[AAACE-NLA] causes of low literacy

Fri Jun 9 07:44:42 EDT 2006

George: I am still not convinced that poverty is the reason for all the 
problems of literacy as you have stated. Working  parents mostly left up the 
teaching to the schools and didnt have time to interfere.with day to day 
learning. " what did you learn in school today" aw nothing can be a general 
response. The schools are left off the hook to easy.  Of course low economic 
status make it more challenging to the teacher to get kids to learn.  
Sometimes I think what you learn in teacher ed. classes has little to do 
with kids learning. In college you have the utopia environment and then in 
the real world you get what you see in students. I often thought back in 
classes in college that what did that do in helping kids learn.  Colleges in 
general are not connected with the real world. Here I go on my soap box.and 
treading on someone. Many general ed classes have little to do with helping 
kids learn as we got filled with too much content and little practical 
knowledge.

  I am not all cetain and maybe showing some bias as what do the learning 
institutions do to get teacher prepared, what book makers do to get beat 
results or what school administers who care how the tests come out fiqure in 
on  how the kids move up in class. These factors are not addressed.  I may 
be way off on some of this but wanted to express some of these issues.

Merle Ayres
412 8th st. North
Humboldt,Iowa 50548
Tel.1-515-332-4630
Fax 515-332-1738

>From: "George Demetrion" <george.demetrion at lvgh.org>
>Reply-To: National Literacy Advocacy List sponsored by 
>AAACE<aaace-nla at lists.literacytent.org>
>To: "National Literacy Advocacy List sponsored by 
>AAACE"<aaace-nla at lists.literacytent.org>
>Subject: [AAACE-NLA] causes of low literacy
>Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 14:40:44 -0400
>
>Hi all,
>
>I've been tweaking this.  Here's the latest.  Comments please!
>
>Thank,
>
>George Demetrion
>________________________________________________________________________
>____
>
>Contributory Causes of Low Level English Literacy Amongst Adults
>George Demetrion in Collaboration with the Field
>June 8, 2006
>
>The following factors were distilled from various reports and on and
>off-line feedback from practitioners and other adult literacy education
>specialists. It is neither a definitive nor an authoritative statement
>on the causes of low level adult literacy, but it is an informed one.
>Also, the points discussed present a correlational rather than strictly
>causal argument.
>
>*	The enduring reality of poverty. Many current adult learners
>were children who were not well-fed, well-nurtured, healthy nor ready to
>learn when they went to school (if they made it to school that day).
>Physical and mental trauma at home due to poverty, or unemployment or
>transient employment, or the ill health of the parents causes many
>children to miss school entirely or to come to school sleepy, ill or
>anxious.  Divorce, chronic diseases, and disabilities are adult problems
>that children face while also trying to learn in school.  Families with
>financial stability will be able to ameliorate these problems for their
>children with tutoring and counseling.  Families without financial
>stability have much fewer resources.  Many schools do not have the
>flexibility to offer make up help with lessons, to change the way in
>which they are "tracking" the children, or to intervene when they see a
>problem that is on a lesser level than actual abuse or neglect.
>
>*	Failed Educational Policy, both currently and historically.  A.
>Particularly with older adults, the legacy of segregation is still a
>factor.  Many people don't realize that it wasn't until the early 1970s
>that some districts integrated, followed by years of turmoil and
>disruption.  B.  Many districts have still not developed adequate
>alternative educational systems for high schoolers who need a different
>structure.  C.  States that have an exit exam requirement may have added
>to the drop-out problem.  Teens who are already behind flunk the test,
>and even though there are multiple chances to re-take it, the resulting
>discouragement often causes them to give up.  The point is remediation
>strategies for those who do fail are often ineffective or are just not
>even utilized.     D.  Programs that break the cycle of low literacy
>from one generation to the next are few and far between, and so parents
>can't equip themselves to help their children.
>
>*	Increasing standards of what counts as literacy.  Literacy is
>not something that can be defined by a static grade level, but is
>measured against the perceived literacy needs of individuals shaped, in
>part, by society and culture.  For basic literacy population the higher
>end achievement is high school equivalency achievement.  Also important
>is mastering the print-based needs of obtaining and keeping a
>sustainable job, understanding and filling out forms of various types,
