1062. Did you know that 21% of U.S. adults struggle with basic literacy? In this eye-opening episode, literacy specialist Kate Crist talks about the literacy crisis in America, how reading is taught incorrectly in schools, and what we can do to fix it. She has real stories of students and adults overcoming reading struggles, the science behind learning to read, and practical advice for parents, educators, and anyone who wants to help.
1062. Did you know that 21% of U.S. adults struggle with basic literacy? In this eye-opening episode, literacy specialist Kate Crist talks about the literacy crisis in America, how reading is taught incorrectly in schools, and what we can do to fix it. She has real stories of students and adults overcoming reading struggles, the science behind learning to read, and practical advice for parents, educators, and anyone who wants to help.
Literacy rates:
Why do we have these low rates of literacy?
How can I help the readers in my life?
What is phonics?
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MIGNON: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and I am here with Kate Crist. Kate is a literacy specialist, more than 20 years in education. She's been a classroom teacher, an instructional coach, program coordinator. She's currently the director of Education 4500, where she works with teachers and leaders around the U.S. to design and implement literacy programs, and she's on the steering committee for the Project for Adolescent Literacy. Kate Crist, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
KATE: Thank you so much. I'm so delighted to be here.
MIGNON: I know, I'm excited to have you here because recently I heard this shocking statistic about literacy: something like 21% of U.S. adults are illiterate. And first I was shocked, but then I started wondering, how is that even measured? What does that even mean? So can you start us at the beginning there?
KATE: Yeah. I think shocking is a good way to start. That statistic should be shocking. It's one of the richest countries in the world, and we have these really low rates of literacy. I think they have a huge impact. So there's sort of two ways we can talk about it. One is “How do we know? What are we using to measure?“ And the other is “What does it mean for people functionally?”
So the 20% of illiteracy, so there's a few different assessments that are used, batch assessments that then there, but they are samples that we can generalize from. They're large enough. One of the most commonly used ones is called the P.I.A.C.
We love our acronyms in education. It's the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. And that's where that 20%, 21% illiteracy rate comes from. That 20% are people who read at about a third-grader level or below.
And so that means job applications, voter registration guides, medical information packets, all of that's pretty inaccessible. Reading to your children, often inaccessible.
The other statistic that comes out of the P.I.A.C. that is really important to think about is that about half of Americans read at or just below a sixth-grade level.
And so those also have pretty big impacts. Conversational English, on this podcast today, when we talk to our friends and colleagues, that's at about a fifth-grade level in terms of the complexity, the syntax, the grammar, the vocabulary that we use.
Print news media is at about middle school, so anywhere sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. And then all of the things that we want to be able to do to be empowered, in charge of our lives — joining the military, or going to a trade school, or a two-year community college, or a four-year university, all of that is high school and above.
MIGNON: Wow. So you're saying like half the U.S. population couldn't do those things because of their reading skills?
KATE: Yeah. And if you look, there was a great article recently in, I think it was in "New York" magazine, "New Yorker," I can't remember. It was very compelling around what's happening in the military, and part of what it talked about is to get into the military, you have to take an entrance exam, and that lots of soldiers who want to enlist cannot pass the entrance exam, and it has to do with their rates of literacy. And so the military is solving the problem largely by giving test prep classes to those prospective soldiers, not necessarily solving the reading problem for them, but getting them past the test.
So there are like these barriers to entry in multiple places that people can't access without some serious intervention or support.
MIGNON: Wow. Wow. When we talked a few months ago, I was really amazed by the stories you told me of some people and how they do manage to get by in the world. You told me about a doctor who had trouble with literacy.
KATE: Yeah. So there … I worked, back a different lifetime ago, 20 plus years ago, at a literacy clinic. And so I had students in the literacy clinic who I taught all day, who some of were, what you would expect, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12 and then lots of adults.
And so I had one student who was a doctor, and he had gotten married really young. And his wife had helped him through medical school, had read … because the ability to read doesn't mean or to read or not read has nothing to do with intelligence, which we can talk about as really how your brain is wired. So he was perfectly smart. He could do all the work of a doctor. He just couldn't get through the text independently because he was severely dyslexic.
