What is the language "British"?

[Alan M. Evans]

On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 10:31, Gene Heskett wrote:
> I was fortunate in that my grammer school education took place in the State 
> of Iowa, where, back in the 40's, we were extremely proud of being the 
> most literate state in the union with a 99.9% literacy rate.  No 
> educational system is doing its students any life favors when the high 
> school graduating class is composed of 20+% functionally illiterate 
> students, but they graduate anyway because of the un-funded no child left 
> behind act.

To be fair, graduating underperforming students has been a problem for
much longer than we've had No Child Left Behind.

And 99.9% seems an awfully high literacy rate for any sample the size of
a state, even one that's proud of it. Perhaps Iowa residents, despite
excellent language comprehension, weren't so good at statistics?