Literacy - Adults Lacking Basic Prose Literacy Skills

Why Is This Important?

Adults need strong literacy skills to get good jobs, stay healthy, be active in their communities, avoid human rights abuse, avoid crime, and to raise children who have strong literacy skills. The employees most in demand in the U.S. have at least a two-year college degree. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report (2003), 75 percent of America's state prison inmates did not complete high school. Literacy begins when parents read to their children and encourage their children to read. Parents who are poor readers don't read as often to their children. When young children are not read to, they enter school less prepared for learning to read than other children. (1)

Definition

The percentage of adults lacking basic prose literacy skills. The literacy of adults who lack BPLS ranges from being unable to read and understand any written information in English to being able to locate easily identifiable information in short, commonplace prose text, but nothing more advanced.

Data Source

How the Measure is Calculated

How Are We Doing?

16% of New Mexico adults (age 16+) lacked basic prose literacy skills. Applied to the 2010 population, this represents an estimated 249,000 New Mexicans. The estimated percentage of adults lacking basic prose literacy skills in New Mexico decreased one percentage point, from 17% in 1992 to 16% in 2003. The difference is not statistically significant.

How Do We Compare With the U.S.?

Data from the most recent survey (2003), report the percentage of adults lacking basic prose literacy skills at 14.5% in the U.S., compared with 16% in New Mexico.

More Resources

1. The Impact of Literacy, downloaded from the ProLiteracy website: http://www.proliteracy.org/page.aspx?pid=370 on 1/20/2012.