Math Scores Dropped Globally, but the U.S. Still Trails Other Countries

In a global exam for 15-year-olds, only a handful of places, including Singapore, Japan and Australia, kept math performance high through the pandemic.

The math performance of U.S. teenagers has sharply declined since 2018, with scores lower than 20 years ago, and with American students continuing to trail global competitors, according to the results of a key international exam released on Tuesday.

In the first comparable global results since the coronavirus pandemic, 15-year-olds in the United States scored below students in similar industrialized democracies like the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany, and well behind students in the highest-performing countries such as Singapore, South Korea and Estonia — continuing an underperformance in math that predated the pandemic.

The bleak math results were offset by a stronger performance in reading and science, where the United States scored above average internationally.

About 66 percent of U.S. students performed at least at a basic level in math, compared with about 80 percent in reading and science, according to the exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/us/math-scores-pandemic-pisa.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FU0.gdCH.yjbq4RSm6pyN&hpgrp=c-abar&smid=url-share