Newswise — A national survey released today in USA Today measures a key component in America's social health by ranking the culture and resources for reading in America's 69 largest cities. It identifies Seattle, Minneapolis, Washington, DC, Atlanta, and San Francisco as the most literate U.S. cities.
Those five cities emerged at the top of "America's Most Literate Cities 2005," a national study that develops a statistical profile of 69 cities with populations of 250,000 or more. This is the third year of the study, and introduces a new factor—internet literacy—to measure the expansion of literacy to online media. The study is available online at: http://www.ccsu.edu/AMLC.
The study's author, Dr. John W. Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University, said he began the study because "Americans are actively interested in issues affecting their quality of life and how that quality varies from place to place."
The 2005 edition of the study ranks cities based on 6 key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and internet resources. The data sources include U.S. Census data, audited newspaper circulation rates, and information on magazine publishing, educational attainment levels, library resources, and booksellers. The information is compared against population rates in each city to develop a per capita profile of the city's long-term literacy.
According to Miller, "While other factors— SAT or mastery test scores, for example—can provide useful information, this set of factors presents a more complex and nuanced portrait of our nation's cultural vitality. From this data we can better perceive the extent and quality of the long-term literacy essential to individual economic success, civic participation, and the quality of life in a community and a nation.
"The value of this study," he said, "lies less in the absolute accuracy of the rank orders and far more in what communities do with the information. It is heartening to see a city like El Paso, which did not rank well on last year's edition, launch a city-wide literacy campaign, where, among other community initiatives, "Read El Paso Read" distributed some 95,000 books to community members at various events designed to encourage literacy. I hope other cities follow suit, invest in libraries, and do other things to promote literacy. At the family level, even the simple step of turning on the closed captioning of TV sets can significantly improve literacy." Miller, whose academic career includes his scholarly publication on literacy, notes that few other factors in American life can have such a profound impact on the quality of life for individuals, cities, and nations.
The site notes that Atlanta, Toledo, New York City, and Newark moved up the most from last year. Rounding out the top 10, in order: Denver, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Paul. Miller noted the relative stability of the rankings over the 3 editions of the study.
RSS