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Students around the world continue to fall further and further behind in the core subjects of reading and math, according to the release of scores from a widely cited standardized test on Tuesday. Meanwhile, their use of artificial intelligence tools for academic reasons has climbed precipitously.

The 2025 administration of the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, showed reading scores of America鈥檚 15-year-olds falling by 14 points since 2022, when the exam was last conducted. Math scores fell by only two points over those three years, but have now sunk 15 points lower than in 2018. Performance in science is essentially unchanged over the last several rounds of the test.

Somewhat perversely, these deflating results mean that the United States has essentially maintained its relative positioning against the dozens of other national and regional school systems that participate in the assessment. In many of those jurisdictions, achievement in math and especially literacy has fallen even further than it has domestically. 

The ongoing slide in all but a few countries 鈥� exceptions include perennial overachievers like Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan, but also the European states of England and Estonia 鈥� indicate that the U.S. is subject to the same educational trends influencing the rest of the world. Clearly, it is not alone in suffering through a 鈥渓earning recession鈥� that began over a decade ago. Likewise, survey responses included with the PISA report show that students overseas are just as willing as their American counterparts to rely on AI chatbots: Far fewer than half of respondents across 82 participating jurisdictions said they used AI 鈥渘ever or almost never鈥� for purposes related to schoolwork. 

Michael Petrilli, president of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called the scores 鈥渁larming,鈥� adding that they largely conform with those of other high-profile exams, such as the U.S.鈥檚 biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress. While academic outcomes have fallen more or less continuously for K鈥�12 students since the Obama administration, he wrote in an email, researchers and advocates shouldn鈥檛 take solace in the equally poor performance of other countries.

鈥淭he fact that other advanced nations are also seeing declines, especially in reading, is cold comfort,鈥� Petrilli said. 鈥淜nowledge is not a zero-sum game; we should want every child, everywhere, to achieve their full cognitive and academic potential, and that’s clearly not happening.鈥�

Created and managed by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, PISA made its debut in 2000. Across all students participating in the 2025 assessment, the group announced, average results in math and reading were the worst ever recorded.

鈥淎t exactly the moment our economies and societies are asking more of young people, too many education systems are struggling to build the knowledge and capabilities they will need.”

Vicki Phillips, head of the National Center on Education and the Economy

Whether or not that result represents rock bottom, it follows a prolonged tumble over multiple iterations of the test. Math and reading scores have either dropped or stagnated since 2009, while reading scores have plummeted since 2012. Just in the 10 years preceding the most recent testing round, OECD reported, average reading scores fell by the equivalent of 1.5 years of classroom learning, while average math scores fell by over one year.

Vicki Phillips, head of the National Center on Education and the Economy, that most PISA participants were experiencing a pronounced diminishment of the very skills that 鈥渨ill increasingly shape individual opportunity and a country鈥檚 ability to innovate, adapt, and grow.鈥�

鈥淎t exactly the moment our economies and societies are asking more of young people, too many education systems are struggling to build the knowledge and capabilities they will need,鈥� Phillips argued.

Amid the general nosedive, America鈥檚 downturn looks less extreme. But it distinguishes itself in terms of inequality, with exceedingly large disparities separating its top-scoring and lowest-performing test takers. The 鈥�90-10 gap,鈥� measured between struggling students at the 10th percentile and high-flyers at the 90th, grew by 50 points in reading since 2015. The gulf in science scores now stands greater than 290 scale points (out of 1,000 total), far more than any other country except Luxembourg. 

Those developments are fairly well-established, with tests such as NAEP repeatedly pointing to widening divergences over the past decade. But this year鈥檚 PISA brings some of the earliest international indicators of AI鈥檚 widespread penetration into schools. 

In a questionnaire accompanying the test, over half of all students said they enlisted chatbots like ChatGPT at least several times a month to conduct their research, write first drafts of papers, or summarize a text required for class. The percentage of students who said they seldom or never used AI for such tasks fell below 30% in every country except Japan, where 39% of respondents said as much.

Notably, too few U.S. students took part in the OECD questionnaires to reliably report their responses. But recent polling evidence strongly suggests that American pupils are highly dependent on AI to help complete their day-to-day academic assignments. 

In by the Fordham Institute, 48% of high school respondents said they regularly had AI solve math problems for them. Over one-third said they asked AI tools to summarize texts to avoid reading them, while over one-quarter said they used it for help during quizzes and tests.

Dan Goldhaber is an education professor at the University of Washington and a longtime observer of tests like PISA. In an interview, he said he worried that K鈥�12 students would increasingly come to depend on AI for routine academic work 鈥� and, in so doing, deprive themselves of meaningful learning opportunities.

鈥淚 hire people that AI is supposed to replace,鈥� Goldhaber said. 鈥淚 worry that it makes some things so easy that people don’t learn those things, and that will lead to a huge gap in knowledge for whole cohorts of students. I’m not sure what to do about it, but I see that problem on a micro-level and think, ‘My God.’鈥�

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