COLUMN ONE : Reading the Signs of a Crisis : Grim statistics show illiteracy spreading in America’s work force. Business and government are both searching for answers to the problem.
Nehimei Bailey was only 9 years old in 1945 when he quit the third grade to pick cotton on the south Georgia farm that his sharecropper father tilled. He never learned to read much.
That did not matter when he grew up and made his way to Columbus to look for a job. You did not need to know how to read in the textile mills then. The bosses wanted their labor cheap, unskilled and non-union. They did not care about schooling. Now 53, Bailey is still in a job that does not require any reading ability: He is a $9.80-an-hour spinning machine “overhauler” at the local Swift Mills textile plant.
But today, Bailey’s job description is changing. Like firms in many other old-line industries, Swift is spending millions of dollars to computerize its operations, and Bailey’s old spinner soon will be replaced. When the new-generation machine breaks down, a computer screen will flash a message diagnosing what has gone wrong. Bailey will have to fix it and then type in computer codes to reset the machine to the correct spinning rate. To do that, he will have to know how to read.
For two years, Bailey has been taking three hours of reading classes each week under a program that Swift has set up to prepare its workers for the computer age. “My level is fifth-grade now,” he said. “I’m not worried about the computer anymore. I could do it right now.”
Bailey’s difficulty with reading is far from a rarity these days. Experts say perhaps 3 million to 4 million Americans cannot read or write at all. And Forrest P. Chisman, director of the Project on Adult Literacy sponsored by the Southport Institute, a Connecticut-based research organization, estimates that between 20 million and 30 million Americans lack so many basic educational skills that they cannot “read, write, calculate, solve problems or communicate well enough to function effectively on the job or in their everyday lives.” California alone has 2.7 million such functional illiterates--about one-fifth of the state’s total labor force.
Many analysts fear that if the U.S. work force is not better-trained, America eventually will prove unable to compete in the world marketplace. Already, one out of every four American youths drops out of school before entering the work force. By contrast, some 96% of all Japanese youths arrive at their first job with a high school diploma in hand. Projections show that the number of functionally illiterate Americans will swell far into the next century.
According to Chisman, Americans must decide now whether they want a high-quality, productive work force that can generate high incomes and boost the nation’s standard of living, or a “second-class economy based on a second-rate work force.” If nothing is done, he warns, the country will have an “unhappy rendezvous with demographic destiny . . . and the United States will become a second-rate nation.”
The specter of a poorly trained work force has begun to spur some business leaders into action. Harold W. McGraw Jr., who recently retired as chairman of McGraw-Hill Inc., has established a new group called the Business Council for Effective Literacy. Besides Swift Mills, a spate of U.S. firms--from Gillette Co., Frito-Lay Inc. and Motorola Inc. to newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times--has set up special education programs to help employees learn to read.
The difficulty is that businesses tend to concentrate mainly on workers such as Bailey, who already have some kind of job, leaving virtually untouched the growing--and far more worrisome --problem of illiterate youths who are not yet employed (and increasingly have little prospect of finding a job today). At the same time, the amount that America is spending on dealing with its illiteracy problem is meager--particularly in terms of federal financing, which had been a major source of education money in the 1970s.
Most specialists agree that the literacy programs that are currently in place are inadequate, whether they are run by volunteers, business corporations or governments. Spending less than $200 a pupil, on average, at most they reach 3 million to 4 million adults annually--barely enough to keep up with the 1 million to 2 million poorly educated youths who leave school and the million-or-so immigrants who enter the United States each year. Some report only meager success, conceding that a large proportion of pupils gives up after only a few weeks. Others do better. But the absence of any coordinated federal drive against illiteracy is conspicuous. “Who in Washington is in charge of helping the 20 million plus?--everybody and nobody,” Chisman said rhetorically.
There also is a dearth of serious evaluations of current literacy programs. Discussing the literacy projects run by corporations, Chisman said in a recent interview: “We need to know whether we are succeeding or failing. I am astounded how some of these companies put out substantial amounts of money and do not know if they are getting their money’s worth.”
Just how widespread the illiteracy problem is was dramatized a year ago when Dexter Manley, then a popular defensive end for the Washington Redskins, stunned a Senate subcommittee by disclosing at a congressional hearing that he had been graduated from Oklahoma State University with only a second-grade reading skill level. Manley, who had just completed two years of remedial reading classes when he testified, could barely read his prepared statement.
