Literacy is a Battleground

It's the terrain, the field, the place where our fights happen

Author

James Shanahan
April 01, 2026

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Mondays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each and Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

There’s a bit of back and forth about adult literacy here in the US. Last Wednesday Matt Yglesias posted a defense of being “out of touch” and one of the main qualifiers he has for being out of touch is that you have to recognize you’re out of touch. It’s a mistake, Matt says, to assume that your preference and overall orientation toward life are generalizable to most other people in the United States. This false assumption, when applied to politics or media or culture means that we pursue policies, write stories, and produce cultural output for a narrow slice of our fellow countrymen. They don’t like it, and we’re then shocked when they vote differently than we do, fall for misinformation, and enjoy watching manosphere podcasts.

It is, I think, not a crazy point to make and we should all recognize that we live in a diverse society where the idea of one big cultural lump of Americans with narrowly similar interests and values is a bit outdated. What’s gotten attention is a small example Matt uses to explain just how different educated elites are from many other Americans. Really it’s just the first paragraph I quote below, but I’m including some subsequent paragraphs too, because I think they help contextualize what Matt’s overall point is.

Half of adults read below a 6th grade level. All questions of snobbery and nepo babies aside, the typical American could not do the job of even a really incompetent journalist. They would, in fact, struggle badly to even read and understand journalism outputs.

Schools widely use the Lexile scale to assess both reading competence and the difficulty of written materials. A typical New York Times article is a 1380 on the scale, which is in the upper range of grade level for 11th and 12th grades. If you can read a New York Times article, you are part of the hyper-literate educated elite. If you mostly socialize with people who can pull this off, you exist in a kind of out-of-touch bubble.

Which is to say it’s not just the people who produce the content but the entire audience for the content that is rather eccentric.

The tech guys who are mad that Wired magazine and the New York Times have pivoted to covering their industry in a negative way are in the exact same bubble as their enemies writing the articles they don’t like — normal people aren’t reading or writing any articles at all!

The sixth-grade-level statistic originally derived from an analysis of the 2017 PIAAC results that found 20% of Americans scored a level 1 or below (out of 5) and 34% a level 2. The Barbara Bush Foundation disregarded the inapplicability of PIAAC to schooling and chose to interpret anything below level 3 as “below a sixth-grade level.” The stat was repeated in a 2022 American Public Media story on adult literacy, and folk wisdom was born — a misunderstanding that persists despite the fact APM later edited their article to retract the grade-level comparison.1

In reality, the U.S. Department of Education reported in 2019 that the PIAAC results show that almost 80% of U.S. adults have “literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences.” The other 20% struggle to comprehend even relatively basic text; in the examples above, they may be unable to determine preschool drop-off times based on the bullet points alone.

Many — around one-third — of those who didn’t reach that mark are non-native English speakers who are nonetheless included in the PIAAC sample and may well be proficient readers in their native language. And the PIAAC scores of native English-speaking adults are in line with the scores of native-speaking individuals in most peer nations.

I think this is probably right but also maybe a bit of an inadequate response that misses Matt’s point. He’s using literacy as an example of the problem he’s addressing, elite sococultural bubbles. While he may have gotten the overall specifics wrong because he didn’t chase down the veracity of his claims, I think it kind of doesn’t matter for the argument. Some adults read a lot, write a lot, and operate in both a career and culture that expects people to be highly literate. Some adults read and write very little (possibly because of illiteracy but also possibly because of choice) and operate in workplaces and cultures that do not expect people to be highly literate. We can call these social classes or whatever but I think it’s an important point to make. Indeed, I think a subsequent Yglesias article about marriage actually makes a very similar point but got much less attention.

Cultural conservatives are either afraid to say what they actually mean, or else are just so accustomed to arguing with feminists about abortion and child care subsidies that they reflexively want to continue fighting with them.

