Reading Between the Lines: America’s Overlooked Literacy Crisis
Photo Credit: Roman Eisele
From kindergarten to 12th grade, there is only one subject that American children are required to take every single year of their legally mandated education: English. Yet despite being home to more English speakers than any other country in an increasingly globalized world, the United States sees itself comparatively falling behind its counterparts in key educational and communication metrics, most notably, that of literacy rates. The U.S. literacy crisis — affecting both children and adults across racial and socioeconomic demographics — is a complex, decades-old problem driven by structural, educational, and policy factors, and one that demands a nuanced, multi-layered plan to tackle it.
In a decisive 2019 study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), it was discovered that one in five (21 percent) of U.S. adults, or 43 million Americans, lacked the literacy skills to compare and contrast information, paraphrase, or make low-level inferences. A different NCES study showed the number of adults with the lowest literacy level increasing from 19 percent of respondents in 2017 to 28 percent in 2023. Simultaneously, across younger demographics, experts are seeing a constantly expanding gap in reading level and reading based test scores between low-income students (predominantly students of color) and their higher-income counterparts. This is coupled with worrying trends in the decline of students reading for pleasure, dropping from 35 percent of 13-year-olds reporting that they read for fun “almost everyday” in 1984 to 27 percent in 2012, 17 percent in 2020, and an all time low of 14 percent in 2023, with 31 percent of respondents stating they never read for fun, according to a National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) questionnaire.
The numbers are undeniable. The United States education system has been failing its citizens for years, and they aren’t improving anytime soon. So why are literacy rates still such an undercover issue for a country that is often considered to be the pinnacle of worldwide education?
Part of the reason the American literacy crisis is being constantly minimized is because of a basic misunderstanding about what literacy means, specifically in the difference between technical and functional literacy. Most Americans probably assume an illiterate person to be one who can’t read or write, and it feels highly unlikely that one-fifth of the U.S. population are part of that demographic. However, if you asked the average fourth grader to read War and Peace, chances are that they would be able to read most, if not all of the words in the book, but they wouldn’t be able to comprehend it or analyze the themes in the way they could with a book in the Percy Jackson series. To keep it simple, being functionally, and not just technically literate, boils down to the contrast between reading words and truly understanding what they are saying.
Thus, while the aforementioned 21 percent of Americans may be able to read all the words on a page, they can’t do much with it. To properly address an issue of this magnitude, we first need to specifically investigate every single potential cause behind it, the short and long term consequences, and evaluate a variety of opinions, experiences, and data to try and look at a multitude of possible solutions.
This situation has been brought about because of a plethora of causes, including but not restricted to long-time curriculum flaws based in sight-reading and word association as opposed to phonics based reading, financial privileges offered to wealthier students in both the public and private school system, race-based structural inequality, and cyclical poverty.
In an effort to make reading “easier,” there was a curriculum shift in the 1960s towards making reading more efficient, shifting the focus from reading every single word to associating words via meaning, sentence structure, and visual cues, thereby enabling students to skim passages faster and struggle less with words or context that they did not initially understand. However, this meant that cueing was valued over comprehension, eventually leading America with multiple generations of adults who were not encouraged to ask questions, fill the gaps in their knowledge, and in short, stick to what they knew, which ended up being very little. These gaps in phonics and comprehension never ended up being remedied in higher education, where teachers were trained as solely specialists in the content, not how to teach it, and reading coaches who could actually help were the first to get fired with funding cuts, leaving students who need individualized help stranded.
Poverty and segregation just further reinforced these pre-existing literacy gaps, causing low-income and minority students to disproportionately fall behind. Undereducated students from poorer areas, most often immigrants, grew up to be underprivileged workers, often living paycheck to paycheck and unable to achieve social mobility or leave the lower-income communities they grew up in. This left their children in the same seats they had once sat in and perpetuated the endless cycle of poverty and struggle, as well as the underallocation of public funds to these schools that couldn’t yield the same test results as their wealthier counterparts, nor could they keep up with the property taxes that afforded more affluent areas a larger chunk of district budgets.
