The Houston Business Journal reports that Houston didn’t rank very highly in a study designed to measure overall literacy:
A national study has placed Houston 53rd out of a total of 69 cities in a ranking of “America’s Most Literate Cities.”
The study released by Central Connecticut State University 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.
[snip]
Other Texas cities on the list include Austin (16), Dallas-Fort Worth (44), Arlington (57), San Antonio (64) and Corpus Christi (67).
[snip]
The 2005 edition of the study ranks cities based on six key indicators of literacy: Newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources.
Dallas-Fort Worth isn’t really a “city” but I guess we can let that slide. Much like the variables in the “Fattest City” rankings measured something other than fat, the variables in this study may not be the best surrogate measures of “literacy.”
Still, we post, you decide.
