Canadian youth score lower in literacy survey than American counterparts

There's no cause for Canadians to feel morally smug when it comes to educational comparisons with our U.S. neighbors. Young Americans read better and are more skilled at using everyday items like bus schedules than similar Canadians aged 21 to 25.

We're not as smart as we thought.

In the first literacy test across the 49th parallel, young Americans do better than young Canadians in more than two-thirds of the questions, the Southam Literacy Survey reveals.

The test compares adults aged 21 to 25 on largely identical questions given as part of separate nationwide literacy surveys.

The Americans clearly outperform the Canadians both in general reading proficiency and in using everyday documents such as bus schedules and the Yellow Pages. The two groups are roughly equal in understanding prose while Canadians edge slightly ahead when handling numbers.

Overall, the U.S. youth score 78 per cent correct compared to 74 for Canadians. One in five of the U.S. youth were either black or Hispanic. One in 10 of the Canadians were immigrants but all but a handful of those went to high schools here.

"This contradicts any illusions we may have of Canadian educational superiority," says psychologist Paul Nesbitt.

"The supposedly brightest age group of Canadians is significantly below Americans in reading proficiency. I have no reason to believe that is not true for the entire population," says Nesbitt.

Saskatchewan Education Minister Lorne Hepworth says the comparison is troubling because the U.S. is already lagging well behind Japan and West Germany in competitiveness.

"I think all of us have viewed the Canadian education system as one of the best in the world. So we have lulled ourselves into neutral. We never had to look over our shoulders and see anybody catching up."

American reaction was more cautious.

"If you say one group reads better or worse, it's important to know what tasks they do better or worse in," says Irwin Kirsch, project director of the literacy study published in 1986 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), based in Princeton, N.J.

"You need to focus on the nature of the problem, rather than just the extent."

The 59 NAEP literacy questions were given in 1985 to 3,538 Americans aged 21 to 25. For Southam to get a comparison, the same tasks were slightly adapted for 334 Canadians in the same age range which was oversampled in the national survey of 2,398 adults. In 19 cases out of 20, the margin of error for the Canadian youth group is within five percentage points.

One glaring difference between the two nations is the high school drop-out rate. Roughly 25 per cent of these young Canadians did not finish high school, nearly double the U.S. average. Only inner-city blacks and Hispanics are as liable to drop out of high school as the average Canadian.

Among the Canadian dropouts, more than one in five is illiterate while one in eight graduates score as illiterate—22 per cent versus 13 per cent.

Bilingualism can't be blamed for the differences between Canada and the U.S. Francophones were equal to anglophones — and sometimes better—on the Canadian literacy test, available in either language.

The lower reading proficiency of Canadians revealed by the test is considered large enough to be statistically significant and not just a chance result.

The survey shows Canadians fall down in the same places as Americans. They just fall down a bit farther.

Youth on both sides of the border perform reasonably well on school-type reading but have trouble with real-life written material that requires more complicated "information processing," like finding headings in the Yellow Pages or summarizing general themes.