Minority communities were hit the hardest. NPR reported that only 63 percent of English language learners (ELLs) graduate from high school compared to the overall national rate of 82% and the National Institute of Health reported that ELLs were far more likely to have teachers with less experience, and attend schools with more lower-income students and fewer resources, contributing to a key chunk of functionally illiterate individuals. On top of this, in the above mentioned 2023 NAEP study, while on average 43 percent of fourth graders in the U.S. scored at or above a proficient level in reading, just 17 percent of Black students, 21 percent of Latino students, 11 percent of students with disabilities, and 10 percent of multilingual learners could do the same. Minority communities are also the ones most heavily affected by the decline in reading for pleasure and its direct correlation with lower literacy rates, because their areas are more likely to be controlled by exploitative power structures that ban books. Since book bans also often target books representing minority stories or the books that criticize these power structures, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to And Tango Makes Three to Fahrenheit 451, students are dissuaded from becoming more engaged readers with a wider variety of materials and to push back against these kinds of structural issues.
Policy stagnation, or failure of national and local reforms to address underlying issues just made any endeavor for improvement feel even more futile. Educational programs were constantly being cut to remain within restrictive state budgets, and in the past, initiatives like the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy Grant program failed because despite focus on evidence-based practices and comprehensive literacy instruction in 435 districts across 11 states with grants that ranged in size from $44,000-$350,000+ per school, many of the resources did not reach the students who needed them most.
The pandemic was the final nail in the coffin. With teachers leaving the profession at unprecedented rates and countless school districts simply not having the infrastructure to keep up with a full shift to online education, students fell behind months, if not years in their education during the year online, most notably students of color who lived in lower income areas. It was then that American experts first started to realize that the literacy issue was a bigger issue than initially assumed to be.
Clearly, there are many issues contributing to the rampant functional illiteracy across our nations, but the sheer implications that come along with this might be even scarier than the problem itself. Not only has the literacy crisis done irreparable damage to our economy over the past few decades, it has wrought havoc on the political landscape of America, leading to an erosion of critical thinking, and at its core, democracy.
Polling by the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy discovered a huge gap in workforce productivity and national economic cost that was rooted in a lack of functional literacy. According to a Forbes article that summarized all of the polls’ findings, “if all U.S. adults were able to move up to at least Level 3 [or sixth grade reading level] of literacy proficiency, it would generate an additional $2.2 trillion in annual income for the country, equal to 10% of the gross domestic product.” With an incredibly low regional cost for eradicating illiteracy, this seems like an incredibly preventable issue in both rural and urban areas, but unfortunately, it has still been hardly addressed, leaving the U.S. to run a highly inefficient labor market and fall behind its competitors.
Low literacy rates also lead to dangerous civic impacts, as there is a high connection between literacy and democratic participation. Without the functional literacy to comprehend policies affecting them and making informed decisions, millions of American citizens have eroded their ability to critically think about the policies that directly affect themselves, discouraging participation in elections, empowering the political elite to exploit them, widening inequality, and limiting access to opportunity. This has led to a political climate very focused on outward perception, charisma, and emotionally triggering citizens into blindly voting for certain individuals or straight down a party line instead of on a policy basis, alienating them from any other perspectives outside of the echo chamber they are in and worsening the polarized gridlock that America faces today.
Literacy rates are a very nuanced problem that very few people actually treat as nuanced— most people try to propose unilateral solutions, but at the end of the day, both top-down and bottom-up approaches will be needed to tackle the plethora of issues behind this. Current reform proposals include curriculum overhaul targeted at implementing phonics based learning systems nationwide to tackle educational blunders, series of tutoring initiatives meant to help lagging students catch up, and most controversially using AI-assisted learning to streamline English education for both struggling children and adults.
In the increasingly polarizing debate on the role of technology in an educational space, it is worth examining the pros and cons of tech-driven approaches, but it is not necessary to restrict the scope of potential solutions into just this. Accessible technology, specifically AI, can help give lower-income students access to the same resources as many of their more affluent peers, help tailor individual study plans for large class sizes in a way that underpaid, burned out teachers can’t, and offer English Language Learners (ELLs) the opportunity to translate in classroom settings and learn English along the way instead of spending time in remedial class isolated from their peers. However, focusing all financial and social efforts on this is a point-blank waste of time, especially with the cons of high financial costs, an unhealthy dependence on technology for students, a lot of lost opportunities for critical thinking and social interaction, and the devaluation of teaching as a profession.
