Building a Nation of Readers

Nonprofit groups struggle to meet demand for literacy training

In Brownsville, Tex., an aging recreational vehicle trolls the streets, parking outside businesses and churches for several hours

at a time. But instead of seeking relaxation, the adults who climb aboard seek to improve their English-language skills by working on one of the dozen computer terminals inside. In areas of town where people can’t afford transportation to classes and are pressed for time because of work and family demands, the Mobile Learning Lab makes it easier for many residents to further their education.

“Adults have a whole lot of motivations for trying to improve their education level,” says Becky Parker, executive director of the Brownsville Adult Literacy Council, which runs the program. “Our students want to be able to communicate — at least on a minimal level — on their own, without the assistance of an interpreter, with their children’s teacher or doctor, or in certain business situations. They don’t want to be dependent on someone else for their English-language needs.”

Lack of Basic Skills

Scores of programs such as the one in Brownsville aim to help adults — both people with limited English skills and those who never finished school in the United States — improve their reading, math, and analytical skills so they can become more-involved parents and citizens, and more productive at work.

Demand is high for these kinds of services: The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, a study published in December by the federal government, found that 30 million adults did not have basic literacy skills, meaning they can’t use a television guide to discern what time a program airs or compare ticket prices for an event. And another 63 million adults possessed only basic literacy skills, meaning they can’t find a location on a map or determine the vitamin content in food by looking at reference materials.

Taken together, those figures account for nearly half the country’s 220 million people age 18 and older, according to 2004 U.S. Census estimates.

The numbers prompt deep concerns among literacy advocates, particularly for parents working to support families. “If you are not literate you can’t get a job,” says Mimi Minkoff, who oversaw grants at the Swalm Foundation, in Houston, which gave the Brownsville charity $225,000 in January to replace its 10-year-old mobile lab. “We want to help people get back on their feet and advance.”

Battling Obstacles

Teaching people to read is only part of the challenge. The federal government defines literacy as “an individual’s ability to read, write, speak in English, compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job, in the family of the individual, and in society.”

Because literacy has so many dimensions, private, community, and corporate foundations are taking a broad array of approaches to tackling the problem, including programs that give people skills to get better jobs and programs that aim to improve literacy in whole families.

However, several obstacles remain to increasing the pool of dollars for adult-literacy programs, including the need to raise the issue’s visibility, the difficulty of quantifying clients’ improvement, and the perception that adults who failed once in the educational system may not merit a second investment of time and money.

After a survey last summer by Zogby International, a polling organization in Utica, N.Y., rated adult literacy of only middling concern to most Americans, literacy advocates have redoubled their efforts to place the issue front and center for grant makers and government agencies, seeking to draw the connections between literacy and societal behavior in starker relief.

“Adult literacy problems cut through every social problem you can name: corrections, education, poverty, etc.,” says Gail Spangenberg, president and founder of the Council for Advancement of Adult Literacy, in New York. “The field needs to do a better job of presenting itself in the way givers in the real world give.”

Literacy and Employment

Raising adult literacy levels to help increase people’s earning power appeals to many grant makers, especially corporate philanthropies.

The Verizon Foundation, in Basking Ridge, N.J., has given $29-million to literacy programs across the country since 2004, banking that the results will help the company expand its pool of customers.

“If you can’t read, you are probably underemployed, or not employed, and you don’t have the purchasing power to buy our products,” says Patrick R. Gaston, the foundation’s president. “We can’t be successful if Americans are falling below the right reading levels.”

The foundation plans to make large gifts soon to groups that use technology to reach the largest possible number of people in need. But to receive those grants, charities must show they are helping people improve their livelihoods. “It needs to be about more than reading to kids when you go home,” says Mr. Gaston of potential programs. “It needs to have a work-force orientation.”

Helping adults with low literacy skills get better jobs also motivated a $751,000 grant the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, in Flint, Mich., gave the Boston charity Jobs for the Future last year.

The money will help adults with an eighth-grade education or less gain the skills and support they need to attend community college. The North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Foundation, in Research Triangle Park, has since added $470,000 over three years to the project.

