[Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: $2.2 trillion gain if overcome adult illiteracy

[Colin Harrison]

Hi Tom and everyone

Thanks for this posting. Your campaign to support low-literacy adults continues, and as always, is laudable. However….

I may be a little slow here, but isn’t it axiomatic that 50% of US sixth graders are reading at sixth grade level, and also that 50% of tenth graders are reading at tenth grade level, etc?  In which case isn’t it nonsense for Forbes to say that more than 50% of US adults are reading at below sixth grade level?

Forgive me it you’ve heard this before, but in 1990, in the very week that I became president of the UK Reading Association, The Daily Telegraph (one of our most revered right-wing newspapers) ran a lead story over the headline “Tests reveal fall in standard of pupils’ reading.” But that wasn’t all; the subheading was even more worrying: “Number below average level doubles”.  This was certainly a shock because now every child in the land was officially below average! Well, I worked my socks off during my presidential year, and I’m proud to report that under my stewardship, we made excellent progress. By the time I handed over the presidential gavel, England was back on track, and only half the readers in the nation were below average—and we’ve maintained that proud record ever since.

More seriously, let’s not forget that 15% of the US population is non-native born (compare that with Japan and Finland, high performing nations that against which the US is often measured). Another key question from where did the author get the indicator of ‘sixth-grade reading level’? It’s not at all straightforward to equate adult reading tests results to school grade levels.
I seem to remember that in 2019, the National Center for Educational Statistics reported that the American adult literacy rate was 79 percent.

As one retired senior researcher into adult literacy said to me, ‘Colin, don’t repeat this, but it’s in our interest for there to be moral panic about adult literacy levels; how otherwise would we ever get any funding?’

As ever

Colin




From: <reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> on behalf of Thomas Sticht <tgsticht at gmail.com>
Date: Monday, 25 October 2021 at 22:06
To: reading hall of fame <Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] $2.2 trillion gain if overcome adult illiteracy


Colleagues:  While looking for information about November as National Family Literacy Month I came across some interesting statements about illiteracy and literacy in the United States. The first thing that caught my eye was from Forbes magazine online with the bold headline: “Low Literacy Levels Among U.S. Adults Could Be Costing The Economy $2.2 Trillion A Year”! The article went on to say: “Sep 9, 2020 — According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old - about 130 million people - lack proficiency in literacy, ...( see online at: https://forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/09/low-literacy-levels-among-us-adults-could-be-costing-the-economy-22-trillion-a-year/?sh=2d7634974c90).

 The claim that some 130 million adults lack proficiency in literacy reminded me of an earlier news headline from the Washington Post in 1993 stating about U.S. adults: LITERACY OF 90 MILLION IS DEFICIENT (Online at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/09/09/literacy-of-90-million-is-deficient/df715ccd-f90b-44e8-8235-f527dde32297/

I then recalled that almost a decade later, in 2001, the Washington Post ran an article headlined     Adult Illiteracy,  Rewritten  in which it was reported that the 90 million deficient in literacy number was based on faulty use of a “response probability” and greatly exaggerated the numbers of adults called deficient in literacy, or, as this quickly got popularized as “illiterate”. (Archived online with a new headline at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/07/17/millions-of-adults-illiterate-no-more/ac1067cb-9fdd-499b-a4bc-8713fc5a9063/

Now a new report conducted by the Gallup organization and sponsored by the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy has led to media reports, like that by Forbes cited above, claiming that millions of U.S. adults are “illiterate”.  The new report (Rothwell, 2020) is available on the web site for the Barbara Bush Foundation and is titled “Assessing the Economic Gains of Eradicating Illiteracy Nationally and Regionally in the United States” When I went to the web site I was somewhat surprised to find a banner statement on the front page of the site stating: Literacy is the key to solving healthcare, poverty, crime rates, unemployment, everything!

 Using data from the levels of literacy developed for the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and the U.S. Department of Education’s combined individual PIAAC data from 2012 to 2017 to create estimated literacy levels for every U.S. county, the report states:

 “This report defines illiteracy as a lack of proficiency on the PIAAC, an internationally validated literacy exam. Adults who score below Level 3 for literacy are not considered proficient and are defined as at least partially illiterate in this study. Adults below or at Level-1 literacy may struggle to understand texts beyond filling out basic forms. Drawing inferences or combining multiple sources of texts is likely too difficult. Adults at Level 2 can read well enough to evaluate product reviews and perform other tasks that require comparisons and simple inferences, but they are unlikely to correctly evaluate the reliability of texts or draw sophisticated inferences. Adults at Level 3 and above are considered fully literate in this study. They can reliably evaluate sources, as well as infer sophisticated meaning and complex ideas from written sources.”

Using these data the report states: “Eradicating illiteracy would have enormous economic benefits. This analysis finds that getting all U.S. adults to at least a [PIAAC] Level 3 of literacy proficiency would generate an additional $2.2 trillion in annual income for the country. That is 10% of the gross domestic product.”

For those interested in this report on illiteracy, whether whole or partial, from the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy the reference is:

Rothwell, J. (2020). Assessing the Economic Gains of Eradicating Illiteracy Nationally and Regionally in the United States. Available online at: https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFoundation_GainsFromEradicatingIlliteracy_9_8.pdf

Following several years after the 1993 report that some 90 million adults were lacking in literacy, funding and enrollments in the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) made up with funding from the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) and state sources, rose up to 1998 when the National Reporting System was implemented and since then while funding has risen (but not enough to overcome inflation) enrollments have plummeted by over 2.5 million from around 4.0 million in 1998 to around 1.3 million or fewer now.

It will be interesting to see where this new initiative by the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy leads.

Tom Sticht


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