U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro speaks during a press conference at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, Sept. 9, 2026, in Washington. (Finn Gomez/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro vented frustration at reporters on Wednesday as she repeatedly refused to answer questions about a topic that has landed her in hot water with President Donald Trump: his demands that she revisit the now-dismissed Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool vandalism case against former Olympian David Hearn.
In a news conference involving an unrelated crackdown targeting Chinese scam centers, Pirro interrupted reporters in at least three exchanges as soon as they mentioned Hearn’s case.
Asked by ABC News if she plans to revisit the Reflecting Pool case against Hearn per Trump’s request, Pirro interrupted: “Ah — why did I know that was coming?”
“President Trump has made clear that this is very important to him,” ABC News responded.
“And you know the president has the right to decide what he wants to do and what is important,” Pirro replied.
When another reporter later followed up and attempted to ask about Hearn’s case, Pirro again interrupted, “No, I’m not going there! Don’t even go there.”
At one point, after a reporter made another final attempt, Pirro yelled, “No! No and no! … How many times do I have to say no?!”
Pirro’s news conference is the first since her surprise move to dismiss the felony indictment against Hearn in August. In a filing, Pirro admitted that damage to the Reflecting Pool was likely caused by “botched” installation and not by vandals.
The move prompted outrage from Trump, who said Pirro “choked” in her handling of the case, and later refused to rule out firing Pirro who he urged to “re-visit” the decision to charge Hearn.
“U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro should re-visit her hastily made decision [to dismiss Hearn’s indictment],” Trump wrote in an Aug. 7 post on social media.
The judge who previously oversaw Hearn’s case is currently weighing whether to dismiss the case “with prejudice,” which would effectively bar prosecutors from seeking another indictment against Hearn.
Hearn’s attorneys have said that Trump is still pushing a “false version” of the events around the Reflecting Pool, bolstering their argument that the government should be blocked from pursuing charges again.
Crew members look at an inflated escape device that extends from the side of the Boeing VC-25B “Bridge” Air Force One aircraft to the ground on Sept. 9, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — An inflatable slide deployed on President Donald Trump’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday afternoon before he was set to board it to head to the Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas, Texas.
Trump appeared to indicate that the emergency slide was deployed intentionally as he waited for about 20 minutes inside Marine One on the tarmac.
“They’re checking the slide over here. And I think it’s gonna take 15 minutes. They were doing a check on the slide, you know, the emergency — so I think it takes about 15 minutes,” Trump told reporters, before adding that it was safe to fly on.
Asked by ABC News why the slide was being checked and if there was a security concern, Trump said they just want to make sure it “works perfectly.” Slides are not typically checked by deploying them before departure as it is a time-consuming process to remove and replace them once they are deployed.
Asked if he was sure the plane was safe to fly, Trump said he was confident that it was.
“Yeah, I am, or I wouldn’t be on it,” Trump said.
The president is set to deliver the keynote address on Wednesday night at the Republicans’ first-ever midterm convention.
The White House referred back the president’s comments when asked about the slide’s deployment.
The slide was later pulled off of the plane and hauled away on the back of a pick-up truck before the plane took off for Dallas.
Trump’s old Air Force One pulled up behind the new jet as a back-up option.
The newly retrofitted Air Force One, a gift from the Qatari royal family worth $400 million, has raised questions from some lawmakers and ethics experts over the unprecedented foreign gift.
Earlier this year, Trump called the jet, which is approximately 14 years old, “the world’s most luxurious plane.” Trump told reporters in July that the plane was going to be “maxed out” — a process that would happen “in about a month or so” he said.
Also in July, Trump secretly switched planes — using a catering food truck and a military aircraft, sources told ABC News — while leaving a NATO summit in Turkey amid threats against him from Iran.
ABC News’ Sam Sweeney and Sarah Beth Hensley contributed to this report.
Aidan Keys is a fourth-year PhD student studying African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. (Courtesy Aidan Keys)
(NEW YORK) — At a time when Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts face local and federal backlash, some academics say that Black studies programs — several of which have been scaled back at colleges and universities across the nation — are more crucial than ever.
