Many Adults Lag in Reading, Math : Literacy: Study finds 50% of state’s grown-ups do not have skills to keep up with technological changes. Figures are worst in the West but mirror U.S. as whole.

About half of California’s adults cannot read or perform math well enough to keep up with today’s technologically changing world, and those with the poorest literacy skills include a disproportionate number of immigrants, for many of whom English is a second language, according to an unreleased U.S. Department of Education study.

The study, titled “Adult Literacy in California,” was requested by state officials as a follow-up to an ambitious national project that estimated how well the country’s 191 million adults performed a range of literacy tasks, ranging from signing their names on bank deposit slips to synthesizing information from long reading passages.

In September, the Department of Education announced that nearly 50% of American adults were “at risk” because they could perform only the simplest of tasks, a dismal performance that educational officials said served as a “wake-up call” to an epidemic of illiteracy and signified a widening society “fault line” between winners and losers in the Information Age.

The California numbers were worse than in other western states but mirrored literacy rates for the nation as a whole, according to the new report. Compared to the national rates, however, California showed a slightly greater gulf between the literacy haves and have-nots, with more registering at both the top and bottom of the scale.

“That means you have more people doing better than the nation and more people doing worse,” said Andrew Kolstad, project director for the literacy studies with the National Center for Education Statistics, a division of the Department of Education.

“What you tend to find is you get a lot of immigrants, a lot of people scoring at the bottom,” said Kolstad. “Yet California has a very good and advanced post-secondary schooling system, so as people . . . get through the system” they score higher.

California officials have yet to officially release results from the follow-up report, although federal officials said they sent copies to state administrators in May. Gary Strong, the state librarian, agreed to release an executive summary of the report after California Literacy Inc., a literacy group, leaked the results in a newsletter published last week.

Strong, who chairs the state Literacy Coordinating Council--a six-agency consortium that distributes literacy funds and ordered the study--said the group has not officially released the study because member agencies still need time to draft their press statements explaining the findings. Council members include officials from the state Department of Education, state library system, community colleges chancellor’s office, employment department, California Conservation Corps and the governor’s office.

But Juanita Stanley, the nonprofit group’s executive director, said she and other literacy advocates were upset about the delay.

The findings are “nothing I didn’t expect, but it’s nice to say we have a problem here,” said Stanley, whose group oversees a grass-roots network of 13,000 volunteer tutors throughout the state. “A quarter of the adults in this state can’t participate, they can’t vote, they can’t read the newspaper, they can’t hold onto a job, they can’t take care of their kids properly because they can’t read.”

California was one of 12 states that paid $345,000 for federal officials to perform a follow-up study. Officials randomly tested 2,665 California adults, who represented the 22.8 million people 16 years old and older.

The study rated participants on scales ranging from 1 to 500 in three levels of proficiency--prose, document reading and math.

Results were tallied on five levels of competency. Those who scored in the bottom two levels were considered at risk because they could do no more than understand appliance warranties or calculate postage. Both the national and state studies intentionally avoided labeling anyone functionally illiterate.

While 23% of the nation’s adults registered in the bottom level for reading documents, the follow-up study showed that 26% of Californians were either illiterate or able to perform the barest of functions.

Of those at the bottom level of the literacy results in California, 59% were foreign-born and 41% were native-born residents, the report says. Those results were disproportionate to the percentages in the adult population as a whole, with immigrants comprising 24% and natives 76%, the report said.

Stanley and other literacy advocates, however, stressed that the poor showing by immigrants was not an indication of intelligence but was attributable to the difficulties of taking the test in English. The special report said that 29% of those who took the test said they grew up speaking another language, and those who reported having limited English skills scored from 129 to 165 points lower than those who write or speak English well.

The report found that those who scored at the lowest literacy rung came disproportionately from three groups--adults who did not finish high school, the elderly and the poor or those who worked in “labor, assembly, fishing or farming jobs.”

On the top end, 5% of California adults performed the most sophisticated quantitative exercises, compared to 4% nationwide.

Other results:

* California men and women scored the same on reading, but men scored higher on quantitative sections.

* 27% of the state’s adults say they watch four or more hours of television a day, while 23% said they spent an hour or less in front of the set. Those who watched less television had higher literacy scores, the report said.

* Those who voted, used libraries and read regularly scored higher on the test.