Across the world's classrooms, something quieter than a crisis but more persistent than a setback is unfolding: a generation of teenagers is leaving school less equipped than those who came before them. The PISA study, a global measure of fifteen-year-olds' abilities in reading, mathematics, and science, reveals declines broad enough to implicate not just schools but the homes and communities surrounding them. American students have reached a twenty-year low in reading — a skill that underlies all others — and the concurrent fall in parental engagement across many nations suggests that educati