More Shocking U.S. Statistics

Adolescent Literacy Reform in America has been undergoing great change with local, state, and national support, especially since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) produced widely publicized reports of low reading achievement among students in U.S. schools. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) recognizes this issue and explains that part of this problem is due to the idea that, “traditionally, educators have focused on the development of literacy in the early grades, assuming that older students did not need special instruction.” However, this assumption is incorrect because “it has become clear that many middle and high school students are increasingly under-literate, lacking the complex literacy skills they will need to be successful in an information-driven economy,”

n 2006, NCTE reported that “only 13% of American adults [were] capable of performing complex literacy tasks,” “literacy scores of high school graduates [had] dropped between 1992 and 2003,” “8.7 million secondary school students – that’s one in four – [were] unable to read and comprehend the material in their textbooks,” and that the “2005 ACT College Readiness Benchmark for Reading found that only about half of the students tested were ready for college-level reading, and the 2005 scores were the lowest in a decade,” (4). These are shocking statistics, and NCTE predicts that low literacy rates in the U.S. predict employment woes for U.S. graduates due to the fact that modern employers are looking for a “highly literate pool of job applicants” and may turn to sources outside the U.S. if American graduates do not meet their qualifications....

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