And that's a solvable problem. And that's what he came to the clinic for, but before he came to us, he was having people in his life help him to get through those texts.
MIGNON: Amazing. What are some of the other stories that stand out to you from your career helping people?
KATE: Yeah. So, for me, my favorite stories are always about high school kids. So I taught high school for over 10 years, and a lot of what I did, because I'd had this experience in a reading clinic, I knew more than most high school teachers have the opportunity to know. Teacher prep programs for high school don't teach you how to teach kids how to read.
But I had worked at this clinic, so I knew a little bit. And so I would tell my students … lots of my students couldn't read at grade level. My students were statistically normal. And I would say, “This is not your fault. This is actually a lack of opportunity. No one did this for you. We can though. It is a solvable problem. You're going to have to work hard and make a deal. Like I'm going to give you stuff, this fluency work, this morphology work. It's going to be hard. And if you do it, you will get better.” And I loved it when my students got pissed. Because they were like, “Wait, what?”
It is really embarrassing and takes a toll on kids to be in school and not read. So all the misbehaviors, wyling out, quiet in the back, whatever they're doing, it might be because they're having trouble getting through the day because they can't read. And so the idea that they could do better and that they had been denied the opportunity was infuriating, but also, deeply motivating.
A teenager's anger is like their best asset. And having them understand that it's not them, and that they now could be empowered to grab it was really a favorite sort of period of time for me with kids.
MIGNON: Yeah. Yeah, no, that's amazing. I was wondering, how do you motivate a teenager? If someone gets to that point, they probably have their own coping mechanisms to make them feel less bad about themselves when they get there.
KATE: 100%. 100%.
MIGNON: Yeah, I remember recently reading about a woman who was suing her high school.
So talking about anger, she had graduated from high school without being able to read, and amazingly, she got into college. So she's in college now because she used text-to-speech technology, which is also an amazing, relatively new technology that I imagine a lot of people who have trouble reading are using now.
Do you find that?
KATE: Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah. And it's incredibly powerful. I think the challenge that story, the woman, Alicia Ortiz, so the challenge for folks who can't get through text independently, again, it's not because they're dumb. And they can have great listening comprehension, and they can understand and have these amazing complex thoughts. So the text-to-speech technology gives them access to texts when they themselves can't do it independently. It doesn't wholesale solve the reading problem. And that's the distinction for students like Alicia Ortiz in this story is that there are ways to solve the problem. There are ways around the barrier, and if we don't give students access to the text independently, they're always going to be needing support rather than being empowered independently.
MIGNON: Like they're not going to be able to take that military entrance test or read the forms.
KATE: Exactly. And so it's a tension that I see a lot in middle and high schools, especially where students need to read lots of text, and they won't, or they can't, and so they're being read to a lot either by an audiobook or text-to-speech, and it's a fine solution in small doses, but as a large-scale solution to the "kids can't yet read" problem, it doesn't solve the problem. It just skirts around it.
MIGNON: So let's talk about how we got here. So how is it that so many people can't read?
KATE: Yeah. Yeah.
MIGNON: Is this a new problem, or is it an old problem I didn’t hear of?
KATE: No. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I will say two things upfront. One is I will say a bunch of stuff that lots of people will probably disagree with. So there's a lot of contested information in the education field around how kids learn to read and how we got here. I have a particular point of view, and my particular point of view was really informed by cognitive science. And so that's where I'm coming from.
And the other thing to say is that there are people who tell this story really well, who if you're curious and interested. So, there's two really good films. Documentary style films. One is "The Truth About Reading" and the other is "The Right to Read," and I think both are available freely for streaming or low cost, and they're really well done, and they really tell this, answer this question that you've asked really well.
And there's another podcast called "Sold a Story." It's a series by a woman named Emily Hanford. And she has a few stories before. She's an education reporter, and she talks about "How did we get here? Why are so many people not able to read?"
MIGNON: We’ll put a link to all of those in the show notes for listeners.
KATE: Yeah, they're really great. So, how we got, so NAEP scores, which are, if you may have heard, the NAEP scores were recently released.
