1 in 3 Adults Lack Basic Literacy Skills: What That Means for the School Newsletter You Just Sent

You spent twenty minutes getting that newsletter just right — the field trip logistics, the fundraiser deadline, the reminder about picture day. Twelve parents opened it. Four replied. The rest, as far as your inbox can tell, went quiet.

It is tempting to read that silence as apathy. New international data suggests a different, more uncomfortable possibility: some of those parents opened the newsletter, started reading, and simply could not get through it.

What the OECD’s 2026 Report Actually Found

The OECD’s latest report, based on the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) and covering 31 countries and economies, found that nearly one in three adults scored at or below Level 1 in literacy or numeracy — the threshold for struggling with everyday tasks like locating a single piece of information in a written document, following straightforward instructions, or completing a form OECD, “Navigating Life with Low Literacy and Numeracy”.

That is not the same as illiteracy. The report is explicit that most adults in this group can understand basic sentences — what they lack is automaticity. Reading remains effortful rather than fluent, which is associated with lower confidence and engagement with written material generally, not just in a school context. A parent in this group does not skim a newsletter the way a fluent reader does. They work through it, word by word, and a dense paragraph can be enough to make them stop.

National breakdowns corroborate this pattern from the same 2023 PIAAC data cycle. In the United States, 28% of adults scored at Level 1 or below in literacy in 2023, up from 19% in 2017 NCES, “Highlights of the 2023 U.S. PIAAC Results”. Across Europe, a joint statement from the European Association for the Education of Adults and the European Basic Skills Network found that literacy proficiency improved in only two of the participating countries over the past decade, with declines concentrated among the least-educated segments of the population — widening the gap between highly and minimally educated adults EAEA/EBSN, “New PIAAC results show declining literacy and increasing inequality”. These 2024 figures are pre-2026 but describe the same underlying PIAAC cycle the OECD’s newer report draws on, so they corroborate rather than date the picture.

The Newsletter Gap Nobody Measured Until Now

Here is where the story turns from an abstract skills statistic into something a school administrator can act on this week.

A 2026 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Literacy analyzed a sample of 100 real school newsletters and found a median readability level of 12th grade — roughly a college-entry reading level, and six grade levels above the 6th-grade benchmark that literacy researchers generally recommend for general-public communication Merga & Ferguson, “Are School Newsletters Easy to Understand at Home, and Why Does This Matter?”. Every newsletter in the sample was substantially more complex than that benchmark.

Even the Families Most Likely to Struggle Weren’t Getting Simpler Text

The same study found that newsletters sent to homes in relative socioeducational disadvantage — where lower English reading comprehension is statistically more likely — were only marginally easier to read than newsletters sent elsewhere. In other words, schools were not adjusting communication complexity for the families most likely to need it — not proof that any single school intentionally under-served a family, but a clear sign that “write it simpler for families who need it” is not something schools are currently doing at scale, even when nothing structural stops them from doing it.

Put the two findings side by side: roughly a third of adults nationally read below the level needed to comfortably process everyday text, and the median school newsletter is written well above the level literacy experts consider accessible to the general public. Read together, they support a reframing — some of the parents a school labels “disengaged” may be facing a text-complexity barrier, not an attitude problem.

Disengagement Is Not the Only Story — and That’s Important

It would be a mistake to conclude that literacy alone explains why parent response rates are low, and the research does not support that conclusion either.

A large, nationally representative survey by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education and Transcend found that parents dramatically overestimate their children’s engagement at school — 65% of parents believe their child “loves school,” compared with only 26% of 10th graders who say the same Brookings, “The disengagement gap”. The researchers attribute this gap not to parents’ reading ability, but to schools rarely sharing in-depth information about learning quality, relying instead on thin proxies like grades and attendance. Separately, a joint policy strategy from the European Basic Skills Network and the European Association for the Education of Adults argues that low participation in adult learning reflects structural failures — relevance, access, governance, funding — rather than individual motivation EBSN/EAEA, “Beyond the Low-Skills Trap”. Literacy complexity is one barrier among several — including thin communication channels and a broader awareness gap — and schools addressing only the readability of their text will still miss the parents whose disengagement has other roots.

What Reading Level Actually Changes

None of the sources above tested whether simplifying a newsletter increases parent response rates — that causal experiment has not, to our knowledge, been run and published. What the evidence supports is narrower and still useful: a documented mismatch between the reading level required by typical school communication and the reading level a substantial share of the adult population can comfortably sustain, plus a demonstrated case of an education system treating plain language as a built-in deliverable rather than a nice-to-have.

