[Reading-hall-of-fame] Adult Literacy Education Still Needed

[Thomas Sticht]

1/12/2018

Still Needed: Massive Injections of Adult Literacy Education to
Improve Children's Reading Skills!

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education (Ret.)

In 2006 I reported that data released in 2005 from the National Center for
Education Statistics showing 30 years of National Assessment of Educational
progress (NAEP) indicated that, from 1971 up to 2004, reading scores for
17-year-olds were flat, showing no improvement. Bringing that discussion up
to date, the 2017 Conditions of Education report from NCES reports that in
2015, the average reading score for 12th-grade students (17-year-olds) was
lower than in 1992. We now know that the 30-year trend of no improvement in
reading scores for 17-year-olds has continued through the decade since 2004
and is now a 40-year trend. Any patient in an intensive care unit whose
health-monitoring indicators went as flat as the forty-year NAEP data for
17-year-old, 12th graders would be declared dead!

With hundreds of billions of federal dollars invested in Early Head Start,
Head Start, kindergarten, elementary, and middle school special reading
programs, over the last 40 years, we have consistently witnessed failures
to improve the average reading scores of 17-year-olds, who are on the cusp
of adulthood and for millions of them, on the brink of parenthood.
Meanwhile expenditures for adult literacy education have been and still are
trivial.

It is extraordinary that policies that attempt to "fix" children in the
institutional settings of preschools or the public schools, and then return
millions of them to debilitating home lives and neighborhoods lacking in
educational social capital, still command such massive amounts of funding,
while there is great reluctance to acknowledge and meet the needs of the
children's parents for continuing education. This situation prevails
despite extensive research suggesting that, through the intergenerational
transfer of language and literacy, serious investments in the education of
adults could likely improve the educability of their children (Sticht,
2010, 2011).

Given the data of the past 40 years, which indicate mostly failure to
improve children's learning of language and literacy in the schools and up
into adulthood it seems that some new strategy for improving children's and
hence adults' literacy is called for.

There is a grossly underfunded and underdeveloped federally supported adult
education and literacy system in the United States enrolling some 1.5
million adults per year. While some states provide additional adult
education services and a level of funding for such programs,  the federal
level of funding is less than US$350 per enrollee, less than one tenth of
what the federal government spends per enrollee on the Head Start program
for children, many if not most of whom are the children of  poorly educated
adults who are not being served by the federal adult education and literacy
system.

Perhaps now, after 40 years of trying and apparently "flat-lining" in our
attempts to raise the reading achievement of children into the realm of
young adulthood, through schemes that largely ignore the literacy education
needs of the children's parents, it may be time to acknowledge the
existence of the adult education and literacy system and to provide the
funding and other resources it needs to produce genuine and extensive
improvements in the literacy and lives of adults.

Massive injections of adult literacy education might just be what is needed
to resuscitate a reading instruction patient that is presently in a deep
coma. And we should do this before the patient goes completely brain-dead!


References Available Online Using a Google Search



Sticht, T. (2010, Fall). Educated Parents, Educated Children: Toward a
Multiple Life Cycles Education Policy. Education Canada, 50.



Sticht, T. (2011, Fall). Getting It Right From The Start: The Case for
Early Parenthood Education. American Educator, 35-39.

tgsticht at gmail.com



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