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0 pointsjcranmer5y ago0 comments

> With a century of universal compulsory education, US adult literacy rates have difficulty cracking 91%.[1] That's about 10 million people with no effective English literacy. (Some are literate in other languages.) Some other industrialised countries see similar results, though most fall at 98% or higher by UNESCO rankings.[2]

I drilled into the literacy reports cited by [1], eventually landing at [3]. From those results, the US is not especially anomalous compared to other countries, although breaking down by nativity does suggest that the US has an anomalously large gap between native-born adults and immigrant adults.

The UNESCO rankings and the PIAAC rankings give substantially different results by observing scores. There's a few countries in both: Chile, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey. Most of those countries are given >99% literacy rates by UNESCO, but have a few percent classified as "Below Level 1" by PIAAC, indicating that UNESCO has a much looser definition than PIAAC.

I can't tell you which ranking is better correlated to what a naïve observer would think of as "literate," but the two rankings are definitely measuring different things.

[3] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/ideuspiaac/report.aspx?p=3...

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dredmorbius5y ago

Just to note, I realised much of this when composing and citing my reply above. US NCES and UNESCO literacy metrics and criteria do seem to differ pretty materially.

There are other evidences of persistent barriers to skills and rationality attainment though, with fairly strong evidence.

US high school graduation rates reached a pretty firm plateau in about 1950, having risen from six percent in 1900. Much of the ballyhoo over secondary education (test scores vs. graduation rates) has involved trading one against the other, though improvements in fundamental living standards for the poorest (well mother/baby care, nutrition, housing, environmental contaminants most especially heavy metals, reduced general precarity) have also contributed greatly, as has equality of access. All of these being before pedagogical factors are considered --- raiseing the floor is the most cost-effective way of raising numerous population averages.

Hiher-education attainment similarly shows some resistance to expansion, as well as questions regarding comparability over time. Bachellors, Masters, and PhD inflation seem likely. There are also cases where standards seem to have tightened somewhat: there was a biography of a 19th century American who was admitted to the bar in a Southern state on the basis of a brief interview, but who declined the practived on account of the obviously lax standards evidenced. (Ran across recently via Wikipedia, though the details escape me.)

Back to literacy, the US seems to struggle to achieve ~95% at a minimum, the number I'd initially written above, though by its own measure (assuming all those unable to participate in the assessment are illiterate) as low as 91%.

The UNESCO values strike me as somewhat suspiciously high. I'm not sure that's warranted suspicion, but it suggests investigating methods more deeply.