[Reading-hall-of-fame] We Still Need Massive Injections of Adult Literacy Education

[Thomas Sticht]

11/29/2018



Thomas Sticht, International Consultant in Adult Education (Ret.)



I Repeat: We Still Need Massive Injections of Adult Literacy Education to
Improve Children's Reading Skills!



At the beginning of this year, on 1/12/2018 I wrote a piece entitled :
‘Still Needed: Massive Injections of Adult Literacy Education to Improve
Children's Reading Skills!’ I noted that forty years of National Assessment
of Educational Progress (NAEP) data, from 1971 into 2015, indicated that
there had been no improvement in reading scores for 17-year olds.



I also noted that, “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.”



Based on extensive research showing that investments in adult education
could result in improved reading scores for both parents and their children
(Sticht, 2010; 2011) I argued that perhaps with massive injections of adult
literacy education in the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) of the
United States, it might be possible to finally improve reading scores of
children from their entry into school all the way up through their
graduation from high school.



Unfortunately, data now available indicate that instead of getting massive
increases in literacy education for adults, the last decade from program
year (PY) 2008-09 through PY 2017-18 has shown large decreases in both
adult learner enrollments and in teaching personnel in the AELS. In PY
2008-09 there were 53,764 part-time teachers , 11,647 full-time teachers,
and  26,688 unpaid volunteer teachers in the AELS, a total of 92,099
teachers who served some 2,400,247 adult learners.



A decade later, in PY 2017-18, teaching staff had plummeted to 37,794
part-time, 9,761 full-time, and 12,257 unpaid volunteers for a total of
59,812 teachers in the AELS, a drop of some 33 percent over the decade, and
they served 1,389,694 adult learners, 42 percent fewer than in PY2008-09.
These declines in both teachers and learners occurred despite the fact
that, even when adjusted for inflation, the PY 2017-18 combined federal and
state funding for the AELS was $92 million more than a decade earlier in
PY2008-09.  This was due to increased funding from the states. The federal
funding declined over the decade.



More than a trillion dollars of educational spending on children’s
education in preschool and K-12 over the last forty years in the United
States has not improved the reading achievement of 17-year-olds. As these
young adults continue to age, millions of them are unable to read at levels
needed to gain further education nor self-sustainable and
family-sustainable employment. Living in economically underserved
 neighborhoods (Chetty, et. al, 2018), suffering from the three D’s (dread,
deprivation, dependency) they do not, and many cannot,  invest their time,
energy and certainly not money in educational activities for their
children. Without books in the home, parents without time, energy, and
ability to read extensively with their children, with no time or means for
library visits or excursions to museums, no visits to schools for meetings
with teachers, the children languish educationally. The cycle begins again.



And so, at the end of 2018, I make the same plea that I did at the
beginning of the year: We need to make massive injections of adult literacy
education in our Nation if we are to raise the reading achievement levels
of high school graduates through the intergenerational transfer of literacy
from parents to their children. We must remember that the real head start
for children, starts with the heads of their parents!



References Available Online Using a Google Search



Chetty, R. (2018, September).The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood
Roots of Social Mobility. , Discussion Papers, U.S. Census Bureau, Center
for Economic Studies 5K028B, 4600 Silver Hill Road, Washington, DC 20233.



 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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