Who Can Actually Read in America?

If you are one of my regular readers, you probably know my usual beat by now. I am a children’s librarian who loves children’s literature and wants more adults to feel empowered to share books with the children in their lives.

A few months ago, I wrote an article about how an adult does not have to consider themselves a “good” reader to become their child’s favorite narrator. I also tried to reassure parents that even when a young child appears to be squirming, wandering away, or paying no attention whatsoever, they may still be absorbing far more from a read-aloud than we realize.

I liked writing that article, and I remain proud of it. I genuinely believe that treating ourselves with more grace (and letting go of the idealized image of a perfectly attentive child listening to a flawless performance) could change family reading for the better.

That is why I was so startled when a Reddit discussion of what I considered a hopeful and encouraging article went rogue and was upvoted to the heavens. Reddit is hardly famous for its generosity, so I was prepared for some disagreement. I was not prepared to be accused of elitism for “assuming everyone can read.”

The criticism seemed to transform my invitation to share a simple picture book into a demand that every parent perform advanced literacy with confidence and ease. That was not remotely what I had written. Still, the comment bothered me. Not because I believed the accusation was fair, but because it exposed how confused our public conversation about literacy has become.

I had apparently assumed that most adults could read. But what did I mean by read? What did the commenter mean? What do researchers mean when they publish literacy statistics? And at what point on the enormous spectrum between reading street signs and analyzing a complicated rhetorical essay do we decide that someone can “actually read”?

One in five Americans is illiterate. Or maybe it is one in four. Depending on the article, source, year, and definition being used, the statistic changes dramatically. This inconsistency is our first clue that researchers, journalists, advocates, and ordinary readers are frequently talking past one another when it comes to “illiteracy.”

When most people encounter that word, a particular picture forms in their heads. They imagine someone who recognizes a stop sign only by its color and shape. Someone who cannot read a birthday card, understand a short note, or type a text message to a friend.

For better or worse, that is not necessarily who researchers are describing when their work is later condensed into dramatic headlines about America’s “hidden literacy crisis” or its increasingly “post-literate” workforce.

The literacy problem is real. But before we can understand it, we must understand what researchers are actually measuring.

Adult literacy is not a light switch that flips from can read to cannot read. It is a continuum of increasingly sophisticated skills. Somewhere between the technical language of assessments and the headlines built from them, that nuance is often lost.

Many of the most widely cited statistics about adult literacy in the United States come from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, generally known as PIAAC.

PIAAC is an international assessment administered through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and reported in the United States by the National Center for Education Statistics. It measures how adults use written information in realistic situations, from understanding basic text to navigating complicated arguments and digital information.

It does not ask a single question such as, “Can this person read?” Instead, it asks what kinds of reading tasks an adult can reliably complete.

That is an entirely different question.

In the 2023 assessment, 28 percent of American adults ages 16 to 65 performed at Level 1 or below in literacy, an increase from 19 percent in 2017. Meanwhile, 44 percent performed at Level 3 or above. Those numbers deserve serious attention. They suggest that a substantial, and growing, portion of the adult population struggles with reading tasks beyond the simplest levels.

But “Level 1 or below” does not mean “cannot read.”

According to NCES, most adults performing below Level 1 can still process meaning at the sentence level. Many can read short, simple paragraphs, determine which word makes sense within a passage, and locate a word or number in a brief text to answer an explicit question. Level 1 readers can work with short texts, understand basic vocabulary, and find information that is directly stated.

These are limited literacy skills. An adult at this level may struggle profoundly with a medical form, insurance policy, workplace manual, government website, or lengthy news article. That difficulty can interfere with employment, health care, education, finances, and participation in civic life.

But these adults are not necessarily unable to read a birthday card, send a text, understand a sign, or share the words in a simple picture book.

That distinction matters.

As the PIAAC levels rise, the work becomes more complicated. Readers must compare information, make inferences, connect ideas across passages, assess competing claims, and understand meaning that is not directly stated. At the highest levels, readers are asked to synthesize dense material, evaluate evidence and assumptions, and reason through ambiguity.

PIAAC is therefore not measuring whether someone can pronounce written words. It is measuring increasingly complex forms of comprehension.

The question is not simply, Can this person read?

It is, What can this person understand, infer, evaluate, and do with what they have read?

Literacy is not one smooth ability. I see this unevenness at my library every day.

I meet grandmothers who gravitate toward Harlequin romances but struggle to complete forms about their medical histories. I meet college students using our computers to write reports for class who resist the suggestion that they consult an adult nonfiction book as a source. I meet parents who comfortably read library signs, text messages, and everyday instructions but recoil when invited to read a picture book aloud to their children.

All of these people can read.

That does not mean they can read everything with equal ease.

The romance reader may possess plenty of stamina, vocabulary, and narrative comprehension while becoming overwhelmed by bureaucratic language and unfamiliar medical terminology. The college student may be able to retrieve information from short digital sources but have little practice following an argument across an entire book. The parent who reads signs but avoids storybooks may be technically capable yet frightened of stumbling, mispronouncing a word, or performing badly in front of another person.

