The United States has a problem with literacy, and it’s not all new.

COVID-19 and lost classroom time have been blamed, and those factors certainly have affected our kids’ academic success. Social media and screen time also take a lot of the blame.

These easy scapegoats, though, are covering for a lot of deeper factors.

Literacy Rates In The 1980s & 1990s

In the last decades of the previous millennium, statistics boasted that literacy in the U.S. was almost universal, around 97% in adults and individuals over age 15.

It’s a strange statistic to me, because I remember sitting in my seventh-grade classroom with my teacher shouting at us about our parents’ (according to her) illiteracy. It was the mid-90s, there was a major political scandal in the news, and she was telling us that we were all old enough to be reading news, which she said was written at a 7th grade level.

Her assertion was that news was written on a 7th-grade level because our parents were not intelligent enough to read above that level. Looking back as an adult, I can see flaws in her reasoning, but at the time, it opened my eyes to just how low reading and writing standards were for the adults around us.

I started noticing when adults couldn’t or didn’t read, when they belittled reading, when they suggested instructions weren’t important, and when they dismissed the same grammatical rules I was learning in class as irrelevant, unimportant, or wrong. Spoiler: it was a lot.

How Did Those Statistics Fit With Reality?

It turns out that my teacher wasn’t the only adult frustrated with the literacy rates surrounding her.

In fact, in 1985 the Washington Post reported on a House Education and Labor Committee hearing in which legislators discussed the inaccuracy of the statistics (99% literacy at the time), and the failed measure the census used to arrive at that count — “completing six years of school or being able to read and write a simple message.”

The hearing included a report that deemed around 20% of U.S. adults functionally illiterate, and laid out the costs in social safety nets, crime, and even difficulties for the Department of Defense when soldiers struggled to read weapons manuals.

The report concluded that the major contributing factor was a lack of support to the education system.

The Current State Of Literacy In The United States

Since adults do not typically take annual standardized tests, measuring literacy in the total population is complicated, but the National Literacy Institute‘s most recent data finds about 21% of the adult population to be functionally illiterate (comparable to the numbers Congress heard in 1985) and 54% to have reading skills below the 6th grade level.

The data still reflects the same connections to poverty and crime from that report nearly 40 years ago, too. Three out of four welfare recipients can’t read, and three out of five people in prison can’t. In fact, the Institute notes, some states are basing their projected needs for prison space on current elementary school reading scores.

For kids who are still struggling with reading, the data projects bleak futures, connecting illiteracy to the inability to obtain and keep a job, and to mental and social struggles in adulthood.

Literacy Levels In Current Students Are Alarming

Even in 2019 — that is, pre-COVID — kids were struggling with reading. At that point, the data showed around 40% of students reading at or above grade level.

This has fallen even further since the pandemic. In 2019 55% of kindergartners were deemed “on track” to learn to read. In the fall of 2020, that dropped to 37%, according to The Policy Circle. Returning to in-person learning improved scores to a degree, but didn’t return them to pre-pandemic levels.

Those pre-pandemic levels are already frightening, though.

When teachers are asked, as they were in a recent Reddit post, they name many culprits, from social media to parental non-involvement, but one significant one is a change in how reading is taught. Many teachers agree that a major cause is a shift from teaching phonics to teaching whole-language reading. One explained:

“So a huge problem is the kids are relying on rote memory of sight words, which works for irregular words but once you get to higher levels you rely on being able to decode the phonics to figure out the word. I’ve had kids struggle with words like ‘pivot’ and ‘fulcrum’ because they don’t really understand how to break down unfamiliar words and sound them out.”

Another major factor teachers bring up is legislation that incentivizes schools to push kids on into the next grade regardless of their mastery of grade-level standards.

What Should We Be Doing About It?

As a society, we should be advocating for a systemic return to teaching phonics. We know it works, and we now have decades of evidence that other methods don’t work as well.

We need to talk to our local school boards, and contact our state and federal boards of education and fight for phonics to be back in our schools.

At home, we can help our kids by exposing them to phonics ourselves, through whatever means are accessible to each of us. Apps like Hooked On Phonics and ABC Mouse can provide these for parents who may not have the time to sit down and go through flash cards.

Scholastic also has a list of activities you can do with your child to practice phonics, and many of them don’t require sit-down time. For example, sounding out words on signs, playing games with letter sounds, and adding rhyming words to songs or nursery rhymes.

The most important step will take a little of your time, but will be so worth it: reading with your child. If you can set aside fifteen or twenty minutes a night to read aloud with your child, it can make a world of difference in his future literacy.