BERLIN — German education officials faced a conundrum this year all too familiar in the United States: Student test scores had been sliding for more than a decade, fueling calls for sweeping reforms.
One prominent education leader from Hamburg, arguing for reforms, recently described the country’s learning trajectory as an “inverted smiley face” with gains in the early 2000s followed by a decade of decline that began before the pandemic. The test scores of American students have followed much the same path, as have those of their peers across much of the world.
The nearly worldwide slide suggests the problem extends beyond America’s debates over reading instruction and take-home laptops, making the search for answers more urgent.
Looking abroad at other education systems can help identify practices that reliably improve learning, according to experts who study education through a global lens. Countries defying the global decline in achievement show that even with challenges like smartphones, students can improve.
The world’s highest-performing school systems share several traits, according to Montserrat Gomendio, the former education lead at the organization that administers the PISA international student assessments. Countries such as Singapore and South Korea emphasize knowledge-building, hold students to high expectations, and place a premium on teacher quality.
“You only allow students who are top performers,” Gomendio said, “to study education.”
As students return to school in the United States and Germany this fall, education leaders in both countries have sought lessons internally from places that had long struggled academically but recently made significant gains.
In Massachusetts, leaders looked to Mississippi and Louisiana as they overhauled the state’s reading instruction. That could result in the improvements Gomendio recommends, at least in English classes. Germany turned to to Hamburg, the diverse city-state near the North Sea which had become one of the country’s highest-scoring states.
Officials here are pushing beyond incremental reforms. In a significant cultural shift, Germany is moving away from its long tradition of “halbtagsschule,” or half-day schools.
That means as first-graders start school his month, they will for the first time all be able to attend school all-day. It was a reform Hamburg previously implemented in part to address inequities visible at an early age.
The afternoon session is optional because its purpose is to help more mothers work, not improve education.
And as the Trump administration has sought to reduce the federal role in education, Germany has gone in the opposite direction. Earlier this year, the country’s states, which have autonomy over schooling, agreed on a nationwide plan modeled on Hamburg’s success. Details are still being finalized, but the plan includes tracking more data, such as standardized tests, student surveys, and teacher observations.
That contrast between the United States and Germany was evident last week with the release of the latest international PISA test results. Fifteen-year-olds in both countries scored at their lowest levels ever in reading and math.
In response, German state officials doubled down on a national push to improve education.
“We will discuss the recommended measures in depth at the Conference of Ministers of Education,” said Bavarian state Education Minister Anna Stolz at a news conference. “We will continue to advance the initiatives we have already launched.”
American Education Secretary Linda McMahon, however, drew the opposite conclusion in a statement criticizing the “one-size-fits-all federal education bureaucracy.”
Like the United States, Germany began the 21st century in a frenzy of education reform. While President George W. Bush pushed for the No Child Left Behind Act to create more federal oversight over education, German leaders grappled with the “PISA Shock,” the revelation in the first international PISA assessment that their students’ test scores were below average.
As a result, Germany created its first national education guidelines and a research institute, the IQB, which ran a new national system of tests.
“IQB was founded to improve the German education system because our results were quite poor — well below average,” said Pauline Schröter, the institute’s spokesperson.
Many blamed Germany’s educational decline on its intensive tracking system. The country splits students into different career paths after primary school.
Germany is not as racially or economically segregated as the United States, but its tracking system divided students by family wealth just as sharply, said sociologist Heike Solga. To address the issue and falling enrollment, many regions reduced the number of tracks and sought to create more flexibility.
At first, the new focus seemed to be paying off. From 2000 and 2015, German scores on the PISA reading test rose from 483 points — below the average score of 500 — to 509.
But despite continued reforms, Germany’s gains peaked more than a decade ago. Students scored 465 in reading in 2025, their lowest level ever, erasing all gains. In math, where they were long above average, they were now scoring far below.
In both countries, according to various tests, the pandemic further accelerated declines and exposed gaps. American 15-year-olds’ achievement has not declined as sharply on the PISA tests, but other assessments including the Nation’s Report Card have documented sharp slides among younger students.
But where the US has seen a backlash to Chromebooks and other classroom screens, German politicians continue to worry about unequal access to computers. Germany is doubling down on standardized tests, while US states from Massachusetts to Mississippi have recently moved away from them.
In other areas, Germany is adopting practices that have long existed elsewhere. The plan the German states agreed to earlier this year emphasizes data monitoring that is commonplace in the United States. Student attendance information, for example, is not collected universally in Germany.
Similarly, there’s growing interest in making kindergarten more academic, and the plan also recommends studying American schools’ practices to improve student mental health.
Germany and the United have made some similar reforms, including increasing education spending in recent years. And some theories for declining test scores are shared: Both countries have struggled to educate large immigrant populations and growing numbers of students with disabilities.
But changing demographics can only explain part of the trend because the scores of all student groups have declined, said Josefine Lühe, the scientific coordinator of a major annual education report.
The real culprit, according to many observers, is social media and smartphones. Social media bans for young people are popular with politicians, if not with courts, on both sides of the Atlantic. And prohibiting cellphones has become a prescription for academic problems across the globe.
But students in the world’s best school systems have smartphones. And Nat Malkus, an education policy scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who has analyzed international achievement trends, notes that declines in student performance began as early as 2013, when very few children had their own smartphones.
Policymakers need to be mindful of that timeline, Malkus said, to avoid putting too much emphasis on the wrong interventions.
“We could successfully manufacture a shift on tech,” Malkus said, “and still be like, ‘Well, that didn’t fix it. ... We just made our big push, and we missed.’”
Christopher Huffaker can be reached at christopher.huffaker@globe.com. Follow him @huffakingit.