I like Gillian Tett, the US managing editor for the Financial Times.  It’s partly because she has a PhD in Anthropology, partly because she has a wide breadth of interests that allow her to write much more interesting columns than the average journalist.

Her latest is about “America’s Reading Problem,” an article that contains the results of Department of Education research documenting the fact that ” 14 per cent of the adult population (or 32 million people) cannot read properly, while 21 per cent read below a level required in the fifth grade. And 19 per cent of high-school graduates cannot read.”

Hartnell College, a community college in Salinas, CA has a powerpoint online that contains a more detailed version of the same information.

Ms. Tett points out that this reading deficit, which has persisted in the US for a long time, tends to reinforce the distinction between haves and have-nots.

I have two thoughts:

–if government economic policy is reliant totally on monetary measures and not on education reform, no wonder 0% interest rates + quantitative easing for a long time have been necessary to  provide the (low skill) jobs that will shrink the unemployment rate.  Imagine what those jobs must be like.  It also seems to me very likely that higher rates will make jobs for the illiterate disappear very quickly.

–I’ve been unable to find the original government source document referred to, although the results are in the Tett article and in many others that pop up through an online search.   The only Department of Education report I can find says simply that literacy rates in the US are similar to those elsewhere in the OECD.

How odd.

I normally search government websites several times a week, so that’s maybe a thousand instances.  This is the first time something like this has happened.