From Newsweek: "An astonishing 47 percent of Detroiters, nearly one out of two adults in this predominantly black city, are functionally illiterate. (By way of comparison, the figure for Vietnam is 6.7 percent and 1.7 percent for Croatia.) Functional illiteracy relates to the inability of an individual to use reading, writing and computational skills in everyday life: filling out a job application, reading traffic signs, figuring out an election ballot, reading a newspaper, understanding a bus schedule or a product label—or an address on a sheet of paper." Funny, I googled this paragraph and tons of entries came up; lots of folks are quoting it everywhere, and Fred Reed did as well.
I remember, back in 1997, the state of Michigan computed Detroit's public school graduation rate at 29.7 percent.
