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ICE shooting comes after bombshell probe finds new recruits 'can barely read or write'
(www.rawstory.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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politics
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21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics
Illiteracy is a huge and intentional crisis in America and is a major reason we're in the mess we're in now. American education has been steadily hollowed out since public schools were integrated and now those chickens are coming home to roost. We are in for a long, bad time of rebuilding I'm afraid.
Gonna be one of those shithole countries trump was talking about first time around
The strange thing is that is has been, for some of us, for a while now. The screws have been tightening my whole life and people don't realize how close to destitution they are until it hits them. It's like the poverty version of "If my neighbor loses their job it's a recession, if I lose my job it's a depression."
True AF. Cannot stand when people calling the shit "recessions". The epitome of denial.
The US has been for most of its existence
As long as MAGA exists, it already is a shithole.
The rest of us already view it as that.
That's nuts.
My kids school promises literacy by 4th grade and hasn't mentioned it since. They're in 8th grade now. It's brutal, I've been working on thier reading level but it's hard when the school isn't making it a priority.
I strongly recommend the podcast Sold a Story about the way reading has been taught in the US. It may help you, believe it or not. It’s also just fascinating. You can find it wherever podcasts are on offer.
I appreciate the suggestion, but I hate podcasts. I just don't connect with them, they're background noise I don't process.
I'm consuming media I would prefer it to be a solo activity, whether that's reading or watching a video. Audio only content is in some nether place where I comprehend nothing.
From a quick skim of the transcript of the first episode, the correct method is phonics. Which thankfully the school and I both teach, they just stop promising to improve the reading level after fourth grade.
I believe they stop working on literacy early on. I taught 10th-grade English in two US states, and over five years of teaching, I maybe had four students reading at grade level. Yet a majority of my students went on to college. How does that work?
The problem is you weren't allowed to fail them for not reading at 10th grade level.
That should be the bar to pass.
Edit: and that should have been the bar the whole way up. Your job should have been to get them from 9 to 10. Give them lower grades from other things, but not reading level.
I absolutely agree with you. Unfortunately, when the system incentivizes keeping bodies in seats for funding, it creates an environment that is not conducive to learning. Admin forced teachers to adjust grades on numerous occasions. And I suspect standardized tests are manipulated before they are sent in. But that can only last for so long, those tests will eventually be computerized.
I don’t think people understand the impact that an entire generation (or generations at this point) lacking a general education and being functionally illiterate is going to have on society.
Colleges will admit anyone, and pass them too, because it's a business...
I don't like listening to podcasts but they provide the full transcript, which was a good read.
isn't ICE where all the proud boys and oath keepers went after "standing back and standing by" and going in and out of jail?
Not taking literacy advice from an organization that considers you illiterate if you are fluent in Spanish but not English, thanks.
Verbal fluency is not literacy.
Por que? How are you going to communicate with officials if you do not speak English? You pretend that there is no reason for this definition.
Translators. Real statistics, not ones from far right think tanks, put illiteracy around 2% in the US.
If you're wondering why, go read the 14th amendment to the United States constitution and think about how it might apply to access to one's government officials.
I feel ya, but the practical reality is that almost all news, all social media, all politics, all technical information, all medical information, and all official documents are presented primarily or only in English.
Yes America doesn't have an official language, but if you had to pick between living here with fluent Spanish and no English, vs. fluent English but no Spanish, which do you think is gonna give you an easier time by far?
I don't find 21% illiteracy hard to believe. I went to a particularly good high school, and even there about 1/5 kids could only read books aloud in a painfully halting, word-by-word manner. And they could either read aloud or understand what they read, not both. And again this was a top-rated high school in the area by far. And just look at the social media trend of flashing words one by one as captions - people pretend it's for those with sound down or hearing difficulties, but the truth is it makes the content vastly more digestible for people who can't pay attention to words but get overwhelmed by the sight of full sentences. So even the people who can read are fantastically bad at it.
you miss my point. it's not 21% illiteracy. it's 21% english illiteracy. the last time i read the statistics on it (iirc it was the 2022 numbers but i don't really care to find them again) 21% were illiterate in english. 2% were not literate in any language. somewhere between 12% and 18% had something between a 6th and 9th grade literacy level in some written language. I'm not arguing whether it is easier to be literate and/or fluent in the lingua franca. i'm just saying you are taking a shortsighted view if you only look at the english language.
No disrespect, but I believe you have missed my point - I understood that you're pointing out that only looking at English literacy is shortsighted. I'm suggesting that English literacy is by far the only significant metric when it comes to someone's ability to function, especially with poltical wisdom, in the United States. It doesn't really matter if half the population is fluent in Vietnamese when all the political debates are in English. This forces them to rely on third-party (questionable) commentary and interpretation for all their news and understanding of the political environment.
If we were talking about a country like Switzerland, where signage, documents, and official material is easily accessible in multiple languages, and where political discussion widely occurs im multiple languages, then I would agree that measuring only German literacy is misleading and not meaningful. But the United States is not that type of country, so it is specifically English literacy that matters, especially when we're talking about being politically informed.
TLDR; if I speak fluent Latin, but no other languages, and I live in Kentucky, it is pretty fair to describe me as illiterate. The literacy I do possess functionally does not exist.