Research in cognitive science and neuroscience has made enormous progress toward understanding skilled reading, the acquisition of reading skill, the brain bases of reading, the causes of developmental reading impairments and how such impairments can be treated. My question is: if the science is so good, why do so many people read so poorly? I mainly focus on the United States, which fares poorly on cross-national comparisons of literacy, with about 25-30% of the population exhibiting literacy skills that are low by standard metrics. I consider three possible contributing factors, all of which turn on issues concerning the relationships between written and spoken language: the fact that English has a deep alphabetic orthography; how reading is taught; and the impact of linguistic variability as manifested in the Black-White "achievement gap." I conclude that there are opportunities to increase literacy levels by making better use of what we have learned about reading and language but also institutional obstacles and understudied issues for which more evidence is badly needed.