[NLA] From the Margins to the Mainstream of Education (very long)

[Thomas Sticht]

Research Note                                December 2, 2002

Cultural Beliefs Contributing to the Continued Marginalization
of the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) of the United States

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

In earlier Research Notes I have argued that there are cultural beliefs
about cognitive development  and when it is possible and/or desirable to
develop it that appear to contribute to the marginalization of adult
literacy  students and the education system that serves them. Given the
concerns for scientific, evidence-based approaches to adult literacy
education that the present U. S. education administration has expressed, I
thought it might be useful to consolidate some of my earlier Research
Notes and to reiterate a need for research to  dispel these types of false
beliefs about human cognition and its  development with adults. Perhaps
someone at the new Institute for Education Sciences will take note and
move forward on these critical ideas that are harmful to the progress of
lifelong learning in the nation.

Early Childhood and Intellectual Development

One of the beliefs in our culture is that the brain and its  intellectual 
capacity  is   developed   in   early   childhood. There is a widespread
belief that if children's early childhood development  is not properly
stimulated, then there is likely to be intellectual underdevelopment
leading  to  academic   failures, low aptitude, and social problems such
as criminal activity, teenage pregnancy and welfare. It will be difficult
if not impossible to overcome the disadvantages of deficiencies in early
childhood stimulation later in adulthood. So why invest much in adult
education? We need instead to put billions of dollars into early childhood
education.

That these beliefs about the consequence of early childhood development
are widespread is revealed by articles written by prominent journalists in
major newspapers. For instance, on Sunday, October 13, 1991 the San Diego
Union newspaper reprinted an article by Joan Beck, a columnist for   the  
Chicago  Tribune ,  that   argued  for    early   childhood education
because, "Half of adult intellectual capacity is already present by age 4
and 80 percent by age 8, ... the opportunity to influence [a child's]
basic intelligence - considered to be a stable characteristic by age 17 -
is greatest in early life."

A  year earlier in the same newspaper on October 14, 1990  an adult
literacy educator was quoted as saying, "Between the ages of zero to 4 we
have learned half of everything we'll ever learn in our lives. Most of
that has to do with language, imagination, and inquisitiveness."

Myths of Intelligence. As indicated above, Joan Beck was quoting research
by Benjamin Bloom in the 1960s. But Bloom did not show that half of one's
intellect was achieved by age 4. Rather, he argued that IQ at age 4 was
correlated +.70with IQ at age 17. Since the square of .7 is .49, Bloom
stated that half of the variance among a group of adults' IQ scores at age
17 could be predicted from their group of scores at age 4. But half of the
variability among a group of people's IQ scores is a long way from the
idea that half of a given person's IQ is developed by age 4. This is not
even conceptually possible because for one thing there is no universally
agreed to understanding of what "intelligence" is. Further, even if we
could agree on what "intelligence" is, there is no such thing as "half of
one's intellect" because no one knows what 0 or 100 percent intelligence
is. Without knowing the beginning and end of something we can’t know when
we have half of it.

Once Disadvantaged Always Disadvantaged

A report by the Department of Defense shows how these beliefs about the
possibility of doing much for adults after age 17 can affect government
policy. After studying the job performance and post-service lives of
"lower aptitude," less literate personnel, the report claimed that they
had been failures both in and out of the military. Then,  on February 24,
1990, the Director of Accession Policy of the Department of Defense
commented  in the Washington Post newspaper, "The lesson is that
low-aptitude people, whether in the military or not, are always going to
be at a disadvantage. That's a sad conclusion." A similar report of the
Department of Defense study was carried in the New York Times of  March
12, 1990. Then on April 8, 1990 Jack Anderson's column in the Washington
Post quoted one of the Department of Defense researchers saying, "...by
the age of 18 or 19, it's too late. The school system in early childhood
is the only place to really help, and that involves heavy participation by
the parents."

The Myth of the Disadvantaged. Regarding the news articles about the
Department of Defense studies of "low aptitude" troops, the conclusions
were based on analyses of the job performance of hundreds of thousands of
personnel in both the 1960s and 1980s with Armed Forces Qualification Test
(AFQT) scores between the 10th and the 30th percentiles, the range of 
scores which the  Department   of  Defense  studies  called "low
aptitude."

But contrary to what the Department of Defense researchers and accession
policy maker stated, the actual  data  show that in both time periods, 
while  the   low aptitude personnel  did  not   perform  quite   as  well 
 as   those   personnel  with aptitudes above the 30th percentile,  over
80 percent of the low aptitude personnel did, in fact, perform
satisfactorily and many performed in an outstanding manner. As veterans
they had employment rates and earnings far exceeding their rates and
earnings at the beginning of the study. Further investigation by the media
would have revealed these discrepancies between what the Department of
Defense's researchers said and what the actual findings were.

