[Reading-hall-of-fame] Taking better care of adults to improve education

[tsticht at znet.com]

June 7, 2011

Education will improve when we get serious about taking better care of
adults

Tom Sticht                                                     
International Consultant in Adult Education

All children are born poor. This is because newborn children cannot own
property, they cannot earn money, keep stock portfolios, nor gain and
maintain wealth in any manner.  So all children, even the children of the
rich,  are impoverished when they are born. Poverty is the natural
condition of babies, infants, and children.

When we say that millions of children are living in poverty, we are
recognizing that each child inheritis the economic condition of his or her
parents.  So we are saying that these children have been born to adults
(parents) who are living in poverty as defined by the federal government.
That is, the children are living in households with incomes below certain
defined levels of income.  In general, children who are living in poverty
are there because their parents are living in poverty.

One of the most enduring statistical findings in the field of educational
research is that children’s achievement in education is correlated with the
level of educational achievement of their parents, especially the
educational achievement of their mothers.  In 1973, the National Assessment
of Educational Progress (NAEP) presented data for 9, 13, and 17 year olds
and for young adults showing that as parents' education increased from no
high school, to some high school, graduate of high school, or post-high
school, the reading achievement of their children systematically increased.
 This was true for some eight types of reading tasks: word meanings, visual
aids, written directions,reference materials,significant facts, main ideas,
inferences, and critical reading.

In the 1980 renorming of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery
(ASVAB), scores on all four of the  subtests which form the Armed Forces
Qualifying Test (AFQT), made-up of reading and mathematics tests, increased
as mother’s education increased.  This was true for Whites, Hispanics, and
African-Americans, though at all levels of mother’s education, Whites
scored higher than Hispanics who scored higher than African-Americans. 
Similar findings to the foregoing have been found on the NAEP and other
cognitive tests (e.g., the SAT) for over a quarter century.

Although there are obvious beneficial effects of educating undereducated
adults, especially women, we presently focus almost all educational efforts
on children or those who have achieved well in the K-12 system and have
entered into higher education, while effectively casting-off the parents of
the children, leaving the parents unemployed  or working in jobs that keep
the family in poverty or near-poverty levels of living and keeping the
parents uneducated. This is, of course, the primary basis for the next
generation of children born poor, bound into living in poverty,  and
failing to achieve well in our educational systeml.

Despite the obvious negative consequences of neglecting the plight of adults
on the continuous failure of their children in our school system, we
continue to discard the parents and other adults who make-up the home
communities of the children, and once again bash the schools, the teachers,
the administrators and the politicians for failing to educate these children
of poorly educated adults.

Writing over a century ago, Edmund Burke Huey (The Psychology and Pedagogy
of Reading, 1908/1968, MIT Press) recognized the plight of many parents
whom he considered might lack knowledge needed to foster language and
literacy growth in children and in Chapter XV he wrote: "Where children
have good homes, reading will thus be learned independently of school.
Where parents have not the time or intelligence to assist in this way the
school of the future will have as one of its important duties the
instruction of parents in the means of assisting the child's natural
learning in the home." (pp. 311-312)


Today, we have chosen to ignore this sage advice about the need to instruct
parents “in the means of assisting the child’s learning in the home.”
Instead, we have sought to take the responsibility for parent’s “assisting
the child’s natural learning in the home” by removing children from their
homes, and educating them in the schools, starting at birth with Early Head
Start and continuing through college. But no matter what we do, the
statistics don’t budge: parent's education is still one of the best,
strongest predictors of how well children will learn and achieve in our
educational system. It is the children of poor and uneducated parents who
are most likely to become the underachieving, dropouts of our school
systems.


Unfortunately, we never seem to take the advice of a century ago, and the
statistics of the last quarter century seriously and focus educational
efforts on adults. Given our past failures of compensatory education of
children by essentially ignoring their parents, perhaps its time to think
about supporting early childhood education with early parenthood education.
 We might just find that by investing in the education of adults we can
improve the educability of children.


It seems likely that our nation’s children’s education will improve only
when we get serious about taking better care of adults.


tsticht at aznet.net