America’s Most Literate Cities

By Andrew Grabois - Jan 21 , 2008

I’ve always thought of cities as being cultured, not literate.

What comes to mind is the baroque beauty of European capitals, with their cathedrals, opera houses, coffee houses, outdoor cafes, bookstores, newspaper kiosks, twisting cobblestone streets, and public spaces. Centers of commerce and culture (and sometimes government), they are places of soaring beauty that produce a certain sensibility in those who live in them. It doesn’t work the other way around. Literate people by themselves do not make cities special. Great urban areas are melting pots that attract peddlers, laborers, thinkers, builders, knaves, and dreamers. The very best cities are crucibles that give rise to history-changing ideas.

It was, then, with considerable skepticism that I approached the 2007 rankings of America’s Most Literate Cities. The data was compiled by Dr. John W. Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University. In attempting to quantify literacy, Dr. Miller took the measure of sixty-nine U.S. cities with populations of at least 250,000, focusing on what he identified as the “key indicators” of civic literacy: newspaper circulation, bookstores, libraries, periodicals, educational attainment, and public Internet access. His overall rankings are a composite of all key indicators. Separate rankings also exist for each individual indicator. The overall rankings are below:

1. Minneapolis
2. Seattle
3. St. Paul
4. Denver
5. Washington
6. St. Louis
7. San Francisco
8. Atlanta
9. Pittsburgh
10. Boston

According to Dr. Miller, the data seems to show that the more educated we become, the less we engage in literate behaviors. Even though three quarters of all cities in the study gained more high school and college graduates, most still saw declines in things like weekday newspaper circulation and retail bookstores.

“We’re getting higher and higher educational attainment levels”, Miller told USA Today, “and at the same time we’re getting fewer and fewer behaviors (that reflect) what we think educated people ought to do.”

Miller says that St. Paul, Minnesota is the “rising star” among American cities. It has seen increases in Sunday and weekly newspaper circulation, library branches (as well as collections and borrowing), public Internet access, and periodicals. St. Paul was ranked eleventh in 2003, the first year of the study, and improved to third in 2007.

The cities that have placed in the top ten every year are Minneapolis, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Denver, and Washington, D.C.

Conspicuous by their absence in the top ten are the three largest cities in the U.S.: New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The big three placed 28th, 40th, and 53rd, respectively. New York was the only one of the three to make the top ten for any of Dr. Miller’s key indicators (periodicals). What all three of America’s world-class cities have in common, of course, are large numbers of non-English speaking immigrants.

Does this mean that the frozen tundra sister cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul have become America’s Twenty-First Century Athens? Or perhaps Seattle, the rainy jewel of the Pacific Northwest that has earned the top spot for two of the last three years? Can we really compare the relatively homogenous populations of small-to-medium sized cities that have attracted large education and talent clusters with the classically diverse populations of teeming megalopolises? Should we even try? What’s more important in the scheme of things, per capita distribution of key literacy indicators or a civic culture that is hospitable to change, innovation, and broad social advancement? I guess Dr. Miller would say that you can’t have one without the other.

Maybe I’m kidding myself. Since New York became relatively crime-free, it has become a caricature of itself, a theme park frequented by European tourists eager to buy cheap American goods with their Euros. And what is Wall Street, after all, but a bunch of high rollers betting on the next big thing to come out of a Seattle garage (or a Minneapolis snow drift)?

There’s always Pittsburgh, though.