14% of U.S. Adults Can't Read (63% of Prison Inmates) | Hacker News Reader

14% of U.S. Adults Can't Read (63% of Prison Inmates)

livescience.com

14 pointscrocus6 comments

Of course, the headline is misleading- It should read "14% of U.S. Adults Lack Basic Prose Literacy Skills"

Even then, I had a hard time finding meaningful info on exactly what constitutes "BPLS", beyond some vague statements in the article. If someone can find some sample questions from this "BPLS" test, please comment on this thread.

The little I could find out about BPLS on a brief Googling suggests that a person that can read given the conventional definition of "reading" can still fail a "BPLS" test relatively easily.

More information here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

A five-year, $14 million study of U.S. adult literacy involving lengthy interviews of U.S. adults, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in September 1993. It involved lengthy interviews of over 26,700 adults statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."

Wow. That doesn't sound like it has much to do with reading, specifically. Frankly, it's more like saying "nearly 25% of Americans are well below average intellectually", which doesn't even seem very remarkable if the top of the curve isn't especially flat.

You should be careful switching between absolute and relative statements.

Well -- not quite as bad as it sounds. 25.5 million people living in America are both foreign born and don't speak English at home. Roughly 85% of them are adults, and roughly half of them (I am going to say probably skewing towards adults) report that they have difficulty with English.

Which if we do the math is something like 3% of the US population not being able to read English primarily because they're not able to speak it. Bad news for them, but the reasons for their problem (and the solutions to address it) are pretty different than for the rest of the illiterate population.

See official Census data:

http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/stp-159/foreignborn...

From the first reference link at the Wikipedia link I gave earlier:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf

In considering the results, the reader should keep in mind that this was a survey of literacy in the English language — not literacy in any universal sense of the word. Thus, the results do not capture the literacy resources and abilities that some respondents possess in languages other than English.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com