By: Haily Shah, Staff Writer
By now, many Americans have heard about Katie Zacharia and her short-lived stint as the White House Press Secretary. Zacharia, a Republican political commentator, was hired on Oct. 9, nearly two months after Karoline Leavitt resigned. Unfortunately, Zacharia would go on to set the record for the shortest-serving press secretary in U.S. history.
During her five-day tenure, Zacharia held only one press briefing and it was disastrous. She stumbled over her words, had no flow to her speech and couldn’t properly answer the three reporters she took questions from. In modern-day social media fashion, the memes, jabs and disgust at her poor performance quickly flooded the internet after the briefing aired.
Liberals and conservatives alike took to shaming Zacharia and questioned whether she really was an attorney. It was only when a White House reporter asked Trump where she had passed the bar and she answered “when I moved to China,” that people discovered that she had never actually passed the bar exam, despite her numerous claims that she was an attorney.
Zacharia’s demonstrated lack of basic reading and speaking skills isn’t new. It’s just a glaring example of a very real problem increasingly plaguing much of the American population: the literacy crisis.
The U.S. literacy crisis is the consistent trend of declining reading proficiency across both adults and children. According to the National Literacy Institute, as of 2026, 56% of U.S. adults score below a sixth-grade reading level and about one in three eighth graders read below the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) basic, which denotes partial mastery of the prerequisite skills and knowledge fundamental for proficient work at the assessed grade level. That means that one in three eighth graders has already fallen behind and lacks the skills to keep up with coursework.
The lack of reading, writing and speaking skills among today’s youth and adults is a cause for alarm, which many educators have been sounding for quite a while now to no avail. This problem came to light after the COVID-19 pandemic, when a substantial number of students fell behind in their studies with no subsequent program substantive enough to address their needs. Since then, the decline has only worsened, with the National Literacy Institute reporting levels of low or lacking literacy at a rate never before seen in the assessment’s history.
Today, we need not look at these statistics to see the literacy crisis in the U.S. It’s everywhere. People are putting the apostrophe after their graduation year, saying “could care less” instead of the grammatically accurate “could not care less,” and butchering sayings like “don’t throw stones from glass houses” until they’ve lost their meaning. Influencers left and right are demonstrating their lack of reading and writing comprehension.
Very recently, in an Interview Magazine Q&A, popular influencer Alix Earle went viral for saying she had never read a book in her life, apart from Dr. Seuss. Earle could’ve made this comment for publicity, but this pattern is real. In 2023, the National Education Association reported that only 48.5% of adults read a book in the last year. People aren’t reading enough.
Even for those who want to read, their access to books is being limited. Libraries across the nation are fighting against the Trump administration, which is looking to cut all funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the main federal agency supporting libraries. The Trump administration has also been steadily dismantling the Department of Education since March 2025. With these movements in mind, it’s a given that the literacy crisis is getting worse.
In a time when more and more students are falling behind and are growing up to be adults lacking basic reading and writing skills, improving Americans’ literacy is of utmost importance. But the only people with the power to bring about significant change are not only unwilling to acknowledge this very real crisis, but are actively making decisions that worsen the problem.
Although Katie Zacharia’s short-lived career as White House Press Secretary was nothing short of shameful, it has the very real potential to not only bring attention to the state of literacy in the U.S., but also spark change. This is among the first displays of our country’s literacy crisis on such a big stage. Her speaking for barely 15 minutes at the White House has facilitated conversations that nothing else has. For many Americans, seeing her struggle with reading and speaking has gotten them thinking about the broader state of literacy. People are expressing concerns and asking what it says about this country that the woman hired for this prestigious position cannot even read the prewritten words off a sheet of paper.
Americans are waking up to the literacy crisis thanks to Zacharia’s poor performance, and it cannot stop here. Lawmakers and politicians need to acknowledge this problem, work to fix the state of literacy in the U.S., expand access to books and education and ensure we are truly leaving no child behind in the school systems. This needs to be a wake-up call, one that brings forth the change we so desperately need.