How U.S. Students Perform in Reading and Math

Key Takeaways 

• Since the 1990s, only 3–4% of students have achieved advanced reading skills, such as synthesizing information with supporting evidence from related texts.
• Seven in ten students can determine the main idea using explicit text features but struggle to offer an opinion on the evidence an author uses to support a claim.
• Only 38% of students can easily solve problems using the Pythagorean Theorem.