“The Trump administration has made clear to colleges and universities that they don’t want them doing anything that is race conscious. So, institutions are very cowardly defunding and eliminating these academic programs and departments that have enriched the campus for decades,” Dr. Shaun Harper, a professor at University of Southern California that specializes in racial equity, told ABC News.
According to Harper, President Donald Trump’s executive order in January 2025 targeting DEI initiatives in the private sector has fueled nationwide anti-DEI sentiment.
The executive order instructed the Departments of Justice and Education to investigate DEI programs at institutions of higher education.
Trump’s order doesn’t explicitly mention Black studies programs at colleges and universities, but it criticizes institutions of higher education that use “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences.”
Following his order, the Department of Education sent a letter to colleges and universities, notifying them that they will investigate and sever federal funding if they maintain DEI programs that the administration considers illegal.
“Many institutions haphazardly scrubbed their websites of everything related to race,” Harper said.
The politicization of DEI at the federal level has created a “trickle-down effect” at institutions where Black history and experiences have been undervalued, according to Harper.
‘We’re not going anywhere. We won’t be erased’
The University of Texas at Austin is one of the institutions that has consolidated their department this year.
Dr. Danielle Clealand, an associate professor at UT Austin that researches Black politics, told ABC News that there was “shock” among faculty and students when they were notified about the consolidation.
“We were the largest Black Studies department in the nation, so it was devastating,” she said.
“It hurts really bad. I really don’t like that I don’t have a department anymore,” Aidan Keys, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in African and African Diaspora Studies at UT Austin, told ABC News.
In a letter to the campus community obtained by ABC News, UT Austin President Jim Davis announced that the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies would merge into the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.
Other departments, such as Mexican American & Latina/o Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, were also brought under the single academic unit.
The university said it examined several factors to determine which programs should be merged like their size, student-to-faculty ratio and resource allocation.
“The University of Texas at Austin is committed to providing all of our students access to a world-class education,” Davis stated. “How we choose to organize ourselves and allocate the resources we steward impacts this important commitment.”
The announcement came after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s 2023 passage of SB 17, banning public colleges and universities from having DEI offices and offering training or hiring policies based on race, gender and sexual orientation.
A UT Austin spokesperson told ABC News that the bill didn’t apply to their curricula changes.
But Keys said that the university’s decision to merge Black Studies is still politically motivated.
“I think that the [Abbott] administration is trying their hardest to silence us and erase more leftist ideas from the campus,” she said.
According to Harper — the University of Southern California professor — recent cuts to Black studies programs appear to be more prevalent in institutions located in the U.S. Midwest and the South, based on his analysis.
“With the exception of historically Black colleges and universities, and perhaps a handful of other higher education institutions across the country, most predominantly white institutions have chronically failed to demonstrate their care for Black people,” he said.
While students at UT Austin can still major in Black studies, Indiana University Bloomington no longer offers a degree in African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS).
Instead, undergraduate and graduate students earn a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies with a subfield in AAADS.
“We are totally against it,” Professor Jakobi Williams, the chair of the AAADS department, told ABC News regarding the policy, adding that the department is advocating to reverse the degree title change.
“We’re not going anywhere. We won’t be erased,” he added.
The university’s decision to discontinue the AAADS major followed an Indiana state budget mandate — introduced by the Republican majority — requiring public institutions to graduate 15 students in a bachelor’s degree program, seven students in a master’s program and three students in a doctorate program over a three-year period to retain the degree.
Indiana University didn’t respond to ABC News’ request for comment on criticisms regarding the degree title change.
Williams explained that the AAADS department graduates about seven to 10 students annually across all degree programs.
‘What we do is so important’
Proponents of Black studies argue that the discipline is valuable because it encourages students to develop cultural knowledge.
“The nature of our discipline is to speak truth to power and train students and the public at large regarding issues like discrimination and socio-economic relations, especially in the larger African diaspora,” Williams said.
“Black Studies is experiencing a moment where we have to remind students why what we do is so important, not only to their academic experience but also to their training as citizens of this country,” Cleadland, the associate professor at UT Austin, explained.
Harper, the USC professor, said that reductions to these programs can produce significant consequences, especially for non-Black racial groups.
