Turning the page on reading

Nearly one-quarter of U.S. adults—21%—are illiterate, and 130 million people can’t read a simple story to their children or sound out more than a few basic words. The problem isn’t confined to high school dropouts, those with disabilities, and non-­English speakers. It affects university students, working professionals, and those who grew up speaking English at home. It goes beyond the inability to enjoy books, skim websites, and write emails. Medication instructions, ingredient labels, and posted warnings can conceal deadly risks from nonreaders.

National literacy rates also have far-reaching implications for social development. Poverty, crime, and literacy correlate so strongly that some states look at elementary reading exam scores to predict how many prison beds they will need in future years. On the international stage, military preparedness, economic competition, and innovation all depend on strong literacy skills.

Globally, about 87% of adults are considered literate in their native languages, an increase of 7% since 2000. But while literacy rates elsewhere are improving, the United States is falling behind. Both literacy and numeracy among U.S. adults have been on a steady decline for at least a decade, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, more than half of U.S. adults can’t read beyond a sixth-grade level. And just 16% say they read for fun—a decline of roughly 40% in the past two decades.

The problem starts in elementary school, where a battle over how to teach reading continues to rage and fewer parents reinforce reading at home. By the time students reach high school, those who can’t read start to fall behind in other subjects. The ripple effects of insufficient learning extend into college, where many students who struggle with literacy don’t understand that they have a problem. They can read basic sentences but miss complex concepts. Once they reach adulthood, people who can’t read are dependent on an informal network of literacy classes to help them catch up.

Literacy building blocks

Laura Rein teaches fourth grade at Ascent Classical Academy of Northern Colorado. She says student literacy habits are mostly formed in second or third grade, and by the time students reach her classroom, they almost always know how to read. And yet, nationwide, nearly 70% of fourth graders can’t read with age-appropriate proficiency.

That’s partly due to the way they’re taught.

At Rein’s school, children learn using phonics. Students pronounce words by sounding out their individual letters and graphemes, or frequently paired groups (such as “-at” in mat, bat, and cat). For decades, this was the dominant method of teaching reading in English-language classrooms. But knowing how to pronounce words doesn’t always make students good readers.

“A student can read something, or maybe understand something in his or her head, but not articulate it,” Rein said. “They say the words wrong, or they just read it so fast they skip a key part, and they just kind of fill in what they think it might be based on context.”

Although Rein does help her students break down whole words into syllables—sounding out words like pen-i-tent in chorus with the whole class—she doesn’t think phonics is a silver bullet to the reading problem. Instead, she points to a rift in the partnership between parents and teachers.

On the school side, Rein says some teachers aren’t willing to have the hard conversations that come with holding kids back. The earlier, she says, the better. The younger the student is, the less severe the social consequences of repeating a grade. Even so, data on the effectiveness of such interventions is limited. One study found that children held back in elementary grades are 60% less likely to graduate high school than similarly achieving peers who were not held back.

On the family side, Rein says she sees fewer and fewer parents encouraging literacy by reading to their kids at home. Studies have consistently shown that a child’s literacy habits correlate with parental literacy, in part because parents who read frequently supply their children with more books and more opportunities to read.

Technology is another piece of the family puzzle. Although phones are banned in the classroom, Rein can’t control whether parents put limits on their kids’ screen time at home. Some children return to the classroom with altered behavior, a reduced attention span, and less patience for reading after spending hours on their devices.

Rein thinks schools should “put their foot down.”

“They can say, ‘I’m not graduating a senior who can’t read and write. That is my standard,’” she said. “And parents can support that work. They can encourage that love of reading. If they are personally struggling with reading, they can work with their students and say, ‘Hey, this is tough for me too, and here’s what we’re going to do about it. I’m going to make your life better than mine.’”

Compounding problems

Math proficiency is a major indicator of how effectively schools teach other subjects, including reading, according to the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Like literacy, math skills correspond strongly to student outcomes later in life. Students with high math scores are significantly more likely to attend college, be high earners as adults, and adapt more rapidly than their peers to a changing job market.

Across the United States, numeracy rates were improving until 2013. Then, alongside literacy, they began a steady decline. Online learning during COVID accelerated a dip in scores that has not fully recovered.

Cheryl Archuleta recently retired from teaching math at Columbine High School in Colorado. She used to skip her lunch breaks and stay after school to tutor underperforming students. Most teachers don’t do that, she said.

