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

[David Reinking]

Here is another analogy that provides an alternative explanation for the flat lining of NAEP scores.  My locker at the university gym for many years was next to an economics professor who was an avid weight lifter. He had been lifting weights for many years and boasted that he could today, at 60 years, bench press the same weight that he did at 30, 40, and 50.  His weight lifting performance had flat lined.

For NAEP scores, it isn’t advancing age that makes flat lining something to be expected, if not boasted about, but the changing demographic of the student population in the US. For example, the number of second-language learners has steadily increased.  Other factors, such as growing economic disparities and new un-tested (devalued?) forms of literacy, may mitigate concern, and may even suggest some measure of success.  Further, long-term analyses reveal a slight, but steadily, narrowing of the gap between disadvantaged and less-disadvantaged students, which is something to build on, and to promote as encouraging news.

I think we need to be careful about using the flat-lined NAEP scores as an alarm bell in advancing arguments for our respective interests in literacy, even in cases such as Tom’s where the cause is admirable and especially when it is justifiable using other sound arguments, which he offers.  The flat-lining argument has been used unfairly to bash educators and teacher educators and to justify misguided political initiatives (e.g., it was a well-worn trope used by Arne Duncan).  I believe we need to avoid legitimizing specious arguments sometimes used against us.

Despite this caveat, I want to congratulate you and to wish you well, Tom, for your continued bold efforts to increase attention to and funding for adult literacy.

David Reinking
Emeritus Professor of Education
http://www.davidreinking.info<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com_-3Furl-3Dhttp-253A-252F-252Fwww.davidreinking.info-252F-26data-3D01-257C01-257Clg40-2540txstate.edu-257Cd43f2d8241584a0ca81608d50aa7b5c9-257Cb19c134a14c94d4caf65c420f94c8cbb-257C0-26sdata-3Dji-252FNnlYJBKtAbG0lEfttgJUZxsi6BinXvN1OaPMm5Uc-253D-26reserved-3D0&d=DwMFAg&c=Ngd-ta5yRYsqeUsEDgxhcqsYYY1Xs5ogLxWPA_2Wlc4&r=gUnMZ3Xw_juA4Q4q8MsCC_IKO_x_v_mImmv8TQcuKAs&m=UedHPeoTlZDAK_Y35nsdvaZ1tvfVsAXM3l43vQNlACI&s=5qWqgpYErOqlfng1rqjL41TgwAGTYZ6oMB15g45RwUc&e=>/
orcid.org/0000-0001-8040-6673David Reinking

From: <reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> on behalf of Thomas Sticht <tgsticht at gmail.com>
Date: Friday, January 12, 2018 at 5:53 PM
To: "Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk" <Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Adult Literacy Education Still Needed


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<mailto:tgsticht at gmail.com>

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