“If we have millions of college-educated white Americans who go into the world not knowing anything about any other population besides white people, they are going to make lots of costly, very embarrassing mistakes,” he said.
Harper also argued that Black studies and other disciplines have been challenged before, yet prevailed.
“Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Women’s Studies are incredibly resilient fields that have encountered politicized resistance,” he said. “We have seen and lived through this particular moment before, and those very important academic fields and disciplines survived.”
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event on the Ellipse near the White House on Sept. 8, 2026, in Washington, DC. (Finn Gomez/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump has escalated his economic pressure against Canada following its retaliatory tariffs against the U.S., issuing a series of proclamations Tuesday night to ban certain Canadian alcohol, dairy products and motorcycles from entering America, and imposing his 50% tariff on more goods.
The ban on the importation of some alcohol, dairy, motorcycles and mopeds would take effect on Sept. 29. at 12:01 a.m. ET.
“President Trump is doing this to make sure again that we keep a level playing field, deter retaliation, and of course protect American production,” a senior White House official told reporters.
The ban covers sparkling grape wine, malt beer, rice wine or sake, Irish and Scotch whiskies, and pisco and singani – as long as they are packaged. Other types of alcoholic beverages that are banned include tequila and mezcal if they are in containers under four liters.
The dairy now prohibited from entering the U.S. from Canada include multiple types of whey protein. Other products include cane molasses and non-alcoholic beer.
Additionally, Trump is subjecting an additional list of goods to his 50% tariffs, including golf carts and similar motor vehicles, cotton mattresses, bamboo and rattan furniture and additional types of aluminum and cheese products, according to the proclamation.
The president is, however, also removing several Canadian goods from the 50% tariffs, including non-white cement, toilet and face tissue, bed sheets and other household and hospital articles made of paper pulp, fishing rods and their accessories, chemically pure sugars and road salt.
The senior official defended the removal of these products from the tariff list saying Trump “has taken a lot more nuance when it comes to naturally occurring items or natural resources not available” in the U.S., pointing to the rock salts as an example.
“There’s a region of the country that relies on rock salt from Canada in those mines, and it’s not easily replaced,” the senior official said.
The updates to the list of goods being tariffed will go into effect in “one week,” the official said.
In another move in response to Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on Tuesday, Trump directed the U.S. General Services Administration and the U.S. Trade Representative to ban Canada from U.S. government procurement markets through which the government buys foreign goods.
“I am hereby directing the GSA, working with the USTR, to take all necessary steps to REMOVE Canadian-origin products from GSA’s Multiple Award Schedules unless Canada restores full and fair reciprocity for American Farmers and Companies,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Those schedules account for more than 50 BILLION DOLLARS a year.”
It’s unclear how long it would take to remove Canadian products from U.S. government purchasing contracts.
ABC News has reached out to the White House and the GSA for comment.
The senior official said Trump’s plans to impose 50% tariffs on Canadian autos on Jan. 1 remains, but that it’s possible the warring sides can reach an agreement.
“Whether we can find alternative resolutions at the table, I would say, I mean, yes, that’s always a possibility,” the senior official said. “I think there’s interest on the Canadian side in finding an alternative pathway, and as always, we remain– we remain open,” they later added.
In response to the latest move by the White House, Canadian Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc said Canada is assessing the measures.
“As has been the case for 18 months, our absolute priority remains to protect and support Canadian workers, farmers, families, and businesses in the face of these unjustified measures,” LeBlanc said in a statement.
“When the United States is ready to engage in dialogue, our government will work in good faith and constructively toward establishing safer and mutually beneficial trade relations that fully respect Canadian sovereignty,” the statement concluded.
Apple CEO John Ternus speaks during the keynote address at Apple’s “Surprise and Shine” event at the company’s corporate headquarters on Sept. 9, 2026, in Cupertino, California. (Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Apple held its annual product event on Wednesday as customers worldwide watched for fresh products as well as the debut of Apple CEO John Ternus.
Observers widely expect the company to unveil its first-ever foldable iPhone, marking Apple’s splashy entry into a long-existing product category. Foldable phones came onto the market in 2018, but they account for a small fraction of smartphone sales.