Born to Lose: Bad Genes and Adult  Basic Skills

Another widespread belief about intellectual development and learning in
adulthood is that because of their inferior genetic endowment, many people
are unable to benefit much from childhood education and they cannot
benefit much from adult education and training either. These kinds of
ideas were given wide notice in "The  Crisis That Isn't"  an article by
Dan Seligman in  Forbes Magazine, October 2, 2000, in which he makes
reference to the National Adult Literacy Survey as an "IQ" test, and
relates poor performance on the test to the kinds of social problems that
were discussed in the 1994 book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life17

The The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life17
created considerable controversy because it strongly implied that
intelligence is largely genetically determined, not subject to much
modifiability, and a strong influence on many of the social problems that
our nation faces, including school dropouts, crime, poverty and welfare.

In a January 7, 1997 article in the Washington Times , a prominent
newspaper published in Washington DC and read by many members of Congress,
columnist Ken Adelman wrote:

The age-old nature vs. nurture debate assumes immediacy as the new
Congress and new administration gin up to address such issues as poverty,
crime, drugs, etc.

This, the most intellectually intriguing debate around, is moving far
toward nature (and far from nurture) with new evidence presented by an odd
pair - gay activist Chandler Burr and conservative scholar Charles Murray.

In brief, their new findings show that 1) homosexuality and 2)
educational-economic achievement are each largely a matter of genes - not
of upbringing.

If true, as appears so, the scope of effective government programs
narrows. Fate, working through chromosomes, bestows both sexual
orientation and brainpower, which shape one's life and success.

Little can be altered - besides fostering tolerance and helping in any
narrow window left open - through even an ideally designed public program.
  (page B-6)

The juxtaposition of homosexuals and those of lower educational and
economic achievement is an obvious rhetorical device meant to stir
negative emotions about both groups.

The Myth of the Bad Genes and IQ. Regarding the genetic basis of
intelligence, although The Bell Curve book cited by Adelman presents
detailed analyses of social problems and IQ, what is not generally
understood is that almost all of the analyses relating IQ with social
problems were made using the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) as the
measure of IQ. What should be of interest to policymakers, however, is
that the AFQT does not measure IQ. This was made clear in the early 1980s
when official Department of Defense spokespersons testified to Congress 
that the Armed Forces Qualification Tests (AFQT) are not  tests of
intelligence or IQ.

Richard Danzig, Principal  Deputy  Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Manpower,  Reserve Affairs, and Logistics spoke before a congressional
committee.  "The testing specialists note that we ought not to confuse
these aptitude tests with intelligence tests as such" Danzig said.
"Naturally there is some correlation between the two types of tests but to
speak of somebody as being in category IV or category V is not per se to
make a judgment about his intelligence. ... In fact, we don't want to test
IQ which is traditionally the aptitude of school children to perform well
in school. We want to test their ability to learn to perform military
jobs. That is somewhat related to intelligence, not alone intelligence
however. I want to avoid that implication" (Congressional Record, U. S.
Senate, 1980, p. 1298)

Instead of measuring IQ, the AFQT actually measures the basic skills of
reading and mathematics. The AFQT is made up of four sub tests: word
knowledge (vocabulary), paragraph comprehension,  arithmetic word
problems, and mathematics knowledge (facts of geometry, algebra). Scores
on the AFQT are highly correlated with years of education. They are also
highly correlated with the Tests of Adult Basic Skills (TABE), the Adult
Basic Learning Exam (ABLE), the Nelson-Denny Reading Test and other tests
of basic skills.

Because the AFQT actually measures basic skills (reading and mathematics),
and not IQ, all of the analyses in The Bell Curve can be reinterpreted as
relationships between basic skills and various social indicators. A couple
of these reinterpretations are given below (The  data below are for whites
only, with socioeconomic status held constant).

Poverty . The bell curve of basic skills indicates that  48 percent of the
white poor in 1989 came from the bottom 20 percent in basic skills. Note
that the foregoing does not say that 48 percent of those in the bottom 20
percent of  basic skills  were poor. It says that 48 percent of the poor
came from those in the bottom 20 percent of basic skills. In fact, most of
the adults in the lowest levels of basic skills were not poor. Some 74
percent of young, white adults (with socioeconomic status held constant)
who were in the lowest 2 percentiles of basic skills were not in poverty.
Over 85 percent of those at the 16th percentile were not in poverty. This
indicates that one's poor basic skills (what  The Bell Curve called IQ) do
not automatically cause one to be poor. Still, poor basic skills were a
more accurate predictor of poverty than parent's socioeconomic class. This
is good news because while adults cannot go back and change their parent's
socioeconomic status, they can, and millions do, change their own basic
skills by studying and learning in the adult education and literacy
development system.

There are other data in The Bell Curve  book to help us understand the
relationships of basic skills to employment, crime, and other social
concerns. But for now it is sufficient to note that  the arguments in The
Bell Curve about IQ and its immutability, are actually arguments about the
basic skills of reading and mathematics. If reading and mathematics skills
contribute to or actually constitute "IQ," as The Bell Curve books
suggests, then there is evidence to argue that, contrary to the
conclusions of the journalists in the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and
Washington Star,  "IQ" can be improved in adult education and literacy
development programs. A large body of evidence in published literature
indicates that the basic skills are teachable and learnable across the
life span.

