On the heels of Donald Trump's election and his promises to end the Department of Education, you may have seen claims like these spreading around X.

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This claim is based on two datapoints. First, is the literacy rate of around 99% in 1979 which was measured by the US Census. After the Department of Education was created in the same year, the census stopped measuring literacy in their surveys and it's since been tracked by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The tweet's second number comes from a recent NCES result that shows that around 16% of sampled Americans are at or below level 1 English literacy.

The problem is that these claims compare two completely different standards of literacy. The census measure of illiteracy is defined as:

The inability to read and write a simple message in English or in any other language. Illiteracy, in this [...]

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