If You Can Read This, You're Above Average

Not long after the election, I started to see a lot of posts like this one floating around social media networks:

This was hardly a new take. I’d seen posts like this for a decade or more, with slight variations. Sometimes it was eighth grade, not sixth; sometimes the posters would say “half of Americans” or “most Americans” rather than the more precise percentage. The point, of course, was always the same—and, of course, dumbed down for mass consumption and thoughtless sharing, with no context and no source cited. This was a message “most Americans” could understand, even if the statistics suggested they might not actually be able to understand it.

Because I’m a masochist, I let these posts bother me, in particular because I wanted to know where this information was coming from. It had to originate somewhere, right? So, because this is a reasonably high-quality newsletter, I went looking.

The data on literacy—and numeracy—around the world, it turns out, comes from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, or PIAAC, a test/survey coordinated by the OECD, with U.S. participation organized by the National Center for Education Statistics. The PIAAC has been administered, in one form or another, four times since 2012¹ , with the results from the latest round released earlier this month. In other words, this newsletter has a news hook, baby! And man, the news is NOT GOOD.

Before I get into what the PIAAC results tell us about literacy in the United States (and elsewhere), let me just say that writing this newsletter filled me with a new kind of fury—a burning, strangling feeling in my stomach that twinged with every detail I uncovered. Part of that was because so few legitimate news outlets even covered the release: Only the Financial Times gave it any serious consideration, while the articles in NBC News and VICE were themselves thin and nearly subliterate. If the bare facts of our national inability to process and understand written information can’t merit an outraged Op-Ed or thoroughly reported feature in our few remaining “better publications,” then I guess it’s up to me to make a stink… after the jump!

What Is the PIAAC?

The PIAAC survey has been performed in (so far) two ten-year cycles, the first of which commenced in 2012 and involved 245,000 adults, age 16 to 65, representing 1.15 billion people across 39 countries. The first round of the latest cycle covered 31 countries and was performed in 2022 and 2023, with the results just coming out now. It’s worth noting that it’s not just a literacy or numeracy test. The PIAAC is a way of gaining data about, as the OECD’s website puts it, “adults’ proficiency in key information-processing skills—literacy, numeracy and problem solving—which represent skills needed for individuals to participate in society and for economies to prosper.” This is the OECD, after all. It wants to connect the raw skills of literacy and numeracy to the ability of individuals and populations (based on age, gender, income levels, and immigration) to make a living.

To get a sense of the survey questions, you can click through these links to answer sample literacy and reading-comprehension components. Fair warning: The passages you will read are about bread and bus fares, so slip into something comfortable, pour a glass of wine, and make sure you’re not on a work computer! They’re designed, it seems, to gauge how well you can understand written material—how you can pluck information from sentences, process it, and make sense of it in other contexts. You know, how well you can read.

But how well can you read? Because this is an international survey, they don’t divide things into the U.S. system of grade levels. Instead, we have Levels 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, although 4 and 5 tend to get lumped together. At Level 1, the guidelines say, adults “are able to locate information on a text page, find a relevant link from a website, and identify relevant text among multiple options when the relevant information is explicitly cued. They can understand the meaning of short texts, as well as the organization of lists or multiple sections within a single page.” At Level 2, adults can “access and understand information in longer texts with some distracting information.” Level 3 is about constructing “meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses.” By Level 4, we’re on to “long and dense texts,” and Level 5 doesn’t have any strict criteria because it such complex thinking about topics and tasks.

The PIAAC people really hate equating these to grade levels, but I’d say Level 1 is maybe second or third grade, 2 is sixth grade, 3 is eighth, 4 is eleventh or twelfth, and 5 is college. (This is roughly how the Appalachian Learning Initiative puts it as well.) We could argue about the precise contours, but maybe if you’re an education professional or an academic who studies literacy, you could just put it in the comments?

Now that you know all that, you can really understand just how bad things are in the U.S. Check out this chart:

I’ll put that in writing because words are important: 27–28% of Americans read at or below a second grade level. A whopping 57% read at or below the sixth-grade level. And just 13 percent are capable of understanding prose at a high school graduate level or above. While that is pretty close to the OECD average across 31 countries², it’s still just plain awful, so please do feel free to use it in your memes.

But actually it’s worse than that. Because American adults’ literacy has in fact declined over the past decade. Back in the 2012/2015 surveys, just 18 percent scored at or below Level 1 (while the Level 4+ cohort has, luckily, remained constant). Overall, we are less able to make sense of the written word than we were during Obama’s second term. We were dumb; we’ve grown dumberer.