The Myth of the Early Years: All Is Not Lost By Age 3:
Adults Can Learn and Their Brains Can Grow

When Hillary Clinton was the First Lady of the United States she weighed
in with the pronouncement in her book on It Takes  a Village  that , "The
first three years of life are crucial in establishing the brain cell
connections. ...By the end of three or four years, however, the pace of
learning slows... The process continues to slow as we mature, and as we
age our brain cells and synapses begin to whither away. ...With proper
stimulation, brain synapses will form at a rapid pace, reaching adult
levels by the age of two and far surpassing them in the next several
years." (Clinton, 1996, pp. 57-58).

It has been argued that if children's early childhood development  is not
properly stimulated, then there is likely to be underdevelopment of the
brain and that can lead to lower intellectual ability, poor school
learning and to a life characterized by  social problems such as
unemployment,  criminal activity, teenage pregnancy and welfare. It will
be difficult if not impossible to overcome the disadvantages of
deficiencies in early childhood stimulation later in adulthood. And so,
some might argue,  "Why should we invest in adult literacy education?
Let’s put our money into early childhood programs. An ounce of prevention
is worth a pound of cure!"

But now  trends in both brain science and cognitive science have converged
to bring about revisions to these ideas from the conventional wisdom. For
over a decade, the James S. McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis has
supported extensive research in neuroscience. Recently, John Bruer,
President of the Foundation has written a new book entitled "The Myth of
the First Three Years" (The Free Press, 1999) in which he explains that
the findings of neuroscience do not support the claims made above for
early stimulation of infants and children under three years of age. He
further argues that most neuroscience is  irrelevant for early childhood
and in-school education (1997, 1998).

 Bruer goes on to say that, "Truly new results in neuroscience, rarely
mentioned in the brain and education literature, point to the brain’s
lifelong capacity to reshape itself in response to experience"(1998, p.
17). In his new book (1999) he references work in adult literacy to make
the point that, "Adult literacy programs provide additional evidence that
acquiring and improving literacy skills is not time-limited or subject to
critical period  limitations." (p. 112).  He says, "The limiting factor
in vocabulary growth, and presumably for some of the other things Verbal
IQ measures, is exposure to new words, facts, and experiences. The brain
can benefit from this exposure at almost any time-early childhood,
childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and senescence."(p. 177)

For adult literacy educators, Bruer makes the important policy argument
that with a better understanding of the limitations of present day
neuroscience for understanding education, "We might question the prudence
of decreasing expenditures for adult education or special education on the
grounds that a person's intellectual and emotional course is firmly set
during the early years." (p. 26, This is a myth he rejects and it is an
important point in light of the current budget activities in Congress
which place tens of billions of dollars in early childhood and in-school
compensatory programs and less than $600 million in programs for the Adult
Education and Literacy System (AELS) of the United States.

We Need Research and Dissemination
to Counter These Harmful Cultural Beliefs

I believe these beliefs about human cognitive development contribute
mightily to the marginalization of the adult education and literacy
development system and the students it serves. They denigrate as
apparently futile the work of those involved in the language and literacy
education of youth and adults in any setting, including the military, job
training, corrections, adult basic education, workplace literacy, and
family literacy programs.  Most sorrowfully, these types of beliefs defame
the educational capacity of millions of adults who seek educational
assistance in adult education and literacy programs throughout the nation.
Many adults may sense these cultural beliefs and incorporate them into
their own self-images and come to believe that they are not smart enough
to learn much. So they avoid adult education programs.

Most of the myths about intelligence, brain development , and learning in
adulthood have gone unchallenged by professionals in adult. Education. 
Neither the National Institute for Literacy (NIFL), the National Center on
Adult Literacy (NCAL) or its successor the National Center for the Study
of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL) have mobilized research and
researchers to counter these harmful myths that retard the development of
the Adult Education and Literacy System of the United States. There has
not been a White House Conference on learning and cognitive development in
adulthood as there has in early childhood. Without this sort of public
notice, journalists are unaware of and cannot expose these harmful myths
to the public at large.

Unfortunately, there is wide spread ignorance about the Adult Education
and Literacy System (AELS) of the United States and the 3,000 or more
adult education programs that are united by the State Grants programs of
the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act of 1998. It is likely, though
I know of no national data on this, that most people, even those working
in it, do not recognize the AELS as the third major publicly funded
education system in the nation.

Embedded in the myths of cognitive development identified above, operating
on the margins of K-12 and Higher Education, and obscured from public
scrutiny by the absence of the public press, it would seem as though the
Adult Education and Literacy System of the United States will continue on
its present path. Despite the best intentions of those adult educators who
worked on the Action Agenda for 2000 and the decade beyond, it seems to me
that as long as these harmful cultural beliefs go unchallenged, it will be
a long time before the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) moves
from the margins to the mainstream of education – if it ever does.





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