Route to Literacy Starts in the Home : Consultant to Track How Parent’s Education Affects Children

The better educated a child’s parents, the better the child will learn in school and succeed later in the workplace.

The general truth of that relationship might strike most people as almost too obvious to state. But the implications intrigue San Diego consultant Thomas Sticht because they suggest that the United States may need to reexamine the way it is pursuing its goal of national education reform and restoring international competitiveness.

While the U.S. pours $3 billion annually into childhood education programs such as Head Start to provide economically disadvantaged children with extra learning skills, the amount of money placed into compensatory adult education for the parents, who often are functional illiterates, is but a pittance by contrast. An “Even Start” program passed by Congress for adult basic education this year will begin with only about $100 million.

A $90,000 Grant

Now Sticht has a $90,000 grant from the prestigious MacArthur Foundation to come up with specific research to buttress the link between parent involvement in education and resulting childhood literacy. He will also suggest new ways to teach adult basic skills that pay off in greater achievement, based on military experiences with low-aptitude recruits.

Sticht will host a nationwide conference in San Diego at the end of this month where officials from throughout the country will examine whether parent education can lead to better learning by children and, if so, how best to design such parent programs.

“The notion is that maybe a lot more attention to the education of (adults with low literacy levels) will have a strong impact on their kids as well,” Sticht said in an interview. He heads the Point Loma firm Applied Behavioral & Cognitive Sciences Inc.

For more than a decade, Sticht has followed with keen interest the little data available to show that parents can improve their childrens’ learning skills by first increasing their own literacy levels. As head of basic skills research for the U.S. government’s National Institute of Education in the late 1970s, Sticht sponsored some basic studies on the subject.

“I’ve looked at what I call the intergenerational transfer of cognitive skills for many years, based on some correlations I found while studying (adult literacy) programs for the military,” Sticht said. Sticht also cited studies done by the World Bank and by UNESCO which indicate that disadvantaged children perform better when their parents are given remedial education.

“Myself and others have picked up on this link between education of parents and the success of children. The relation is not always necessary (for children to learn) because you can look at the offspring of Hmong (mountain tribesman from Laos) who do well even though the parents are illiterate. There are of course community and cultural influences that go beyond parents to affect literacy and learning.

“But I suspect that (the correlation) holds true for mainstream black, Hispanic as well as whites.”

Sticht said that even after more than 20 years of educational efforts for children and adults, there remains a lack of conclusive data to show which programs work best, and at times how even to measure effectiveness.

“How effective has Head Start been?” Sticht asked. “There are evaluations that show there may be little long-term effect in terms of boosting IQs (the ability to learn) although other studies show that such kids do persist in school, graduate in greater numbers and perhaps have less delinquency than those who were not in the preschool program.

“But do they achieve better? That is an iffy thing to say one way or another at this point.”

There is a growing consensus, nevertheless, that more parental involvement in education will pay some benefits for children as well.

“We still do not know whether it is due to higher motivation, to a better attitude, or to transfer of cognitive skills,” Sticht said. “We still don’t understand the process fully.”

Sticht urged that pilot projects be expanded so that a greater number of evaluations can proceed more quickly in judging how to measure success or failure. The MacArthur Foundation has awarded almost $4.4 million in grants nationwide for such projects.

But Sticht warns that adult education programs will not pay off if they continue to be based on traditional teaching patterns used for children, which stress abstract concepts more than specific goals, whether job- or family-related.

“I don’t think you can repeat the kindergarten-through-12th learning patterns that most adults (who are functionally illiterate) failed in the first place,” Sticht said. He said that more than half the adults who enroll in adult basic skills classes drop out before the first month ends.

Designed Program for Military

Sticht has helped design curriculum for military personnel deemed functionally illiterate when they enter the various services. And his study of 100,000 low-aptitude recruits taken into the services during the Vietnam War shows that their literacy levels were boosted more than 300-fold, based on testing, following courses that emphasized useful information as well as basic skills.

“My experiences in studying such low-aptitude personnel shows that you must give them an opportunity to do something useful and purposeful at the same time you are giving them the basic skills,” Sticht said.

“For example, in one Army unit, (at first) they were giving soldiers a book about Betty the Doll Doctor to read. That doesn’t make any sense to me. They need to be reading about first aid, about skills that they need to do their job, such as learning about how to fire a TOW (anti-tank) weapon, at the same time they are learning to read better.

“The point is that adults don’t have the luxury of the K-12 years again. They usually must work, rear kids, and interact with other family at the same time they are trying to gain in basic skills. For them, literacy is not abstract stuff but something within a functional context, to be used on the job as well as for reading to their children, helping them with homework, etc.”

Skills They Can Use

By focusing adult programs on teaching basic skills that are embedded in either job or family matters, Sticht said that adults will stay with the programs longer and will also make gains in general literacy. More of the veterans who had specific skills-type literacy training in the military used the GI bill to further their education once they left the military, Sticht said. And more of their children continued with schooling than offspring of veterans who did not take additional courses, he said.

A number of schools in lower-income San Diego areas have established special parenting sessions, where they bring in mothers and fathers of children once or twice a week for a month at a time and teach parenting skills.

“I’d like to see some experiments where we would give the parents job training and parenting, with emphasis on basic skills at the same time,” Sticht said, “perhaps using children’s books with adults during lunchtime that they could then take home to read with the kids.

“With enough data, I think we can design programs that work.”