The product event, dubbed “Surprise and Shine,” kicked off in Cupertino, Calif., at 1 p.m. Eastern Time. It can be viewed on the company’s website.
The glossy showcase comes days after Ternus took the helm of the tech giant on Sept. 1, after having worked at the company for 25 years. Ternus replaced former CEO Tim Cook, who succeeded co-founder Steve Jobs in 2011.
The world’s second-largest company, as measured by market capitalization, depends largely on its smartphone business while offering an array of other products such as its iPad, Apple Watch and MacBook.
Shares of Apple have surged 22% in value over the past six months, far outpacing the S&P 500’s growth of 13% over that period.
The expected announcement of a foldable iPhone marks Apple’s latest effort to weigh in with a standout option in an existing product category, often at a higher price point.
In 2024, the company unveiled Apple Vision Pro, a mixed reality headset meant to compete with Meta Quest and other early-to-market offerings. At the time, the most affordable version of Apple Vision Pro sold for $3,499.
Apple also unveiled AI-driven features across several key products in 2024, heralding its long-awaited entry into the high-stakes AI race. The AI capability, dubbed Apple Intelligence, amounts to the “next big step for Apple,” Cook said at the time.
Apple released Apple Watch in 2014, referring to it then as the company’s latest “category-defining product.”
Exterior view of Plymouth Superior Court during Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial on Aug. 26, 2026, in Plymouth, Massachusetts. (Mel Musto/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Jurors in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy are speaking out after the 12-person group was unable to reach a unanimous verdict, triggering a mistrial in the high-profile case.
In an interview with NBC 10 Boston, which aired Tuesday, the jurors discussed their task of determining a verdict after a weekslong trial which centered around the events of Jan. 24, 2023, when Clancy was accused of strangling her 5-year-old daughter Cora, 3-year-old son Dawson and infant son Callan at the family’s home in Duxbury, a Boston suburb.
Clancy and her attorney, Kevin Reddington, argued that she killed her three children but should not be held criminally responsible for their deaths, because she was experiencing postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings.
Prosecutors argued that Clancy was criminally responsible for the children’s deaths and was capable of understanding the severity of her actions.
Throughout Clancy’s trial, much of the testimony centered on whether or not Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she strangled her children and attempted to take her own life.
“We weren’t trying to figure out if she murdered the children. She did,” said foreperson Roni Carlson. “We’re trying to figure out, ‘Did she know right from wrong at that time?'”
“With everybody saying she loved her children so much, and everything proved she loved her children … she had to have snapped,” Carlson added.
Jury deliberations spanned seven days, eventually yielding an 11-1 split in favor of not guilty by reason of insanity, but the final juror would not relinquish his position in favor of conviction, according to the jurors who spoke out publicly.
“He was very arrogant, he really did not take anything that anybody said,” said Paula Devlin, another juror.
The judge overseeing the trial, Judge William Sullivan, sought to emphasize to jurors during deliberations that it was their duty to determine whether prosecutors had successfully proven Clancy’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard prosecutors must surpass in order to secure a conviction in a criminal case. Sullivan repeated that instruction to the jury multiple times across the seven-day span, but it had little to no impact on the holdout juror, Carlson said.
Carlson alleges that at one point, the holdout juror admitted to having reasonable doubt about Clancy’s guilt but would not change his mind.
“He admitted he had reasonable doubt,” Carlson said. “I started filling out the forms, I was so excited … and then he said, ‘But I’m still not gonna say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.'”
Jurors also opened up about the significant impact the evidence in the case had on them, specifically the gut-wrenching 911 call made by Clancy’s then-husband Patrick Clancy, who found his wife after her suicide attempt and discovered his three children in the basement of the home the day of the killings.
“It’s something that I will never not hear, if I think about it,” juror Kellie Farina said. “It was the most horrific thing.”
The jurors also touched on their feelings about each side’s legal representation.
“I just found it to be harsh,” Farina said of the prosecution’s case.
The jurors said they found defense attorney Kevin Reddington both “entertaining” and “arrogant.”
Reddington told ABC News in an interview this week that he could understand why there was so much passion around this case.
“You’ve got three dead children,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of lightning rod emotion on both sides, unbelievable emotion on both sides.”