Wisconsin offers the clearest named example. Under Wis. Admin. Code PI 11.36, the state requires that written notices to parents in special education be written in language understandable to the general public, translated into the parent’s native language or mode of communication when needed, with oral translation and comprehension confirmation when the parent’s language is not a written one. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s “Special Education in Plain Language” handbook further recommends parent-friendly plain-language summaries of individualized education plans as standard practice, noting that special-education communication “has a language of its own” full of acronyms that can confuse families who are not immersed in it daily Wisconsin DPI, “Special Education in Plain Language”. This is a compliance requirement, not an evaluated experiment — Wisconsin has not published outcome data proving the mandate changed parent comprehension. But it is a working example of a school system deciding that readability is the school’s responsibility to manage, not the parent’s burden to overcome.

In Practice, This Looks Like

• A weekly digest capped at one screen, no scroll. Instead of a 600-word newsletter, a short in-app or SMS notification triggered every Friday afternoon: three bullet points, one date, one action needed. Anything longer links out for parents who want detail.
• A permission-slip reminder in plain language, sent 48 hours before a deadline. One sentence stating what is needed, one sentence stating the deadline, and a single tap-to-confirm action — not a paragraph explaining the trip’s educational rationale.
• A translated, read-aloud-friendly version of any special-education or formal notice, sent at the same time as the standard version, mirroring the Wisconsin approach of pairing translation with a comprehension check rather than assuming a translated PDF alone closes the gap.

A Starting Checklist for Administrators

• Run your next three outgoing communications through a free readability checker — such as the Flesch-Kincaid score built into Microsoft Word, or a free site like Hemingway Editor — and note the grade level; most administrators are surprised by the result.
• Separate “must act now” content (deadlines, forms, safety) from “good to know” content, and give the former its own short, single-purpose message.
• Default to short sentences, common words, and one idea per line rather than dense paragraphs — this costs nothing and requires no new tooling.
• Ask whether translated communications are checked for comprehension, not just checked for language — a translated PDF written at the same reading level is still a barrier.
• Track response rates by message length and format, not just by open rate, to see whether shorter formats correlate with more replies at your school specifically.

The Real Fix Is a Communication System, Not a Single Newsletter

Rewriting one newsletter is a one-time fix. What the research actually points to is a standing communication practice: short, plain-language, multi-channel messages that separate urgent asks from background information, by default, for every family — a pattern that matters most for schools managing high communication volume, not just the ones a staff member remembers to accommodate.

That is an operating requirement, not a one-time content edit. BeeNet’s messaging features are one implementation path: short-format, multi-channel parent communication designed so plain, scannable messages are the default rather than a manual discipline. If you want to see how that looks against your own newsletter, book a demo.

The OECD’s numbers are not going to reverse next term, and neither is the reading level gap between what schools send and what a third of parents can comfortably process. The question for most schools is not whether their communication needs to get simpler — the data already answers that. It is when they start measuring it.

References

1. OECD. (2026). Navigating Life with Low Literacy and Numeracy: New Results from the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/navigating-life-with-low-literacy-and-numeracy_c198a20f-en.html
2. European Basic Skills Network (EBSN). (2026). OECD to launch new PIAAC report on adults with low literacy and numeracy. https://basicskills.eu/oecd-to-launch-new-piaac-report-on-adults-with-low-literacy-and-numeracy/
3. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), U.S. Department of Education. (2024). Highlights of the 2023 U.S. PIAAC Results (NCES 2024-202). https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp
4. European Association for the Education of Adults (EAEA) / European Basic Skills Network (EBSN). (2024). New PIAAC results show declining literacy and increasing inequality in many European countries – Better adult learning is necessary. https://eaea.org/2024/12/11/new-piaac-results-show-declining-literacy-and-increasing-inequality-in-many-european-countries-better-adult-learning-is-necessary/
5. Merga, M. K., & Ferguson, C. (2026). Are School Newsletters Easy to Understand at Home, and Why Does This Matter? Literacy (Wiley). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lit.70027
6. Winthrop, R. (Brookings CUE), Shoukry, Y., & Nitkin, D. (Transcend). (2025). The disengagement gap: Why student engagement isn’t what parents expect. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-disengagement-gap/
7. European Basic Skills Network (EBSN) / European Association for the Education of Adults (EAEA). (2026). Beyond the Low-Skills Trap: A Joint Policy Strategy by EBSN & EAEA. https://basicskills.eu/post-beyond-the-low-skills-trap-a-joint-policy-strategy-by-ebsn-eaea/
8. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI). (2024). Special Education in Plain Language. https://dpi.wi.gov/sites/default/files/imce/sped/pdf/spec-ed-plain-lang-english.pdf