Nuke the Site from Orbit, Part Who-the-Hell-Knows

More evidence that the public school systems are working about like you'd expect from a .gov system, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars "invested" in it over decades, despite the creation of the Dept. of Education ($1.2 trillion alone - not inflation adjusted - since its establishment in 1980):

Literacy study: 1 in 7 U.S. adults are unable to read this story

Key grafs:

A long-awaited federal study finds that an estimated 32 million adults in the USA — about one in seven — are saddled with such low literacy skills that it would be tough for them to read anything more challenging than a children's picture book or to understand a medication's side effects listed on a pill bottle.

--

How low? It would be a challenge to read this newspaper article or deconstruct a fuel bill.

"They really cannot read … paragraphs (or) sentences that are connected," says Sheida White, a researcher at the U.S. Education Department.

Well, good to know we spent $1.2 trillion to find that out!

But all is not bleak!

In many cases, states made sizable gains. In Mississippi, the percentage of adults with low skills dropped 9 percentage points, from 25% to 16%. In every one of its 82 counties, low-skill rates dropped — in a few cases by 20 percentage points or more.

Still, there's more bad news:

By contrast, in several large states — California, New York, Florida and Nevada, for instance — the number of adults with low skills rose.

Why, you might ask did Mississippi improve so remarkably? Need you even ask?

David Harvey, president and CEO of ProLiteracy, an adult-literacy organization, says Mississippi "invested more in education … and they have done innovative programming. We need much more of that."

We need more money! MUCH more money!

I swear, it's the only play in the playbook. WE NEED TO SPEND MORE (of other people's) MONEY!