Not that serious

A large portion of the world’s top universities are in the US. I keep seeing people bring up the “20% of Americans are illiterate and 50% read at a 6th grade level” copypasta but I’m skeptical of those statistics and how they were found, data also shows that around 21% of Americans speak a different language at home. State tests have gotten more difficult over the years as "standard creep" has gotten worse. If you look at the PISA scores (an international test for Reading) the US is like 12th in the world and is only slightly behind Canada. We are scoring better than France and Germany in reading at the international level.