54% of Black Adults Read Below Sixth-Grade Level — This Is the Real Emergency

Before we speak of unemployment, before we speak of incarceration, before we speak of the wealth gap or the health gap or the life expectancy gap or any of the other gaps that have become the permanent furniture of American racial discourse, we must speak of the thing that sits beneath all of them, the thing without which none of those other conversations can produce meaningful change, the thing so fundamental that to ignore it is to build every subsequent policy initiative on sand: literacy. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, found that 54% of Black adults in the United States function at or below the “basic” literacy level — meaning they can perform no more than the most simple and concrete literacy tasks. They can locate a single piece of information in a short text. They can sign a form. They cannot compare two editorials, follow written instructions for a moderately complex task, or read and understand a lease agreement, a medical consent form, or the terms of a loan. This is not a gap. This is a chasm. And nearly every pathology that afflicts Black America — every one — can be traced, through documented causal pathways, back to this abyss.

I use the word “emergency” deliberately, because this is not a problem. A problem suggests something that might be solved incrementally, approached with reasonable patience, addressed through the normal machinery of policy and reform. What we have is an emergency — a situation in which the failure to act immediately produces cascading, compounding, irreversible harm to millions of people. An emergency in which every year of inaction sentences another cohort of children to functional illiteracy, and through that illiteracy, to poverty, to incarceration, to shortened lives, to the perpetuation of every crisis that the entire apparatus of racial justice claims to be fighting.

The Reading Wars and Their Casualties

To understand how we arrived at this catastrophe, you must understand the reading wars — the decades-long ideological battle within education schools over how children should be taught to read. On one side stood the advocates of systematic phonics instruction: the explicit, sequential teaching of letter-sound relationships that allows children to decode written language. On the other side stood the advocates of the “whole language” approach, later rebranded as “balanced literacy,” which held that children learn to read naturally through immersion in literature, that explicit phonics instruction was unnecessary and even harmful, that reading should be taught through context clues, picture cues, and the sheer joy of books.

The whole language movement won the institutional battle. By the 1990s, it dominated education schools, curriculum publishers, and school district reading programs across the country. Its flagship program, “Reading Recovery,” was adopted in thousands of schools. Lucy Calkins’ Teachers College Reading and Writing Project trained tens of thousands of teachers in methods that deliberately minimized phonics instruction. And the results were catastrophic — for all children, but for Black children in particular.

Here is why: children from print-rich homes, children whose parents read to them nightly, children who arrived at kindergarten having already absorbed thousands of hours of spoken and written language, could sometimes compensate for the absence of systematic phonics instruction. They had enough background knowledge and vocabulary to guess at words from context, enough exposure to print to develop some decoding skills organically. But children from homes where books were scarce, where parents worked multiple jobs and had limited time for bedtime reading, where the vocabulary of everyday speech was smaller due to the well-documented effects of poverty on language exposure — these children needed explicit instruction. They needed to be taught, systematically and directly, how the written code works. And the whole language movement denied them that instruction on ideological grounds.

“The most fundamental responsibility of schools is teaching students to read. If we don’t get that right, nothing else we do is going to matter very much.”
— Louisa Moats, literacy researcher and author of “Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science”

The NAEP — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the “nation’s report card” — has tracked reading achievement by race for more than four decades. In 2022, only 15% of Black fourth graders scored at or above proficient on the NAEP reading assessment. Fifteen percent. That means 85% of Black nine-year-olds in America’s public schools cannot read at the level the nation has defined as the minimum standard for their grade. The number has barely moved in twenty years. In some states — in the very states that most aggressively adopted whole language and balanced literacy curricula — the proficiency rate for Black fourth graders is in single digits.

The Pipeline from Illiteracy to Prison

The connection between illiteracy and incarceration is not a metaphor. It is a documented, measured, replicated causal pathway that the criminal justice system itself has acknowledged. The Department of Justice has reported that approximately 70% of inmates in state and federal prisons read at or below a fourth-grade level. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that incarcerated adults were far more likely than the general population to have literacy skills in the lowest proficiency levels. A study published in the Journal of Correctional Education found that inmates who participated in education programs had a 43% lower odds of recidivating than those who did not.

The mechanism is not mysterious. A child who cannot read at grade level by third grade — and the research is overwhelming on this point — has a dramatically higher probability of never reading at grade level. A child who cannot read is a child who cannot learn, because after third grade, the curriculum shifts from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” A child who cannot learn falls behind, becomes disengaged, becomes disruptive, is suspended, is labeled, drops out. A young person without a high school diploma in twenty-first-century America has almost no legitimate economic options. The path from illiteracy to poverty to crime to prison is not inevitable for any individual, but it is statistically predictable across populations, and we have known this for decades.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation documented in 2011 that a child who is not reading proficiently by third grade is four times more likely to drop out of high school. For Black and Hispanic children from low-income families who were not proficient readers by third grade, the dropout rate was staggering. This is the pipeline that no one wants to name honestly: it does not run from school to prison through racism or policing or any of the external forces that dominate the public conversation. It runs from school to prison through illiteracy — through the failure of the institution charged with teaching children to read to actually do so.

