You have had the conversation. You laid out the facts. You pointed to the data. You stayed calm and reasonable. The person across from you nodded, waited for you to finish, and then repeated the exact thing they walked in believing, except louder.
You walked away thinking something is wrong with that person.
Something is wrong, but it is not what you think, and it is not really about that one person. It is about a country that has quietly lost its grip on the basic skills a free society runs on. I am going to show you the numbers, I am going to show you why this is getting worse, and then I am going to show you how to actually reach these people without losing your mind or your relationships. And just so you know, every week, in court and across the mediation table, I put these same techniques to work, and after four decades of doing it I can tell you they work, and they work well.
When reading, also please keep in mind that this is not a piece about who is good and who is bad. Instead, approach this as a problem we have to deal with, and you are going to deal with it better by the end of this.
The Problem Is Real, And The Numbers Prove It
Start with adults, because adults vote, parent, manage, and post.
The OECD runs a study called the Survey of Adult Skills, known as PIAAC. It measures whether working-age adults can read, do basic math, and solve everyday problems. The 2023 results landed in December 2024, and they are bad. The share of American adults scoring at or below Level 1 in literacy, the second-lowest of the test’s proficiency tiers, now stands at 28 percent, or 58.9 million people, up from 19 percent in 2017. For numeracy, 34 percent, or 72 million adults, score at or below Level 1, up from 29 percent in 2017.
Read that again. Adults at that tier struggle to compare and contrast information, paraphrase a passage, or make low-level inferences. At the very bottom band, below Level 1, adults could not compare the dates printed on grocery tags to tell which item was packed first. That is not an insult. That is a measurement. Overall, adult literacy scores fell 12 points and numeracy fell 7 points in just six years.
It gets sharper. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the gap in numeracy between the highest and lowest skilled adults in America is the widest of any country measured. More Americans are clustering at the bottom levels of proficiency while a thinning middle gets pulled apart. We are not one nation reading the same page. We are splitting into two populations who process information in completely different ways.
Now look at the kids coming up behind them. The OECD runs a parallel test for 15-year-olds called PISA. In 2022, U.S. students dropped 13 points in math from 2018, a score that ranked among the lowest ever measured by PISA for the United States. Twenty-five education systems posted higher math scores than ours. American teenagers hold their own in reading and science, where scores stayed roughly stable, and they fall behind in math, and the math gap is the one that controls whether a person can evaluate a statistic, weigh a risk, or smell a number that does not add up.
Here is the honest part most takes leave out. A serious chunk of America’s weak average traces to poverty, not to bad classrooms. The OECD’s own data shows that disadvantaged American students actually perform relatively well for their socioeconomic level. Some analysts go further. The National Education Association calculated that if you measured only U.S. schools with childhood poverty rates under 10 percent, the average reading score would place the United States first in the world. Read that figure as the advocacy estimate it is, not as an official OECD ranking, and the point still stands. The talent is here. The conditions are not. That distinction matters for how you treat people, and I will come back to it.