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Jonathan Kozol, in his book Illiterate America, states that there may not be any intentional deception in the literacy figures. He goes on to explain[7] that the Census Bureau reported literacy rates of 99% based on personal interviews of a relatively small portion of the population and on written responses to Census Bureau mailings. If the interviewees or written responders had completed fifth grade they were considered literate. In the 1970 census, for example, 5% of those surveyed had less than a fifth-grade education. The Census Bureau considered 80% of those with less than a fifth-grade education as being literate and thus calculated a 99% literacy rate. In the 1980 and 1990 censuses, most of the Census Bureau calculations of literacy were based upon grade completion. They used written questionnaires and a small number of home visits and telephone interviews. If a respondent stated that they had completed fewer than five grades, they were asked if they could read and write, and their unsubstantiated answer was recorded as a fact. Kozol asserts that this method of determining literacy is certain to underestimate illiteracy for the following reasons:

* Illiterate people would not respond to written forms and their family members — also likely to be illiterate — would not either.
* Illiterate people are less likely to have telephones than the general public, because of unemployment or low paying jobs.
* Illiterate people may distrust anyone knocking on their door or calling on the telephone and seeking information because they are often hounded by bill collectors, salesmen, and others because of their financial condition and because they may have been cheated as a result of their illiteracy. Therefore they cannot be expected to give accurate answers to questions asked by Census Bureau workers they do not know, especially if the answers are embarrassing.
* Grade level completion does not equal grade level competence.
* Those who have no permanent home address, no telephone, no post office box, and no regular job — a condition shared by more than 6 million adults, most of whom are illiterate — cannot be found by the Census Bureau in time to be included in the count.

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Most studies place the rate of American functional illiteracy at around 20% today, and that is the item that was below 10% in the early 1800s.

It is true that my thesis would be the same if literacy rates exceeded 90% in both the earlier and current periods, since it would still be consistent with the position that tax-funded compulsory education was not established to deal with a problem of educational quality and that public school teachers today are twice as likely to pay good money to keep their own kids out of public schools. Still, I think the case that literacy has dropped is pretty strong, and it is hard to believe that the crisis leading to No Child Left Behind was that “only 99%” of all children were learning effectively.