The State of Adult Literacy

Report Says “Grand Alliance” Needed to Address Adult Literacy Crisis

Syracuse, NY
October 6, 2006

Problems such as poverty, unemployment, crime, and human rights abuses cannot be solved in the United States and the world without addressing the need for adults to have strong reading, writing, and math skills, according to a report released today by the world’s largest organization of adult education and literacy programs.

ProLiteracy Worldwide President’s Report on the State of Adult Literacy 2006 calls for governments, business and industry and community leaders, health care providers, law enforcement, and human service agencies to see adult literacy as a key factor in addressing other problems.

“Poor reading skills among adults can be linked to every socioeconomic problem that faces industrialized nations and developing countries,” said Robert Wedgeworth, ProLiteracy president and CEO, and the report’s author. “People who can’t read often live in poverty. They are more likely to suffer ill health than strong readers. More than 70 percent of the population of U.S. state and federal prisons are people who can barely read. Literacy alone can’t solve these problems, but neither can solutions that don’t address literacy skills as key component for life-change.”

Wedgeworth reports that ProLiteracy is forging relationships with non-literacy organizations that have shared literacy-related agendas as part of the effort to create “a grand alliance to address our nation’s literacy crisis.”

The State of Adult Literacy 2006 quotes the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy which estimates that 30 million people over the age of 16 in the United States struggle to read a newspaper article and have difficulty using a printed bus schedule to travel across town. It also provides a summary of the 2003 International Adult Literacy and Lifeskills survey, in which the reading, writing, and math skills of adults in the U.S. fell behind those of adults in Norway, Switzerland, Bermuda, and Canada.

Wedgeworth released the report during ProLiteracy’s annual conference at the Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel in Atlanta, GA. The conference provides professional development workshops and presentations to more than 800 adult literacy program administrators, instructors, trainers, and volunteers.

For a copy of the State of Adult Literacy 2006, please visit the ProLiteracy Publications page.