Becoming Readers in a Complex Society: Eighty-Third Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education

Over the 1960s and 1970s, the United States has witnessed a decline in the verbal aptitude scores of those taking the College Entrance Examination Board's Scholastic Aptitude Test and other standardized tests. All of these findings clearly suggest that by one criterion of literacy, that of simply recognizing the words of a text or answering a multiple-choice test on what it is about, the United States educational system has been reasonably effective.