The PIAAC Data and the Adult Crisis

The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, known as PIAAC, administered by the OECD, provides the most comprehensive international comparison of adult literacy skills available. The 2017 PIAAC data for the United States confirms what the NAAL found more than a decade earlier: Black adults in America score, on average, significantly below their white, Asian, and immigrant counterparts on measures of literacy, numeracy, and digital problem-solving. The gap is not closing. In some measures, it is widening.

What the PIAAC data reveals, and what should haunt every educator, every policymaker, and every advocate in this country, is that the adult literacy crisis is not merely a legacy of past failures. It is being actively reproduced. The children who were failed by whole language instruction in the 1990s and 2000s are now the parents who lack the literacy skills to support their own children’s reading development at home. The cycle is generational, and each turn of the wheel makes the next turn harder to reverse.

Adult literacy programs exist, and some of them work. ProLiteracy, the National Center for Families Learning, and local programs across the country serve hundreds of thousands of adults each year. But the scale is laughably inadequate. The National Coalition for Literacy estimates that there are approximately 36 million adults in the United States who lack basic literacy skills. Federal funding for adult education under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) serves approximately 1.5 million of them. At current enrollment rates, it would take decades to serve even the current population of functionally illiterate adults — and every year, the schools produce more.

What Mississippi Did

In 2013, Mississippi — dead last among the fifty states in virtually every measure of educational achievement, the state whose name had become synonymous with educational failure — did something radical. It passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, which mandated that no child could be promoted from third grade to fourth grade without demonstrating reading proficiency. It required all K-3 teachers to be trained in the science of reading — explicit, systematic phonics instruction grounded in decades of cognitive science research. It provided literacy coaches to every elementary school. It screened every child for reading difficulties starting in kindergarten and provided immediate intervention for those who were falling behind.

The results were extraordinary. Mississippi’s NAEP reading scores rose from 49th in the nation to 21st in a single decade. Its gains among Black students were among the largest ever recorded. Mississippi proved that the literacy crisis is not intractable, that it is not the inevitable product of poverty or race or any of the other factors that have been used to excuse decades of failure. It is the product of how we teach — and when we teach correctly, the results change dramatically.

The Science of Reading Revolution

The good news — and there is good news, buried beneath the wreckage — is that the science of reading movement is winning. Investigative journalism by Emily Hanford at APM Reports, beginning in 2018, exposed the bankruptcy of balanced literacy to a national audience. Parents, many of them learning for the first time why their children could not read, organized and demanded change. State legislatures, including those in some of the most politically divided states in the country, passed laws mandating evidence-based reading instruction. As of 2024, more than 40 states have enacted some form of science of reading legislation.

The science itself is not new. The National Reading Panel synthesized the research in 2000 and concluded definitively that systematic phonics instruction produces superior outcomes, particularly for disadvantaged students. Cognitive scientists have understood for decades how the brain learns to read. What was new was the political will to act on the science — and that political will was born not from the education establishment, which resisted the evidence for decades, but from parents who could no longer tolerate being told that their children’s illiteracy was caused by poverty or racism rather than by the methods being used in their children’s classrooms.

But legislation is not implementation. Passing a law that mandates phonics instruction is the beginning of the work, not its completion. Teachers who were trained in whole language methods need to be retrained. Curriculum materials need to be replaced. Reading specialists need to be hired and deployed. And the adult literacy crisis — the 36 million adults who were already failed — requires a parallel investment that no state has yet made at the necessary scale.

What Must Be Done

The prescription is not complicated. It is expensive, it requires political courage, and it demands that the education establishment acknowledge that it has been wrong for decades — but it is not complicated.

Every child must be screened for reading difficulties in kindergarten — not in third grade when the damage is already done, but at the first moment when intervention can prevent failure. Every K-3 teacher must be trained in the science of reading — in systematic phonics, in phonemic awareness, in vocabulary development, in comprehension strategies grounded in cognitive science rather than ideology. Every child who falls behind must receive immediate, intensive intervention — not referral to special education, not social promotion, not excuses about poverty or home environment, but actual instruction in the skills they are missing.

Adult literacy must be funded at a scale that matches the crisis. The current federal investment is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. The cost of adult illiteracy — in lost productivity, in healthcare expenses, in criminal justice costs, in generational poverty — is measured in hundreds of billions. A serious adult literacy initiative would fund community-based programs in every city and county with significant illiteracy rates, would use evidence-based curricula, and would provide the wraparound supports — childcare, transportation, flexible scheduling — that adult learners need to persist.

Frederick Douglass, who taught himself to read in slavery at the risk of his life, who understood more clearly than perhaps anyone in American history the connection between literacy and freedom, wrote that “once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” He did not mean it as poetry. He meant it as a precise description of the mechanism by which human beings escape subjugation. The slaveholders understood this — that is why they made it illegal to teach enslaved people to read. The question that should keep every educator, every policymaker, and every citizen awake at night is this: if 54% of Black adults in America cannot read at a level that allows them to fully participate in the economy, in civic life, in the protection of their own interests — if the institution charged with teaching them to read failed them, using methods that the scientific evidence had discredited decades earlier — then what, precisely, has changed? The chains are different. The illiteracy is the same. And until we treat it as the emergency it is, every other conversation about racial justice in this country is building on a foundation of sand.

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
— Frederick Douglass