Reddington ultimately said he believes Clancy should have been acquitted.
“She deserved an acquittal, not because of me, but because the evidence that was there or not there,” he said.
Investigators continue work to determine what caused the crash of an Amazon cargo plane at Miami International Airport on September 07, 2026 in Miami, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — The National Transportation Safety Board expects to interview the two pilots who were in the cockpit of an Amazon Air cargo plane that overran a runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday, crashing into a van and leaving five people dead.
At a press briefing Tuesday night, NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said investigators have recovered the cockpit voice recorders, which she said contains two hours of good-quality audio, and the flight data recorder, which she said contains 55 hours’ worth of data.
Investigators have already combed through some of the data, which indicated that the plane was coming in for landing, but that several seconds before the recording ends, throttles increased consistent with a “go-around thrust,” NTSB investigator Chihoon Shin said. A few seconds later, brakes were reapplied and continued to be applied until the end of the recording, but there was no indication that speed brakes or thrust reversers were deployed, he said.
Homendy said the NSTB expected to release a readout of the voice recorder on Wednesday after the pilots had been interviewed.
The cargo plane, Amazon Air Flight 7598 arriving from Puerto Rico, was carrying about 32,000 pounds of mostly contact lenses, Homendy said.
When it overran the runway, the plane hit a Ford Econoline van owned by a company that cleans aircraft, with seven people inside.
The five people who were killed were identified by the Miami-Dade County Sheriff’s Office as: Rolando Aleman Leon, 55; Yoel Rodriguez Narajo, 53; Julio C. Pineda, 75; Carlos Acosta Fajardo, 53; and Javierkys Reyes Quevedo, 47.
The aircraft’s two pilots were treated and have been released from the hospital, according to the sheriff’s office.
The sprawling BP refinery is shown on Sept. 8, 2026, in Whiting, Indiana. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
(LONDON) — The global price of oil topped $100 a barrel on Wednesday for the first time since July, as continued tensions between Iran and the United States added to uncertainty over future supply.
The rise followed a statement on Tuesday by U.S. Central Command, which said that its forces destroyed five Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps oil tankers.
The IRGC followed those strikes by issuing a warning that all oil tankers in Kuwaiti and Bahrani waters should be evacuated.
Brent crude oil prices, a benchmark for global trading, climbed about 2.7%, trading at about $100.57 a barrel for contracts with November deliveries.
U.S. oil traded at about $95 a barrel, up by about 2%.
A large-scale U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran in late February prompted Iran’s near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which facilitates one-fifth of global crude supply.
The ensuing war set off the largest oil supply disruption on record and prompted the release of hundreds of millions of barrels of reserve crude from emergency storage in dozens of countries. A six-month stretch of on-again, off-again fighting has continued to choke off oil supply and keep prices elevated.
Oil prices account for a large share of the price of gasoline. The average price of a gallon of gas in the U.S. currently registers at $4.22, according to AAA, marking a 41% jump since the war broke out.
Diesel prices in the U.S. hit a new record high on Wednesday, jumping to an average of $5.94 a gallon, AAA data showed. High diesel prices push up transport costs for many everyday products, including groceries, clothes and furniture.
(WASHINGTON) — A federal appeals court in Louisiana could decide whether patients in the U.S. can continue to access the abortion drug mifepristone by mail and at pharmacies.
The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans began hearing oral arguments on Wednesday as Louisiana attempts to roll back a Biden-era policy around the way mifepristone is dispensed.
In January 2023, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it was permanently lifting its restriction that mifepristone had to be dispensed in person, allowing certified retail and mail-order pharmacies to dispense the medication as well.
Louisiana, however, has argued that government regulators acted arbitrarily without proper consideration of health risks. The state has also argued the rule change violated the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned Roe v. Wade by allowing abortion pills to be administered by telehealth and by mail in states with abortion bans, including Louisiana.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the state in May, barring dispensation of mifepristone by telehealth providers and by pharmacies or mail, but the Supreme Court preserved access to the pill, keeping the lower court’s order on hold.
The Center for Reproductive Rights said in a press release the case will likely go back to the Supreme Court for a final ruling until it’s “decided on the merits.”
