America’s Welfare Depends on Improved Literacy Rates

To the Editor:

While it was gratifying to see that The Chronicle deems the issue of adult literacy worthy of a cover story, we were disappointed with the article (“Building a Nation of Readers”) that ran in your April 20 issue.

While the article adequately described the programmatic initiatives that various foundations and corporations have funded, you missed an opportunity to describe why the issue is critically important and worth the investment.

The significance of the recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy released by the U.S. Department of Education is not, as you suggest in the article, that 30 million adults in the United States are unable to decipher a television guide.

The significance is that in an increasingly complex, information-driven society and economy, almost half the adult population — 93 million — simply do not have the skills that they need to meet current and future employer needs, support their families, assist with their children’s education, attain and sustain economic independence, and participate fully in the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. In short, low literacy is a clear indicator of limitations on one’s quality of life.

Research demonstrates that adult low literacy can be correlated with every significant social and economic issue that we face as a nation, but the single most telling point about adult low literacy is its relationship with child literacy.

Children whose parents have low literacy skills tend to be at risk to become low-literate adults no matter how early their schooling begins. Breaking this intergenerational cycle of low literacy will require a major commitment of time, energy, and resources at the federal, state, and local levels.

We, and other adult-literacy advocates, applaud the efforts of organizations like Verizon and the Dollar General Corporation to devote philanthropic dollars to addressing this issue; however, the harsh reality in the United States is that, even taking all available philanthropic and public dollars together, the adult basic-education and literacy system serves only three million adult students a year out of a potential population of 30 million or more.

While the adult-literacy advocates mentioned in your article were successful at preventing a reduction in the annual federal appropriation of $570-million last year, that is hardly a victory. Current adult-literacy public policy is simply insufficient to address the problem.

We feel compelled to point out that ProLiteracy Worldwide financed the Zogby International survey referenced in your article. We commissioned this study in order to ascertain the level of public awareness about the issue of adult literacy.

It is not an accurate reflection of the findings to say that the issue is of “middling concern to most Americans.” In fact, most participants said that they thought the issue was of great concern and that they would be willing to invest more to solve it; many respondents said that they would be willing to suffer a tax increase to do so.

Robert Wedgeworth
President and Chief Executive Officer
ProLiteracy Worldwide
Syracuse, N.Y.

Editor’s note: The survey commissioned by ProLiteracy Worldwide found that 42 percent of Americans rated the literacy problem a three on a scale of one to five. In a report that mentioned the poll, the organization wrote, “Americans view low literacy in adults as neither a particularly large nor a particularly small problem for the country.”