Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, and I am here with Kate Christ. Kate is a literacy

specialist. More than 20 years in education. She's been a classroom teacher, an instructional coach,

program coordinator. She's currently the director of Education 4500, where she works with

teachers and leaders around the U.S. to design and implement literacy programs. And she's

on the steering committee for the Project for Adolescent Literacy. Kate Christ, welcome to

the Grammar Girl podcast. Oh, thank you so much. I'm so delighted to be here.

I know. I'm excited to have you here because recently I heard this shocking statistic about literacy.

Something like 21% of U.S. adults are illiterate. And first I was shocked, but then I started wondering,

how is that even measured?

Like, what does that even mean? So can you sort of start us at the beginning there?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think shocking is a good way to start. That statistic should be shocking.

It's, you know, one of the richest countries in the world. And we have these really low rates of

literacy. And I think they have a huge impact. So there's sort of two ways we can talk about it.

One is how do we know? Like what are, like what are we using to measure? And the other is,

what does it mean for people functionally? So the 20% of illiteracy, so there's a few different

assessments that are used, sort of batch assessments

but they're, you know, samples that we can generalize from. They're large enough.

One of the most commonly used ones is called the Piac. We love our acronyms in education is the

program for the international assessment of adult competencies.

And that's where that 20%, 21% illiteracy rate comes from.

That 20% are people who read it about a third grade level or below.

And so that means, yeah, so that means like job applications, voter registration guides, medical information packets.

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