Education Policy, Business and Technology

Global Reading Scores Are Rising, But Not for U.S. Students

Education Week: The good news from the latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study is that basic literacy is at an all-time high worldwide and a majority of countries have seen rising reading achievement in the last decade.

The bad news is that students in the United States are bucking the trend.

While U.S. 4th graders performed at an average score of 549, above the average of the 58 education systems participating in PIRLS in 2016, that score was 7 scale points lower than the last test in 2011—basically the same as they did in 2006.

PIRLS tests four different areas of literacy, and U.S. students performed significantly worse on tasks that called for them to read to find and use information than they did for “literary experience,” and they were less skilled at making “straightforward inferences” than at interpreting or evaluating texts.

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