Foolish Progress: A Brief History of U.S. Adult Literacy Programming
Written by Ned Zimmerman-Bence, Co-Founder of GogyUp25 Years and 20% Is Not Progress
Teaching adults to read in the United States has had a long and frenetic history, in part because funding and program structure have historically been tied to national crises or imperatives. Yet developing funding and developing educational programming around national imperatives is a tragically ineffective method. Data from the 2017 Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies bear that assessment out. From 1993, when the first national assessment of adult literacy was conducted, to 2017, when the last assessment was implemented, the percentage of the U.S. working-age adults without functional print literacy has remained essentially unchanged at 20%. After nearly a quarter century of fluctuating funding and policies focused on advancing adult literacy, one out of five working-age adults still lack a foundational skill necessary to qualify for living-wage work.
Twenty percent is certainly an alarming number of working-age adults to be without a critical skill in a rapidly changing workplace. But when one considers how limited adult literacy acts as an amplifier for costly societal problems, including health disparities and generational poverty, the true scale and impact of an endemic 20% adult illiteracy rate comes into sharper focus and with much greater concern. One out of every five working-age adults with limited literacy means that, at a minimum, at least 20% of all households have less capacity to fully engage with and benefit from societal institutions and systems: education, finance, health, civic, and government. This lack of capacity impacts not only the adult but the younger and older generations dependent on that adult to fully engage. It presents a large obstacle to the national economy and even our national security through lost opportunity to increase productivity, implement innovation, and equitably shift to an economy responsive to a changing environment, demographics, and geopolitics. In short, our national, endemic adult illiteracy rate of 20% means our nation is leaving 20% of our potential behind and, what's more, allowing that 20% to languish from generation to generation. Why?
The reason partly lies in how our nation has historically funded education: to serve the national imperative rather than to provide the tools to citizens to fully develop and achieve their potential. Literacy and general education were seen as tightly integral to national defense. As far back as the late 18th century, military and civil employees were explicitly taught the skills and expertise necessary to facilitate the government's ability to preserve the "General Welfare" clause of the U.S. Constitution. President Andrew Jackson established the Bureau of Education under the Department of the Interior in 1867. It remained under that department until the 1930s when it was placed within the Federal Security Agency. During this sixty year period, the U.S. addressed significant waves of settlement, migration, immigration and conflict. In fact, the military has played an outsized role for the education of adults with limited literacy since World War I. During World War II (1939 to 1945), 300,000 men who lacked literacy were given a 90-day program to bring them to a fourth-grade reading level. A similar program was again implemented in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War.
Note that each of these initiatives were implemented not from a collective sense of national equality but from a threat to national security. It was not part of the programming to ensure that those adults had the skills to continue to develop their potential. Like most military-initiated literacy efforts, these programs had a limited goal: to raise the level of literacy in adults of military age in order for them to fight effectively.
Changing Tactics Haven't Changed the Outcome
This growth is however a fragmented, disorganized, unplanned and lopsided growth...If we are to build upon these resources, to meet the urgent needs for adult education, to make possible the ‘Great Society’ and to capitalize on the present favorable climate there is, however, a compelling need for more and better leadership in the field. - Dr. A.A. (Sandy) Liveright at the Center for the Study of Liberal Education for Adults, 1966.
The same issues around adult education and literacy were as highly prevalent in the 1960's "Great Society" legislation as they were during World War II conscription. They remain just as prevalent in this century and decade. Despite consistent need, the priorities, approaches, requirements, and funding levels have all perpetually shifted from imperative to imperative. For example, adult education and literacy programs providing a broad range of services experienced double digit increases in the 1970's which was then then shifted to block grants given directly to state-run programs during the 1980's. Since the Clinton administration, "workforce readiness" (otherwise known as "College and Career Readiness" - CCR) has been become more and more the focus of federal funding and policy for adult education.
The result of these swings and changing imperatives? The adult literacy rate is essentially unchanged: 20% of working-age U.S. adults remain unable to read.
