Conduct an Internet search for literacy organizations in the United States, and you will find about 825,000 listings. There will be many duplications, broken links, and dead ends, but if you are willing to spend a few hours browsing, you will come away with the accurate impression that there is no shortage of local and national groups working to promote literacy in this country, no shortage of paid staff and volunteers tutoring children and adults, no shortage of educators and reading professionals discussing how best to teach people to read, no shortage of effective programs for doing it.

You also will learn that the United States, once the most literate country in the world, is ranked anywhere from 12th to 24th, depending on which agency or organization compiles the statistics and which Web site you look at. You can find numerous Web sites and blogs that cite these numbers as evidence that we are in decline when compared with the progress made in other developed countries.

“These days in the U.S., the amount of pure illiteracy is tiny,” says Timothy Shanahan, professor of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, an advisory board member of the National Institute for Literacy, and past president of the International Reading Association. “It’s relatively rare and is limited to people who are disabled in other ways. It’s usually linked to deafness or blindness, or it can be associated with newcomers with low literacy in their home language.”

In 2003, the National Center for Education Statistics, the entity within the U.S. Department of Education responsible for tracking literacy information, conducted a National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), the first such assessment in the United States since 1992. The study surveyed some 19,000 adults ages 16 and older, including 1,200 inmates in state and federal prisons.

Although African Americans and Asians showed modest gains and Hispanics had modest declines, the NAAL indicates that overall, there was little change in national literacy levels from 1992 to 2003.

Is there anything in the survey to indicate that we have made headway during that period, or are we just hanging on?

“It depends on how you look at,” says Shanahan. “If your question is, ‘How prepared is our population to do what we need to do?’ then we’re just hanging on. But when you compare our population now to what it used to be, and consider that there are millions for whom English is a second language, and you are able to maintain the same level, you might think, ‘We’re doing something right.’ From an education standpoint, we’re doing something remarkable. But the reality is that we’re less able to compete in the world. So it depends on whose dinner table you’re sitting at.”

Shanahan sits at the table where there is worried conversation about the need to improve. When he talks about literacy, he sounds like the economist most of us didn’t listen to five years ago, the one who said that payday loan stores and adjustable-rate mortgages were signals of a bad economy ahead.

“The fact is, we’ve become a high-education workplace,” he says. “We’re educating people as well as we did in 1970, but that’s not enough to keep pace with the level of demand. Back then, half the jobs were blue collar; now, it’s 15 percent. Achieving 1970 literacy levels would be fine if our workplace was staying at that level, but it’s not.”

Shanahan says that people at the lowest literacy level “are a problem for themselves, and they are a problem for all of us to face. But our real problem, in terms of competing with the rest of the world, is the overall distribution of literate people. We only have a small percentage of people who can read as well as we need them to read. We’re losing engineering jobs to China and India ‑ not just because the wages are cheaper, but because their people are more skilled.”

One ranking in particular is a cause of concern to Shanahan: a country-by-country comparison of the percentage of adults with a secondary education. At one time, the United States had a higher high school graduation rate than any other developed country; now, according to Shanahan, it ranks 18th.

“For most of the 20th century, we really set out to invest more in schools than our trading partners did,” says Shanahan. “And for most of the 20th century, we succeeded. A lot of countries looked at our model and said, ‘We’re going to out- U.S. them.’ And they did. But part of the reason we’re not the leader anymore is because we have a more diversified population. A lot of developed countries don’t have the depth of poverty that we do.”

Do we need to solve the poverty problem before we can have a real impact on literacy? “It’s a circle,” says Shanahan. “If you’re low in literacy, you won’t get out of poverty. But if you’re poor, you won’t become literate. We’ve got to break the circle, give these kids a chance. Literacy brings jobs, jobs break poverty. Teachers can do more than they do.”

Owing to Shanahan’s association with the International Reading Association, a worldwide network of teaching and reading professionals with which Rotary has partnered since 2002, he’s quite familiar with Rotary’s volunteer literacy efforts.