But federal action on literacy so far has been limited. Although First Lady Barbara Bush has lent her name to a highly praised private project to encourage family literacy, her husband has been conspicuously less active. While Bush proclaimed during the 1988 campaign that he wanted to be the education President--and set a goal during his Jan. 31 State of the Union speech of making every American adult “a skilled, literate worker and citizen” by the year 2000--he has yet to unveil plans for meeting that target.
A summit meeting that he called last summer to rally the nation’s governors into improving educational standards stirred new expectations but so far, apart from a White House proposal to boost spending for the Head Start preschool program, it has not resulted in any moves to increase outlays for literacy programs.
“What is needed,” said McGraw, a friend of both President Bush and his wife, “is for the President to sit everyone down and say: ‘I’m the education President, and I want you to do these things right now.’ Barbara Bush understands the problem, and I’m sure she talks about it over the dinner table--maybe so much that he’s sick of it. But he hasn’t acted.”
The problem is a complex one. Even the definitions of illiteracy have changed over the years. A century ago, an American was considered literate if he could sign his name rather than mark an X--a test that almost everyone could pass these days. Today, some criteria are so broad that one out of every three adults would qualify under them as functionally or marginally illiterate--some 60 million people in all.
Most specialists talk about gradations of literacy. In what probably is the most detailed survey on illiteracy in America, Irwin S. Kirsch and Ann Jungeblut of the Educational Testing Service concluded that 440,000 young Americans--or about 2% of the 21 million people in the 21-to-25-year-old age bracket--could not read well enough even to be tested. (About 225,000 of these were Spanish-speaking.)
More important, those whose skill levels could be gauged showed serious deficiencies: Some 1.25 million young Americans could not even read at the fourth-grade level. Another 6 million, or almost one-third of those measured, were not literate enough to write a letter to a store about a billing error, or were not skilled enough in simple mathematics to balance a checkbook. Yet most of the new jobs in the 21st Century will require just these kinds of basic skills.
The problem is even more acute among individual ethnic groups. While eight out of every 10 young whites passed the letter-writing and checkbook-balancing tests, only four out of every 10 blacks and six out of every 10 Latinos were able to do so.
While manpower experts predict that more than half of the new jobs created in the coming decade are likely to require at least one year of college education, almost half the new entrants into the work force now are the youths with the lowest levels of literacy. Moreover, analysts say the proportion is sure to increase by the end of the century. In short, while the nation’s employers are requiring more and more education, job applicants in America are becoming less and less literate.
Just as worrisome to some experts is a growing belief that illiteracy virtually guarantees poverty. Dawn Hill, a supervisor of social workers in Atlanta, says a major obstacle for homeless women who are trying to break out of the slums is that “they cannot read and write well enough . . . to get a job.”
Many would-be jobholders “do not read and write well enough even to be hired by McDonald’s” hamburger chain, Hill asserted, and “if they manage to get (a job), they definitely cannot hold it.” Some academics who have studied the situation agree.
But Mike Fox, director of Push Literacy Action Now, or PLAN, a private volunteer organization in Washington, contends that such reasoning confuses the cause with the effect. “The idea that illiteracy causes poverty--that it causes people to take drugs or to hang out on street corners--is ridiculous,” Fox asserted. “These people have a literacy problem because they were poor when they went to school.”
So far, educators seeking to cope with the nation’s mounting illiteracy problem have centered on two basic approaches--trying to improve the reading skills of adults who already are in the work force, and trying to help young children from poor families become better prepared to start school.
Perhaps the most admired of the early childhood educational programs is Head Start--the 1960s-era legacy of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. For a quarter of a century, Head Start has helped provide two years of preschool classes for more than 9 million youngsters from the nation’s poor neighborhoods. President Bush has asked Congress to increase its financing by a full 30%--though that still would not be nearly enough to take care of all the poor children who might qualify.
Head Start ran into criticism in the early 1970s, when early evaluations showed that children who had been enrolled in the program--who had scored higher in IQ tests over similar children who had not benefited from Head Start--lost their advantage after a few years in elementary school.
