Why Adult Literacy Matters

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Spring 2004 by Kogut, Bethel House

With so much attention being focused on improving student performance and schools' accountability these days, it is often difficult to get policymakers, educators, and the general public to appreciate why attaining higher levels of adult literacy also merits a national commitment. But adult literacy does matter. In fact, the success of our current education policies and goals is inextricably linked to achieving improved levels of adult literacy in this country.

For the past ten years or so, literacy advocates have cited results from the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) to describe the magnitude of the U.S. adult-literacy problem. NALS established and evaluated literacy levels of the U.S. population and introduced a now widely accepted definition of literacy as "using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential." According to the 1992 report, one in five adults - between 40 and 44 million people - lacks sufficient literacy skills to meet daily needs in their families, their workplaces, and their communities. Despite this finding and the United States's middle-place ranking among industrialized nations on most measures of adult literacy, many of our nation's educators, elected representatives, and social commentators are still not convinced that significant numbers of U.S. adults struggle with functional illiteracy.

Adult-literacy advocates and critics alike are anxiously awaiting the next important report, the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), which will be released in 2005. This report is expected to clarify the correlations between literacy and economic status, occupation, education, health, and voting behavior. It also will measure the ability of the least-literate adults to decode and to recognize and read words with fluency in either English or Spanish.

Once NAAL is released, adult basic-education and literacy programs will have a new set of numbers to work with as they plan and advocate on behalf of functionally illiterate adults. More significant, though, will be the contribution that the report will make to our understanding of how literacy instruction and literacy programs can help address an array of social problems including poverty, rising health costs, joblessness, prison recidivism, and so on.

Some questions remain, however, that NAAL will not fully answer. One is, why does the United States have an adult literacy problem at all? ProLiteracy Worldwide President Robert Wedgeworth considered this question in his recent State of Adult Literacy 2003 report and identified several factors that contribute to low functional-literacy rates among adults. One of the most important of these is immigration, a demographic factor that is basically outside the purview of our education system.

IMMIGRATION

Immigration is now driving U.S. population growth. The 31.1 million immigrants identified in the 2000 Census is more than triple the 9.6 million who were resident in 1970 and more than double the 14.1 million in 1980. Roughly a third of the U.S. foreign-born population has arrived since 1990. Most important, one in five U.S. children is the child of an immigrant.

While immigration fuels our nation's vitality and productivity, it also creates literacy challenges. Taken as a group, immigrants have less education and are poorer than native-born Americans. Thirty percent of immigrants lack a high school diploma - that is 3.5 times the rate for natives. U.S. literacy programs, both publicly funded and community-based, provide the critical "front door" for these newcomers, helping them learn to read and write English, master basic educational skills, prepare for citizenship, and obtain jobs that will provide them and their families with financial security. Today, 90 percent of ProLiteracy America's 1,200 community-based adult-literacy programs are delivering English as a second Language (ESL) and related instruction to immigrants and their families. Almost three-quarters of these programs report waiting lists of adults seeking instruction.

KIDS LEAVE SCHOOL WITHOUT SKILLS

Another factor that contributes to the U.S. adult functional-illiteracy problem is that young people are leaving school without the basic literacy skills that they need. According to a recent study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, evidence linking literacy problems in early adolescence with dropping out at a later age is just beginning to emerge. Understandably, middle and high school curricula assume that fundamental skills are in place and can make little or no allowance for students who lack the ability to handle their coursework. When remedial or resource help is available, it necessarily focuses on course material, not reading or other basic skills.

Literacy programs that work with adults are very familiar with learners who never mastered the basic skills that they needed to be successful in school. Many of these adults struggle with learning disabilities or otherwise lack confidence that they still can improve their reading, writing, and other literacy skills. They find success in community-based literacy programs partly because the instructional setting is so unlike the formal-classroom settings where they have failed in the past.