>basic math, capacity to write a basic letter, rudimentary computer-based
>mastery and knowing how to access information from various print sources
>in home, work, community, and commercial environments.  All of these
>pertain to the ESOL population.  The higher end here would be entrance
>into college and obtaining a professional or entry level administrative
>position.  One cause of low literacy is that the ladder of what
>functional proficiency consists of has been raised.
>
>*	Increasing immigrant population.  31.4 million immigrants were
>identified in 2000 census.  Immigrant groups as among the lowest levels
>of English literacy. This includes the subgroup of refugees from African
>nations such as Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan, and also Afghanistan that
>have been war-torn for years, in which schooling was not an option for
>many in those countries.  This also pertains to immigrants from English
>speaking countries, particularly the Caribbean Islands where those who
>sign up for literacy classes are typically at a much lower literacy
>level than US born adults who sign up for literacy classes.
>
>*	Student mobility.  About 60% of students in the US make
>unscheduled school changes between grades 1 and 12.  Students who move
>may miss key pieces of instruction in reading and never catch up, a
>problem which gets compounded in the higher grades, particularly when
>students are passed through "social promotion." The student who moves a
>lot is typically from a lower income family and/or attends an inner city
>school.  In areas of high rent, poor housing and economic hardship,
>school populations changing as much as 100% per year are increasingly
>common.
>
>*	Drop out rates and increasing numbers of students, especially in
>the cities not reading at grade level.  All the way through their
>schooling, such students are getting further behind as they are socially
>passed year after year, or sometimes misplaced in special education
>classes.  This would be a problem even if high school drop outs were
>ready to prepare for the GED, but this is rarely the case.  Most, in
>fact, lack the basic literacy and numeracy skills needed to succeed in a
>GED program, and may lack the basic skills to succeed in a pre-GED
>program.  This, in turn, contributes to the alarming life long gap
>between the educationally haves and have nots, which, in turn, help to
>foster generational cycles of low literacy.  High drop out rates are
>both a symptom of low literacy and a contributory factor.
>
>*	Learning Disabilities. Undiagnosed learning disabilities,
>including a broad range of reading disabilities, have been identified as
>an important cause of adult illiteracy.  Based on research in the
>neurosciences from various countries, the critical factor is the
>neurologically-based difference in the way the brain processes the
>smallest bits of language, i.e., phonemes.  Those with LD have abilities
>in many areas but have deep deficits in receptive or receptive verbal
>processing in reading, writing, comprehension, and/or speech.
>
>*	Learning Difficulties.  Whether one can always point to the
>highly technical term learning disabilities, it is indisputable, at the
>least that millions of adults have tremendous learning difficulties in
>relation to reading and writing.  For many, those difficulties were
>pervasive throughout their public schooling, which acted to keep them
>back in their learning, and in any event, impacts on their ability to
>learn as adults even if they have enrolled in an adult literacy or adult
>basic education programs.  What we typically see in adult literacy, even
>among the most dedicated students, is modest progress, which, except for
>the most advanced students is still a far cry from fluent, independent
>literacy.  Thus, one of the causes of adult illiteracy is the current
>rate of low literacy, for whatever reasons, and the difficulty of moving
>substantially beyond current levels of mastery.  One might say that
>illiteracy is self-perpetuating even as people can and do make progress
>in ways that matter to them as we have seen in the case-study profiles.
>
>
>*	Low self expectations/ lack of use.  In addition, students who
>have had trouble specifically in reading during school not only struggle
>to learn to read but often also suffer from poor self- efficacy and
>self-respect. They learn early that they must be "dumb" since they have
>trouble learning to read. This perception follows them through adult
>hood, regardless of their gains in reading skill.  Moreover, the
>literacy skills that students might have had at one point in their lives
>diminish if not used on a regular basis.  Many adults who enter programs
>in their 30s, 40s and 50s have read little or nothing since they
>attended school as children or teenagers.  Whatever literacy skills
>adults possessed in their youth, however modest, the use it or lose it
>saying has much applicability here.
>
>
>
>
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