Our adult literacy problem

Larissa Phillips, Free Press -   Forty-eight million adults in the U.S. read at or below the third-grade level, and many of them struggle in ways that are almost impossible for a fluent reader to imagine: They can’t order off a menu, check in for a telehealth appointment, or fill out a job application. Low literacy skills correlate heavily with poverty and crime, and are associated with an estimated $2.2 trillion per year of social services, healthcare, and lost wages. This is an issue both sides of the political spectrum would love to address. The question is: How?

In April, a bill was introduced in Congress to expand funding for adult education programs. It’s called the WORKS Act—the Adult Education Workforce Opportunity and Reskilling for Knowledge and Success Act—and it would nearly double current funding for programs, to $1.35 billion, by 2029. The bill mentions digital literacy, college advisers for adults, and “foundational skills.” But there is no plan for the most foundational and intractable problem in adult education: teaching grown-ups to read.

Having worked in adult education for 20 years now, I can tell you the shocking reality: There are very, very few programs that do this. Federal dollars that were earmarked decades ago for helping adults with low literacy mostly go to programs for adults reading at or above third-grade level, such as citizenship classes or English as a Second Language, or ESL...

 Even adult education programs that do teach reading tend to do it completely ineffectively. In my two-decade career in this field, I have heard of only a very few literacy centers that teach reading using methods that are actually proven to work—and that’s because of a conflict that plagues American education. It is, fundamentally, a battle between a progressive mindset and a traditional one. The former prioritizes the student’s inclinations, the joy of learning, and the teacher’s intuition. The latter wants strictness, structure, and an evidence-based curriculum.