Missouri cities rank high in literacy rankings

A new report ranking U.S. cities' literacy rates ranks Missouri's largest cities among the upper tier.

The analysis, conducted by Central Connecticut State University, creates an index for literacy in cities with populations above 250,000 based on newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources.

"This set of factors measures people's use of their literacy and thus presents a large-scale portrait of our nation’s cultural vitality," university president Jack Miller writes. "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."

In Missouri, St. Louis gets the top rating coming in at number 11. Kansas City was not far behind, with a ranking of 14.

The high Missouri ratings are driven by public library variables and high newspaper circulation per capita.

The conclusions may be somewhat overstated as the index does not attempt to analyze the outcome factors Miller writes about, but may nonetheless serve as a useful tool to consider which cities fare better than others.

Because the index does not provide data and only rankings, the use is limited. The rankings are provided below, but note that there is no indication on what the differential is in the actual scores. We can safely assume differentials are non-linear throughout the largest cities in the U.S., so this is definitely a shortcoming of the index.

There are more limitations given the combination of variables seem to be put together without a complete rationale or weighting scheme for doing so. The methodology is not transparent, so before the municipalities or statewide officials brag about these ratings, they would do well to dig a litter deeper into this data.

A more useful tool is the literacy rate estimates provided by the U.S. Dept. of Education. The most recent data from 2003 shows Missouri had just 7 percent of the population lacking basic prose literacy skills. Nationally that rate was about 15 percent in 2003.

What drives Missouri's better than average literacy rates? Is it better education? Higher quality libraries? We can't say. But if the CSSU authors would take their analysis one step further and employ advanced statistical techniques to their dataset, they might be able to provide some answers instead of just a ranking system.

Component Rankings
Booksellers: St. Louis (8), Kansas City (56)
Educational Attainment: Kansas City (27), St. Louis (49)
Internet Resources: Kansas City (12), St. Louis (38)
Public Libraries: St. Louis (2), Kansas City (9)
Newspaper Circulation: St. Louis (5), Kansas City (17)
Periodical Publishers: St. Louis (9), Kansas City (21)

Related Links:
CCSU Literacy Rankings 2009

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