More recently, however, results from a 1984 study of the Perry preschool program in Ypsilanti, Mich., showed that while the Head Start approach did not raise IQ scores significantly--or for very long--it spawned widespread successes in almost every other measure of educational and social achievement.
For example, compared to a control group of children who had no preschool classes at all, the children who attended the Ypsilanti program scored grades that averaged half a letter grade higher in high school (say, a C rather than C-); had fewer failing grades; dropped out of school less frequently; earned significantly higher wages at age 19; experienced less unemployment and engaged in much less criminal activity.
Even so, such results must be placed in perspective. Although the children in the Ypsilanti program performed far better in school and at work than other poor black children, their achievements still did not propel them out of poverty or boost their educational achievements. Tests measuring basic skills showed them below the national average. The lesson: A poor child who lacks study space at home, adequate health care or sufficient food and parental encouragement simply cannot shake these disadvantages with only two years of Head Start.
This dilemma has persuaded some specialists to push for programs that try to improve the literacy of both the parents and children simultaneously. Thomas G. Sticht and Barbara A. McDonald, two literacy specialists from San Diego, refer to money for these kinds of programs as “double-duty dollars.”
An example is the Beethoven School Project in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. Using grants from the Department of Health and Human Services and from private foundations, the Beethoven program is trying to prepare some of the city’s poorest children for school by caring for their mothers from the start of their pregnancies and then working with both mother and child until the youngster enters kindergarten. It is far more extensive than Head Start.
Yet there is still trepidation about the Beethoven program’s chances for success--especially in a site like Robert Taylor Homes. The school that the children will enter--the Beethoven Elementary School--often is denounced as the worst school in America. And the place that the youngsters still will live--Robert Taylor Homes--is the site of 11% of all of Chicago’s murders.
“These things just don’t stop when the kids go to kindergarten,” said Dorothy Coleman, director of the project’s day-care center. “The drugs don’t stop. The gangs don’t stop. The poverty doesn’t stop.”
In a University of Chicago study of big city schools, Prof. Gary Orfield concludes that schools in poor urban neighborhoods--which mainly serve blacks and members of other minority groups--are so poor in quality that the youngsters have virtually no chance to obtain an education equal to that of whites. And Orfield insists that these schools are likely to remain that way until the federal, state and municipal governments adopt policies designed to provide more jobs and job-training, to boost government benefits and to stem the outflow of jobs from the inner city to the suburbs.
But programs for children such as Head Start and the Beethoven School Project only touch one side of the problem. As the Southport Institute’s Chisman points out: “School reform will not solve the problem of literacy: The 20 to 30 million adults with inadequate basic skills are already out of school.” Something must be done to upgrade the level of adults in the work force and of those who are looking for work, Chisman says--and it must be done very soon.
Some such efforts already are under way. Midway between Capitol Hill and the slums of Anacostia in southeast Washington, Evelyn Greene, a retired social worker, teaches a small reading class at the headquarters of PLAN. Her pupils are Geraldine--a heavy-set, eager woman in her 30s who recently moved to Washington from South Carolina--and James, a gray-haired man in his 50s who likes to guffaw at his own mistakes. James says he enrolled mainly so “I can read Scriptures in church on Sundays.” Geraldine wanted, among other things, to learn how to fill out job applications.
Greene, a warm and good-humored mentor, wanted to know if Geraldine was still reading a book that she had taken out of the library. Geraldine said she had stopped. “Oh, I like it all right,” she said, “but it’s getting hard. There are difficult words.”
In his Southport Institute report, whose recommendations have been widely endorsed by experts in the field, Chisman has proposed the creation of a Cabinet council on adult literacy--to coordinate a federal campaign against illiteracy--and a national center for adult literacy to exchange information about programs that work. Chisman says some $500 million in new financing would enable literacy educators to make “a quantum leap forward,” and he suggests that budget-makers could rechannel several billion dollars more from other federal programs. For example, the Family Support Act of 1988 already enables the Department of Health and Human Services to provide money to help welfare mothers improve their literacy, so that they can land jobs more easily. HHS officials “are just beginning to wake up to this and don’t know how to deal with it,” Chisman said. Without a federal agency to coordinate such efforts, he insists, such programs will go untapped.
The Senate has already passed a bill following many of Chisman’s recommendations, and the House is moving toward enactment of a similar bill. But it isn’t clear yet whether the White House will go along.
