After two decades of quiet erosion, New Zealand's schools have registered the first signs of recovery in science and mathematics — a modest but meaningful interruption of a long decline that had cost students the equivalent of years of learning. Yet reading, the foundational skill upon which so much else depends, has fallen to its lowest recorded point, with nearly a quarter of the country's fifteen-year-olds struggling to meet basic literacy thresholds. The results arrive shadowed by a sampling bias that may overstate the gains by ten to fifteen points, reminding us that progress in education