So NAEP is the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And there's math and literacy scores in fourth grade and eighth grade from 2024 were just released. If we look at the recent NAEP scores, they're overall down. It was not a great year, but it's overall not really ever a great year on NAEP scores. Reasonable people can disagree about if NAEP is the tool we should be using. But by any measurement tool you use, American students don't read well. That's how we get adults who don't read well, is because we have American students who are not reading well. And so the rates have been largely flat over 30 plus years.
And that has largely to do with the failure of American schools to provide good reading instruction to students. And I think, we can talk about what good reading instruction is and what we know kids need to learn to read, but I think it's also really important to say that, by and large, teachers, this is not an attack on teachers. They have been doing what they are told. So they go to teacher prep programs and get told this is how you teach kids how to read. And then they go to teach in schools, and schools say here's your curriculum to use to teach kids how to read. And all of that stuff is wrong. But if you don't know better, you can't do better.
And so there is a big sort of problem in teacher prep and instructional materials that are because those materials aren't aligned to what we know is good instruction. And that's what "Sold a Story" is about. That could be a doctorate dissertation all in and of itself.
MIGNON: Was there some sort of policy change like 30 years ago when it got to this point?
KATE: No, I think what we know about, so two things are true. What we know about how kids learn how to read has gotten significantly better over the last 20, 30 years because cognitive science, brain imaging, we just know more about how our brains work. And that has been really insightful to understand what it is that's happening for students when they learn to read.
American reading instruction in general has had, like all of American education, has had big pendulum swings. About 20 years ago, there was a big, huge, unresolved disagreement in the American education landscape about whether or not we should teach this whole language approach. So looking at words as wholes and memorizing patterns, or if we should teach through a phonics approach. And it turns out we should be teaching through a phonics approach and not through a whole language approach.
But that idea around whole language has really taken root and stuck. And there's lots of really great reasons why that's the case, but reading instruction is still largely misaligned.
So what we know about reading and good reading instruction is largely not happening in American classrooms.
MIGNON: So, help the listeners who don't have kids or who are older and haven't engaged with the education system for a while, like, how are kids taught to read right now?
KATE: I will say that, here's the ideal. Here's what we know. And then here's what ends up happening in the classroom. So we know that reading comprehension is really two big buckets of things. This is a very simplistic view, right? But it's two buckets of things. It's what we call language comprehension and word recognition. So what do the words say and what do the words mean?
So knowing that L O V E spells "love." And then knowing that "love" means this deep and abiding feeling of care for somebody. And those two things multiplied together get us to reading comprehension. Reading itself is a contrived process.
So you and I learn to speak. Everyone learns to speak naturally if we're exposed to enough people talking as babies. We learn how to speak. Learning to read is not like that. I can listen to Mozart or Beethoven all day long. I can watch a concert pianist. It's not going to teach me how to play the piano that way. And so similarly reading has to be directly taught.
And so reading is taught ideally along these two buckets. So you teach kids about what words say, right? L O V E spells "love." You teach them the patterns of the English language. And at the same time, you teach them the knowledge and vocabulary of the world. And those two things, they draw on that knowledge and vocabulary to be really good analytical thinkers. And what the words say just gets increasingly automatic as kids get better and better at it as they get older.
And so ideally our instructional approach does both this decoding stuff and this language comprehension stuff in equal measure in classrooms. And what often happens in the classroom is the decoding part of the word recognition, the foundational skills, the phonemic awareness is not happening systematically in classrooms. It should be happening every day, 20 to 45 minutes a day, and it's not.
And then the knowledge building is also not happening systematically in classrooms. So rather than learning about Mars rovers, kids are learning about themes like, being thoughtful, or being in a community, or having courage. And so what you really need is those like coherent bodies of knowledge and this direct instruction about how words are made.
MIGNON: I've heard that kids love nonfiction books.
KATE: Yeah.
If you have little kids, you go to the library, like my son came home, he's six now, with a bag full of books about dirt bikes. I was like, “Oh boy, here we go.” Loves them. He thinks they're great. Yeah.
MIGNON: Fun. So, it's really a curriculum problem right now in that those two buckets of things aren't always happening.
KATE: Yeah, and it's a methods approach and in materials problem. Exactly.
