What Is True And What Is False About Literacy?

Jared Henderson has a thoughtful Substack post about literacy statistics and the "literacy crisis." Many statistics thrown around in the public square about this issue are misleading or ill-sourced. 

Henderson spends a lot of time revisiting his prior commentary on the issue, acknowledging that some of what he said previously was probably wrong or overstated, and sourcing the common misleading statistics. I'll skip that here.

The most essential point is that there are different levels of literacy and commonly cited statistics on point frequently don't disclose what level of literacy they are talking about. They also often cite statistics about literacy in the English language, which is appropriate for many purposes, but neglect to mention that many people in the U.S. who are not literate in English are literate in another language.

"Could not participate" is a mix of non-English language speakers, and people who have physical or cognitive disabilities too serve to interview, two very distinct populations.

Level 1 is minimal basic literacy, and about 8.1% of adults in the U.S. either could not participate in the survey or can't attain this basic level of literacy, although even some people below Level 1 literacy might be able to read a simple story to their children, recite the alphabet, or read a street sign. Many people with Level 1 literacy would struggle to graduate from high school at all.

Level 2 is the literacy level of typical non-college bound high school graduates.

Level 3 is the literacy level of a college bound high school graduate and about 57.5% of Americans have that level of literacy (other sources have put this figure as low as 46%).

Levels 4 and 5 are the literacy levels, roughly speaking, of above average college graduates and people who have graduate degrees.

An OECD report puts the United States in the middle of developed countries for literacy levels:

The United States does have a very high level of disparity between the 90th percentile and the 10th percentile in literacy (and numeracy and problem solving) compared to other developed countries, which is to say crudely that we have very literate smart people and very illiterate dumb people (using the same scale as the mean literacy levels in the chart above).

Prior to COVID, the U.S. was seeing a very gradual trend of improvement in reading and math among school children, but it took a dip (hopefully temporary and due to disrupted educational programs) in the year 2020 from which it had not yet recovered in the most recent available data.

The author describes as a separate matter the decline in the extent to which adults who used demographically used to read books do so now, but attributes this to a disinclination to read rather than a decline in the ability to read long form books. But he makes a point of distinguishing this issue from adult literacy from childhood literacy, each of which are distinct issues with distinct workable responses.