Low Literacy of Americans

Not good news here, according to Emily Schmidt:

About 130 million adults in the U.S. have low literacy skills according to a Gallup analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education. This means more than half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 (54%) read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

Literacy is broadly defined as the ability to read and write, but it more accurately encompasses the comprehension, evaluation and utilization of information, which is why people describe many different types of literacy — such as health, financial, legal, etc. Low literacy skills can profoundly affect the day-to-day success of adults in the real world, and these impacts extend to their families, too.

 

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America’s Reading Emergency

This is where I would have invested the >$100B that was inexplicably handed to Ukraine without meaningful debate: Teaching children how to read.

These dismal reading scores signal a bona fide national emergency affecting the lives of millions of Americans. These numbers portend a bleak future for the United States. The following are excerpts from "Is Your Child Becoming a Proficient Reader in School? Statistics Would Say No."

According to pre-pandemic 2019 Quincy Public Schools (QPS) Illinois Report Card Data compiled by Wirepoints, only 25.9% of 3rd grade students met or exceeded grade level reading standards, while reading proficiency in Black students fell to only 3.1%. Updated Report Card data for 2021 shows further declines statewide Unfortunately, this literacy tragedy is not unique to QPS, but representative of a national problem. 2022 National data compiled by the National Assessment of Education Performance, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, reveals that only 33% of all fourth graders are reading at a proficient level.

Why is this important? Research has shown that students who cannot read at grade level by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of school. These students are more likely to live in poverty, rely on public assistance and experience poor health outcomes. Even more concerning is that 85% of youth who interface with the juvenile court system struggle to read while 70% of incarcerated adults cannot read at the fourth grade level. This is known as the school to prison pipeline.

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Haven’t you ever read . . . ?

I am often asked whether I've read a particular book, and I usually haven't because there are a gazillion new books published every year. Here's what I say: "No, I haven't read THAT book. Thank you for your suggestion." Here's what I think: Please quit acting as though I haven't been doing any serious reading just because I haven't read the book that YOU just told me to read. For the past 20 years, I have been on a quest to grasp a somewhat detailed understanding of human animals. This has been a rather intense pursuit, jump-started (for about 5 years beginning in 2006) by my auditing of more than 30 hours of graduate level cognitive science courses at nearby Washington University in St. Louis. During the past 20 years, I have read almost entirely non-fiction, and I've been rather careful to limit my topics mostly to the topics represented by the books below. Recently, I decided to inventory what I have been reading. I'm not entirely sure why I did this. Perhaps it is because the end of the year is approaching, which tends to be a time for reflection regarding who we are and where we are headed. What better way for a writer to determine his direction based upon the books he has especially admired for the past two decades? Thus I took an inventory of the non-fiction books I have read that have significantly influenced me. I tend to make many notes on the books I own (I haven't started into electronic books yet), and I retain them in my "library," which is actually a storage room that contain lots of other household items. Yesterday, I ventured into my library with the intent of documenting the books that have especially impressed and challenged me. I ended up selecting less than 20% of the books I own for this honor. What follows below is a list of such books, all of which I have read over the past 20 years. It is not a perfect list. I am sure that there are many dozens of other books that I have overlooked. I probably own 500 books that I have only browsed so far, or not even begun, yet look promising. I'm more and more convinced that I will never read most of my unread books unless I win the lottery and retire. I try to not keep a steady course, though my quest seems hopeless. I'm reminded of this hopelessness every time I stumble on a pile of 30 unread and partially read books by the side of my bed. In my list below, I have only included those books that I have actually read. I would highly recommend any of them. I have not included in many other books I have read that I would consider merely been useful or "good." As I made my list, it occurred to me that I have been greatly influenced by more than books. I have read far more pages of online or in paper magazine articles than book pages. More recently, I've been impressed by many video and in-person presentations/lectures. I have also corresponded with many people over the years on these topics, including many of the authors of the books in my list. I've poured immense time into my reading and writing. It surprised me how much material I have reviewed in 20 years, considering that I also have a day job as a consumer lawyer and also try to spend time with my family. It occurs to me that I am extremely lucky to be living in a time and place where I can benefit from so many incredible ideas developed be others. Each of these authors spends his or her entire life working hard, and then I simply scoop up the their life's work by investing a mere day or two or reading. I have mentioned many of these books and authors in the five years that I've been writing at this website; I find that writing comments about these book helps me to absorb the material better. It also occurs to me that I would not be at all who I am had I not seriously read the books in my list. I make reference to many of these ideas many times each day. To the extent that I have been able to come up with interesting ideas, it is quite likely that "my" ideas came, directly or indirectly, from these books, and that I am thus standing on the shoulders of giants (there I go again with the borrowing). Without further ado, here many of my favorite non-fiction books, broken into a few general categories: [More . . . ]

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What is intelligence?

A few months ago, I collected many definitions of "intelligence." One version of intelligence measures the ability to use language well. It turns out that using language well can be affected greatly by practice. David Shenk reports on this topic in an Atlantic article titled, "The 32-Million Word Gap":

The differences were astounding. Children in professionals' homes were exposed to an average of more than fifteen hundred more spoken words per hour than children in welfare homes. Over one year, that amounted to a difference of nearly 8 million words, which, by age four, amounted to a total gap of 32 million words. They also found a substantial gap in tone and in the complexity of words being used. As they crunched the numbers, they discovered a direct correlation between the intensity of these early verbal experiences and later achievement. "We were astonished at the differences the data revealed," Hart and Risley wrote in their book Meaningful Differences. "The most impressive aspects [are] how different individual families and children are and how much and how important is children's cumulative experience before age 3."

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