Improving Literacy Rates

A couple of weeks ago, Trevor posted on his Will to Exist blog an excerpt from an an article by one Ronald Nash on illiteracy. Here's another excerpt from the same article:

Thirteen percent of American seventeen-year-olds are illiterate, according to a recent issue of Time; the estimate for minority youth is an astonishing forty percent.

The above is a quotation from the August 14, 1989 issue of Time. Naturally, it led me to suggest that illiteracy is less of an education problem and more of a minority problem. More recent statistics are available directly from the federal government, more specifically the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (PDF document).

Figure 2 from the NAAL shows us that 14% of those tested fell below the basic level of prose literacy, i.e., were functionally illiterate, in both 1992 and 2003. Amazingly, in violation of all the tenets of political correctness, the NAAL also breaks down the statistics by race/ethnicity in Figure 8:

Figure 8 informs us that while only seven per cent of the white population is functionally illiterate, a whopping forty-four per cent of the Hispanic population is functionally illiterate. The meaning of Hispanic is not made clear, but when mentioned in connection with any social pathology, Hispanic usually means illegal immigrant from Latin America. This suggests a simple method of improving our literacy rates other than the usual and ineffectual method of throwing money at the Department of Education: kick the illegal aliens out.

The beauty of this method is that it requires no new legislation to be enacted and no new taxes to be levied. It merely requires that some of the bums in the Department of Homeland Security get off their sorry asses and do what we taxpayers pay them to do. But I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.