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An Urban Myth That Should Be True
During a panel discussion with the current mayors of Los Angeles, Houston and New Orleans at the Aspen Ideas Festival Monday, NPR's Michele Norris offered a chilling factoid about the importance of third-grade reading comprehension. "The prison industrial complex will look at the test scores of a city's third grade population," she said. "If the test grades are low they know that they'll have to start building a prison." It was a moving notion that Norris said "haunts" her to this day; Unfortunately, it's not actually true.
Norris is hardly the first to propagate this idea. After hearing it across a range of conferences and blog posts, The Oregonian's Bill Graves investigated and refuted the anecdote in 2010. "This is an urban myth," California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman Terry Thornton told Graves in an e-mail. "A few weeks ago I contacted nearly every department of corrections in the nation. I heard back from 25 states saying they do not use elementary reading levels to plan for future prison beds. We have no idea where this originated from." Earlier this year, Politifact also looked into the anecdote and concluded that it seems to be "nothing more than an Internet rumor."
It turns out, planners have their own methods of predicting the need for future prisons. Max Williams, director of the Oregon Department of Corrections, told Graves that planners "look at complicated formulas that are based on arrest rates and demographic data, such as the number of 18-to-28-year-old men in the state."
However, in Norris's defense, reviewing third-grade reading scores wouldn't be a terrible idea. Consider recent scholarship on the importance of reading comprehension in the third grade.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/an-urban-myth-that-should-be-true/259329/