MIGNON: Okay. So let's say, you're a parent and/or a grandparent and you notice that your child or grandchild isn't reading as well as you think they should, but like, kids learn different things at different rates. So at what point should an adult start to worry?
KATE: So, great question. I start to worry if kids aren't reading really simple stuff — "cat," "bat," "fog," "log" — in kindergarten, because there's just a foundation that's set.
If at the end of first grade, you have concerns about your child's reading, you're correct. And there's a correlation we know between success, like reading at grade level at the end of grade one, at the end of first grade, correlates really directly to finishing high school, right?
Because if you're a child in a school, and you haven't mastered the code, pretty soon, you're reading books in lap. No one's reading out loud to you or few people are reading out loud to you, right? You're more and more required to read independently, but if you can't get through what the words say, you can't read independently.
So we see this Matthew effect, where those who mastered the code, they're good to go. They get more and more, and those who didn't, get, over time, get less and less because they just, they can't pick up a book, right? That's how we get this 20% and 50% of adults.
It's because they didn't get instruction that met the need.
MIGNON: Did you call that "the Matthew effect"?
KATE: Yeah, the "Matthew effect." The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
MIGNON: Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. And so if you are concerned as a … what do you do at that point? Should you go badger your school or do you need to, are you…
KATE: Yeah, I think you should always ask your, always ask the school, right? And it is entirely possible that the school where your child or grandchild goes is "Oh, yeah, we know. Kate's having a hard time. Here's what we're doing for her. We recognize her phonics are struggling. Here's the gaps we see. Here's what we're doing in class. Here's what you could do at home." That would be amazing.
But if your kid is struggling to read at the end of first grade, it's probably not what's happening, right? And if you don't know yet, I always say, “Go ask the teachers.” The teachers spend a lot of time with your kids. They are doing the best they know how to do. So ask them what they're doing. And if they say, “Oh, don't worry about it.” I would continue to be worried about it. I would say, “Thank you so much.” And then I would go do something else.
So I think the general advice I give to parents, whether the kid is really young — so 7, 8, 9, or much older — is generally the same, but then has to flex because adolescents are a different sort of group of kids than our young school age kiddos.
I say there's a few really great resources, and we can link the show and show notes to these two. There are some materials that are made and designed specifically for parents to use at home with kids. Recognizing what is essentially not happening in schools, right? There are sort of companies that have made materials that I think are really good and that will satisfy the needs of most kids.
The Reading League puts out a really fun set of videos called Reading Buddies. My kids have watched them. I think they're really good.
There's a man named Spencer. He has a company called Toddlers Can Read, and he puts out stuff for free, and then you can also enroll in courses, and he'll teach you whiteboard and a marker, super simple.
And then there's programs, reading dynamics or how to teach your kids how to read in a hundred, there's like these things you can buy at home that I think are really, if you have the ability to buy them or the ability to watch some videos and learn, it's totally worthwhile for every parent of young kids to do it.
Kids should be writing in daily, writing grocery lists, writing a to-do list, writing a “tomorrow I would like to.” Just real-world writing situations are really helpful. Take your kid to the library. To your point about nonfiction, what are they interested in? Let's get like a whole cache of books.
Use the librarian. Librarians are very good at this. So if you say, “This is my daughter Kate, and she is really interested in unicorns. She’s 10, but she reads at about a second grade level." That librarian will be like, “Great, let's get all this fantasy stuff together.” And you read it with your kid, right?
You read some sections; they read some sections. Read something that's hard out loud. Have them follow along. Have them read back to you that same exact passage. Those are the kinds of things we can do at home. And then two other things I always say is if you have the money, get a reading tutor. Don't mess about.
If you have the funds to spend, then if you I will say, if parents start asking other adults, they will be shocked at how many people are like, “Yeah, my kid can't read either.” Like it is right. That's how we get here. That's how we get to 50% of adults in sixth grade. So there are a lot of other families just like yours whose kids are struggling and are not sure what to do.
But somebody in your little text thread or in the pickup line, somebody does know what to do. Somebody does know the name of a good literacy tutor, or a free program at the library. So ask around, and then tell your kid it's not their fault. Be really clear. I know this is hard, and it must feel awful, and we're gonna get something to work for you, and it's not your fault.