“There are fewer jobs in the economy that pay well but don’t require a postsecondary degree,” says Jerry Rubin, a vice president at Jobs for the Future. “There has to be a way to improve success for low-literate and low-skilled adults to get into college.”

Foundations in Indiana and South Carolina have also supported adult-literacy programs to help improve the local pool of workers.

The Lilly Endowment, in Indianapolis, gave Indiana’s Chamber of Commerce Foundation a grant of $155,000 to study adult literacy and its impact on the state’s economy. The 2005 report found that about one in three adults had low literacy levels, and called upon employers to remedy the problem by providing more on-the-job literacy programs in return for better-equipped, more-productive employees.

“The needs are great and will only grow as time passes,” said the report. “The time to act is now.”

South Carolina’s shrinking textile industry helped spur the J. Marion Sims Foundation, in Lancaster, to pour more than $6.1-million since 2002 into literacy programs that will help adults and families. Fifteen charities, which include churches, a community college, and a community center, are receiving three years of support as well as management and fund-raising advice from foundation officials. “It’s not an overnight problem so it can’t be an overnight fix,” says Mary D. Henderson, the foundation’s program officer for special initiatives. “We didn’t want to fund a program for a year and then see it go away.”

‘Success Is Baby Steps’

However, tackling adult-literacy shortfalls requires more than money, at least one of the Sims grant recipients has found.

Four days a week, people ages 17 to 60 pass through the doors of a renovated bank building in rural Great Falls, S.C., to improve their reading, math, and technology skills at the Guided Academic Preparation Program, which received nearly $350,000 from the Sims Foundation in 2004.

While the classes aim to fill the gaps in people’s education and prepare them for better employment, obstacles abound, says Delores D. Fedrick, director of the Chester County Literacy Council, which runs the program.

Many clients lack transportation and child care to attend classes, so the charity uses some of its grant money to provide bus service. Work schedules and family obligations limit the time participants can spend in class. “They maybe average 10 hours a week but it’s 10 more hours than they had,” says Ms. Fedrick.

Improving one skill level takes at least 40 hours of classes, so if a student comes in with a fifth-grade education, as several have, it takes a long time to pass the general education development exam, or GED, and it’s tough to stay motivated.

To help spur people along, officials distribute prizes donated by local businesses, such as towels or a gas grill, for students who have the best attendance or show the most improvement. But the biggest prize of all, students have noticed, is using their new knowledge. One student told Ms. Fedrick the classes helped her determine which restroom said “women” at doctors’ offices, so she no longer had to wait for a fellow patient to show her the way.

“Success is baby steps,” says Ms. Fedrick, who helped start a cooperative with other Sims literacy-grant recipients, to share resources and prevent duplication of efforts.

But baby-step improvement can sometimes be a hard sell to grant makers, some charities say.

It can take participants at the South Baltimore Learning Center, which offers literacy classes to low-income people, two to five years to get their GED, says Sonia Socha, the group’s executive director.

“Foundations aren’t so patient sometimes,” she says.

The group had no trouble raising money from foundations to buy and renovate its building several years ago, but getting enough support to keep its programs operating has been more of a struggle. Last September the charity received an $8,500 grant from the Morris Goldseker Foundation, in Baltimore, to hire a fund-raising consultant to increase donations. “There are people on our doorstep who desperately want these classes, but we don’t have the funding yet,” says Ms. Socha.

The group had an additional fund-raising scare last year when the Bush administration proposed scrapping more than half of the $580-million federal adult-education budget for fiscal year 2006. About half the group’s $900,000 budget comes from federal and state grants. However, a coalition of advocates successfully lobbied to reinstate it and no cuts were proposed for adult education in fiscal year 2007.

Looking at Results

Creating further complications for literacy groups is that not all students aim for a GED or a college degree, so they don’t achieve results that are easy to tout to potential grant makers. Some clients of literacy groups simply wish to improve their skills enough to read the Bible, help their children with homework, or understand the culture of their new country through words.

For example, at the Volunteer English Program in Chester County, in West Chester, Pa., where immigrants learn English, one woman asked when it was appropriate to use the word “bull___,” says Carol Klauss, the program’s director. (The answer: not very often.)

And some literacy providers are not equipped to provide help for other issues adult learners might face, such as drug addiction or homelessness.