“When local Rotarians partner up with a school, that helps,” he says. “But our kids aren’t getting sufficient teaching to move them ahead. The No. 1 thing we need to do is provide more schooling than we do now. You do that by extending the school year, extending the school day, expanding summer programs. There are so many different models for teaching reading. They all work. We need more instruction that is explicitly aimed at reading. Why should schools stop teaching reading in the fifth grade, as we do now? We should keep teaching reading in higher grades.”

Among the organizations that support this view is the Alliance for Excellent Education, a national policy and advocacy group with a goal of making every child a high school graduate. The federal government must provide the same sort of commitment and resources that have been directed toward the teaching of early reading skills, an investment that has shown results, to the needs of adolescents, the group says. The investment begun by the federal government in reading instruction for students in the first through third grades must be extended to include students in grades 4 through 12.”

According to Shanahan, one of the reasons the United States has fallen behind is that “we’ve been sloppy.” “But, he continues, “we’re also complicated: We have 50 different education systems. The one in Massachusetts is not the same as the one in Alabama. The federal government can’t wave a wand.”

One federal initiative that was expected to affect literacy was the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which became law in 2002. But there has been widespread criticism that it is not adequately funded and that its sanctions, intended to promote accountability, are counterproductive.

In 2004, the International Reading Association conducted a random survey of 4,000 of its 90,000 members to determine their assessment of No Child Life Behind. Nearly 70 percent of the literacy educators who responded agreed that reading instruction receives more attention under NCLB, but only 41 percent thought that it had improved. Respondents were largely negative on NCLB’s effect on such issues as identifying students who need more help in reading, availability of more funding and resources for reading, and access to professional development. Nearly 80 percent disagreed with the statement that teacher morale had improved under NCLB, so it’s possible that this sentiment affected other responses.

The gloom does not lift when the subject shifts to improving literacy among adults beyond college age. “Adults are tough – there’s no system for them,” says Shanahan. He estimates that Americans spend an average of about $6,500 a year for each child in school. For adults in literacy programs, the expenditure is about $300 per year.

The reluctance of adults with low literacy skills ‑ especially those for whom English is not a second language ‑ to take part in training programs is not surprising, considering the stigma associated with illiteracy. Shanahan says that some people at the lowest literacy level have adapted well and know how to compensate for their shortcomings ‑ from the mother who makes a point of being busy when her kids come home from school so that she won’t have to read their papers, to the man in the workplace who hides his inability to understand a memo by walking into his boss’ office, waving the paper in the air and demanding, “What’s this all about?”

Says Shanahan, who has served as director of reading for the Chicago Public Schools and is an adviser to the National Center for Family Literacy: “When you teach someone to be literate, you’re bringing them on board, buying them a ticket to get into the game. That’s what Rotarians are doing: giving people tools that allow them into the group. Literacy is an enabler. The price of not being literate is isolation.”

The isolation of prison is familiar to those at the lowest rung of the literacy ladder. “The statistics are stark,” says Shanahan, who points out that about one in six people you pass walking down the street is illiterate. In prison, four out of five are people with below-basic literacy. “It makes sense to have job programs in prisons,” says Shanahan. “But it also makes sense to have schools in prison.”

Another thing that makes sense is to make full use of the Internet as a resource in advancing literacy. But the Internet brings its own variables to the literacy equation, requiring competence in an additional set of reading comprehension and communication skills.

“You hear about kids who are so technologically savvy that they can hack into government computers,” says Shanahan. “The truth is, most kids can’t tell the difference between a [Web] site about Martin Luther King that is done by the government and one that is done by the Ku Klux Klan. Kids don’t have a good sense that everyone out there is not equal. The Internet has so many sources ‑ so much good info, so much bad info – that it demands that you teach some things about it.”

Shanahan believes that to improve literacy levels, we have to “build out from the classroom.” “That’s where the biggest payoff is,” he says, “because we have people there for a large number of hours. If there are people in the community who will kick in time to help – tutoring and volunteering – that can make a real difference. But we need to have every hand on deck.”

Paul Engleman is a Chicago-based freelancer and a frequent contributor to The Rotarian.