[NLA] Cast-off Adults in America

[Thomas Sticht]

Research Note 5 October 01
Tom Sticht

Cast-off Adults in America

I must admit I was pretty apprehensive. I was on K street in Washington
DC, the "power" street in DC. I was on my way to interview one of the
most controversial men in America. I went up the elevator to the floor
on which his office was situated. I went into the reception room, and
announced myself and why I was there. The secretary/receptionist  asked
me to wait a few minutes, and went behind the closed doors to the inner
sanctum.  She returned and I was told that I could go on in. 

I went into the inner office, and there he was. There was Robert Strange
McNamara. He was sitting behind a kind of normal looking desk. The room
had a conference table on my right hand side as I faced his desk, and
there were a couple of chairs in front of this desk. He stood up. A
pretty tall man. I was invited to take one of those chairs. I did. 

Robert Strange McNamara. He was a former President of the Ford Motor
Company, Secretary of Defense for both Presidents John F. Kennedy and
Lyndon B. Johnson during America’s most controversial war, the Vietnam
war, and later President of the World Bank. 

During the Vietnam war,  Secretary McNamara had joined with President
Johnson’s War on Poverty and had decided that the armed services would
induct up to 100,000 young adults a year into the armed services who had
previously been excluded because of low aptitude or low physical
abilities. . He was convinced that this would offer opportunities to
poor, undereducated young men, who were having difficulty escaping what
was then considered as the "culture of poverty."

Project 100,000 was not a popular idea in military circles. The Army
Times editorialized: "Are the services likely to get any reasonable
mileage from such people? Past performance indicates not
.Is this any
time to require the services to take on a large scale "poverty-war"
training mission? We would think not." 

When I spoke with McNamara about Project 100,000, which he called an
experiment, he said, "
there was immense resistance initially in the
services to Project 100,000 because they feared that accepting
individuals between the 10th and 30th percentiles on the Armed Forces
Qualification Test would seriously weaken the military forces.
Obviously, I didn’t, nor did the President wish to weaken the military
forces
.I believe this reflects an emotional, built-in bias, to be
absolutely frank with you – I told you, I believe, that before the
experiment began, this was known as McNamara’s Moron Corps."

I went on to discuss with McNamara the results of a long term analysis
of Project 100,000 personnel performance. It turns out that , contrary
to all the negative expectations  about the  "lower aptitude" or  "Moron
Corps" who made-up the military’s Mental Category IV (those with AFQT
scores between the 10th and 31st percentiles) close to 85 percent
completed their first term in a satisfactory manner, compared to 92
percent of "controls," higher aptitude men fully qualified throughout
the Vietnam war.  And though the Project 100,000 men included a large
percentage of non-caucasians, with significantly lower aptitude scores
than caucasian Project 100,000 men, the non-caucasians had an even
higher completion rate (86 percent) than the caucasians (83 percent).
Some two-thirds  of the Project 100,000 men were in jobs like cooks,
military police, supply clerk, and other jobs that had civilian
counterparts. 

I also reported to McNamara an analysis of over 300,000 personnel
records for a group of Mental Category IV personnel who had been
mistakenly brought into the military services between 1976 through 1980
due to an error in the AFQT testing. Again, the performance of the lower
aptitude groups was at high levels, contrary to expectations. In fact,
their performance was so good that the Director of Accession Policy for
the U. S. Department of Defense said, "
a quarter of a million people
who did not meet the enlistment standards and should not have been able
to do the job did in fact do it pretty well."

It is findings like these that cause me to be extremely uncomfortable
when adult literacy researchers start dividing adults up into groups
according to their literacy "levels" much like the military’s "mental
categories" and then talk about adults in the lower literacy levels
(Levels 1 and 2 on the National Adult Literacy Survey-NALS) as   "Level
1" adults or "Level 2" adults. They speak as though these are
homogeneous groups of people and that as a group they do not possess the
literacy skills to function well in today’s information-oriented
society. Some adult literacy researchers even declare adults with
literacy skills below NALS Level 3 as not meeting the standards for
coping with the work demands of our contemporary society, even though
these same researchers  offer no evidence that Level 3 literacy skills
are actually needed by many and perhaps most jobs in the nation. 

It is easy to slip from talking about adults with low literacy ability
to talking about adults with low intelligence. In Forbes Magazine,
October 2, 2000, Dan Seligman writes about the findings of the National
Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) and says, "But note that what’s being
measured here is not what you’ve been thinking all your life as
"literacy. " The cluster of abilities being examined is obviously a
proxy for plain old "intelligence." He then goes on to argue that
government programs won’t do much about this problem of low
intelligence. 

These types of popular press articles can stymie funding for adult
literacy education. That is one reason why it is critical that when
national assessments of cognitive skills, including literacy, are
administered, we need to be certain about just what it is we are
measuring.  Unfortunately, that is not the case with the NALS or the
proposed NAALS. These assessments leave open the possibility of being
called "intelligence" tests leading some, like Seligman, to the general
conclusion that the less literate are simply the less intelligent and
society might as well cast them off – their "intelligence genes" will
not permit them to ever reach Level 3 or any other levels at the high
end of cognitive tests. 

We have to be careful that the NALS or forthcoming NAALS Literacy Level
1 and 2 adults do not become NcNamara’s Morons in the minds of the
general public. We need to be able to get the resources needed to help
provide high quality education to adults who are seeking to better
themselves, their families, and communities. 

At the end of my interview with Robert Strange McNamara, whose wife,
Margaret Craig McNamara, was founder of Reading is Fundamental, Inc., 
he spoke about the importance of motivation and training for adults. He
said, "Now, this kind of approach shows that there is something that can
be done, and people – individuals in out society – that society thinks
can be cast off need not be cast off."

This is a message that adult educators, students,  and researchers
should strive to demonstrate and disseminate every day. If we are to
have national assessments, workforce laws,  and government regulations,
their aim should be to support policies that foster social inclusion,
not exclusion. We cannot afford cast-off adults in America. 

References

Sticht, T. et al. (1987). Cast-off youth: policy and training methods
from the military experience. New York: Praeger. 

Sticht, T. (1992). Military testing and public policy: selected studies
of lower aptitude personnel. In B. Gifford & L. Wing (Eds.) Test policy
in defense: lessons from the military for education, training, and
employment. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers (pp. 1-77).