The message so far:
- Almost a fifth of American adults are functionally illiterate
- Close to half of American 18 and over read at the 8th grade level or less
- Poor reading skills condemn a huge swath of the Americansto low-wage jobs and poverty
- Wages for high school dropouts have plummeted
- Wages have stagnated for those without post-secondary education or training
- Rising inequality in part reflects the growing wage premium paid to college graduates
Unfortunately, new generations of Americans are falling even further behind. Despite unending school reform and the expansion of adult basic education, literacy levels of young adults are lower today than they were a decade ago:
Chart accessed at: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/12/23/the-declining-productivity-of-education/
The above scores, by the way, are on a scale of 0-500. They put the average American in the mid-to-high “Basic” level of literacy and numeracy, which is associated with the ability to:
- read and understand information in short, commonplace prose texts
- read and understand information in simple documents
- locate easily identifiable quantitative information and use it to solve simple, one-step problems when the arithmetic operation is specified or easily inferred
Such a 'basic' level of literacy is barely enough to perform low-wage, low-skill jobs, much less jobs with a future.
References:
The Declining Productivity of Education by Jonathan Rothwell. The Brookings Institute, Social Mobility Memos. December 23, 2016
National Center for Education Statistics: Overview of the literacy levels. https://nces.ed.gov/naal/perf_levels.asp Accessed on 3/30/2107