Skill, confidence, familiarity, stamina, background knowledge, and willingness are not the same thing. We often behave as though reading ability transfers cleanly from one situation to another. It does not.

A person may read sports journalism easily and struggle with literary fiction. Someone may devour fantasy novels but find a tax form nearly impenetrable. A fluent reader may become lost in a legal opinion, scientific paper, or insurance document because the vocabulary, structure, and assumptions of that genre are unfamiliar.

This does not mean reading is so subjective that it cannot be measured. It means that the statement “this person can read” tells us less than we think it does.

Can they decode the words? Can they understand the literal meaning? Can they make an inference the author has not plainly stated?And many more nuanced capabilities must be accounted for because all of them fall beneath the enormous umbrella we call “reading”.

The current debate about children’s literacy has recently emphasized the importance of decoding. Children must learn how written letters correspond to sounds. They must be able to recognize words accurately and fluently before they can devote their attention to understanding a complicated text.

But decoding is the foundation of reading, not its final form.

A recent Wired examination of Mississippi’s reading reforms illustrates the distinction. Mississippi has achieved impressive gains in elementary reading through explicit phonics instruction, intervention, literacy coaching, teacher training, and high-stakes accountability. Yet those gains have not consistently carried into adolescence. Older students continue to struggle with comprehension, inference, engagement, and the stamina required to read longer material. Teachers and literacy experts described students who could complete passage-based exercises and practice isolated skills but still had difficulty “translating words into conceptual thinking.”

This is not evidence that decoding instruction failed. It is evidence that decoding solved one problem while revealing the next.

A student can pronounce every word in a passage and still misunderstand what the author is saying. A person can read a paragraph aloud beautifully and fail to recognize that it is sarcastic. A reader can retrieve one explicitly stated fact but lose the argument when it stretches across twenty pages. A college student can understand every individual sentence in Dickens and still lack enough historical or literary knowledge to understand what those sentences mean together.

Reading depends on more than recognizing words. It depends on vocabulary, background knowledge, attention, memory, familiarity with different kinds of writing, and repeated experience following ideas through increasingly complicated texts.

It also requires practice. Which adds another complication to the question of who can read in America.

A person may technically possess the ability to complete a long and complicated text but rarely exercise it. Someone who once read novels comfortably may discover that they now become restless after three pages. A student may have enough decoding skill to read an assigned book but so little experience with sustained reading that every chapter feels exhausting.

That is not the same problem as being unable to decode. It is not necessarily the same as poor comprehension, either. It is the difference between possessing a skill and maintaining it.

We understand this distinction in nearly every other area of life. Someone who has not run in ten years may still know how to run, but they should not expect to complete a marathon tomorrow. A person who once played the piano may still recognize notes while lacking the speed, strength, and fluency they once possessed.

Reading stamina works similarly. Long-form reading asks us to remain with one voice, argument, narrative, or world without immediately abandoning it for something easier. It requires us to tolerate confusion long enough for meaning to emerge. It asks us to remember information introduced many pages earlier and connect it with what we are reading now.

Those abilities can grow stronger through use. They can also weaken through neglect.

This may explain why America’s literacy conversation increasingly feels as though it is describing several crises at once. Some adults need foundational decoding instruction. Some can read straightforward material but struggle with inference and unfamiliar documents. Others possess strong comprehension within familiar subjects but lack the background knowledge needed elsewhere. Then there are those who can understand complex writing but rarely sustain their attention long enough to do so. And finally there are the ones who read constantly, but mostly in the never-ending fragments of messages, captions, posts, emails, headlines, and brief explanations.

All of these people may be described at various moments as “struggling readers.” Yet they do not have the same problem, and they do not need the same solution.

Not every American needs to interpret Moby-Dick, read a Supreme Court opinion without assistance, or evaluate a peer-reviewed medical study. Advanced and specialized texts often require extensive education, background knowledge, and familiarity with the conventions of a particular field. Even highly literate adults need experts, summaries, definitions, and guidance when they move beyond their areas of knowledge.

But a functioning democracy must surely expect more than the ability to sound out words.

Adults regularly encounter claims about health, education, economics, crime, public policy, and elections. They are asked to compare candidates, evaluate competing explanations, understand where a statistic came from, recognize when evidence is missing, and resist language designed primarily to provoke fear or anger.

That requires comprehension beyond the literal sentence.

A citizen does not need to become a literary scholar. But they should ideally be able to follow a substantial argument before responding to it. They should be able to distinguish what a source actually says from what someone online claims it says. They should recognize that a headline is not the same as an article, that correlation is not automatically causation, and that repetition does not transform an assertion into evidence.

These are reading skills, but they are also habits of mind.

They are precisely the habits that sustained, complex reading can help cultivate. A good reader is patient, can infer and compare, has a strong memory, is at times skeptical, and has the willingness to remain with an idea longer than a few seconds.

