Illiteracy in the USA Since the launch of “Look and Say” (another name for the Immersion Theory), illiteracy in the USA has catapulted to a national and disruptive crisis, which the government regularly calculates downward by injecting non-instructional, non-skill based factors into data interpretation, for example, tying skill evaluation to economic, social, and racial factors. In fact, 89% of NAEP standardized test data interpretation was shown to be based on a combination of four variables that had nothing to do with instruction: number of parents living at home, parents’ educational background, type of community [e.g., ‘disadvantaged urban’, ‘extreme rural’], and state poverty rate.  And one of these variables, ‘the number of students who had one parent living at home’, accounted for 71% of the interpretation all by itself (Robinson and Brandon, 1994). Then there’s the SAT, which, far from being a measure of merit, is largely a measure of family income. Break down the test takers by income, measured in $10,000 increments, and without exception the scores rise with each jump in parents’ earnings (“1999 College Bound Seniors’ Test Scores,” 1999).