Literacy for People, the Planet, and the Minutes

You have seen this statistic. "54% of American adults read below a sixth-grade level." It is on posters. It is in grant applications. It has been in mine.

Its publisher took it down.

On November 17, 2024, APM Research Lab edited that sentence out of the article that made it famous, with a note: while some have associated these assessments with grade-level reading, the assessment itself discourages the comparison. The underlying study never measured grade levels. Someone translated it into one, and the translation traveled better than the finding.

It is still everywhere. It is on the front page of half a dozen literacy organizations today, on International Literacy Day, being repeated by people who care enormously about literacy and have no way of knowing the number was withdrawn.

That is the whole problem in one statistic. Not that people can't read. That what's available to read has a retraction nobody can see.

Sixty years ago today, UNESCO named the eighth of September International Literacy Day. This year's theme is "Literacy for people, the planet and prosperity," and the real numbers are sobering enough without embellishment: at least 739 million young people and adults without basic literacy skills, four in ten children not reaching minimum reading proficiency. In the United States, adults scoring at the lowest literacy level rose nine percentage points between 2017 and 2023.

It is also Library Card Sign-up Month. Every September the American Library Association asks a simple question in a hundred different graphics: do you have one?

I have spent the last two weeks close to both of these things — one at a library desk, one in an archive — and I keep arriving at the same uncomfortable thought.

Both observances measure whether a person can read. Neither asks whether a place can.

Last week I wrote that Robert Putnam's worry was that people stopped showing up. Mine is different. Mine is that the people who do show up can't read the system they've shown up to.

That is not an insult. I mean it literally, and I include myself.

Show up to a fiscal court meeting and you will hear a motion, a second, and a vote on a line item nobody reads aloud. Show up to a school board meeting and the budget is an attachment. Show up to a nonprofit board — I sit on one — and the financial report is a page of numbers with no prior year beside it.

Everyone in the room is literate. Almost none of them can read that.

Community literacy is not the ability to decode words. It is the ability of a community to read itself: its budget, its minutes, its record, its own history of decisions. It is a collective capacity, not an individual one. And unlike personal literacy, it can be lost by a whole place at once — not because people forgot how to read, but because the instrument that made the place legible went away.

Keep reading to learn what happened when I looked up my own county's two elementary schools on a national literacy map — and found four published numbers for the same county that disagree by a factor of six, only one of which reaches the map.