Abortion rights groups have argued that reinstating an in-person requirement would create a barrier for pregnant patients, many of whom live far from a clinic.
“This case isn’t just about Louisiana — it could make it much harder to get abortion pills in every state, from New York to California,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. “Abortion pills and telehealth have been a game-changer for women since Roe v. Wade was overturned, and that is exactly why the anti-abortion movement is going after them.”
She went on, “This is not simply about convenience — for many people, telehealth could be the difference between getting an abortion and not. Whether a doctor sends it to you via mail or hands it to you in their office, mifepristone is safe and effective. There is no scientific reason to restrict it.”
The court date comes two years after the Supreme Court unanimously rejected a similar legal challenge to mifepristone, concluding that the doctors and anti-abortion groups who sued over the drug did not have standing.
Mifepristone is a drug typically used in combination with another drug, misoprostol, to induce an abortion or to help manage an early miscarriage.
The medication works by blocking progesterone, a hormone that the body needs to continue a pregnancy.
This causes the uterine lining to stop thickening and to break down, detaching the embryo. The second drug, misoprostol, taken 24 to 48 hours later, causes the uterus to contract and dilates the cervix, which will expel the embryo.
The FDA authorized mifepristone for medication abortion in September 2000 for up to seven weeks’ gestation, which was then extended to 10 weeks’ gestation in 2016.
However, the World Health Organization says the two drug-regimen can be taken up until the 12-week mark of pregnancy.
Medication abortion now accounts for more than 60% of all abortions in the U.S., according to the Guttmacher Institute.
In states with total bans, about 91,000 abortions were provided last year via telehealth, the Guttmacher Institute said.
(WASHINGTON) — New data shows U.S. students continue to fall behind their peers in reading as the country’s achievement gap widens, according to results from the latest globally recognized international exam.
The 2025 Program for International Assessment, or PISA, found that 15-year-old U.S. students’ reading scores fell 14 points from the last time the test was administered, in 2022. The assessment also found that the achievement gap among U.S. readers in the 90th percentile and the 10th percentile was the largest among any other country included in the report.
The results come as reading scores among U.S. fourth and eighth grade students worsened in 2024, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, dubbed the nation’s report card. The recent plunge has renewed the conversation around the literacy crisis gripping the nation’s education system and the debate over COVID-19 school closures.
The Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, or NCES, which administers both tests to American students, releases the PISA results every three years.
Acting NCES Commissioner Matthew Soldner noted in a press release Tuesday that the performance gap between higher and lower end U.S. students is larger today than it was 10 years ago.
Combined with the NAEP — the largest assessment of U.S. students’ performance in public and private schools across all 50 states and the District of Columbia — Kevin Huffman, CEO of education nonprofit Accelerate, told ABC News the PISA results are troubling.
“People should have been concerned for a while about the direction of scores for older kids in this country,” Huffman said.
The international education scores confirm a “decade of stagnation and a devastating gap” for American students, according to Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
“This moment is a stress test for our nation’s future,” McMahon wrote in a statement. “To pass it, we must enact a hard reset that stops protecting a failed status quo and instead builds a system that empowers state leaders and embraces innovative learning options through school choice.”
PISA — which is organized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD — is the industry standard for ranking students from different countries, according to education experts. More than 700,000 students in roughly 90 education systems worldwide, including more than 30 developed nations in the OECD, participated in 2025.
Huffman, the former Tennessee education commissioner, stressed that the gap for the highest and lowest performing students from the assessments was exacerbated by the interrupted instructional period most U.S. students experienced amid the COVID-19 pandemic. He suggested that the disturbing trend in American education will worsen without accountability at the state level.
“I do worry about the idea that if top performing kids do OK, it decreases the urgency among a group of people who otherwise might be pushing to improve educational performance for all kids,” Huffman said.
Despite the sobering data, U.S. average scores in reading and science were higher than the OECD average in those subjects, according to the PISA results.
According to NCES, only Singapore and parts of China scored higher averages that were “significantly different” than the U.S. in both of those subjects.
The U.S. ranked 13th overall in reading and science but fell outside the top 25 in math (27th). There was no significant change in scores for science and math from 2022 and 2015, which is how PISA calculates short-term and long-term trends.
