OUR VIEW: Time to stop shrugging off literacy data
It's gotten to the point where many people in Bakersfield just roll their eyes and laugh when Men's Health or another supermarket glossy comes out with a ranking that places this city at the wrong end of some national list. We rank low in terms of patriotism and high in terms of drunkenness? Really? Where does this stuff come from, and what are we supposed to do about it?
But a new ranking that came out last week placing Bakersfield dead last in terms of literacy is not just some throwaway compilation of market data packaged into a space-filling magazine article. It's a meaningful statement about Bakersfield's single greatest failure -- and a legitimate warning that things will never get appreciably better unless we address it.
In its sixth annual literacy report, Central Connecticut State University places Bakersfield 75th out of 75 in a survey that considers education level, the city's number of bookstores, periodical circulation, library resources and other factors. If this were the first we'd heard of it, perhaps we could file it with the others. It isn't, and we can't.
Some will use Bakersfield's immigrant population as an excuse for these problems, and that is a huge factor, but plenty of cities in the rankings have large immigrant populations. Seventy-fifth is 75th.
Bakersfield will never escape from its pervasive poverty, middling-tech economy and aura of ordinariness unless and until we make a meaningful commitment to foster a culture of education. No Bakersfield elected official in a half-century has ever truly made that commitment.
Instead, we hear about how job opportunities will increase and business will grow if we simply reduce regulation and generally take the shackles off the private sector. There is truth to that, although such a course of action comes with its own price. But even if California were somehow transformed into a laissez-faire utopia, Bakersfield's quality-of-life needle would barely budge, so great is our literacy deficit. High-tech employers -- and those are generally the ones that pay well and revolutionize local economies -- simply don't come to cities with such low levels of educational attainment and pervasive semi-literacy.
Elected officials tend to want to demonstrate that they can get results immediately. They write bills, they block bills, they shake lecterns. Committing to the creation of a culture of education is less attractive because there is no quick fix for it -- it's a multigenerational problem, and American politics operates on a two-year cycle.
Still, a change in tone can go a long way. It starts with who we elect and how they prioritize -- and, yes, we're talking to Rep. Kevin McCarthy, among others -- but it filters throughout the community, to our leading employers, our schools and even, perhaps especially, our churches.
In many ways, Bakersfield is a rising influence in California politics and economics. But the city cannot achieve its potential, and in so doing raise its residents' standard of living, without addressing its single most pressing issue -- education. All other shortcomings revolve around this. Fixing it will require a commodity that's in short supply: vision.