“If you flunk, you flunk, and you have to deal with it,” Archuleta said. “[But] a lot of [the students] just have so much fear and are just swimming in a dark pool. So I can’t do that conscientiously.”

Archuleta and her two daughters are dyslexic, so they find reading labor-intensive and mentally exhausting. Archuleta saw her students struggle in the same ways, particularly when confronted with word problems. They could solve math questions they had seen before, even if she changed the numbers. But Archuleta says a brand-new word problem could stump almost the entire class.

“What I’ve taught these kids [is that] you need to read everything three times,” Archuleta said. “Get it through your brain once to set a path. The second time, start picking out words and start trying to put them together. And then the third time, read it again and see if you can put everything together.”

When her students finally began to understand what they were reading, she watched their confidence blossom: “They figured out they could learn. They were more motivated to learn because I taught them techniques.”

Archuleta rarely flunked anyone. When she did, she hoped the failure would be a turning point instead of a roadblock.

“I had one little gal that I brought in after school to tutor every single week, and she was late to my tutoring sessions. She had attitude, so she flunked,” Archuleta said. “I had her again in intermediate algebra, and she did her work. She knew better. She learned. … It was nice to see, and then she thanked me.”

But the growth Archuleta described is a rarity. Nationwide, nearly 80% of high schoolers graduate unable to complete simple math problems. And 65% cannot read proficiently enough to understand complex material and apply it in real-world situations.

Fallout from the Reading Wars

Economist Doug Allen teaches a writing class for fourth-year students at Canada’s Simon Fraser University. Last semester, he had 20 students. By March, 11 of them were failing.

“Two-thirds of our students are coming out of high school with a vocabulary of about 200 words, mostly verbs and nouns,” Allen said. “Their strategy for reading is to guess.”

Simon Fraser University is among the top 2% in the world, according to the Centre for World University Rankings. It ranks No. 11 in Canada, putting it on level with Ivy League colleges like Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, and Columbia in the United States. But Allen says the school faces an incentive problem. Simon Fraser’s public funding is allocated on a per-student basis, so the goal is to fill seats.

Allen has been teaching the same writing class for three decades. He encourages failing students to drop the class and seek remedial writing and reading help. Prior to 2015, however, he couldn’t imagine that this policy would one day eliminate more than half his students.

“They wouldn’t know an adjective if it kicked them in the rear end, and they’re just guessing at a third of the other words in a sentence in a technical book,” Allen said. “Attending the lecture is very unenjoyable and pointless, and so they just stay home, and then they fail.”

Allen attributes the decline in writing skill and literacy to a change in how students were taught to read. Three-cueing theory emerged in North America in the 1960s as an alternative to phonics, based on the idea that skilled readers do not need to sound out words. Instead, students sound out only the first letter and guess the rest of the word from an associated picture.

The problem, according to Allen: Visual cues convey concrete nouns, such as table or house, but they can’t capture abstract concepts like inflammatory, notably, or verifiable. So students taught with three-­cueing, Allen says, never learned to read those words.

The decades-long battle between phonics and three-cueing became known as the Reading Wars. By the mid-2000s, cognitive research declared a victor. Phonics was statistically more effective in enhancing memory and reading skills, including for children with learning disabilities. Researchers warned that three-cueing was reinforcing the crutch-like techniques of bad readers.

In both Canada and the United States, only about half of adults can read at or above a sixth-grade level. And casualties of the Reading Wars are still adding up. Three-cueing remains in standardized curricula in British Columbia, where Simon Fraser is located. In the United States, 75% of K–2 and elementary special education teachers used three-cueing, and 65% of college education professors recommended it to their students.

Allen says he has a hard time convincing students they can’t read or write at a college level. Last semester, he decided to prove it with a quiz on the first day. Questions included: “What’s wrong with this sentence: ‘Yesterday, he will go to the market to buy groceries’?” and “What does colloquial mean?” Of the 11 students who failed the class, none passed that first quiz. When Allen gave the same quiz a week later, after requiring them to read English-writing primer The Elements of Style, all 11 got zeroes.

Weak performance in last semester’s class continues a downward trend that Allen has tracked since he began teaching at Simon Fraser in 1990. The exception was the first semester of COVID, when students in his economics courses learned online with limited supervision.

“I had the students sign a pledge form saying that I sent them the exam and that they would not cheat,” Allen recalled. But exceptional performance suggested most didn’t honor their promise. “In the middle of all this disaster, I think the average score was 80% in the class. Not a single person below 50. If that’s not an example of the fall of man and the depravity of man, I don’t know what is.”

