Survey says: They're reading after all

• Jay Matthews reports on a new survey of young readers in The Washington Post.

Books by the five well-known U.S. authors, plus lesser-known Laura Numeroff, Katherine Paterson and Gary Paulsen, drew the most readers at every grade level in a study of 78.5 million books read by more than 3 million children who logged on to the Renaissance Learning Web site to take quizzes on books they read last year. Many works from Rowling's Potter series turned up in the top 20, but other authors also ranked high and are likely to get more attention as a result.

"I find it reassuring . . . that students are still reading the classics I read as a child," said Roy Truby, a senior vice president for Wisconsin-based Renaissance Learning. But Truby said he would have preferred to see more meaty and varied fare, such as "historical novels and biographical works so integral to understanding our past and contemporary books that help us understand our world."

Michelle F. Bayuk, marketing director for the New York-based Children's Book Council, agreed. "What's missing from the list are all the wonderful nonfiction, informational, humorous and novelty books as well as graphic novels that kids read and enjoy both inside and outside the classroom."

It's not all bad

• A new survey reports that library usage is highest with patrons aged 18-30.

Mostly they're coming to use the computers, but still:

Of the 53 percent of U.S. adults who said they visited a library in 2007, the biggest users were young adults aged 18 to 30 in the tech-loving group known as Generation Y, the survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project said.

"These findings turn our thinking about libraries upside down," said Leigh Estabrook, a professor emerita at the University of Illinois and co-author of a report on the survey results.

"Internet use seems to create an information hunger and it is information-savvy young people who are most likely to visit libraries," she said.

Decline and fall

• U.S. 4th-graders' reading skills are dropping in a rather bricklike way.

Test results released Wednesday showed U.S. students, who took the test last year, scored about the same as they did in 2001, the last time the test was given — despite an increased emphasis on reading under the No Child Left Behind law.

Still, the U.S. average score on the Progress in International Reading Literacy test remained above the international average. Ten countries or jurisdictions, including Hong Kong and three Canadian provinces, were ahead of the United States this time. In 2001, only three countries were ahead of the United States.

The 2002 No Child Left Behind law requires schools to test students annually in reading and math, and imposes sanctions on schools that miss testing goals.

The NSS Awards #15

From the AP: "Government study: Americans reading less"

Your tax dollars at work, folks.

So much for rehabilitation

• Books are disappearing from prison libraries.

It's mostly books about Islam -- surprise, surprise -- but still. I don't think that every person behind bars that picks up a book automatically sprouts a countdown-towards-rehabilitation timer on their foreheads, but at the same time, flipping a few pages is a lot better than parking a shiv between someone's ribs.

Feldman said inmates are permitted to order books on their own and bypass the chapel libraries. "So fundamentally this is not a case about what books the inmates have the ability to read," he said.

However, inmates say the rules have had a chilling effect.

Inmate Moshe Milstein told the judge by telephone that the chaplain at Otisville removed about 600 books from the chapel library on Memorial Day, including Harold S. Kushner's best-seller "When Bad Things Happen to Good People," a book that Norman Vincent Peale said was "a book that all humanity needs."

"There is definitely irreparable harm done to us already, and we would like the court to issue the injunction to get the books back as soon as possible," he said.

Inmate Douglas Kelly, who described himself as a representative of the prison's Muslim community, complained of "a denial of our First Amendment rights."

He said books on Islam already were the least represented in the library's collections and were reduced by half in the Memorial Day removal.

"A lot of what we are missing were definitely prayer books or prayer guides and religious laws on the part of the Muslim faith," he said.

No comment

• The Associated Press reports that 1/3rd of the D.C. population is illiterate.

Oh, wait, it's actually the fault of all those durn immigrants.

The study by the State Education Agency, a quasi-governmental office created by the U.S. Department of Education to distribute federal funds for literacy services, was ordered by Mayor Anthony A. Williams in 2003 as part of his four-year, $4 million adult literacy initiative.

The growing number of Hispanic and Ethiopian immigrants who aren't proficient in English contributed to the city's high functional illiteracy level, which translated to 170,000 people, said Connie Spinner, director of the State Education Agency. The report says the district's functional illiteracy rate is 36 percent and the nation's 21 percent.

Adults age 65 and older had the lowest literacy score of any group, the report found.

These things write themselves

• Sunday-Sunday-Sunday, it's Laura Bush versus global illiteracy!

Laura Bush announced an initiative Monday to combat global illiteracy, saying that more than 800 million people around the world can't read. The first lady said a conference on global literacy will be held in New York in September during the opening of the 61st session of the U.N. General Assembly.

She can start with her husband.

Another survey says

• "Most College Students Lack Skills," says the AP.

This report is slightly less disheartening than it initially seems. Take this poorly worded bit:

More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks. That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

Uhmm... three of those four "tasks" depend first upon numerical aptitude, not literary aptitude. But it does go on to say this:

Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than that of adults across the nation. Study leaders said that was encouraging but not surprising, given that the spectrum of adults includes those with much less education. Also, compared with all adults with similar levels of education, college students had superior skills in searching and using information from texts and documents.

The educational system in this country leaves much to be desired, yes... but there's also good old-fashioned American laziness to consider, as well. People in this country, by and large, are simply not intellectually curious; they do not seek out new ideas for their own edification, for fear of posing an insurmountable challenge to their tenuous belief systems. One thing that the Democratic Party did not take into account during the last election was the strong streak of puritanical conservatism that runs very, very deep within the population. Education has to get better, sure, but people have to first understand that ideas, too, can become stale and irrelevant. Even the ones that are held to be most precious.

Survey says

• One in 20 adults in the U.S. can't read.

The defense rests.