Although the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is not well known in the United States, findings from this study offer valuable information on reading engagement and provide lessons for instruction and policy. In 2000, and again in 2003, thousands of American youth took part in an international assessment of reading literacy. Can you name the assessment? If the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) doesn't spring to mind, you're not alone. Few university and fewer public school educators in the United States know about this assessment. But they should. Did you know, for instance, that results of the PISA place white students in the United States second on the reading literacy scale among the 32 participating countries but that African American and Latino American students rank 25th? If we ever hope to institute the most effective curricular and policy reforms in our schools that close achievement gaps and produce wise, literate consumers and global citizens, we should be asking important questions about PISA. These include, What are the main characteristics of educational systems that produce uniformly high achievement? Which variables have the most significant impact on reading performance? This last question is taken up in this article. We begin by describing our roles in a special International Reading Association (IRA) task force charged with analyzing cross-na-tional literacy studies. This is followed by a description of PISA's global effort to assess reading literacy. We then fo-cus on the variable of engagement, de-scribed by PISA researchers (Kirsch et al., 2002) as the "student characteristic [that] has the largest correlation with achievement in reading literacy" (p. 124). Next, salient findings related to engagement from three English-speaking PISA countries, the United States, the United Kingdom (including England, Wales, Northern Irland, and Scotland), and the Republic of Ireland, are presented. (Unless otherwise stated, data are drawn from PISA 2000, in which reading literacy was the major assess-ment domain and received more emphasis than the other assessed domains—mathematics and science.) We conclude with a discussion of lessons about reading engagement, derived from findings common to our three nations, with implications for policy and practice.