Is Low Literacy a Unique American Problem? What A Teacher Learned At Home And Abroad
Last October, I sat across from Mia’s mom at my 4th grade parent-teacher conference, the table still sticky from the half-spilled latte I’d grabbed before the first meeting. Mia was reading two grade levels behind, had stopped raising her hand to read out loud halfway through fall, and hid her chapter book in her desk during silent reading. “I keep seeing TikTok reels saying this is just a broken American thing,” her mom said, twisting a faded cloth mask between her fingers. “That every other country has it figured out. Is this just us, broken?” I keep my old notebook from a summer teaching stint in northern Portugal in my desk drawer, so I pulled it out, flipped to the back, and showed her the crumpled dinosaur drawing a 9-year-old boy named Tiago had left there three years earlier.
I’d taken that volunteer job right after the first pandemic wave, burnt out from the constant testing mandates in my Ohio district, curious to see how other schools approached literacy. The small rural school I worked at served a cluster of apple orchard communities, and 4 of the 11 8- to 10-year-olds in my class came from migrant families that spoke mostly Spanish or Mirandese at home, not Portuguese. The first week, I met Tiago, who’d slide his book under his desk when it was time to read, couldn’t sound out three-syllable words, and would claim he “forgot his glasses” when asked to read out loud. It was exactly the same avoidance, the same quiet shame I see every year in my own classroom. For a minute, I felt silly for ever thinking the problem would be totally different somewhere else.
There were differences, of course. The school had a 30-minute unbroken read-aloud every single morning, no exceptions. No one pulled kids out for speech or testing during that time, no announcements cut into it. The town library kept a stack of free kids’ books by the door, and every child got to take one home each month, no income check, no late fines. Tiago got 10 minutes of one-on-one reading time every day with the classroom aide, and she let him pick any book he wanted. He stuck with dinosaur picture books for the entire two months I was there, and no one told him he was too old for them. By the end of the summer, he read a whole page about T-Rex teeth out loud to the class, his voice shaking, but he finished it.
After I left, I talked over the summer with the lead teacher, Maria, who told me Tiago was still behind. She said the school had lost half its literacy funding after the 2010 recession, that lots of kids in rural Portugal struggle with reading, especially kids from working or migrant families. It just doesn’t headline the news there the way it does here. That conversation stuck with me. When I got back to the US, I looked up the numbers to check. The OECD puts U.S. adult literacy slightly below the average for developed countries, but we’re not an outlier—Latvia and Chile land right in the same spot. Even top-performing Finland has 10% of adults with low literacy skills. Globally, 1 in 5 adults can’t read well enough to understand a daily newspaper article. Low literacy isn’t unique to America, but the way we structure our system makes it harder for far too many kids here.
We’ve cut library funding in 40% of U.S. school districts over the last 10 years. We tie teacher evaluations to reading test scores, so teachers end up drilling kids on multiple-choice questions instead of letting them read books they actually care about. We have more child poverty than most developed countries, and we fund low-income schools with local property taxes, so they get less money to spend on literacy support from the start. But that doesn’t mean the problem is some uniquely American failure that we can’t address on a small scale every day.
What I’ve started doing, both for my students and my own niece who struggles with reading, is the small, low-cost stuff I saw work in Portugal, and it’s made more of a difference than any expensive curriculum I’ve used. First, carve out 15 unbroken minutes a day to read with your kid—no phones, no checking work emails, no interruptions. Let them pick the book, even if it’s a graphic novel, a comic book, or a picture book they’ve read 10 times. Don’t push them to “level up” before they’re ready. Second, get a free library card, even if the closest branch is 20 minutes away. Most county libraries do free curbside pickup, and many local branches give away free kids’ books every month, no strings attached. Third, if your kid is behind, don’t panic and label them before you give them months of consistent, low-pressure time with books. So much of the panic around reading gaps here pushes kids to hate reading before they ever get the chance to get good at it.
A few weeks ago, I got a postcard from Maria in Portugal. She sent a photo of Tiago holding a vanilla ice cream cone, the prize he won for finishing three books in the library’s summer reading contest. She wrote that he still mixes up longer words, but he brings a new book home every week now. Mia, in my class, is still two grade levels behind on our state standardized tests. But she brings her dog graphic novel to me every day after lunch, asks for 10 extra minutes to read a chapter out loud, and she doesn’t hide it under her desk anymore.
Low literacy isn’t a uniquely American problem. It’s a problem that shows up wherever kids don’t get enough of the small, consistent, low-pressure time with books they enjoy. We don’t have to fix the whole system tomorrow to give our kid that 15 minutes. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s something that works, one kid at a time, wherever you live.
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