On the whole, the findings show that American adults are at an average level of prose literacy performance, behind the Nordic countries and the Netherlands but at a par with adults in Australia, Canada and Germany. American and Canadian adults significantly outperform adults in Ireland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. There is a large gap between the literacy performance of American adults and poorer performing populations in the emerging economies of Chile, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Portugal and Slovenia.
But the averages for the United States and neighboring Canada mask the fact that in both countries there is a high degree of variation in the distribution of prose literacy skills, with large numbers of people at both the lowest and the highest levels of literacy. Americans and Canadians at the top 25th percentile of the population distribution have a high average level of literacy compared with adults in all other nations. Thus the literacy ability of the top-performing segment of the North American workforce is superior to that of the highachieving segment of workers in many European countries, including Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
But inequality in the range of literacy scores in North America is also among the highest of the nations surveyed. Especially in the United States, inequality in the distribution of literacy scores on the English test used for the survey is strongly related to economic inequality measured by income differentials between households. The high degree of inequality in the distribution of literacy proficiency in Canada and the United States poses a large challenge to policy makers, because all citizens require high levels of literacy to be able to participate fully in the information-dependent society and derive benefits from the strong North American economy. This is important because, in both countries, literacy proficiency and educational attainment have been shown to exert powerful effects on the labor market outcomes of individuals, including their wages.
The results indicate that a good part of the observed differences in skill can be attributed to differences in the quantity of education people in various nations have received. It is also clear that some of the observed differences are related to between-country variation in the quality of education. For example, young Americans aged 20-25 with a completed college or university education demonstrate an average level of literacy ability, a level comparable to that of college-educated young adults in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and Portugal. In contrast, young Americans and Canadians who have not completed high school score quite poorly compared with adults with a similar education level in the other countries.
With 1 in every 5 adults aged 45-65 at Level 1, there can be no denying that the United States has a literacy issue to deal with. Even if it is true that the magnitude of the problem is worse in the majority of the countries surveyed, the issue nevertheless carries such importance that it must be addressed. That a disproportionate number of those with the lowest skills are second-language foreign-born does not make the challenge any easier. The next chapter considers some of the options for policy.