No subject

school  across this 62 year period, their literacy skills do not vary much
on the average, with all three age groups scoring in the upper half of
Level 2 of the NALS. This would seem to indicate that regardless of
whether the schools emphasized a code (phonics) or meaning (whole
language) emphasis during this time, or had the benefits of feedback from
the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)  from the 1970s up
to the time of the NALS assessment,  once adults get out of high school
and spend some time in other activities other than postsecondary
education, their literacy skills don't differ very much, at least for the
adults sampled in 1992 and assessed using the functional literacy tasks of
the NALS.

The NALS also asked adults to rate their own reading skills as they
perceived them. In the same report on the Literacy of Older Adults in
America, the authors reported (p. 43) that adults aged 16 to 59 rated
themselves as reading Very Well-72%, Well-22% and Not Well/Not At All-7%.
Overall, then, some 93% of adults in this age range rated themselves as
reading Well or Very Well.

These self perception ratings of their reading skills suggest that adults
do not perceive themselves to be reading poorly, though critics of the
public schools are wont to decry the "fact" that our high schools are
graduating "functional illiterates" and they don't teach the kids to read
as well as they did in the good old days. Possibly, this may reflect the
tendency that has been known since Socrates' day for the older generation
to complain about the newer generation. On the other hand, perhaps adults
of today are not as literate as those of an earlier generation. But the
data from the NALS do not support this conclusion across the six decades
from 1939 to 1992.

On the other hand, the NALS indicated that some 10 million adults were
such poor readers that they could not even take the exam. While this might
not be a crisis for a nation with some 200 million adults, it is a
national disgrace that so little is being done to help these adults help
themselves and their families through access to a well funded, high
quality, public Adult Education and Literacy System (AELs). With state and
federal funding for the
AELS below a woeful $600 per enrollee, this is poverty level funding for
the education of our most difficult to reach and educate citizens.

Its a national shame to spend billions of dollars to leave no children
behind, while largely ignoring the desparate need of the children's
parents and leaving them behind. How can this be an inspiration to
children to pursue their own education?





_______________________________________________
NLA mailing list: NLA at lists.literacytent.org=20
http://lists.literacytent.org/mailman/listinfo/nla=20
LiteracyTent: web hosting, news, community and goodies for literacy
http://literacytent.org