Did You Know? 

• Quirky Pickle’s main mission is to support literacy and communication skill-building for all ages, kids and adults.

• Quirky Pickle Education Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established in January 2026 as a dedicated commitment to develop and support special projects involved in literacy and communication initiatives across the United States.

How About These Troubling Statistics?

The literacy rate in the United States is 79% for adults, meaning that 79% of U.S. adults have the English literacy skills to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences.

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• Average reading level: The average American reads at the 7th-8th grade level. 

• Illiteracy rates: 21% of adults in the US are illiterate, and 54% of adults have a literacy below 6th-grade level. That's still approximately 43 MILLION U.S. ADULTS THAT STRUGGLE WITH BASIC READING AND WRITING.

• Gender gap: Males have a literacy rate of 90%, while females have a literacy rate of 82.7%.

• Less than 20% of Americans will read the text on a website, barely scanning for what is of value at that moment. Congratulations to you for doing all of the reading YOU have already done here on the Quirky Pickle website. We clearly share a similar passion. 

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Other literacy statistics include: 

• 130 million adults are unable to read a simple story to their children. 

• 44% of American adults do not read a book in a year. 

• Two-thirds of 4th and 8th graders are unable to read proficiently. 

• 6 out of 10 households do not buy a single book in a year.