PISA, the international program that measures 15- and 16-year-olds’ academic performance, released its 2025 data last week.
The results are, in a word, terrible.
The PISA tests of math, reading, and science are normally administered every three years, with the 2021 assessment was pushed to 2022. Between 2018 and 2022, no one was particularly surprised that test scores went down. Students were barely out of pandemic lockdowns; in many countries online school went on for more than a year, with learning losses as a result.
The 2025 data gives us our first true look at academic performance in the post-pandemic era when students had been back at in-person school for several years. Given that, one might expect that test scores would rebound, perhaps to 2018 levels.
Not only did that not happen, but scores were even lower in 2025 than in 2022, especially in the core subjects of math and reading (see Figure 1 for the trend worldwide; this is based on my analysis of the publicly available raw data). And, as I’ve reported previously, the decline in test scores began well before the COVID-19 pandemic, starting around 2012 (that familiar year when teen mental health also began to suffer).
