Quote:
In 2003, the National Assessment of Adult Literacy from the U. S. Department of Education indicated that as many as 5 percent of adults over the age of 16 were non-literate in English (that's 11 million adults), 14 percent (30 million) were below basic in literacy, and another 29 percent (63 million) possessed only basic literacy skills.
Quote:
Reading levels of young Americans fell so low in the 1970s that the Army was forced to rewrite its operating manuals in comic fashion.10 Much reading material previously used for years in American schools became incomprehensible to present-day students and had to be simplified. For example, when a well-known history book was revised with an eye toward the high school market, words like “spectacle” and “admired” were removed. Apparently they were too difficult.11
On 26 April 1983, pointing to the literacy crisis and to the collapse in standards at the secondary and the college levels, the National Commission on Excellence warned: “Our nation is at risk.” The report warned that America would soon be engulfed by a “rising tide of mediocrity in elementary and secondary school.”12
Since the Nation at Risk report, education reforms have taken place in every state. New teaching methods and programs have been tried and evaluated. But the overall goal set for the year 2000 — to educate every child to a high standard — has remained a mere dream. “The nation is at even greater risk now,” voiced Senator Edward M. Kennedy a decade after the famous report was published.13 A newspaper reported in 1997 that the standards of education are so low in the U.S. that black Americans are returning to Africa, specifically Kenya, to get better schooling.14 And if the article, published in The Atlanta Journal and Constitution in October 1999, part of which appears below, is only partially representative of conditions in the United States, it should cause great alarm:
In the aftermath of the Atlanta Public School's announcement that more than half the city's third-graders may flunk come spring, administrators, teachers and parents are grappling with questions about why the scores were so low and what can be done to improve them. Superintendent Beverly Hall last week revealed the stunning results of the Scholastic Reading Inventory, a criterion-referenced test that gauges a child's reading skills against what is expected for a child in that grade. Seventy-three percent of second-graders, 55 percent of third-graders, 57 percent of fourth graders and 49 percent of fifth-graders are not reading on grade level, according to the test.15
The sad truth is that a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows 59% of American high school graduates between the ages of 16 and 25 are functionally illiterate, incapable of coping “adequately” with the complex demands of everyday life. 