The literacy skills demanded of Americans by today’s economy far exceed those required only fifty years ago

From Can Academic Standards Boost Literacy and Close the Achievement Gap? by Ron Haskins, Richard Murnane, Isabel Sawhill, and Catherine Snow.

As shown in a recently released issue of The Future of Children, “Literacy Challenges for the Twenty-First Century,” America has a literacy problem—actually, two literacy problems. The basic cause of both is that the literacy skills demanded of Americans by today’s economy far exceed those required only fifty years ago. It is no longer sufficient to define reading as merely the ability to recognize words and decode text. The American economy, responding to technological advances and international competition, has shed blue-collar and administrative support jobs that involve simple operations and minimal reasoning skills while adding jobs that require the ability to select, categorize, evaluate, and draw conclusions from written texts. Think of twenty-first-century literacy as reading plus.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the reading skills of American children are inadequate for the heightened literacy demands of the twenty-first-century economy. Nor do American students perform well on international test score comparisons. U.S. students score lower in reading than students from fourteen other countries on the Programme for International Student Assessment conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. That is literacy problem number one—the literacy skills of the average American student do not match international standards. And although the NAEP scores of recent cohorts of black and Hispanic U.S. students have improved, the gap in average reading skills between students from high- and low-income families has widened. That’s literacy problem number two—in a nation committed to equality of opportunity and economic mobility, a widening literacy gap between students from rich and poor families is a national affront.

ADDENDUM:
The International Adult Literacy Survey in this post, On all three (literacy) scales, only Sweden had higher percentages of their adults at these levels, is consistent with literacy problem number two identified in the Haskins report. The best are keeping up and leading the international pack but the gap is widening between that top group and the rest within our society. The problem is that this is happening everywhere. All countries are seeing widening internal gaps while the cream of their cognintive and non-cognitive elite compete among the best on the global stage. How do we harvest the benefit of wealth arising from global competition without sacrificing a common sense of community?