Literacy Trends

Because I can't let my old job alone, even though I don't work there anymore, and because I think literacy is the key to, well, everything, a new article by the Economist and some recent statistics made me perk my ears up. Or, I'm just a literacy geek, whichever you prefer to think.

Here's the link: linkity

The study compares data from 1992 to 2003 to determine trends in literacy rates. The link has a state by state breakdown, so you can see what the trends are in your own state--and even by county. My state seems to be at 13% functional illiteracy, with the counties I worked for posting 11% and 15% respectively. If that's true, that's incredible, because the numbers we used to post from the 2000 Census were 20% and 36%. My home state of Kentucky posts up at 12%. New York, shockingly, is at 22% and Texas is at 19%. This is really interesting, because I don't think most people would assume WV is more literate than New York. It could be that the data is just more easily measured now. But the data is somewhat incomplete because, if I understand it correctly, it excludes people who can't take the test because they can't speak or read English--so it deals only with Americans who are not immigrants, essentially. If we added those figures back in, the rates are probably higher. But, too often people want to excuse illiteracy figures by blaming the immigrant population, along the lines of, well that's just people who can't speak English--real Americans aren't in those figures. But that doesn't explain why New York has far more illiterate people than West Virginia--unless we can say that coming from traditionally impoverished areas has nothing to do with being illiterate. I'm not sure how to explain that gap other than population size differences. I believe the information overall found a 14.5% national illiteracy rate. That's a hell of a lot better than 20% (but again, I think that's without nonnative speakers added in). Check out the link to see how your state measured up!

A couple of weeks ago, the Economist ran this article called "The Readers", which also addressed literacy practices.

FOR a quarter of a century, surveys of reading habits by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a federally-funded body, have been favourite material for anyone who thinks America is dumbing down. Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason”, for example, cites the 2007 NEA report that “the proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004.”

So it is a surprise that this bellwether seems to have taken a turn for the better. This week the NEA reported that, for the first time since 1982 when its survey began, the number of adults who said they had read a novel, short story, poem or play in the past 12 months had gone up, rising from 47% of the population in 2002 to over 50% in 2008.

Although 3% doesn't seem like a lot, it translates to hundreds of thousands of people more, so it really is a big deal. The article goes on to say that this trend was seen across all demographic and ethnic groups.

But the best part:

The increase has been most marked in groups whose reading had declined most in the past 25 years, African-Americans and Hispanics (up by 15% and 20% respectively since 2002). It has also been larger among people at lower levels of education: reading among college graduates was flat, but among those who dropped out of high school it rose from under a quarter to over a third.

Most remarkable of all has been the rebound among young men. The numbers of men aged 18-24 who say they are reading books (not just online) rose 24% in 2002-08. Teachers sometimes despair of young men, whose educational performance has lagged behind that of young women almost across the board. But the reading gap at least may be narrowing.

Yeah, double digit figures, baby! That's tremendous improvement, and that's outstanding.

The article ends by saying that 21% of adults didn't read a book because they couldn't. But the new info from the NCES may indicate that 21% figure is a thing of the past. Have we finally turned the corner on illiteracy and reading apathy? Godless, I hope so!

-- DV