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NCES Study Shows 11 Million Adults Nonliterate in EnglishSome 11 million Americans, about 5% of the adult population, are nonliterate in English, meaning interviewers could not communicate with them or that they were unable to answer a minimum number of questions, according to a government report released December 15.The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, also shows that U.S. adults have not advanced since 1992 in their ability to read and understand English sentences and paragraphs or to understand such documents as prescription drug labels. Although quantitative literacy scores that show the ability to understand numbers in text has improved by eight percentage points, adult prose and document literacy remain the same. “It’s really hard to have a well-educated and highly intellectual population of children if they go home to parents who do not have adequate reading skills,” American Library Association Literacy Officer Dale Lipschultz said in a December 15 Associated Press report. “One adult unable to read is one too many in America,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who the same day pledged to coordinate adult education efforts in 2006 across multiple federal agencies. “We must focus resources toward proven, research-based methods to ensure that all adults have the necessary literacy skills to be successful.” NCES Commissioner Mark Schneider broke down some of the results by race and ethnicity since the survey was last conducted in 1992: “In 2003, White adults had the highest prose literacy, followed by Asian/Pacific Islanders, Blacks, and then Hispanics. White adults had higher quantitative literacy in 2003, while their prose and document literacy did not change significantly. Black adults had higher literacy on all three scales.” Schneider added that “Hispanics were the only group whose prose and document literacy scores decreased,” a decline he attributed to demographic and immigration changes. Posted December 16, 2005. |
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