All of these one-dimensional “fixes” miss the problem’s complexity. It has flown under the radar for longer than it should have because of how spread thin it is, and accordingly, anyone looking to solve America’s literacy crisis should be prepared to face that same challenge with any potential solutions. But while it may be difficult to help the millions of adults that are currently affected, there is a wide range of things that can be done to ensure the next generation of students grows up differently, some of which may even push functionally illiterate adults towards better on the way.
A combination of both top-down and bottom-up approaches will be necessary to alleviate the economic, social, and educational repercussions that have come with the last few decades of damage, hence why a cooperation and mutual respect between politicians and teachers is a key part of this project, especially in areas where both share spaces like school boards and open community forums.
On a macro-level, policy reform is needed, specifically via federal funding for literacy programs. However, to prevent them from failing like those in the past, there need to be failsafes built into them, including targeting them towards the communities who most need them and clear allocations of where that money will go, whether furthering education for teachers or buying technology with translation tools for ELLs keep up with regular lessons. This will help deal with the misuse of federal funds, like what happened with the aforementioned ‘Striving Readers’ program, as well as prioritize equity and best accommodate for the limited budgets and common spending cuts that governments inevitably face (often due to suspect misuse of money), the same ones that caused literacy initiatives like federal ‘Reading First’ and state ‘Comprehensive Literacy State Development’ (CLSD) grants to fail.
Coupled with this, increasing the baseline for pre-K, elementary, and secondary school teaching certification could be incredibly impactful; it would enable educators to actually know how to teach evidence-based reading in a specific way to a variety of students instead of just making them familiar with the subject and leaving them to teach it in whatever way they can. This would also place a higher value on teachers and increase the standards they are held to after a debilitating few years of trying to just fill teaching positions with anyone at all since the pandemic.
On a grassroots level, avoiding tunnel vision is key, according to educational psychologist from Harvard, Catherine Snow. Education has always held a purist mindset in its small scale reform: a teacher has to either focus on technical comprehension or fostering a love for reading, students either need to be dependent on hardcore parent support or learn to be independent. Snow makes the argument that to some degree, all of these factors, whether community literacy initiatives, parental involvement, local library or 1:1 tutoring programs can contribute to an improved literacy environment, but none are the be-all or end-all of it. Snow admits that “[students] need phonics instruction. But they don't need an hour and a half a day of phonics instruction. 15 minutes a day, in the context of opportunities to read and practice and play with language, is probably more effective than overloading literacy instruction with phonics.” This encapsulates the essence of her argument, even if she is only discussing one example. A busy parent with multiple jobs of a child growing up in a lower income household may not have the time to read to their child every day, but instead of just giving up and not reading to them at all, with community encouragement, a 30 minute weekend library trip could help push both parties to incorporate just a bit more reading into their lives. Taking every step with moderation is the best medicine on such a convoluted issue, and trying to include as many people, from peers to parents to community members is the best way to bolster the infrastructure needed for students to succeed like libraries or book discussions, as well as one of the most effective ways to push the adults in their lives who may have also been grappling with the literacy crisis to find the support and resources they need to tackle their own struggles.
Literacy is more than the ability to read words, it is a necessity to exist within our fast-paced world, both as an individual and a functional member of society; it is about comprehension, empowerment, and equity. The first step to solving a problem of this scale is recognizing the issue on every layer of this crisis, including policymakers, educators, and communities. The next is to actually listen to all three of these perspectives to implement both expert-based policy initiatives as well as small scale adjustments on the classroom levels to amend the damage that has already been done and prevent it from continuing. Making sure both the children and adults of America can put their best foot forward has to be a priority. The future of democracy and opportunity in America depends on whether we choose to read and understand the warning signs of a crumbling nation right now.