Literacy in the United States

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Rates of literacy in the United States depend on which of the various definitions of literacy is used. Governments may label individuals who can read a couple of thousand simple words they learned by sight in the first four grades in school as literate; but the most comprehensive study of U.S. adult literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government argues that such adults are functionally illiterate--they cannot read well enough to hold a good job.^[1] A study by the Jenkins Group has shown that millions of Americans never read another book after leaving school.^[2][3] A five-year, $14 million study of U.S. adult literacy involving lengthy interviews of U.S. adults, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government,^[1] was released in September 1993. It involved lengthy interviews of over 26,700 adults statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in twelve states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."^[1]

The study detailed the percentages of U.S. adults who worked full-time, part-time, were unemployed, or who had given up looking for a job and were no longer in the work force. The study also reported the average hourly wages for those who were employed. These data were grouped by literacy level--how well the interviewees responded to material written in English--and indicated that 40 to 44 million of the 191 million U.S. adults (21 to 23 percent of them) in the least literate group earned a yearly average of $2105 and about 50 million adults (25 to 28 percent of them) in the next-least literate of the five literacy groups earned a yearly average of $5225 at a time when the U.S. Census Bureau considered the poverty level threshold for an individual to be $7363 per year.^[4]

A follow-up study by the same group of researchers using a smaller database (19,714 interviewees) was released in 2006 that showed no statistically significant improvement in U.S. adult literacy.^[5] These studies assert that 46 to 51 percent of U.S. adults read so poorly that they earn significantly below the threshold poverty level for an individual.

The World Fact Book prepared by the CIA^[6] claims that the U.S. literacy rate is 99 percent, but defines literacy as being able to read and write when a person is 15 years old or older. A person who can only read a few hundred--or even a couple of thousand--simple words learned in the first four grades in school, is only marginally literate.^{[citation needed]}

Jonathan Kozol, in his book Illiterate America, states that there may not be any intentional deception in the literacy figures. He goes on to explain^[7] that the census bureau reported literacy rates of 99 percent based on personal interviews of a relatively small portion of the population and on written responses to census bureau mailings. If the interviewees or written responders had completed fifth grade they were considered literate. In the 1970 census, for example, five percent of those surveyed had less than a fifth-grade education. The census bureau considered eighty percent of those with less than a fifth-grade education as being literate and thus calculated a 99 percent literacy rate. In the 1980 and 1990 censuses, most of the census bureau calculations of literacy were based upon grade completion. They used written questionnaires and a small number of home visits and telephone interviews. If a respondent stated that they had completed less than five grades, they were asked if they could read and write, and their unsubstantiated answer was recorded as a fact. Kozol asserts that this method of determining literacy is certain to underestimate illiteracy for the following reasons:

• Illiterate people would not respond to written forms and their family members--also likely to be illiterate--would not either.
• Illiterate people are less likely to have telephones than the general public, because of unemployment or low paying jobs.
• Illiterate people may distrust anyone knocking on their door or calling on the telephone and seeking information because they are often hounded by bill collectors, salesmen, and others because of their financial condition and because they may have been cheated as a result of their illiteracy. Therefore they cannot be expected to give accurate answers to questions asked by census bureau workers they do not know, especially if the answers are embarrassing.
• Grade level completion does not equal grade level competence.
• Those who have no permanent home address, no telephone, no post office box, and no regular job--a condition shared by more than six million adults, most of whom are illiterate--cannot be found by the census bureau in time to be included in the count.

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