in many cases, one of the big drivers of success in a system is whether the students feel they belong, and have relationships not only with their peers, but also with their teachers.
Q: So, the U.S. doesn’t provide safety net services to students as well as countries like Canada do, which could be a significant factor in the performance gap on this test. Right?
A: Yeah. That’s a contributing factor. At a national level, the U.S. does not have a comparable set of supports.
Q: You mentioned that in top-scoring countries like China, you may get more top-tier teacher candidates. I read that China recruits from the top 10% to 30% of college grads, while the U.S. draws heavily from the lower-middle tier. Is that right?
A: Yes. There’s a question here that underlies all of this, which is, what is the status of teaching? Is it considered a desirable job? Are teachers respected? In many countries, particularly Asian countries, teaching is desirable and respected.
This is somewhat less true, but still true, in places like Ireland, Estonia. There is a cachet to teaching, which is not the case in the U.S. And so that means that in those systems, there are more applicants to be teachers.
They are 100% choosing the best of the best because those are the students applying. In the U.S., if you are the best-performing student in your year and have every option open to you, teaching is usually not on the highest list of options that you’re going to go for.
Top-performing countries also have, in many places, a clear retention policy. They want to get good teachers into the system, support them to continue to grow, and keep them. In many countries, including the U.S., the best teachers leave after a certain time because they can no longer continue to rise, there are not always great career options.
Best teachers
Q: How do these countries incentivize highly effective teachers to take assignments in low-income schools?
A: In many cases, you have a struggling school that’s paired with a successful school. They have relationships between teachers and principals in those schools, to provide support. In other cases, they rotate teachers in for a certain amount of time.
In Singapore, you have five-year terms in different places, and you’re rotated in. Singapore is obviously a very, very small place, so geographically they’re able to do that in a way that is just not possible in the U.S. They want to bring the highest, most skilled teachers with the best impact to the schools and students that need them the most.
Q: How much of a factor is teacher pay in attracting the best and brightest?
A: Pay is important. Nobody wants to work for free. It’s important not just as labor recognition, but a social recognition that this is a meaningful profession. American teachers earn less than 60% of what similarly educated U.S. workers make, putting them far below the average of wealthy nations for relative teacher pay.
You see in countries that do extremely well, that an increase in teacher pay is associated with better outcomes for students, but only up until a point. After that point, more pay will not solve for a system that’s broken.
Q: How much of the gap in performance on this test do you think is tied to classroom teacher quality, as opposed to, say, private tutoring?
A: That’s a very good question and we don’t know. None of this is causal; this is all correlational data.
The homework question
Q: Does homework matter? I understand some countries assign a lot less and their students still do well.
A: More time on homework is associated with higher performance, up to a certain point, about two hours a day. Then it declines. Many top-performing systems spend about the same average time on homework as the U.S., about 1.4 hours a day for a 15-year-old. Some spend more, roughly 2 hours daily in Singapore and Korea.
Q: What steps should American schools realistically take to help close the achievement gap between poor kids and their wealthier peers?
A: There’s a whole host of things, like policies that support hiring and retaining excellent teachers. But you can’t only work on one thing in isolation. States should get all the actors together to build a coordinated strategy, then figure out: How do we make it work?
Q: Might an example of that be Mississippi’s literacy push? They started with policymaking at a high level on how reading should be taught and it trickled down to having coaches go into the classroom to help teachers.
A: Mississippi is a great example of what happens when you’re all rowing in the same direction and also using evidence to guide your choices. But part of the success of Mississippi is, it wasn’t perceived as a top-down order; it was something very clearly directed by the evidence that science is telling us makes a difference. Then the solution was built with members of the community and schools.
Building AI skills
Q: When you look at how the U.S. scored on this test, was over-use of artificial intelligence a factor? Or is that a problem everybody’s facing?
A: To some extent, it’s the problem that everybody’s facing. But you see exceptions to the overall trend. In countries like Korea, for example, students did report a relatively high use of AI and still scored very well. So, in that system, they are able to teach students the skills to use AI to build and augment their knowledge, not to take away from it.
“How do you want to build the workforce of tomorrow?” — Tracey Burns
That’s the warning sign to the U.S.: If you’ve got education systems that are able to do this at scale, then there’s the potential for an explosion of capacity of skills, in a way the rest of the countries are currently not able to follow.
Q: Wow. Any other lessons here for the U.S.?
A: If you think, from a national perspective, that the U.S. is the world economic superpower, the capacity to fuel that innovation comes from being able to have the best and brightest work on the hardest technological problems of the day.
So all the investments that you make now in education yield thousandfold returns, in terms of where you are not just in labor market productivity, but the economic productivity of a country.
What we’re talking about here is a concerning set of test scores, for now – for individual students, communities, families and the country. And what’s also happening is a clear set of challenges are being put down around, well, how do you want to build the workforce of tomorrow?
