Adult Illiteracy in the U.S

Adult illiteracy in the United States refers to the inability or insufficient ability of adults to read and write, affecting approximately 20% of the adult population, including individuals with high school diplomas and jobs. Definitions of literacy can vary significantly, with a focus on "functional literacy," which encompasses the skills necessary to perform everyday tasks like reading instructions or handling financial documents. The reasons behind adult illiteracy are diverse, ranging from learning disabilities to socio-economic challenges and inadequate early education. Immigrants may face additional hurdles in achieving English proficiency, complicating their literacy journey.

Aliteracy is another related concern, characterized by individuals who possess reading skills yet choose not to engage with written material, which can have negative implications for workplace performance and personal health. The U.S. has made efforts to assess literacy levels since the early 1990s, but reported rates may not accurately reflect the true situation, as methodological issues could inflate literacy figures. Adult education approaches differ from those for children, emphasizing voluntary participation and the unique life experiences of adult learners. This distinction is essential for developing effective programs to reduce illiteracy and support diverse learning needs.

Published in: 2021

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Subject Terms

Adult Illiteracy in the U.S.

Abstract

Illiteracy is the inability or insufficient ability to read and write. Various measures of literacy seek to account for not only complete lack of reading ability but also ability below a certain level considered necessary to function healthily in society. The U.S. government has made efforts to track illiteracy levels, and those efforts have demonstrated little overall improvement despite the intention of using such surveys to better distribute educational resources. Adults suffer from illiteracy in ways unique to them and distinct from children, and similarly, approaches to teaching adults differ from approaches in teaching literacy to children.

Overview

Adult illiteracy, a term for which there are several definitions, refers to the number or share of adults who are illiterate. Definitions vary according to the degree of minimum ability—whether literacy requires some basic level of skill or whether any ability to read and write qualifies as literacy. Many surveys focus on "functional literacy," the ability to read and write at the minimum level required to function in society.

There are many reasons for adult illiteracy, ranging from learning disabilities to economic or health-related problems that interfere with education at the age at which instruction in reading and writing normally occurs. Students are sometimes described as having "slipped through the cracks" due to poor or inappropriate teaching strategies that fail to identify and address insufficient progress. Further, students who arrive in the United States as immigrants speaking another language face a variety of challenges to achieve English proficiency. While lack of proficiency in reading and writing may contribute to the decision of many dropouts to leave school early, some students do successfully complete school while remaining functionally illiterate.

Some theorists have identified "aliteracy" as a separate but related issue. Aliteracy is considered a problem specific to the developed world, where at least a functional level of literacy is nearly universal. People who are aliterate are identified as disinclined to use acquired reading skills to accomplish basic tasks, which can lead to problems in the workplace and in conveying safety and medical information. Aliterates are technically able to read but are uninterested in reading as either a form of entertainment or a source of information, preferring visual media such as television and graphically presented instructions. Aliteracy is not illiteracy but can have similar negative consequences.

Further Insights

There are two ways to define illiteracy: as an inability to read and write at all, or as some level of literacy in which mastery is below a certain level. Definitions of the latter type are preferable and more useful for most contexts. While the black and white approach may seem simple, it is anything but: Is an adult who has learned to write their name and recognize it in print "literate" in a meaningful sense?

Because illiteracy is an issue that many public and private organizations seek to address, more expansive definitions of illiteracy are more useful in making assessments and identifying the groups and individuals in need of assistance. When reading about literacy rates, it is important to know what definition of literacy is being used in the reportage of a given rate. For instance, the most comprehensive guide for use in comparing various measures among multiple countries is The World Factbook, maintained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Because breadth is the Factbook's focus, the measures used are often very broad; for literacy, it simply considers the percentage of a population over 16 that is able to read and write.

The most useful measure of literacy for most purposes is functional literacy. Functional literacy refers to the ability to perform the reading and writing tasks associated with the most common activities in society. Someone who is functionally literate, for example, can read the pamphlets given to a patient by his or her doctor or pharmacist or voting instructions and statements from candidates or related to ballot issues. A functionally literate person can write a letter or e-mail communicating with a credit card company about a disputed charge, navigate the website of their bank, read and pay an electric bill, and so on. According to most studies, roughly 20 percent of the U.S. adult population is found to be functionally illiterate, including millions of adults with high school diplomas and/or jobs.

