Study ranks cities' literate behavior
Most literate cities
1. Minneapolis
2. Seattle
3. Pittsburgh
4. Madison, Wis.
5. Cincinnati
6. Washington, D.C.
7. Denver
8. Boston
9. Portland, Ore.
10. San Francisco
Least literate cities
70. Garland, Texas
71. Fresno, Calif.
72. Arlington, Texas
73. Long Beach, Calif.
74. Anaheim, Calif.
75. San Antonio, Texas
76. Santa Ana, Calif.
77. Corpus Christi, Texas
78. Hialeah, Fla.
79. El Paso, Texas
Source: America's Most Literate Cities
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By Mary Beth Marklein
USA Today
August 3, 2004
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them, Mark Twain has been credited with saying. And when you measure literacy through that kind of prism, a new study suggests, Minneapolis has the most going for it; El Paso, Texas, the least.
Minnesota's largest city and the Tex-Mex border town are at opposite ends of the spectrum in the study, which examines the extent to which residents of the nation's 79 largest cities behave in literate ways -- such as buying newspapers and books or borrowing library materials.
Indianapolis falls in the top half, ranking 27th overall; Fort Wayne placed 45th.
The country's largest cities appear well into the bottom half of the rankings: New York is 49, Chicago, 58, and Los Angeles, 68.
Like Minneapolis, many top-ranked cities also boast some of the nation's most highly educated and affluent residents. In contrast, low-ranking cities, like El Paso, tend to attract recent immigrants, many of them poor and with little schooling.
Education isn't the only factor considered in the study, which draws from U.S. Census and Education Department data, newspaper circulation rates, library resources, magazine and journal publishers, and other public documents. In all, 22 variables are measured.
This is the second year of the America's Most Literate Cities study, which this year includes 15 more cities. It ranks cities with populations of 200,000 or more.
The new version also is based on more recent federal data, and was tweaked in a few areas to provide what author Jack Miller, a longtime education researcher and chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, calls a "more thorough and . . . more accurate" indicator of literate behavior.
J/K
