From The New Publishing Standard:
In his 1962 State of the Union address, President John F. Kennedy talked about millions of “functionally illiterate” adult Americans.
Fast forward 2022, sixty tears on, and the number is 48 million, or 23% of the adult US population.
Publishers must share the blame.
The books publishers churn out can help or hinder literacy. But there are worryingly few books printed for literacy-challenged adults to catch up on their failed school years, and the prices are invariably the same as for books aimed at competent readers who likely have higher earning power.
Likewise there are far too few books aimed at the less-confident teen readers offering appropriately mature teen-adult storylines with English suited to a lower grade reader.
Link to the rest at The New Publishing Standard
It did occur to PG that publishers might not see an anxious audience ready to purchase books to help them become literate. They may be perfectly happy with cable television.
PG categorizes this as, “Something terrible is happening, someone else must help to resolve the problem.”
Of course, the author of the OP didn’t mention volunteering for a local organization that helps people learn to read.
Here’s a very interesting interactive set of NAEP scores. Overall it is pretty dismal. More interesting is the leveling of scores based on various factors including race and poverty levels. Observation shows scores are a partial function of a state’s demographics. So a presentation of the unweighted raw score along with one weighted for the demographics is revealing.
https://apps.urban.org/features/naep/
I don’t know why the title says the publishers share the blame, when I see this as primarily a schooling issue. An excessive number of schools are just day care centers, and badly run at that.
The Pro Publica article the OP links to is more informative. I liked the Skills For Life initiative, at least as described, because it actually addresses the problem of illiterate adults who have to balance other problems.
If I understand what the OP wants publishers to do, it’s to have adult novels pitched at a child’s level specifically to target adults who have to catch up? Like a Dick and Jane variant of the Reader’s Digest version of books, but for adults? That strikes me as something to approach textbook companies to do. In K-12 our worksheets in English class would include extracts from real novels, compatible with whatever lesson we were learning in a given chapter. I discovered several authors that way. A Language Arts curriculum for illiterate adults might take it a step further and simplify the extracts. Or make up something new altogether, I suppose.
Initially I thought the OP wanted fiction imprints, e.g., Baen or Harlequin to do the Dick & Jane editions, so PG’s skepticism makes sense. The ProPublica article makes it clear that half the problem of literacy training is access, so what the OP is asking for would have to be done as part of a targeted outreach rather than just releasing a book into the wild and hoping something interesting happens. This seems like more of a Scot Foresman / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / Macmillan initiative (I’m out of textbook companies I remember from childhood).
The ProPublica article does say something that throws me, though, where it suggests the eighth-grade reading level is insufficient for one of the people profiled. Which it can be, but it depends on what you’re up to. Back in the day journalism classes instructed us to write the news at an eighth grade level. Then in college I was told to pitch to a sixth-grade level.
But background knowledge ties into how well you can comprehend what you read, so I think they mean to say his overall education is fixed at an eighth-grade level. He left school at 14 (eighth grade), and the school in question was a public school in Detroit (notoriously crappy schools). Likely the eighth-grade education was eighth grade in name only. Tragic, but I don’t see the publishers as blameworthy here.
Actually, the author of this piece, Mark Williams, sponsors a local village school in the Gambia that teaches children to read.
That’s a plus for him, A.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.