Part of this statistic is because we have a high immigrant population that doesn’t speak English as their primary language.
Let’s not blame the immigrants for this.
First, there is no official language of the US. Literacy tests can be administered in Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, or whatever language the subject predominantly uses.
Second, the US does not have unusually high ratio of immigrant. That’s a lie that had been created by right-wing bigots. The US is about 14% immigrant, which is not unusual compared to European countries.
Anecdotally, most of the complete dipshits I know are born in the US. The people that manage to immigrate are the individuala who can read and write well enough to understand immigration documents (with the help of a lawyer), and have a decent chunk of money, or necessary skillset to sustain their finances in the US.
This isn’t a “blaming immigrants” thing. 14% of the population is notable and while much of that population can speak, read, and write English better than native speakers a sizable portion only learn to speak it. This does go back to the official language thing (which actually is not true anymore, trump executive ordered it in his flurry of bullshit EOs). Before that EO they could just get government forms in their native tongue but now that’s probably jeopardized
But these studies generally look at literacy rates of English since, while it wasn’t the official language until very recently, it functionally was. So it’s not blaming immigrants but more explaining that yes, a portion of the data is attributed to people that do not speak English as a first language, rather than the native speakers who were failed by a collapsing public education system
Let’s not blame the immigrants for this.
First, there is no official language of the US. Literacy tests can be administered in Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, or whatever language the subject predominantly uses.
Second, the US does not have unusually high ratio of immigrant. That’s a lie that had been created by right-wing bigots. The US is about 14% immigrant, which is not unusual compared to European countries.
Anecdotally, most of the complete dipshits I know are born in the US. The people that manage to immigrate are the individuala who can read and write well enough to understand immigration documents (with the help of a lawyer), and have a decent chunk of money, or necessary skillset to sustain their finances in the US.
This isn’t a “blaming immigrants” thing. 14% of the population is notable and while much of that population can speak, read, and write English better than native speakers a sizable portion only learn to speak it. This does go back to the official language thing (which actually is not true anymore, trump executive ordered it in his flurry of bullshit EOs). Before that EO they could just get government forms in their native tongue but now that’s probably jeopardized
But these studies generally look at literacy rates of English since, while it wasn’t the official language until very recently, it functionally was. So it’s not blaming immigrants but more explaining that yes, a portion of the data is attributed to people that do not speak English as a first language, rather than the native speakers who were failed by a collapsing public education system