EducationNews.org

Tom Sticht
Columnist EducationNews.org

Each year you can count on numerous reports and news articles being written about reading education in the K-12 school system of the United States. Without exception, these reports give the impression that we need to spend billions of dollars more on teaching children to read earlier (e.g.,universal preschool) and better.

But if America's public schools aren't doing a good job of teaching reading, you wouldn't know it when the children have grown up and are asked as adults how well they read. Overwhelmingly, our nation's adults think they read Well or Very Well.

The 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) asked adults to rate their own reading skills as they perceived them. In a report on the Literacy of Older Adults in America, from the National Center for Education Statistics in Washington, DC, November 1996, 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.

When broken out by ethnic groups, ratings were

Whites: Very Well-77%, Well-21%, or Not Well/Not At All-3%.
Blacks: Very Well-67%, Well-27% and Not Well/Not At All-6%.
Hispanics: Very Well-46%, Well-22% and Not Well/Not At All-32%

In this analysis, only Hispanics reported a high percentage, 32 percent, or 5.3 million adults, who thought they could not read English Well or Very Well, no doubt reflecting the large immigrant population in this category with less education and poorer English language skills than U.S. born adults. Among both Blacks and Whites, poor reading appears to be a perceived problem for only 3 to 6 percent of these populations, about 4.5 million adults in the age range 16-59.

Interestingly, when the average proficiencies of Whites and Blacks on the NALS Prose scale were compared, it was found that for Whites who rated themselves as reading Very Well, their average Prose proficiency was 308, well above average, whereas for Blacks rating themselves as reading Very Well, their Prose average proficiency was 259, well below average.

Perhaps when children grow up and get out of the pre-K-12 world they adapt to the ambient literacy demands of a cultural niche that they find possible to occupy. They find jobs they can qualify for, they get information from sources they have access to and feel comfortable in using, and as they slip ever more firmly into their literacy niche, they feel more and more satisfaction with their literacy skills. Maybe this is why so many U.S. adults think they read Well or Very Well, despite their poor performance on literacy tests. This raises the possibility that if they are using themselves as a standard, many adults are not able to judge whether or not their children are learning to read Well or Very Well in school and fail to take action on behalf of failing children.

Today, our nation's Adult Education and Literacy System remains marginalized, operating with an average of $820 per enrollee, including both federal and state funds. This is less than 10 percent of what we spend per child in the K-12 system. Strangely, though federal and state governments have provided tens of billions of dollars in mostly failed attempts to improve the reading skills of children, once the children grow up their reading problems seem to go away. I wonder why?

Published November 23, 2008