Literacy in the United States

The literacy rate of the United States is estimated to be 99.0%.

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. A study by the Jenkins Group has shown that millions of Americans never read another book after leaving school. [Citation
url=http://www.humorwriters.org/startlingstats.html
title=Some startling statistics
author=Robyn Jackson
publisher=University of Dayton, Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop
accessdate=2008-02-05
*1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
*42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
*80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
*70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
*57 percent of new books are not read to completion.] [Citation
url=http://www.crossville-chronicle.com/columns/local_story_155175613.html
title=THEREFORE I AM: Why can't books and TV just get along?
author=David Spates
date=June 04, 2007
publisher=Crossville Chronicle
accessdate=2008-02-05 "According to a study funded by The Jenkins Group, a publishing company, one-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives after they finish school. [...] The study also found that 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college."]

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,Citation
url=http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf
title=Adult Literacy in America
publisher=National Center for Educational Statistics
month=April
year=2002
accessdate=2007-12-11] 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 12 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."

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 million to 44 million of the 191 million U.S. adults (21% to 23% of them) in the least literate group earned a yearly average of $2,105 and about 50 million adults (25% to 28% of them) in the next-least literate of the five literacy groups earned a yearly average of $5,225 at a time when the U.S. Census Bureau considered the poverty level threshold for an individual to be $7,363 per year. [Citation
url=http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/threshld/thresh93.html
title=Poverty Thresholds: 1993
publisher=U.S. Census Bureau
accessdate=2007-12-11]

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. [Citation
url=http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF
title=A First Look at the Literacy of America's Adults in the 21st century
publisher=National Center for Educational Statistics
year=2006
accessdate=2007-12-11] These studies assert that 46% to 51% of U.S. adults read so poorly that they earn "significantly" below the threshold poverty level for an individual.

The World Factbook prepared by the CIA [Citation
url=https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/us.html
title=United States
publisher=CIA World Factbook
accessdate=2007-12-11] claims that the U.S. literacy rate is 99%, 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.Fact|date=January 2008

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 [Jonathan Kozol, "Illiterate America" (New York: New American Library, 1985), pp. 37-39] that the Census Bureau reported literacy rates of 99% 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, 5% of those surveyed had less than a fifth-grade education. The Census Bureau considered 80% of those with less than a fifth-grade education as being literate and thus calculated a 99% 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 fewer 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 6 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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