Health Literacy. Some studies focus specifically on health literacy: the ability to read and understand information related to health care, especially one's own or that of one's dependents. Because so much health care is a matter of individual responsibility in the United States—a doctor may not communicate much information about a prescription or other treatment, or may not do so in a clear manner, and many treatments are over the counter and involve no gatekeeper to explain them—literacy levels have a real and demonstrable effect on personal health and health care decisions.

Literacy is an important and reliable indicator of well-being in advanced age. This is in part due to the effects of health literacy. But there are also correlations between literacy and economic factors, such as income, wealth, and job security, all of which have significant effects on the resources and well-being of the elderly (Roman, 2004).

Measuring Illiteracy. The United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and levels of access to education are high. Many experts, however, believe that the reported literacy rates of the United States are inflated by methodology. Some surveys, for instance, count as literate any adult who completed elementary school, without allowing for the possibility of finishing the 6th grade while remaining functionally illiterate. As with other population surveys, it is also hard to gauge how well literacy surveys account for very poor populations, including the homeless, those without permanent addresses, and other marginalized groups and individuals, a difficulty that suggests a likelihood that such populations are undercounted.

Though surveys were conducted by private-sector and non-governmental organizations in the twentieth century, and the Census Bureau conducted a limited assessment in 1982, the U.S. government has only been reliably tracking adult literacy since 1992, which means in-depth information about long-term trends is generally not available. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (originally the National Adult Literacy Survey), administered by the Department of Education (DOE), uses levels of literacy in its data gathering, the most basic of which is the ability to understand simple instructions.

DOE surveys also differentiate between types of literacy, not merely extents. Categories include prose (the ability to read materials that consist almost entirely of writing), document (the ability to read materials that present information in some form other than prose, such as with diagrams, illustrations, charts, graphs, and pictograms), and quantitative (the ability to read materials consisting mainly of numeric and mathematical information). Naturally, these overlap: being able to read an electric bill involves both document and quantitative literacy, though document literacy is sufficient to determine that it is correctly addressed, how much is owed, and by when it must be paid. The prevalence of comparatively high levels of document literacy explains how otherwise illiterate or barely literate adults are able to tend to basic reading- and writing-related tasks in adult life without requiring the help of others.

A 2013 study by the DOE's National Institute of Literacy divided literacy/illiteracy into four tiers: proficient, intermediate (able to do moderately challenging activities, such as consulting reference books or the Internet in search of professional answers to specific questions), basic (able to read the simplest forms of written materials, such as informational pamphlets or books for young children), and below basic, with the literacy rate considered as everyone in the first three tiers. In that study, 14% of American adults, or 32 million people, were functionally illiterate, reading at a "below basic" level if at all. This included 19% of high school graduates and a staggering 70% of prison inmates. Whites displayed the highest literacy rate, with only 9% of whites reading below basic, while 41% of Hispanics read below basic (a figure presumably impacted by the number of Hispanic immigrants speaking English as a second language or not at all) and 24% of African Americans (Statistic Brain, 2017).

This literacy rate was almost identical to a study administered by the same agency in 2003—and that study found literacy rates almost identical to the National Adult Literacy Survey of 1992 ("Study," 2006). Over these three surveys in a twenty-year period, the literacy rate in the United States appears to have remained flat despite increased spending and targeted efforts on raising it, and furthermore, that flatness was true across education levels. The most relevant change to the adult population in that time seems to be the decrease in the number of respondents who had been fluent in English at the age when they first started school in the United States.

This flatness may simply be explained by the relative lack of investment in adult literacy. While budgets were increased in response to early literacy surveys, spending is still trivial compared with what is spent in other areas of education. While the total cost of higher education was an average of $16,000 per student in 2001 (and has continued to increase), and $7,500 per student for the K-12 level, less than $400 per student was spent on adult literacy education (Sticht, 2001).

Issues

Familiarity is an important factor in literacy. There is more to literacy than simply the ability to recognize words and understand their meaning in sentences. On a micro level, the increasingly proficient reader stops paying attention to the individual letters in order to sound them out and simply recognizes the word (and can consequently read words that they would have trouble spelling), and soon pays more attention to the sentence level than the word level and is able to skim large chunks of text while taking away most of the meaning. Something similar happens on a macro level, in which the reader intuits that they are reading a newspaper article, a novel, a set of instructions, a map, a math problem, a persuasive essay, or any of a number of other types of text.