Because, in reality, educated women get married at higher rates than working-class women, and the weak link in convincing more people to settle down earlier is, in fact, men.

This suggests the constraint isn’t highly educated women opting out of marriage. The issue is pretty clearly that better-educated women meet better-educated men. These men are smarter and more conscientious than average, and thus are more likely to have the sort of financial and emotional stability that make them attractive long-term partners. Most of all, they’re also more likely to be seeking marriage in a serious way.

Like in the “out of touch” post, Matt is identifying a difference between social classes. He’s calling out an incorrect assumption that declines marriage rates are because of higher female educational attainment and that’s probably because, as he says in the earlier post, the people making these claims are college educated and draw on experiences of being in and around college educated people.

Literacy, though, is a battlefield. We wage our culture wars over many things and literacy is often the grounds on which that war takes place. The reason The Argument is speaking out about literacy is because that’s where we do our fighting. Literacy is the battlefield. When Matt Yglesias wants to write about elite bubbles and the problems they cause. literacy is a core example and also gets lots of commentary in the comments section, more so than the other examples he uses. The Argument has other goals and wants to push for policies.

As kids, both of us remember with fondness the D.E.A.R. campaigns: Drop Everything and Read. There’s not a lot the polarized American public agrees on these days, but the importance of developing a love for reading in kids — and the ability to do it — should be one of them.

More broadly, then, efforts to improve the stability and quality of family life form the enabling conditions for strong literacy habits. Financial strain is negatively correlated with parents reading to their children, for instance, and it’s hard to curl up with a good book yourself when you’re working multiple part-time jobs with unpredictable schedules.

In a recent YouGov survey commissioned by Capita (the think tank we work for), one-quarter of parents of minor children reported that in the previous four weeks, they experienced a job schedule change with less than 24-hours notice. One of the best things we can do for adult and child literacy may be to pass family-friendly policies like robust child tax credits, paid family leave, and fair workweek laws.

Fine by me! Still, neither Matt nor Haspel and Greco are writing about literacy per se and we need to remember that. Instead, literacy is the battlefield where, in this case, the war for better social programming is fought.

I should also remind everyone that the DEAR campaign Haspel and Greco mention as an example of something that isn’t polarized is, in fact, quite polarized. With the advent of the Science of Reading, DEAR has fallen out of favor and reading whole books has been replaced by reading “decodable” texts and short excerpts akin to those on standardized tests. Letting kids spend time reading books, rather than explicit phonics instruction, has been called “vibes based literacy.” Independent reading, like the kind Haspel and Greco reference, is on thin ice with the SoR crowd that is dominating policy and curriculum at the moment. This isn’t just some academic debate, either. The move toward the SoR is one taken up by Moms for Liberty and other right wing social activists. We’re told that focusing on phonics, dropping teachers unions, and electing Republicans is the path to higher reading scores. Literacy is where these groups wage war. They fight about knowledge and content and phonics and retention and test scores but beyond all those first-order components of reading lie a whole other set of orthogonal concerns that, for whatever reason, are part of the package too. We cannot just teach kids to decode; we have to have school choice to do it. We cannot drop everything and read; we have to bring in paid family leave. We cannot focus curricula on building content knowledge; we have to enforce a common cultural legacy.

I like to bring everything back to the scholastic alchemy concept and fits here pretty well. Our discussions about literacy, that it means to be literate, and which policies would get us there are almost always about something else entirely. We rarely have these discussions centered around students and their needs, preferring to foreground adult concerns about culture or economics or politics. In doing so, we serve our children poorly. A neat corollary to Matt Yglesias point is that many Americans are children. Definitionally, developmentally, children are different from you and me. When we make our literacy discussions about adult concerns, we don’t just leave kids out, we fail to consider their needs. Should we be surprised, then, when our various literacy drives fail to achieve the desired literacy outcomes? It was never about literacy in the first place. Literacy is just a place where battles about other things are fought.

Thanks for, ahem, reading.