April 24, 2008

25 Years Later Our Nation is Still at Risk in a Dangerous World:
Can We Afford to Continue to Marginalize Adult Literacy Education?

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

"Our Nation is at risk. 
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to
impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today,
we might well have viewed it as an act of war." With these opening
statements 25 years ago the National Commission on Excellence in Education
issued its devastating April 1983 report on the condition of education in
the United States. Among the indicators of the risk facing America were the
findings that about 13 percent of all 17-year-olds in the United States
could be considered functionally illiterate, with functional illiteracy
among minority youth running as high as 40 percent.  As adults, 23 million
Americans were declared functionally illiterate.

The Nation at Risk report called for a "learning society" with "a system of
education that affords all members the opportunity to stretch their minds
to full capacity, from early childhood through adulthood, learning more as
the world itself changes
.without life-long learning, one's skills will
become rapidly dated." (pp. 13-14). But beyond this rhetoric, the report
did not call for the greater development of the Adult Education and
Literacy System that was created almost 20 years earlier in the federal
Adult Education Act of 1966.

Two months before the release of the Nation at Risk report, in February
1983, I released a report through the Human Resources Research Organization
in Alexandria, Virginia entitled Literacy and Human Resources Development at
Work: Investing in the Education of Adults to Improve the Educability of
Children. In this report, which was an expanded version of a presentation I
made in Toronto, Canada to a meeting of the National Academy of Education, I
called for a greater investment in research and development to find
cost-effective methods for permitting employing organizations to put
marginally literate youth and adults to work, while at the same time
providing education and training to increase the literacy and learning
skills of these employees.

In my presentation I pointed to some concepts of human resources development
and utilization that predominate in our society. I noted that in our
economic system, we typically allocate childhood and youth as times for
human resources development, and we provide the K-12 education system as
the primary means for literacy and other cognitive skills development.

However, as adults, the economic focus is upon the utilization of human
resources for productive work. For this reason I emphasized the need for
cost-effective methods for hiring undereducated, underskilled youth and
adults for productive utilization while also making investments in adult
literacy development in work organizations. This would make possible the
expansion of the pool of adults upon whom to draw for productive work while
extending the idea of the "learning society" with lifelong learning as
called for in the Nation at Risk report. In my report, I gave examples of
how one could integrate literacy skills education with job skills education
and do both for less than sequential programs in which adults are counseled
to first raise their basic literacy skills to some level before they can
qualify for job training or employment.

Additionally, I pointed out that by investing in the further education of
the workforce through cost-effective, integrated job skills and literacy
skills programs, there was a good chance that this would contribute to
improving the educational achievement of language and literacy skills in
the families of the workers through the intergenerational transfer of oral
language and literacy from parents to their children.

Today, 25 years after A Nation at Risk, despite hundreds of billions of
dollars in funding for compensatory education in pre-school and in-school
programs, 30-year long term trend data from the National Assessment of
Educational Progress show that the Nation has made only a little if any
improvements in reading for 9 years olds, and none for 13 and 17 year olds.
The Pre-K-12 schools continue to graduate tens of thousands of functionally
illiterate young adults just as reported in A Nation at Risk 25 years
earlier.

As far as adult literacy education is concerned, in 1988, five years after
the publication of Literacy and Human Resources Development at Work, the
federal government passed legislation to create a National Workplace
Literacy Program (NWLP) that would support the provision of job-related
basic skills education for workers at the workplace, and a separate program
called Even Start that focuses on raising the literacy skills of adults and
the intergenerational transfer of literacy from the adults to their
children. However, the NWLP was short-lived, less than five years,
underfunded, less than $20 million a year, and was later folded into the
Adult Education Act as renamed the National Literacy Act of 1991. Today,
the Even Start program has survived attempts to completely shut it down by
the Executive Branch of the federal government, but it operates with less
than $100 million a year.

Overall, the federal government's budget for the Adult Education and
Literacy System is less than $575 million, amounting to some $220 per
enrollee and even with the contributions from the 50 states the adult
literacy education funding is less than $860 per enrollee. Meanwhile, a
2003 report from the federal government has claimed that adult functional
illiteracy has increased in the 25 years since A Nation at Risk was
released from 23 million to over 30 million and perhaps as many as 90
million!

In the quarter century since the release of the A Nation at Risk and
Literacy and Human Resources Development at Work reports one consistent
finding of the National Assessment of Educational Progress 30 year trend
data has been repeatedly reported. This is the finding  that as the
parents' educational levels increase, so do the educational achievements of
their children, and this intergenerational relationship holds for  9, 13,
and 17 year olds and persists into adulthood.

This calls for a change from educational policies based on  birth-to-death,
lifelong learning policies and calls instead for a Multiple Life Cycles
education policy that explicitly recognizes the long term finding of the
intergenerational effects of education and provides for funding for the
Adult Education and Literacy System at a level comparable to that for the
Pre-K-12 system. Because of the intergenerational transfer of better
health, inspiration for learning, oral language and literacy from parents
to their children, and the effect this has on the school achievement of
children, policies and funding decisions for education should be based on
the expectation that one of the best investments we can make for the
education of children, is an investment in the education of adults.


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