SUMMARY
America's Most Literate Cities
Study by Jack Miller, PH.D.
Chancellor and professor of education, UW-Whitewater
Americans are actively interested in issues affecting their quality of life and how that quality varies from place to place. People want to know how their community compares to others on a broad range of dimensions such as crime rates, taxation levels, segregation levels, public health services, and environmental quality, to name a few.
For example, the U.S. Environmental Protective Agency evaluates and reports on air quality by cities. Ladies Home Journal ranks the best cities in the United States for women on such issues as crime, lifestyle, and health factors. Forbes ranks cities by the best life quality for singles including factors such as the number of nightclubs and job growth. U.S. News and World Report annually evaluates colleges and universities on a broad range of variables. The U.S. Department of Education monitors schools “needing improvement” and “persistently dangerous schools.”
This study seeks to assess a collection of important factors related to literacy and literate behaviors, and ranks the 79 largest cities in the United States. The focus is not to examine school achievement test scores, although such scores are undoubtedly correlated with many of the factors measured here. Rather, this study analyzes factors directly relating to the literacy of communities and their populations.
Whether these quality of life analyses are “accurate” is not so much a point of fact as it is of nterpretation and operational definition. Obviously, communities that score highly
on given indicators tend to be supportive of the research methodology, while those who are not highly assessed question the variables selected and their measurement. The point is that the “accuracy” of reports depends on acceptance of the operational definitions of the factors measured.
The value of this study to communities will depend on acceptance of the main factors used to measure literacy: newspaper circulation, numbers of bookstores, library resources, publishing and educational attainment. These five ranked factors combine 22 different variables that form the operational definition of literacy.
