Teenagers Are Falling Behind in School. The Problem Is Bigger Than Covid.

Test scores have fallen sharply across much of the developed world, but the decline began before the pandemic. The deeper challenge may be how students learn, how schools teach, and how technology is changing attention.

Something unusual is happening in classrooms across the developed world. Teenagers are struggling more with mathematics and reading, and the decline isn’t confined to one country or one education system. The latest international evidence suggests the problem is much bigger than a temporary disruption caused by the pandemic.

The OECD’s PISA assessments show that average performance across OECD countries fell by almost 15 points in mathematics and about 10 points in reading between 2018 and 2022 — a decline unprecedented in the history of the assessment. But Covid-19 can’t explain all of it. The deterioration in reading and science had already begun years earlier, and some countries managed to protect or even improve student performance despite the disruptions of the pandemic. That raises a more uncomfortable question: what has actually changed about the way teenagers learn?

Covid Was a Shock. It Wasn’t the Whole Story

School closures clearly disrupted education. Millions of students spent extended periods away from classrooms, teachers, and classmates, and for younger students in particular, interruptions during formative years may have opened gaps that proved hard to close. The scale of the 2018-to-2022 decline shows the pandemic mattered.

But the longer trend tells a different story. Reading and science performance had already been slipping before Covid, and mathematics had begun weakening in a number of education systems well before school buildings closed. In other words, the pandemic seems to have accelerated an existing problem rather than created one from scratch — which matters, because getting students back into classrooms can’t, by itself, fix a problem that predates the classrooms being closed.

The Attention Problem

One of the most obvious changes in teenagers’ lives has little to do with school policy at all: the smartphone. Young people now live inside a constant stream of notifications, short-form content, social media, and competing information — and learning, unfortunately, requires sustained attention, which is exactly what that environment is built to interrupt.

PISA data offers some evidence of the tension. Across OECD countries, 65 percent of students reported being distracted by digital devices in at least some mathematics lessons, and nearly six in ten said their attention was pulled away because other students were on their devices. The relationship isn’t simply “technology is bad” — students who use digital tools appropriately for learning can do well.

The problem grows more pronounced when devices become primarily sources of entertainment, messaging, or distraction. Students who reported frequent distraction from digital devices in math class scored about 15 points lower than those who reported almost none, even after accounting for socioeconomic factors.

The lesson isn’t that schools should reject technology. It’s that technology has to serve learning rather than compete with it.

AI Makes the Question Even More Complicated

The smartphone changed attention. Artificial intelligence could change something even more fundamental: how much thinking students actually do themselves. AI systems can summarize a chapter, generate an essay, explain an equation, or produce an answer almost instantly, and that can genuinely be useful. But there’s a real difference between using technology to understand something and using it to avoid understanding it.

If a student asks an AI system to explain a difficult concept and then works through the problem independently, the technology becomes a learning tool. If the student just asks the system to complete the assignment outright, the immediate result may look fine while the underlying learning never actually happens. That’s a new kind of challenge for schools — the goal can’t simply be to stop students from using AI. Schools increasingly need to teach students how to use it without outsourcing their thinking to it.

Knowledge Still Matters

There’s been a long-running debate over how schools should teach. Should students memorize facts or focus on problem-solving? Should classrooms emphasize traditional subjects or project-based learning? Should technology replace conventional teaching methods?

The evidence suggests this is a false choice. Students need both knowledge and the ability to use it. A teenager can’t reason effectively about a scientific problem without understanding the basic science behind it, and mathematical problem-solving gets much easier once fundamental concepts and operations are already second nature.

Knowledge is the raw material reasoning is built from. That doesn’t mean education should retreat to rote memorization — it means foundational knowledge shouldn’t be treated as obsolete just because information happens to be a search away.

Teachers Still Matter

Technology hasn’t eliminated one of the oldest ingredients in education: a good teacher. PISA data shows a strong relationship between teacher support and mathematics performance — students who reported good access to teacher help scored higher on average and were also more confident learning independently.

That matters especially after periods of disruption. Students who fall behind don’t necessarily need more information; they often need someone who can pinpoint exactly what they misunderstand, explain it a different way, and keep them engaged long enough to actually master it. An algorithm can hand over an answer. A teacher can recognize why the student needed that answer in the first place.

Some Countries Are Showing That Decline Is Not Inevitable

The international results matter partly because not every education system moved in the same direction. Singapore remained among the highest-performing systems in mathematics, reading, and science in PISA 2022, and Estonia and several East Asian systems also performed strongly.

That doesn’t prove any single education philosophy holds the answer — systems differ enormously in culture, inequality, teacher training, curriculum, and family circumstances. But the international variation does undercut the idea that falling scores are simply an unavoidable consequence of modern life. If some systems can maintain stronger outcomes while others decline sharply, policy and educational practice clearly matter.

The Home Matters Too

Schools are only one part of a teenager’s educational environment. Parents’ education, involvement, and expectations shape how students approach learning, as do the language spoken at home, economic circumstances, and the amount of support available outside school. That makes educational decline particularly hard to solve — a school can improve its teaching, but it can’t fully compensate for every disadvantage a student carries in from outside the classroom. That’s not an excuse for poor performance; if anything, it’s an argument for earlier intervention.

Immigration Is Not a Simple Explanation

Declining scores have also fueled arguments that immigration is responsible for weaker educational performance. The evidence is more complicated than that. Immigrant students can face real disadvantages, including socioeconomic hardship or taking assessments in a language different from the one spoken at home. But the broader decline can’t be pinned on immigration alone, since non-immigrant students have also seen significant declines across many OECD countries. The international data points toward a wider problem affecting education systems as a whole, not one demographic group within them.

The Bigger Problem May Be Attention

Perhaps the most important question isn’t whether teenagers are becoming less intelligent — there’s little reason to draw that conclusion from falling test scores. The more plausible concern is whether modern environments are making it harder for young people to concentrate, push through difficult tasks, and build knowledge over time.

Those abilities don’t develop automatically; they have to be practiced. Reading a long text requires attention. Solving a hard math problem requires persistence. Learning a foreign language requires repetition. Understanding science requires accumulating knowledge steadily, brick by brick. None of that produces the instant reward that dominates so much of the digital environment — which may be exactly why this is a problem no single curriculum change can fix on its own.

Schools May Need to Teach Attention Again

For decades, schools have focused mainly on what students should know. They may increasingly need to focus on how students pay attention. That could mean clearer phone policies, fewer digital distractions, more sustained reading and writing, stronger foundational instruction, and more deliberate use of technology. PISA data already suggests that limiting digital distractions can meaningfully affect classroom performance.

The goal shouldn’t be technology-free classrooms. It should be classrooms where technology is used on purpose rather than simply always present.

The Real Lesson From Falling Scores

The decline in student performance shouldn’t lead to nostalgia for some imaginary past when every classroom worked perfectly. Nor should it lead to the opposite conclusion — that traditional education is obsolete. The evidence points somewhere more balanced. Students need strong teachers. They need foundational knowledge. They need opportunities to practice difficult skills. They need technology that helps rather than distracts. And they need environments, at school and at home, that give sustained attention a real chance to develop.

The pandemic exposed how fragile learning can be. Smartphones have changed the environment where learning happens. Artificial intelligence is now changing how students can complete intellectual tasks in the first place. The challenge for education is making sure these technologies become tools for learning rather than substitutes for it.

Falling test scores aren’t proof that teenagers are becoming less capable. They’re a warning that the environment in which teenagers learn is changing faster than many education systems are adapting to it. And if schools want students to think better, they may first have to give them something that’s grown surprisingly hard to find: the time and attention to think at all.