Why literacy rates look grim — and why it might not be as bad as it seems
Published
Todd Stumpf
Americans can’t read.
American kids really can’t read.
If you’re reading this, I mean, good for you, right?
It’s been in the news a lot lately how illiterate we are as a nation. So this may be an appropriate time to remind you not to believe everything you, ahem, read.
Yes, news on the reading front has not been great lately. What news has? Maybe not being able to read isn’t the worst thing.
My mom spent the last decade-plus of her life legally blind. Unable to use a book for anything other than correcting a wobbly table, she took up books on tape. She “read” more in those 10 years than most scholars do in a lifetime. That’s another story, though, and it’s not available in audio form.
We do, so all the studies say, have a reading problem. But is it that we can’t read, or just don’t? While one of those may naturally lead to the other, they’re not mutually exclusive.
We certainly don’t want to. Much. It’s why I have no unfinished books. I have started writing several but have no idea who would want to read them and don’t want to have to deal with the rejection of that vacuum.
Despite reports of declining literacy, kids may not be behind so much as facing higher expectations — and often just prefer not to read.Todd Stumpf
Kids, though, are the main concern here. While estimates place the number of illiterate adults as high as 20 percent, kids are giving them a run for their money.
High school kids, as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) suggests, are not well educated. Then again, when were they? NAEP assessments began in 1992. I’m glad, having learned to read long before that, that I was never assessed.
Fast forward a generation. The only one being assessed at my house these days is a sixth grader who scores very high on such things. He learned to read in preschool.
The one who teaches English at the college level (that’s me), meanwhile, did not learn to read until midway through first grade. Who’s ahead of whom, hmmm?
My college students read just fine, much like my son does. They — neither freshmen nor middle schooler — just would rather not.
I didn’t really enjoy it much during my formative years, either. I just had, comparatively speaking, nothing else to do. So my peers and I picked up books from time to time.
Had we been blessed with gaming consoles, smartphones, tablets and laptops, a dozen streaming platforms and a complex social web, I can promise you we wouldn’t have read much, either. And that would have been OK.
And it’s OK now.
I pay very close attention to my kid’s education. I do that because it presents daily with challenges I could not have handled at his age. He handles them with aplomb. Whatever a plomb is (I actually know what it is, because I, um, read a lot now).
It’s not hard to see how some assignments he has gotten this year and last could overwhelm a typical preteen.
NAEP math scores also are low, with nearly half of high school seniors not performing at a basic level, whatever that means. Using my only source — and it’s a tiny sample — my kid is doing things in sixth-grade math that I didn’t do for at least two more years.
At least some seventh graders these days take algebra, then geometry in eighth grade. I took those in ninth and 10th, respectively. I’m not a rocket scientist, but math doesn’t scare me, either.
I may be way off base here, and I have no data whatsoever to support this, but I have an inkling that many kids these days may actually be ahead rather than behind. The goalposts have been moved so far over the decades that current expectations are beyond unreasonable.
I’d explain what that all means, but I’m pretty sure you don’t want to read it.
