> Our PISA reading scores were worse than Canada, Ireland, Estonia, and the rich Asian countries, but higher than everyone else in Europe.

Wrong.

In the article, the nearest link that was supposed to prove that claim points to a blog post that uses the 2019 PISA data. And in that post, there's not just Ireland and Estonia in Europe that do better than USA, but also Finland, Poland and Sweden. US-Americans have a reputation of knowing little of the world geography, maybe that's why these countries were forgotten ;-)

The article also has a link to a blog about 2021 PISA data, but with a very limited sample: e.g. Estonia is missing. And Poland still does better than the USA.