Of the students failing Allen’s writing class last semester, 10 dropped the class when he told them there was no way to recover their scores. The 11th stuck it out.

“There’s always one who refuses to drop,” Allen said. “The reaction has always been, ‘I know I’m going to fail, but I’m actually learning a lot.’ I might be the first person in their life that told them they can’t write and they need to learn.”

Overcoming shame

Despite the scale of the problem, few resources are available to help adults learn to read after they leave school.

Sharon Bonney is CEO of the Coalition on Adult Basic Education (COABE), a national organization representing local centers for adult learners. The centers get $583 per student per year from the federal government. COABE and its member groups serve 3.2 million learners across the United States, but Bonney says the waitlists are long, and at least 43 million adults still need help.

From the students’ perspective, resource deficits are only part of the problem. Shame is often the biggest obstacle to seeking help.

“Oftentimes, they really have to overcome that to come into the local program,” Bonney said. “But I’m really happy to say local programs are known for being incredibly welcoming.”

Brandy Logan was once among those students. As a young girl, she lived in a group home and struggled to keep up with the rest of her grade. At 16, she emancipated herself from drug-addicted parents and dropped out of school to work midnight waitress shifts.

“There was a woman that worked with us, an older woman in her 70s, waiting tables,” Logan said. “And I literally looked at myself and thought, I’m going to die like her.”

Logan did a Google search that led her to adult education classes. Teachers there helped her open a bank account, automate rent payments, and buy a car. She earned her GED, then applied for college.

“You’re going to be no one,” the other girls in the group home used to tell Logan. “You’re never going to make it.” Authority figures prophesied morosely over her, saying that statistically, she was almost certain to end up on the streets.

Logan now has her doctorate in Education. She’s a mother and a keynote speaker on behalf of COABE, advocating for funding opportunities to support adult learners like she once was. She also heads the adult education program at SouthWest Metro Intermediate District in Minnesota.

The people who once discouraged her ended up being her motivation: “I purposely remembered their names. I remembered their words,” Logan said. She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of “writing” her life. “So I chose what my life was going to be.”

Playing catch-up

At 6:30 p.m. on a Monday, the lights are on in one classroom at Hope of Lake Lafayette Church. Inside, three men and one woman sit at a round table with homemade teaching aides open in front of them—laminated manila folders with letters stuck to them in rows.

Renee Nixon is the pastor’s wife and a first grade teacher. She cheerfully calls out a word. The students around the table move letters to the top of their folder, spelling out the word. Tonight, they are working on four-letter words with sh, ch, and th graphemes.

John Wininger is sitting next to his daughter, Trinnie, who convinced him to try these adult literacy classes almost a year ago. Along with Mike Despain and Kirte McCray, Trinnie and her father initially participated in Renee’s classes from a common desire to read the Bible. But their stories are achingly similar in other ways, too.

Trinnie and McCray have high school diplomas. John and Despain dropped out of school. All started again by learning the alphabet last June.

None of the four has a driver’s license, since they cannot read the manual. Even though the automated testing machine will read the question aloud, Despain has failed the test five times. That hasn’t stopped him from driving, however. He landed several jobs doing deliveries. Whenever he stopped for lunch at a diner, he couldn’t read the menu. But, as John points out, menus often have pictures.

John has struggled to apply for jobs. An application, he says, is just “big words that I don’t know anything about.” Each member of the group has worked short-lived, manual labor jobs—yard work, handyman, carpet and cabinet installer, painter, self-described jack-of-all-trades. All the men have done stints in custodial work.

Trinnie yearns to take care of her ailing mother in Utah. But she can’t read instructions and destinations on the bus trip, and fears of getting lost have kept her anchored in Missouri.

But she’s the star student of the four. Initially shy and reluctant to speak, she has only kind words for Nixon, her teacher.

“I said, ‘I need to read!’” Trinnie recalled. “And she helped me.”

One by one, the students read aloud from a children’s book. When John’s turn comes, Nixon directs him to put his finger under the words.

“But I do not think you should be as small as a shrimp for too long,” John reads with painstaking precision. “There would be a bunch of bad things that could get you, and you would not be as strong.”

At the last page, John stumbles over a difficult word. Gently, Nixon helps him: “Shrunk.” And that concludes the lesson.

“That’s our book,” she says. “You’re going to practice at home, OK?”

—with additional reporting from Nina Oetting

Editor's note: This story has been updated to note that the statistics listed in the first sentence refer to different groups of people who struggle with reading.