If you can read this, you probably passed the ITBS*. Hey, coastal slicker boy, diss humble Iowa all you please, but I'll bet that there's a significantly higher percentage of Iowa yokels than pig-ignorant (in the technical sense of a deficiency in pork gnosis) Californians who can actually read the cereal box.

I use the equivocating "I'll bet" above because a quick google for my quick snark did not quickly turn up a link to a neat table of adult literacy rates by state. It's quite remarkable how buried and obfuscated that information is on all the governmental and non-gov sites I turned up. There are all sorts of "assessments" for this and that grade level but I haven't yet found what I'd think would be an important and simple stat - the percentage of adults who possess an easily defined attribute of "functional literacy", by state. There is, however, all sorts of gobbledy-gook in brain-desiccating educationese - sites that tell you all about "what they do" re literacy research without any apparent posting of any results of all the research they've optimized, empowered, and missionized themselves to do. One even had impactful links to webcasts about their research! Well, I didn't actually follow those links, but I'm sure they impacted stuff like nobody's business.

Wait - here's a table (p,8) with rates of Level I literacy by state as of 1998. (According to the text (p.9), "Level 1 Literacy refers to the lowest level of literacy and is defined as the adult population that can perform many tasks involving simple texts and documents but display difficulty using certain reading, writing, and computational skills considered necessary for functioning in everyday life.".) Utahns, Alaskans, and Wyomingans have the lowest level of lowest-level literacy at 11%. The deplorably white and unrepresentative New Hampshire is second with Vermont at 12%, and Iowa ties for 3rd place at 13% with Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, and Nebraska. Californians, alas, at 24%, have only slightly less trouble with cereal box decipherment than my fellow Floridians (25%). (I would guess that those percentages have increased in most of these states since '98.) Now, I am sure you are muttering to yourself, "But, Moira, those numbers are pushed up by the large number of non-English speaking immigrants in those places!" To which I say, "Nonetheless." Call me nativist scum, but I don't feel that my destiny would be any more wisely decided by persons illiterate in English than by honest hog farmers, despite their high-falutin' tradition of widespread literacy.

But I must admit I disagree with the gravamen of Bainbridge's post only to the degree that "incredibly annoying" hardly begins to describe the profound suckitude of our political process. And that's my ethanol-burnin', high-fructose corn-syrup swillin' opinion, live from the heart of Ames.

*I do not, as a matter of fact, know if the folks who run the ITBS, developed at the University of Iowa, are still Iowa-based.

Posted by Moira Breen at 13 August 2007 08:08 AM