AS THE candidates talk (and talk and talk) about education, it seems appropriate that we consider recent research on one of most fundamental skills: reading. But that is easier said than done, in part because definition of literacy just won't keep still. Once upon a time, a person who could sign his or her name was deemed literate. Later, anyone who had completed third grade was considered literate. Then along came a mushy concept, functional literacy, and its equally slushy counterpart, functional illiteracy, about which lots was written in days of minimum competency testing madness (roughly 1975 to 1985). Two April 2000 reports, Literacy in Labor Force (from U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement) and Literacy in an Information Age (from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), construct a scale that runs from 0 to 500 - much like scale used by National Assessment of Educational Progress. However, both OERI and OECD often collapse scale into five categories or levels. The OECD document defines literacy as the ability to understand and employ printed information in daily activities, at home, at work, and in community - to achieve one's goals and to develop one's knowledge and potential. Notice that, by this definition, there is no fun in literacy: reading a novel, a magazine, or a poem doesn't count. Both studies differentiate three varieties of literacy: prose, document, and quantitative. While three do present some differences, correlations between them are quite high, and they share some highly similar patterns as well. Unless specifically noted, results discussed below come from analyses of prose literacy. The first results of OECD study were discussed in Seventh Bracey Report (October 1997). Since then, 13 other nations decided to participate, bringing total to 22 countries. The U.S. average for prose literacy is significantly lower than that of four nations, not different from that of six, and significantly higher than that of 11. By contrast, our average for document literacy is significantly lower than that of 11 nations, same as that of four, and higher than that of six. The first principle of data interpretation in my book Bail Me Out! (Corwin Press, 2000) is Beware of Averages, and that advice is very useful here. Only one nation, Sweden, has a 95th percentile in prose literacy that is higher than that of U.S., and only four countries - Portugal, Poland, Slovenia, and Chile - have a 5th percentile that is lower. The difference between U.S. 95th percentile and that of Sweden is just 13 points, but difference between 5th percentiles is 78 points. In other words, dispersion of scores in U.S. is enormous. These results are similar to findings of 1992 international reading study, How in World Do Students Read?, which measured reading skills of 9- and 14-year-olds. American students were near top at both ages and had highest 95th and 99th percentiles. Our best readers scored higher than any other nation's best readers. Some of data are impossible to interpret. For example, data on scores for people who complete college are difficult to interpret because proportion of college graduates varies enormously across nations. Age comparisons are also iffy. Many adults in oldest age group would have lived through World War II and subsequent rebuilding efforts. Informal reports also indicate that older Europeans, especially those who would be expected to be on lower rungs, refused to participate, thereby raising sampling issues. There are substantial relationships between proportions of adults at lowest levels and at highest levels and a nation's economic productivity. The relationship is negative for first group, positive for second. …