The Wallace Foundation, in New York, spent $18-million over 10 years, ending in 2002, on adult-literacy programs and research. It made big grants to 15 libraries around the country, but the grants did not do much to improve the literacy levels of the participants.

“Students faced a variety of situations that really limited their ability to persist,” says Edward Pauly, director of research and evaluation at the foundation. In a follow-up report, the grant maker recommended ways to incorporate more services, such as child care and referrals to substance-abuse programs, into literacy programs to help achieve better results.

Literacy for the Whole Family

Melanie Styles, program officer for work-force development at the Abell Foundation, in Baltimore, which has provided $155,000 to literacy programs, acknowledges the difficulty in assessing progress.

“It’s a struggle for a lot of literacy programs because their outcomes are so diverse,” she says. “When you can’t quantify it, it’s hard to get funding.”

However, the Fannie Mae Foundation, in Washington, found a way to mesh adults’ varied literacy needs with tallying the accomplishments of the charities it supports.

Instead of expecting a certain number of participants to find jobs or earn degrees, foundation officials set a three-year time frame for 10,000 adults to meet “learning goals” they set for themselves, says Stacey D. Stewart, the foundation’s president.

The grant program began last year and has so far committed $2.1-million, including $425,000 to D.C. Learns, a literacy coalition, to set up a hotline to help residents of the city find an adult-literacy program that matches their needs; collect information about literacy in the city, including the people served and services provided; and pay for activities for literacy providers that improve their teaching practices and program management.

If parents can’t read, likely the next generation can’t either.

“When parents read to their children, their children are better readers,” says Sharon Darling, who founded the National Center for Family Literacy, in Louisville, Ky., in 1989. “If parents don’t have literacy skills or have never been read to, or they have never found joy in a book, it’s really difficult for them to make that transition.”

To overcome the problem, foundations have poured millions into programs that jointly work to improve literacy skills of children, parents, and others who take care of youngsters. For example, the National Center for Family Literacy has attracted $23-million since 1991 from Toyota Motor North America, in New York, which has helped start programs in 24 states.

Family-literacy programs take many shapes, but at the core they encourage parents to interact with children in an environment that promotes learning. Last month, the center received $286,203 from the UPS Foundation, in Atlanta, to start a program at Salvation Army sites in Louisville and Atlanta where families will gather to eat dinner, then pair off into separate classes or activities for adults and children, and later come together for a joint activity.

Women who enroll at the Learning and Loving Education Center, in Morgan Hill, Calif., also hope to help themselves and their children. They come from 15 countries, and learn English in several classrooms while their toddlers attend preschool in another. The center aims to help people not just learn how to read and write but to feel comfortable in their new country and confident in themselves, says Sister Pat Davis, a Catholic nun who started the group 12 years ago.

“Many times the immigrant woman’s self-esteem is nonexistent,” she says. “They can have dreams also.”

In addition to language skills, the center arranges training in navigating the local school system and offers math, nutrition, and computer classes. The center’s inclusive approach to literacy attracted a $28,000 grant from the Community Foundation Silicon Valley, in San Jose, Calif., and a $30,000 grant from the Sobrato Foundation, in Cupertino, Calif.

“Adult literacy is really talking about acquiring basic skills to be successful,” says Jeff Sunshine, director of programs for the Silicon Valley foundation. “If you can get to these folks earlier and empower them with a set of skills, they are more apt to solve their own problems later in life.”

Lynn Reed, executive director of Literacy Volunteers of Maricopa County, in Phoenix, wishes more local donors would take a similar long view in supporting adult literacy.

In Arizona, she says, there’s a waiting list for services and it’s “extremely challenging” to raise money for adult-literacy programs. “There is some thinking, in some minds, that these people had the chance and didn’t take the opportunity,” says Ms. Reed. “You want to say to these kids who are dropping out, ‘No, you don’t get a second chance’?”

Adopting that view would be a blow to the millions of adults who need assistance as well to the nation’s economy, which needs skilled workers in order to compete with other countries, says John Comings, director of the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy, at Harvard University. “Ninety-three million people don’t have the skills they need to be successful in the 21st century,” he says. “Society as a whole should look at ways to get over this problem.”