Covid shutdowns, grade inflation and now AI are degrading the quality of American education.
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have been matched by an astonishing decline in student learning. More evidence arrived last week from the Program for International Student Assessment, which measures skills of 15-year-olds around the world every three to four years.
Between 2018 and 2025, reading performance fell in some three-fourths of countries. U.S. math and reading scores fell by the equivalent of three-quarters of a year of learning and trailed China, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, the U.K., Canada and Australia.
“Most troubling is the decline in the very skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources, and thinking critically about what we read,” the report notes. “The instances of ‘hasty reading’—in which students read quickly but inaccurately—nearly doubled to 9% between 2018 and 2025.”
Adults may be equally guilty of hasty reading, judging by emails that this writer receives. Could Pavlovian ping alerts be fueling a collective attention deficit disorder?