And you know who’s leading the dumbening? Older adults. Yes, Americans born from 1958 to 1988 showed the sharpest declines in reading scores, with the oldest cohort—older Gen X and younger Baby Boomers—worsening the worstest, even though one of the reading-comp passages was about bus fares. Check out the OECD graph:

There’s a whole lot to speculate on here. Is this the fault of Fox News? Of Facebook? Of Covid? Of Trump? Of the iPhone? Of general political polarization driven by volatile emotions? The failure stretches over such a broad swath of Americans, who represent so many different educational backgrounds and approaches and eras, that the best I can do, in the absence of any real data, is rely on NCES commissioner Peggy Carr’s explanation, when she presented the research on December 10: “It’s difficult to say.”

Perhaps it’s instructional to compare the U.S. with another country from the survey? Let’s look not at the top countries—Finland and Japan, who put us to absolute shame—but at New Zealand, whose overall literacy score of 260 is just two points ahead of the United States. Except that New Zealand tumbled since 2017, dropping 21 points compared with our descent of 12. The Slovak Republic, South Korea, Lithuania, and Poland—they cratered as well, by even greater margins. So, awesome! It’s not just Americans’ feckless idiocy to blame. It’s a worldwide phenomenon! Except, you know, in Japan and much of Northern Europe.

(Can we just blame the phones? And social media? God, that would make it so much easier, wouldn’t it? Those darn screens are the problem! And maybe they are, partly, but I have a feeling it’s a lot more complex than that.)

If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need an explanation of Why This Matters, but I’ll go at it anyway. As the OECD report shows, higher literacy and numeracy levels correlate with quality of life. If you are Level 4+, you’re far, far more likely to be employed, more likely to make more money, be in better health, feel you can trust people, do more volunteering, and in general feel more satisfied with your life. (You’re also more likely to be a paid subscriber to daily newsletter essays, but that goes without saying.) This is probably a big Duh for most of us, but the OECD report very clearly illustrates the enormous and widening gulf between those who can read and solve problems and those who cannot. It is bad, and it is dangerous for all of our futures.

There is, however, one data point where all Americans remain close together, whatever their reading ability: When asked how much the U.S. political system allows people “like you” to have a say in what the government does, almost no one expressed optimism. Just 20% of Level 1 and below, and 23% of Level 4 and above rated their feelings at a 7 out of 10 or higher. We’re all smart enough, or maybe stupid enough, to know the system is fucked. E pluribus ummm…

I wish I could end this piece by saying there’s progress being made—capable people doing smart things to correct this depressing downward trend! But I don’t know of any, and given the incoming president’s proud illiteracy, hatred of the Department of Education, and resistance to the very idea of complexity, I doubt there are any nationwide fixes forthcoming. Perhaps someone whose job it is to cover education for a large media organization can take on this project, tracing the roots of our loss of reading ability (and not just for school kids and college students), questioning the tools and methods we use to measure it, examining cities, states, or countries that have turned their declines around. But that’s beyond the scope of this angry little newsletter, unless of course you want to hire me to do the investigation. Till then, I think the best we can all do is to guard against our own declines by reading widely, across every genre we can bear, and challenging ourselves to seek out and get through ever more difficult material. If we don’t, I fear, it’s memes all the way down.

Still, I will leave you with at least one bright point. Worried that Trying! might be out of reach for the majority of Americans, I ran it through a variety of “readability” calculators and generally got scores from the high 60s to the low 80s on the Flesch Scale³, putting it somewhere between Harry Potter and Jurassic Park, meaning it can be easily read by 13-to-15-year-olds. And since there’s nothing young teens like better than obscure rants by a washed-up journalist delivered every single day to inboxes they never check, I’m confident in saying: There’s hope for us yet! 🪨🪨🪨

Notes

1. It evolved from two other surveys that were done in the 1990s and early 2000s.

2. In fact, the OECD’s write-up of the various levels is way less diplomatic than the U.S. education stats department’s: “At Level 1, they can understand short texts and organised lists when information is clearly indicated, find specific information and identify relevant links. Those below Level 1 can at most understand short, simple sentences.”

3. Meanwhile, on the Felch Scale, it scores a consistent 69. Sorry, sorry—just trying to keep things at a ninth-grade reading level.

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