California, with its huge immigrant population, has the lowest adult literacy of any state, according to a new U.S. Department of Education study, and it's 50 percent worse than it was a decade earlier.
The report is extrapolated from a 2003 national survey testing adults' ability to comprehend a simple bloc of English text. The survey found that 23 percent of adult Californians could not pass that test, up from 15 percent in a 1992 survey.
New York was just one percentage point lower than California, while other states ranged downward to the 6-7 percent level.
Not surprisingly, California counties with high proportions of foreign-born or first-generation farm workers had the state's highest levels of adult illiteracy in the survey, topped by 41 percent in poverty-stricken Imperial County. Conversely, high-income and mostly white suburban counties had the lowest rates with Marin, Nevada, El Dorado and Placer the lowest at 7 percent, just about the rate of the nation's most literate states.
Sacramento County's rate came in at 13 percent.
The full report from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy is available here and California's county-by-county chart can be found here.
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