SIIA Statement on the 2025 PISA Results

The following statement from the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) can be attributed to Sara Kloek, Vice President of Education and Youth Policy.

Today's release of the 2025 Program for International Student Assessment makes one thing clear: there is more work to do. American students still outperform most of their OECD peers, but that is little comfort when the United States now shows the widest gap between its highest- and lowest-performing readers of any country that took the exam. Our strongest students are thriving; our struggling students are being left behind.

The reading results are why states across the country have spent recent years rewriting their reading standards and grounding literacy instruction in evidence. What we teach, and how we teach it, shows up in outcomes years later. That should be the central lesson policymakers take from these numbers - not a simpler, more convenient one.

Some will read this data as an indictment of technology itself. The evidence points somewhere far more specific. One in three students used AI to draft their writing for them - and that use tracks with lower reading scores, not higher ones. Pair that with the exam's rise in "hasty readers," who skim and answer fast and wrong, and a pattern emerges: commercial tools that let students skip the hard work of thinking produce students who can't do the hard work of thinking. That is the opposite of what purpose-built educational technology is built to do. A tool designed to help a teacher build fluency and stamina is not the same as an app that writes the essay, and policy that treats them as one thing will get the diagnosis exactly backward.

It is also why a blunt screen ban is the wrong response. U.S. math performance held steady in part because purpose-built digital tools help students practice and master computational skills. Sweep those away with a blanket ban, and the most likely casualty is the very computational performance we should be protecting. The answer is not fewer screens; it is the right tools, vetted, overseen by educators, and proven to help students learn - while limiting the commercial apps that reinforce shallow processing.

SIIA looks forward to working with educators, states, and families to close these gaps with evidence-based tools that strengthen deep learning, support teachers, and give every student - not just the highest achievers - what they need to succeed.