[AAACE-NLA] Adult Literacy Assessments. Who cares?

[tsticht@znet.com]

May 12, 2007

Reports on International and National Assessments of Adult Literacy in the
United States: Is Anyone Reading Them? Believing them? Acting on them?

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

>From January 2005 up to now we have had four major reports on national
assessments of adult literacy. One, the Adult Literacy and Life Skills
(ALL) report compared the U.S. to several nations using the methods of the
International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) of the mid-1990s. In December of
2005 the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released the first
of three national reports from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy
(NAAL) of 2003.

The NAAL used the same sorts of complex information processing tasks as
found on the ALL but a different methodology for forming scales of
difficulty and for assigning people levels of proficiency. This first
report was entitled: Learning a Living: First Results of the Adult Literacy
and Life Skills Survey. The second report, Literacy in Everyday Life,
Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), was
released early in 2007, and the third, Literacy Behind Bars: Results From
the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy Prison Survey was released
this month. Additionally, NCES has just recently released state-level NAAL
reports for several states.

Regardless of which of the national (not prison) reports is consulted, the
message is the same, tens of millions of adults score in the lowest levels
of proficiency. Those whose native language is not English and people of
color tend to perform below the proficiency of whites.  Younger people in
the 20 to 50 years of age range tend to perform better than younger or
older people.

Unfortunately, as far as I can see, the general reaction to these various
reports has been as consistent as the message - outside of a brief spate of
newspaper articles when the first NAAL report was released, next to nothing
has been or is being said about the reports by anyone outside the field of
adult education, and I have seen no rush into adult literacy education with
millions of dollars of additional funding by either the federal government
or the thousands of non-profit, charitable institutions across the nation,
although some states have made slight increases in funding.

 This apparent lack of interest in doing anything much beyond what is
already going on in adult literacy education seems to persist even though
numerous labor market economists and workforce analysts insist that the
U.S. is facing a drastic workforce deficit with a shrinking pool of younger
workers, a growing number of older workers looking at retirement, growth in
higher skill jobs and declines in lower skill jobs, and growing
inequalities in the incomes of those with four-year or advanced college
degrees and those with less than these levels of education.

Thirty-year long term trend data from NCES suggest that despite spending
hundreds of billions of dollars in compensatory education in the
pre-school-K-12 system in the last thirty years, the reading skills of high
school graduates  have not improved, and they may even have declined! So for
the foreseeable future, even though we put tens of billions more dollars
into trying to "stop illiteracy at the source" in the pre-school-K-12
system, we are likely to witness a constant flow of low-skilled, poorly
literate young people into the workplace. This would seem to provide an
additional incentive to greatly increase investments in adult literacy
education. But where is it?

It seems to me that there is some disconnect between all the literacy
assessments that declare some one-half of adults to be so poorly literate
that they cannot compete in today's knowledge-based society, the reports of
the dire workforce needs facing the nation, and the beliefs about all this
by most citizens and even many of the government policymakers who have
voted to fund these national surveys and workforce studies.

To me, there really doesn't seem to be much of a sense of urgency by
governments, business, industry, the military, and the public about the
weak skills of adults and the present and future well being of the nation.

But, why worry? We can continue to import millions of poorly educated
workers who are practically illiterate in English for the low-skilled jobs,
and we can increase our outsourcing of large numbers of the high skilled,
knowledge-based jobs to low-wage places like China, India, or other
emerging nations.

Meanwhile, lets plan the next multi-million dollar international and
national assessments of adult literacy and the reports they generate. And
lets hope that this next time someone actually reads them, and more
importantly, believes them. Maybe then something actually on the order of
the scale of the need will be done to improve the literacy of adults in
America. Maybe...

Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education
2062 Valley View Blvd.
El Cajon, CA 92019-2059
Tel/fax: (619) 444-9133
Email: tsticht at aznet.net