According to a new report from the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund, 47 percent of Detroiters are functionally illiterate. The fund’s director, Karen Tyler-Ruiz, explains:
“Not able to fill out basic forms, for getting a job — those types of basic everyday (things). Reading a prescription; what’s on the bottle, how many you should take… just your basic everyday tasks,” she said.
“I don’t really know how they get by, but they do. Are they getting by well? Well, that’s another question,” Tyler-Ruiz said.
Some of the Detroit suburbs also have high numbers of functionally illiterate: 34 percent in Pontiac and 24 percent in Southfield.
“For other major urban areas, we are a little bit on the high side… We compare, slightly higher, to Washington D.C.’s urban population, in certain ZIP codes in Washington D.C. and in Cleveland,” she said.
The article neglects to mention what we might delicately call demographics.
A Department of Labor study from 1999 points out the importance of looking at tested skills, like functional literacy, rather than years of education:
The distinction between skill and education may explain part of the wage erosion among workers with low levels of formal education. Older cohorts of the population were much less likely to have graduated high school than younger cohorts. Of those born in the years 1938 to 1943, only about 76 percent graduated high school; of those born between 1973 and 1978, 88 percent had graduated high school. Put another way, dropouts in an earlier period were a much more common phenomenon; the typical dropout was at about the 12th percentile of the educational distribution. Today, dropouts are only at the 6th percentile.
If literacy level is an independent dimension of skill, then today’s dropouts, who represent more of the bottom tail of the distribution, might exhibit less skill than comparable dropouts 30 years ago. One study found that taking account of the changing rankings of those without a college education explains some of the deterioration of earnings of workers with less formal education (Rosenbaum, 1998).
If we may return to the topic of demographics, the study has an important finding to share:
Taking account of education and functional literacy sharply reduces the measured impact of race on employment and low wage status. The size of the measured employment and wage disadvantages that can be directly attributed to race and Hispanic depends a great deal on the inclusion of education and literacy indicators. When we control only for age, region, marital status, health status, and immigrant status, the effect of the variable representing an individual status as black reduces employment rates by 6.9 percentage points and raises the incidence of low wages (among the employed) by 10 percentage points. After controlling for education but not literacy differences across individuals, the effects of race falls to a 4.8 point reduction in employment and 3.7 point increase in low wage status. Adding the functional literacy variables lowers the employment effect by a further one-third (to 3.2 points) and diminishes the wage effect to by over two-thirds (to 1.1 points).