It needs to be emphasized that this result is not due to a lack of commitment from adult learners, nor lack of commitment from the adult education system and its legions of professional educators and volunteer educators. The barriers to overcome in order to attend adult education are immense: transportation, child care, work schedules, family demands. Changes in a government's requirements and funding sources impact the ability for programs to provide the instruction that their learners need.
Why Equivalent is Inequitable
The current, standard programming centers around the GED - Graduate Equivalency Development Test. Earning a GED is no small feat and is often the highest level of programming provided by adult education (AE) programs. The GED and its equivalents have just about become the singular goal for many adult education programs because these tests provide verifiable metrics to proclaim an adult learner to be CCR and CCR is directly tied to the funding AE programs receive. Yet research stemming from the 1990's, when CCR was becoming the predominant imperative for adult education, illustrates that the GED provides no net benefit to a learner's ability to pursue higher education or possess functional workplace skills certified by the GED.
What Works: To Focus on the Learner
What the U.S. Adult Education system needs is an approach that puts the learner front-and-center rather than a national response to a crisis. By putting the learner in the center of policy making, programming and resources can be developed that facilitate the learner's progress.
Significant, persistent challenges inherent in a system serving perhaps the most diverse learner population remain. The first is the lack of AE system capacity: less than 10% of the 36 million adults needing literacy instruction are enrolled in formal programming. The second is a suite of issues caused by fluctuating and inadequate funding: wide variation in program delivery, minimal professional training, and heavy reliance on volunteers. The third stems from inherent life circumstances of adults the ABE system serves: high absenteeism and attrition due to employment, family, or other life demands; and wide heterogeneity in educational background, race, ethnicity, gender, age (16 to 80+), language status, and psychosocial attributes. Each of these challenges can significantly impact engagement, motivation, access, and progress.
To overcome these challenges, AE programs have begun to take advantage of growing access to digital technology and implement educational technologies such as digitized curricula via mobile and distance learning. Incorporating digital technology can incrementally expand programming capacity and potentially mitigate challenges to progress. However, the majority of digital curricula and learning systems are developed for post-secondary and K-12 markets and are therefore misaligned with the needs of adult learners with limited literacy as well as the unique challenges and broach needs of the AE system.
Assistive technology (AT) is any item, equipment, software, or product system used to increase, maintain, or improve a person's functional capabilities. When applied to instructional technology, AT increases access to and effectiveness of adult literacy instruction from the youngest to the oldest learners. However, AT is typically only made available to learners with diagnosed learning disabilities and only while the learner is enrolled in a program, minimizing its impact on the broader adult population.
AT for adult literacy instruction represents a promising response to ongoing inattention to adult learning needs in the U.S. The promise increases exponentially when combined with three other trends in instructional technology: the expanding ubiquity of smartphones; rapid expansion of cloud computing and artificial intelligence; and greatly reduced development cost for new digital curricula and apps. Together these four developments present a “new wave of opportunity” to build instructional technology for adult literacy instruction that is both responsive to the challenges of learning a complex skill amid the competing demands of adult life and supportive of existing AE infrastructure.
Designed with working adult learners and in accordance with best practices for andragogy, the GogyUp Reader provides multiple levels of assistive-reading technology that allow the adult learner to understand important information as needed and in-the-moment while also providing longer-term, sequenced, and personalized instruction in English phonics and phonemic awareness so that overtime the learner can rely less on assistive-reading technology and more on the skills developed while using GogyUp Reader.
GogyUp's hybrid approach still puts the learner in the center. By providing the ability to comprehend important information as needed, the GogyUp Reader facilitates the inclusion of 20% of the U.S. workforce in increasingly more technical workplaces. This approach allows adults with limited literacy to begin to pursue their goals through literacy instruction, in conjunction with or independent of adult education programming, depending on the adult learner's individual goals and circumstances.
We believe the same successful approach can be applied to adult education as a whole: start with what the learner needs immediately and then slowly remove the scaffolding as the learner builds internal capacity to read, compute, etc. This "life-wide" approach is taken and argued for by many prominent adult education scholars.
The key difference to why this approach is successful when previous approaches to adult education and literacy have not been successful? The imperative comes from within rather than from outside.
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