[Reading-hall-of-fame] Adult Literacy and Basic Education in the United States

[Thomas Sticht]

Greetings, Reading Hall of Fame colleagues! Twenty years ago I wrote a
brief chapter about the history of the adult education and literacy system
in the United States (Sticht, 2002). Seven years later I prepared a chapter
for the Cambridge University Press about adult literacy education in
industrialized nations, with a focus on the United States, United Kingdom,
and Canada (Sticht, 2009). Then a dozen years later, in February of 2021, I
was invited by the Oxford University Press to prepare a chapter on adult
literacy and basic education in the United States. Since I had already
written for Cambridge University I felt that it would only be fair to do
something for Oxford University, too, so I agreed to write the paper. The
article is now complete and available online (see below).

The summary for the article states:

"From colonial times to the modern era the United States has provided adult
literacy and basic education (ALBE) for those adults seeking better work, a
better home life for themselves and their families, greater educational
achievement for their children, and engagement in civic duties for
community development. In the Moonlight Schools of Kentucky, illiterate
country folk learned to read and write to run their farms and towns better.
In the cities, immigrants learned English and their civic duties as
citizens in programs of “Americanization.”

By the 1960s, civil and voting rights movements helped tens of thousands of
African Americans learn to read and write so they could exercise their
rights of self-government through democracy. In 1966, the United States
established for the first time a national Adult Education and Literacy
System (AELS) formed in a partnership of the federal and 50 state
governments. From serving some 50 thousand or so adults in its early years
the AELS enrollments rose over the next 35 years to around 4 million.

Then, following the implementation of a National Reporting System with
stringent performance accountability requirements, enrollments fell over
the next 20 years to less than 1.2 million. But during all these years the
AELS provided basic education aimed at achieving general educational
outcomes and benefited from research and development projects leading to
the implementation of special programs in which the basic skills of English
language, reading, writing, and arithmetic were taught contextualized
within the domains of workplace, health, civics, family, and digital
knowledge.

At the end of the first two decades of the 21st century, the AELS had seen
its mandate extended from helping adults gain contextualized skills and
knowledge, and the achievement of a secondary school level of education, to
gaining access to postsecondary, college, and specialized certificate
programs within a career pathway with recurring education and
credentialing. There is increasing interest in moving forward with ALBE
within a full “lifelong” and “lifewide” AELS."

Reviewers of the article commented:

Reviewer # 1: “…* an extraordinary job of summarizing developments in the
US.  … knowledge and portrayal of how developments were linked including
their individual and collective significance are powerful.  The details
provided of the changing nature of these developments, their antecedents
and influences afford a narrative which brings to the fore historic figures
and their role as well as how developments resonated with America’s
economic and political developments.” *

* Reviewer # 2: “This is a superb, detailed and exhaustive overview of the
field drawing upon both contemporary data and a broad historical
understanding of its development and foundations. The author is the leader
in documenting, advocating and building this field over many decades, and
this piece will be a crucial update in a period where, as this contribution
establishes, the challenges of extending adult literacy programs and
policies remain acute.”*

*I hope some will find this article of interest and use.* It is entitled
"Adult Literacy and Basic Education in the United States" and is available
online by subscription at:


https://oxfordre.com/education/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-1744?rskey=oiUZ2C&result=1

For those seeking additional information about adult literacy education in
the U.S., U.K., and Canada see:

Sticht, T. (2009). Adult literacy education in industrialized nations. In
D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (pp. 535-547)

Sticht, T. (2002). The rise of the Adult Education and Literacy System in
the United States: 1600- 2000. In: J. Comings, B. Garner, & C. Smith (Eds.)
Annual Review of Adult Learning and Literacy. Vol. 3. San Francisco, CA:
Jossey-Bass. Online at: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED508720



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