Reporting on low adult literacy in California revealed reveals a rich trove of overlooked stories

Growing up and reporting in California’s Central Valley, I would often hear about poor literacy. Public officials cite low adult literacy as an underlying condition that worsens employment, poverty, crime, health and children’s literacy in the community.

My research on the subject would bear out the connections between literacy and other measures of community health. Yet relatively little attention is paid to why adults struggle to read or to the systems that are tasked with educating them — especially compared to TK-12 or higher education systems.

My story for EdSource — “When you can’t read a medicine bottle: California immigrants struggle with low English literacy” (and accompanying audio piece) — centered around a dizzying statistic: three out of 10 Californians struggle to read anything more complicated than a simple form, the second worst in a nation with middling literacy rates. My reporting found that immigrants were the hardest hit and that it can be a life-threatening issue. It also explored how the institutions set up to help them “run on dust” and weren’t meeting their unique needs.

Education is a field where there is little shortage of timely data, but information about adults’ skills tends to drop off precipitously once they have left formal schooling, such as high school or college. 

The most recent data on adult literacy in the United States comes from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The most recent surveys were conducted between 2012 and 2017 — long before the pandemic. But a new round of surveys was conducted in 2022-23, and the results are newly available. The PIAAC survey also includes information about adults’ digital literacy and numeracy.

The American PIAAC literacy survey could be better described as a test of English literacy, since the survey was only available in English. It does not distinguish between an adult who is literate in their home language but not English, a native English speaker who is not literate, or an immigrant who is not literate in any language.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released modeled data that gives a more precise picture of what literacy and numeracy looks like all the way down to the county level and among specific demographic groups, such as race, age, gender, educational attainment and place of birth. But like all datasets, this one had its limitations beyond the age of the data: the modeled data did not estimate, say, how many immigrants in California struggled with literacy.

That’s why it was useful to use certain proxies to supplement this sparse dataset. American Community Survey data includes more precise information about the education levels of immigrants compared to native-born Americans, and also the numbers of Californians who do not speak English well. This sort of back-of-the-napkin math wasn’t perfect, but it helped me better understand the dizzying scope of the issue statewide and also at the county level. It also affirmed my suspicion that the problem was uniquely bad in my own backyard.

My reporting suggested that there are a lot of adults who struggle to read and are not getting help. These stories were trickier to find than the success stories from adult schools. 

The PIAAC data did not have a lot of information on adults who could not read at all — either because of a developmental disability or because they had never learned. Instead, I focused mostly on those who read only at a very basic level.

Once I switched to focusing on immigrants, it was a little easier to find individuals who could not read English well. I sought out groups, such as unions and nonprofits, that were focused on helping serving immigrant adults. Otherwise, it can be tricky to find a native-born source who is not reading well and has not received any help as an adult. 

One interview that I conducted with a native-born Californian shed some light onto why this may be. One woman I spoke to had dropped out of high school her senior year, then returned to school in her 50s to receive her GED. She had returned to school only because it was getting harder for her to find a job that didn’t require a diploma — not because she struggled to read. But the PIAAC data suggested that students like her without a high school diploma or an equivalent are very likely at the lowest level of reading. She said that it was only during the course of our interview that she was able to fully grasp how much her reading had improved through the course of attaining her GED. She said reading was something that she used to “put off” but now it was easy to dive right into reading paperwork for her job as an in-home care assistant. 

Some adults may feel ashamed of not being able to read well — particularly those who speak English natively — but I suspect that many others who are able to do really basic reading may not wish to identify themselves as struggling readers.

Adult literacy is a complicated subject. In my initial reporting, I expected to report on both native-born Californians as well as immigrants. But the data in California pointed to the importance of centering immigrants when discussing adult literacy. Immigrants make up such a large proportion of the state, and they, unsurprisingly, are much more likely to struggle with English literacy compared to native-born groups. California has one of the lowest rates of adult literacy in the country, and this is largely a reflection of that fact. PIAAC data indicates that this is true in other parts of the country with high numbers of immigrants, such as border communities and New York.

In other parts of the country, the more dominant story about poor adult literacy may be a mostly homegrown problem. I spoke to native-born students who never learned to read well for a multitude of factors: an undiagnosed learning disability, a chaotic upbringing that made it difficult to focus on school, teen pregnancy or other caregiver duties. Some, such as people of color, believed the school system never expected them to succeed.

But narrowing the subject to immigrants didn’t totally simplify the story. Immigrants in California tend to represent the extremes of educational attainment. Many immigrants who come to California are highly educated and have specialized skill sets in technology, research and the arts. But there are also many immigrants who do not have a basic elementary education. These immigrants have wildly different educational needs.

Basic adult education is vastly underfunded. Adult education in the United States receives a fraction of the funding of K-12 or higher education. In the scope of my report, I found out that California is actually much better off than many other states. It has state funding that, while nowhere near the funding of K-12, is many times better than most states, who rely solely on skeletal federal funding. It’s a small silver lining in a state where the need is so great. But reporters in most other states will find that spending on adult basic education is limited to federal funding — just $438 per student each year in 2021. What this does or doesn’t provide for adults struggling with basic skills and the communities they live in is a topic worthy of exploration.

Adult education is an underreported subject. A bright spot to tackling this subject was that both educators and — to my surprise — students were eager to share their experiences. Over and over, sources told me that they were just happy to see that someone was interested in writing about the subject. Adult educators said they struggle to get local officials to attend adult graduations. It was devastating to hear one source say he was shocked to see a reporter care to write about a subject that, in California, largely affected Latinos in rural areas. This population feels invisible.

But there are so many important and fascinating stories to tell on this subject. Those who learn to read as adults have usually overcome much more adversity than your average college or even high school graduates — and they’re a part of every community. This underreported subject has the potential for quick feature stories for daily reporters, but also for vital, in-depth beat reporting on health care, education, politics and business. Understanding how adults struggling to read are or are not being served has big ramifications for nearly every aspect of a community.