I read the following on LinkedIn this morning.

Let this be our collective call to action - to reduce tech in classrooms and have classroom instruction center on texts. (Molly Ness, PhD)

Alarming new data shows U.S. students continue to fall behind their peers in reading as the country's achievement gap widens, according to results from the latest globally recognized international exam.

As usual the US and the UK will continue barking up the wrong tree.  

Let’s not blame technology first. U.S. reading scores have been weak for a long time — the slide started well before phones and social media became the convenient culprit. NAEP and other data already showed a “reading recession” years before COVID, and PISA 2025 simply continues that pattern: U.S. 15-year-olds dropped 14 points in reading from 2022 and are near a 25-year low, even though they still sit above the OECD average.

Comparisons also need more care. China’s high reading scores are not in English; students are assessed in Chinese. Singapore, by contrast, sits at the top of PISA reading (535 in 2025, after 543 in 2022) while testing in English. That is the comparison that matters.

The question worth asking is why Singapore stays No. 1. My working hypothesis, based on years of teaching so-called dyslexic children and on Singapore’s own figures, is this: Singapore identifies struggling readers early (by the end of Grade 1), brings most of them back to grade level, and keeps them in the talent pool. Official data put reported dyslexia at about 3.5% of Primary 3 pupils — within a 3–10% international range. In the U.S., U.K., Australia and similar systems, 10–20% of children are routinely labelled dyslexic. Many of those children are not dyslexic in any deep neurological sense. They are intelligent “shutdown” kids who disengaged after confusing early instruction (wrong letter sounds, late intervention). They then sit in class as functional illiterates while Singapore’s rescued readers take the PISA exam.

Singapore’s early, systematic foundation work widens the pool of students who can actually read well at 15. That is a more plausible explanation for the persistent gap than screens, pandemic disruption, or “kids these days.”

Details and earlier PISA posts are here: https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2023/12/hypothesis-why-singapore-consistently_16.html