This ability to sort forms of writing impacts reading and writing skill performance: an experienced fiction reader reads a novel with greater speed and comprehension than a reader who never reads for pleasure, even if the two of them have similar vocabularies and proficiency levels. Familiarity therefore impacts attempts to measure literacy. Standardized tests, therefore, invite skepticism according to critics, because on one level what they measure is prior familiarity with questions similar to those used by the test; so too for diagnostic tools used to measure literacy.

Adult Education. Adult education encompasses numerous scenarios, from classes taken for self-improvement to adults entering college at a nontraditional age to earn or complete a degree, and may include the education of adults in such basic skills as literacy. The teaching of adults is philosophically and methodologically distinct from the teaching of children for a number of reasons. To begin with, adult education requires the voluntary participation of students. Adult learners generally have life experience and obligations outside the educational environment and may struggle with obstacles or deficits incurred during early life. Developmentally and psychologically, adults differ significantly from children. It's important to note that the education of adults and children is different even when the subjects being taught are the same, as with teaching literacy to adults. This doesn't mean none of the techniques used to teach children will work or be appropriate, but teaching adults must be considered separately, and using techniques better suited to teaching children may make the adults feel patronized and fail to engage them.

The academic discipline related to providing a foundation for teaching adults is sometimes called andragogy, to differentiate it from pedagogy; though pedagogy is the method, practice, and study of teaching, it is derived from the Greek word for "child." In andragogical approaches, for instance, self-evaluation is more common and more helpful than the evaluations performed by teachers in pedagogy. Pedagogical education is primarily didactic in method, and teaches from a standardized curriculum defined by external entities, such as state boards of education, to meet external needs; andragogical education includes more discussion and service learning, and revolves around the needs and goals of the adult student.

Grades, if they are important or useful in any context, are useful in pedagogical settings in providing external motivation and a measure of achievement; they have little use in andragogical settings except in a form that tracks quantifiable progress toward a goal such as written English proficiency. Naturally, there is some debate about the degree to which a pedagogical-andragogical dichotomy exists, or whether the terms are better used to describe segments on a continuum of teaching styles which are optimized for different learning styles that may or may not map to different age ranges. Even if this is true, though, it is equally true that adults and children come to the role of student for different reasons and in different contexts, and that it only makes sense for teaching approaches to take this into account.

It is probably unsurprising that the dropout rate in adult literacy programs is much higher than in children's education. Adults are attending voluntarily, for one thing, while education is mandatory for minor children except in extraordinary circumstances; this factor alone would make higher attrition the expected result. Some studies find a dropout rate as high as 80% during the first year of enrollment. As with college for traditional students, however, dropout rates decline with seniority. Recent studies of adult literacy attrition have emphasized the correlation between persistence and retention: students who spend more time on the program are less likely to drop out of it. It is less clear that more time closely correlates to more success in achieving the program's goals. This both reconfirms the tendency for attrition rates to be highest in the first year, and reveals that consistent attendance correlates with retention. Some studies measure persistence in terms of whether the student is motivated. While adult literacy students are all present voluntarily, levels of motivation and investment in their success in the program nevertheless vary considerably.

Terms & Concepts

Aliteracy: A disinclination or aversion to reading that may manifest in the same practical dysfunctions as illiteracy.

Adult Education: Formal or informal education for adult learners, especially adults who are returning to an educational environment to acquire basic or vocational skills.

Andragogy: The methodological underpinnings of education for adult students.

Attrition: Attrition is the phenomenon of students voluntarily leaving their programs before completing them.

Functional literacy: A level of literacy sufficient for the carrying out of basic task, such as filling out a job application or following a set of instructions. Functionally illiterate people may have some ability to read and write but cannot demonstrate a proficient level of comprehension or performance necessary.

Illiteracy: The inability to read and write, or more commonly, the inability to read and write above a certain very low level. Illiteracy is usually discussed in language-specific terms: that is, a study of literacy in the United States is specifically concerned with English-language literacy, and counts as illiterate immigrants who are literate in their native language but insufficiently literate in English.

Pedagogy: While used broadly to refer to the study and methodology of teaching in general, in discussions of adult education, "pedagogy" is often used to refer to the teaching of children and young people, in contrast with andragogy.

Bibliography

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