Asia’s Teens Pull Ahead as AI Reshapes the Classroom
2 min readAsian teenagers extended their lead over Western peers in the 2025 PISA rankings released this week, even as reading, science and math scores slid almost everywhere else. The sharpest warning in the report is not about the scoreboard. It is about which skills are eroding exactly when AI makes them most valuable.
What PISA Measures
The Programme for International Student Assessment, run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, tests 15-year-olds on reading, science and math. It is the closest thing school systems have to a shared global benchmark. This round’s top performers clustered in Asia: the Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai, the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and Singapore, with Japan, South Korea, Macao and Taiwan also in the Asia-dominated top 10 across all three subjects.
What the Results Show
American secondary students saw reading scores fall close to 25-year lows. Across OECD countries the share of students below a basic level of aptitude rose to 20 percent, up from 16 percent in 2022, and the proportion of hasty readers, meaning students who rush a text and answer it wrong, nearly doubled between 2018 and 2025.
Classroom habits track the gap. Fewer than 10 percent of students in China, Japan and South Korea said their peers were distracted by devices during science lessons, against a global average of 28 percent. The report singles out Singapore for using technology in class while still drilling reading comprehension early. One caveat travels with every PISA cycle: China submits scores only from four wealthy eastern jurisdictions, which critics say flatters the result.
Why It Matters
Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s education director, wrote that the decline hits the very skills that matter most in the AI age, naming the ability to evaluate information, connect multiple sources and read critically. Those are precisely the abilities a person needs to supervise a machine that writes fluently and is sometimes wrong.
The stakes are economic as well as educational. The report cites a Stanford study estimating that lifting every American 15-year-old to baseline aptitude would add more than 40 trillion dollars to the US economy over their working lives. It lands in the middle of a US and China race for technological advantage in which both countries passed one trillion dollars in research spending in 2024.
The talent pipeline is now part of the AI competition. Watch whether Western systems respond by restricting devices, rebuilding reading instruction, or both.