We're gonna get you help and fix this because you don't want them to carry any kind of shame
MIGNON: Mm hmm.
KATE: You really don't want that to happen.
MIGNON: Yeah. That's why I'm so excited you're here. Because this is a really big problem. So many people listening must be having this.
KATE: Yeah, if you're someone who likes to push, I say ask your school, “What is your approach to literacy instruction? Are your materials aligned to the science of reading?” Ask your school district, right? “What is our approach as a district?”
If your literacy outcomes are poor, ask why. Ask about instructional materials. Superintendents should have in their contract growth for literacy rates, should be non-negotiable. We shouldn't have people running our school districts who don't have a laser focus on stuff that matters most like learning to read.
So those are political things, right? Or like community-based, pushing the narrative a little bit. But those are also things that people who are inclined to do is really helpful. And there's some great resources we can put in show notes about, “How do I do that? And how do I talk about it? What questions do I ask? What answers do I worry about?” All that kind of, there's great community resources for that kind of…
MIGNON: Yeah. And then, I was thinking about adults too, because it seems like so many of the materials must, by their nature, they have to have simple language. But if you're 30 or 50, you don't want to be reading books that are like "The Cat in the Hat." What materials are available for adults who want to learn to read?
KATE: Yeah, so there's a few companies that are making … So there's, when we learn to read, because the English language is like such a coded language, there's so many codes and rules, into how words are spelled and how to read them, decode and encode the words,here are texts that are controlled for what you've learned, those patterns that you've learned are called decodables. And I hear lots of people like, “Oh, decodables are boring.” I'm like, “You've never taught a five year old to read.” Because they are like magic. Because they're like, “Oh my god, I'm reading a book.” It's so cool. And so there are decodables made for adults, and those are really helpful.
And we can do some show notes linking, I'm sure, here. But City [Stories] makes some pretty cool stuff. There's one, we'll look it up and put it in the notes. There's a woman who's made a series of things just for adults, that are, so the topics are relevant, right?
So we're not talking about the fat cat with the jam and the ham, right? We want to have compelling stories. And most adults don't need that really basic sort of consonant vowel consonant. What they need is, they have some amount of the code, and they just need a little bit of help to crack the rest of it and to accelerate that sort of independent reading.
And so there are some resources for that. And adult literacy centers vary by region for what sort of services they provide, but they are a good place to start. Sometimes run by community college or local charity organizations like Catholic Charities, like in the state of Nevada, Catholic Charities runs a lot of adult literacy centers. And being able to go there and get help as well as an, as often another good place to start for folks.
MIGNON: And is that where you'd start to … let's say you're a listener and you want to help. You want to volunteer to help people learn to read, kids or adults, like what can you do as an individual?
KATE: So your libraries, again, like librarians are the saviors of the literacy world, right? So often a good place to start is your local library, right? So you can go down and say “Hey, I really want to help. I understand that kids in our school community, our adults in our community have low rates of literacy, and I want to be involved," and librarians know all the stuff that's happening and can plug you in and hook you in.
You can also ask your local school, "Can I come and help with reading instruction?" if you have, if you're a grandparent or a parent or an auntie, oftentimes you can come in and help in this school, and lots of schools are doing pretty cool stuff, but they don't necessarily have the staff to do all the different parts and pieces, and they would love you to come run a table during the literacy block. And it's really fun. I will promise you, being in a classroom is the best place to be.
Great. Those are all such great resources. We'll have links to those in the show notes. For regular listeners, this is the end of the episode, but if you're a Grammarpalooza supporter — if you support the show, which we appreciate so much — you're going to get a bonus episode. And we're going to talk about phonics or the science of learning to read.
And something that I learned in junior high, but I can barely remember what it was. So we're going to get into the nitty gritty of that. Kate Crist, where can people find you?
KATE: They can find me on LinkedIn, just at Kate Crist, or they can find me on Instagram @Education4500.
MIGNON: Great. And again, her company is Education 4500. Kate, thank you so much for being here with us and sharing all these great resources.
KATE: Thank you so much for having me.