When fewer people practice the advanced skills of reading, the danger is not that every adult suddenly becomes unable to decode a sentence. The danger is that complex written thought becomes accessible to a smaller portion of the population, and that everyone else becomes increasingly dependent on whoever is willing to summarize it for them.

Calling someone illiterate or claiming they “can’t read” tells us very little about what they can do, where they struggle, or what support might help them. One adult may need foundational instruction in decoding. Another may understand spoken language and audiobooks beautifully while finding print difficult because of dyslexia or visual impairment. Another may be a fluent reader in Spanish, Arabic, Vietnamese, or another language but perform poorly on an English-language assessment. Others may comprehend well but avoid reading because years of humiliation taught them that books are places where they fail.

These are not fixed identities. They are specific combinations of strengths, weaknesses, circumstances, and experiences.

That means they also call for more specific solutions.

A decoding problem requires instruction. A language barrier requires access and language support. A problem with background knowledge requires broader exposure to information, conversation, and texts. Limited stamina requires regular opportunities to read material long enough to become absorbed. Dyslexia may call for specialized instruction and accessible formats. Shame requires patience, privacy, encouragement, and the freedom to begin without performing competence for someone else.

“Americans are illiterate” may create alarm, but alarm is not the same as understanding. A category broad enough to contain all of these people is too broad to tell us what should happen next.

So, who can actually read in America? The honest answer is that most American adults can read something.

Many can read everyday messages, signs, instructions, and straightforward passages. A smaller group can reliably navigate longer and more complicated documents. Fewer can comfortably integrate competing ideas, evaluate evidence, and reason through dense or ambiguous prose. Even among adults capable of advanced comprehension, some may rarely practice it enough to maintain their stamina.

Meanwhile, the number of adults who literally cannot decode written language at all remains surprisingly difficult to isolate. The most prominent modern literacy statistics were not designed to answer that narrow question. They measure proficiency across a continuum, and then their findings are repeatedly translated into a binary vocabulary they were never meant to support.

That does not mean America’s literacy problem has been invented.

Twenty-eight percent of adults performing at Level 1 or below is not reassuring simply because many of those adults can read a short paragraph. It means millions of people may struggle with the kinds of texts through which modern institutions communicate. It means that a medical portal, benefits application, workplace policy, or substantial news report may be inaccessible even when its reader can decode every individual word.

At the other end of the ladder, the erosion of sustained reading presents a different problem. A population may remain technically literate while losing the practice, confidence, and patience required for advanced comprehension.

The crisis, then, is not captured by saying that Americans can read.

Nor is it captured by saying that Americans cannot.

Reading is not a door that is either open or closed. It is a staircase. Most Americans appear to have climbed onto it. Far fewer may be reaching its upper steps, and fewer still may be regularly practicing the forms of reading that keep them there.

The question is not merely who can read.

It is what kinds of reading Americans can do, how reliably they can do them, and what happens to a society when advanced comprehension becomes the province of a shrinking minority.

And this brings me back to the accusation that began this essay. Was I being elitist when I encouraged adults to share picture books with children because I had assumed that everyone could read?

I do not think so. The existence of adults with serious literacy barriers does not make the invitation to share books elitist. It makes lowering the threshold more important. Not every parent can comfortably read every picture book. Some may need a predictable board book with only a few words. Some may tell the story through the illustrations, sing a familiar rhyme, listen to an audiobook while turning the pages, or let a child recite a memorized favorite. Some may stumble, pause, ask for help, or choose the same manageable book night after night.

None of this erases the seriousness of America’s literacy problems. Adults who struggle with forms, policies, medical information, or sustained arguments deserve meaningful instruction and support. Children who can decode but cannot comprehend need more than endless exercises. A democracy in which advanced written thought belongs to an ever-smaller group should concern all of us.

But concern should not harden into fatalism. Literacy is not a fixed identity bestowed on some people and withheld from others. It is a collection of abilities that can be practiced, supported, strengthened, and shared. Libraries understand this instinctively. We do not begin by asking people to prove that they are readers. We begin by helping them find something they can enter.

A child’s favorite narrator does not have to be the most fluent reader in the room. They do not have to perform every sentence perfectly or understand every book they encounter. They only need a doorway wide enough to step through and someone willing to assure them that, no matter where they begin, they belong among books.

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How This Article Was Written

Back in April, a string of Reddit comments got me thinking about who is considered “able to read”, who is labeled “illiterate,” and whether it was truly possible that one out of every five people I encounter could not reasonably be expected to read a picture book aloud to a child.

I began researching literacy statistics, paying particular attention to what researchers were actually measuring and how those findings were being interpreted. Over time, I compiled that research and my own thoughts into this essay.

The images were created by me in Canva by collaging and arranging existing artwork. No images were generated using artificial intelligence.

The argument, analysis, and writing are my own. This essay would not exist without the time I spent researching, drafting, revising, and developing it.