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Dozens of countries and economies scored higher than the United States on the world's leading measure of student achievement, according to "PISA 2025 Results," a report released Tuesday by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
American 15-year-olds posted a reading score of 490 and a math score of 463 on the 2025 exam, known as PISA. Twenty-four countries and economies scored higher than the U.S. in math. Ten of those also beat the U.S. in reading, according to a Newsweek analysis of the results.
PISA is administered every three years to 15-year-olds around the world. More than 760,000 students, representing some 33 million 15-year-olds in 91 countries and economies, took the exam last year. About 4,600 of them were in the United States.
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Which Countries Beat the US in PISA 2025
Singapore posted the highest reading score, at 535, followed by China at 527. In math, China led with 612, more than 100 points above the U.S. mark, followed by Singapore at 563. China's result reflects only four regions, Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Taiwan, tested separately under the name "Chinese Taipei," also outscored the U.S. in both subjects.
Japan, Korea and Estonia rounded out the group that beat the U.S. in both reading and math. Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand outscored the U.S. in reading but not math. A longer list, including Switzerland, Canada, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Italy, Sweden and Germany, beat the U.S. in math but not reading. Germany and Sweden each edged the U.S. math score by a single point.
Most participating Chinese jurisdictions, along with Estonia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Chinese Taipei and the United Kingdom, were the only education systems to rank in the top 10 worldwide in science, math and reading alike, the OECD found.
U.S. students still scored above the average of the 38 OECD countries in reading and science, and near the middle of the pack in math. They also scored above average on a new measure of computational problem solving, a category topped by China, Singapore and Japan.
The Decade-Long Slide
The pandemic did not start the slide. Across the developed world, students have been losing ground in reading, math and science for more than a decade.
The 2025 results extend a decline that predates the pandemic. Average science scores across OECD countries slipped from 489 to 482 between 2015 and 2025, a drop the report called comparatively mild next to the other two subjects. Math fell further, from 485 to 463, equal to just over a year of learning. Reading recorded the steepest drop, from 489 to 461 points across OECD countries and from 428 to 412 among non-OECD participants.
Twenty percent of 15-year-olds across the OECD now count as low performers in all three subjects, up from 16 percent in 2022. Researchers said those students lack the foundational skills needed for further education, employment and everyday life.
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"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," wrote OECD’s Andreas Schleicher.
Reading fell in three-quarters of education systems with comparable data between 2018 and 2025, dropping 25 points across the OECD, more than a year of learning. The share of "hasty readers," students who rush through a text and answer incorrectly, nearly doubled over that stretch.
The steepest losses landed on students from wealthier families. Poorer students, by comparison, lost far less ground, narrowing the socioeconomic gap in scores this cycle.
"This isn't about calculus. It's about basic competence," the report said.
Why the US Climbed the Rankings Anyway
The U.S. moved up the rankings even as its own scores fell, largely because other countries declined faster.
That relative gain masks a weaker picture at home. Reading scores are near a 25-year low, and math scores rank among the lowest since PISA began in 2000. The improvement in the rankings largely reflects how much more sharply scores have deteriorated in other countries.
Seventy-four percent of American 15-year-olds reached basic proficiency in reading this cycle, compared with 69 percent across the OECD, and U.S. math proficiency matched the OECD average at 65 percent, according to Chalkbeat’s analysis of the results.
But the U.S. remains far from the top. Just 8 percent of American teenagers scored at the highest level in math, compared with 37 percent in Singapore, 23 percent in Korea and 22 percent in Japan. The gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students was also larger in the U.S. than in most other countries in both science and reading.
There are some brighter spots. American students performed above average on science and on a new PISA test measuring computational problem-solving skills in the digital age. They were also less likely than students in other countries to rush through reading questions and answer incorrectly, suggesting they generally took the exam seriously.
Still, the U.S. results come with an unusual caveat. Researchers warned that the American sample of roughly 4,600 students across 144 schools fell short of PISA’s response-rate targets, making it impossible to rule out bias in the U.S. scores or determine its likely direction. Only Albania received a similar warning this year.
More than 40 percent of U.S. students who took the test did not complete an accompanying questionnaire, which kept researchers from breaking out the results by race and family income, two factors that are central to understanding academic disparities in the U.S.
The missing data coincided with a monthlong pause in PISA-related work at the Department of Education last spring, after the Trump administration cut staff and contracts at the department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.
AI, Phones and Distracted Classrooms
More than one in four students said their classmates are distracted by digital devices in most or every science lesson. Moderate use of devices for learning at school tracked with stronger science scores. Leisure use during the school day did the opposite, correlating with sharply lower performance.
This was the first PISA cycle to dig into how students use artificial intelligence for schoolwork. Students who used AI chatbots to help them learn scored higher, on average, than those who never used AI that way. Heavier reliance on AI to draft assignments went the other direction, corresponding with lower scores. Researchers framed the split as a matter of use, not exposure: how a student deploys the tool mattered more than whether they touched it at all.
Bullying tracked closely with lower scores, too. Students who reported being threatened by classmates or having embarrassing information shared about them online without consent scored dozens of points lower on average than peers who had not. Only a small share of students reported those experiences happening regularly.
Not every trend was downward. Costa Rica, Slovakia, Türkiye and the United Kingdom posted rising OECD science scores, and a dozen non-OECD countries, including Saudi Arabia, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, notched gains of their own. Türkiye's science score climbed nearly 70 points in a decade, equivalent to more than three years of learning.
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