• Rusty_Red@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s true, but there are other factors such as this is an English literacy measurement. So somewhere like southern California which has a higher level of Spanish only speakers would test a lot lower than other places with a higher population of English only speakers.

    • yarn@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I only looked at the abstract, and only for like 3 minutes, but it looks like this is the relevant line:

      Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013). In contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these tasks (figure 1).

      So not that 1 in 5 adults can’t read, but 1 in 5 adults have difficulty completing basic tasks involving reading. OP’s choice of the term “illiterate” seems like a poor choice, but that also seems like a never ending pedantic argument that I’m not really looking to get invovled in.

    • Blamemeta@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Lot of non-English speakers combined with very fuzzy ideas of illiterate. Usual America bad bullshit.