An American Father Speaks

Here I must confess an interest because my own two young children are part of this troubled cohort. The wife and yours truly are countering it by carpet-bombing our kids with books, writing children’s books and hosting a Little Free Library in our front yard. Every single room in our house has books, including the laundry room and the head.

So far, it is working on our daughter. She is soon to enter the second grade and reads at a much higher level. She is tall for her age and has a monster vocabulary. It would not surprise me if she skips from, say, second to fourth grade. Our son is set to enter kindergarten. He remains a smart, funny, articulate, but only fleetingly literate work in progress.

I suspect that any American parents who throw down as hard as we have on early reading will have broadly similar results. Surround the kids with books, read them books, let them score points against the tyranny of bedtime by staying up reading, and good things are quite likely to happen.

Misdiagnosing American Readers

Still, not everyone can do what we did, which brings us to American public education. I came up through American public schools, which is the track our children are on as well. I pay some attention to what is taught and caught in classrooms.

Near as I can tell, the problem is not that Americans are postliterate. The real issue is that they are subliterate. That condition appears to be deepening, and our schools are ill-equipped to handle it.

Let me explain what I mean by subliterate. By definition, people who are literate can read. So can people who are subliterate, just not very well. Sure, they can read a bunch of words by sight, and they might be able to sound out others – though we will come back to that – but when it comes to putting words together, well, the results are not wonderful.

Thus, when critics complain that Americans are postliterate, the real complaint when you push past everything else is that they are lazy. While that is possible, I do not think laziness is the real issue at play here. Rather, the real issue is that they are developmentally stunted.

“Very low literacy”

Evidence that a substantial part of the population may have some trouble with reading is nothing new. A pair of broad surveys in the 1990s stopped separating the rare illiterate goats from the great mass of literate sheep. Instead, researchers “discussed adult literacy as a continuum from very low literacy to very high literacy”, reports the wonderfully named Encyclopedia of Social Problems.

Using this new methodological bar, researchers learned something alarming, namely that the number of adults in developed nations “with very low literacy skills ... were 10 times as high as [earlier] estimates”.

Very low literacy is considered Level 1, and the next level up is not much better. As National University explains, in 2023, 28% and 29% of US adults were ranked in Levels 1 and 2 respectively. Those in Level 1 have “significant difficulty with everyday reading tasks” and Level 2 folks have “basic reading proficiency but challenges with complex texts”.

Those results are graded on the curve, as 28% scored “at or below” Level 1. Regardless, the recent results tell us that almost 60% of the US adult population either can barely read or cannot really hack “complex texts”, such as most books.

What the Lockdowns Took

Many adults in these two groups, which comprise a majority of the voting-age population, have children. These are the children for whom K-12 education can really matter. They can learn to read from their teachers, for instance, and take in books as a social experience for the first time along with their fellow students.

Unfortunately, a worldwide pandemic happened. It did not touch children’s health deeply, thank God. Around the world, many public schools were allowed to reopen fairly early on, and the disruptions to their education were minimal. But in most American states, the COVID disruption was massive with at least one year that was effectively lost.

COVID had a lot of horrible knock-on psychological and educational effects. A lot of the socialization that normally happens among young children was delayed. I still remember taking my children, born in 2019 and 2021, to parks. They would approach other children at those parks to try and play with them, and it is still hard for me to say what happened next.

Many of those kids would run away from my children. They did this because their parents had taught them to fear and flee other children. This fear extended even to an open-air park, where the chances of transmission were very low. When this happened, our kids would look to me and the wife to make some sense of why they were being treated like lepers. We did our best to comfort them and change the subject.

COVID children missed out on a lot of the socialization that normally happens, for a couple of years. This had bad effects on reading. One of the main channels for American children to get books is through schools. This is true for school books and a lot of other books as well, through Scholastic book fairs and the like. And while schools were shuttered, many libraries were shuttered as well, so it was a double whammy.

For kids like mine, whose determined parents said damn the torpedoes and send us those Amazon packages, there was no book shortage. But for many kids, the COVID years were years of isolation and tragic loss – my children lost two uncles in a single week, for instance – and few books.

Additionally, the scars that those years left have made many of America’s COVID kids less social. That has made it harder to revive the peer-to-peer sharing network that made many childhood books of yesteryear into common currency. Now, many of those kids who want to read books are on their own.

Looking for Miracles in… Mississippi?

Is there any silver lining to this dark cloud of subliterate woe? Yes, maybe. And it is found in Mississippi. Mississippi is the state in the US that is the most fun to spell. It is also the poorest state, but it is educationally rich. The results there are so good that many are calling it the Mississippi miracle.

Here is what happened: In 2013, the state decided to get really serious about two things. The first was phonics. The second was cracking down on social promotion in schools. Kids in the state take tests in third grade. If they cannot hack it, they are held back for a year.

The results have been spectacular. The state climbed from 49th place among the 50 states for fourth-grade reading scores before the reforms to 9th place in 2024. And it turns out that when you can read well, you often do better in math to boot. Those scores climbed from 50th in the nation to 16th.

Harry Anthony Patrinos, a professor of education at the University of Arkansas, called the Mississippi results a “model for global literacy reform”. Some nearby states have attempted similar reforms, with good results.

It is easy to see why ending social promotion would be a useful prod to achievement, and it has helped. But the real head-scratcher is the gains made from the state making it really, very, quite and absolutely clear to teachers that they must teach phonics to the kids.

Phonics!

S-o-u-n-d-i-n-g w-o-r-d-s o-u-t!

Previous American educational fads emphasized the whole word method of learning English. Though some shifting has occurred at the schools of education and in the classrooms, the shift apparently was grudging and not nearly thorough enough.

It turns out, there were seismic gains to be made by getting the kids to pronounce all the phonemes in See Spot Run and other volumes.

That is why, while I tremble for the future of reading in my country, I cannot totally despair. If Mississippi could turn it around like that, how hard could it be for the rest of the states to follow, eventually?

While America is getting that all sorted out, we will be reading books with our children. On good nights, the daughter delights in showing us what she can do.