[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 38 (Tuesday, March 19, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2338-S2339]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  ADULT EDUCATION FOR FAMILY LITERACY

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, a former valued staff member of mine 
who is now working with the National Institute for Literacy, Alice 
Johnson, sent me an article that appeared in the magazine, Adult 
Learning. It is titled, Adult Education for Family Literacy by Thomas 
G. Sticht, President of the Applied Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences 
Company in El Cajon, CA. In the midst of budget cutting I hope we will 
not be short-sighted on this matter of literacy.
  There has been a great deal of talk about the growing disparity 
between the top one-fifth of our population and the lower one-fifth of 
our population in terms of income.
  One of the most effective ways of lifting the lot of the bottom one 
fifth is to make sure that they have the basic skills that are needed 
in our society, and that certainly includes reading. There is no single 
magic bullet for solving this problem. It is a mosaic with many pieces. 
But literacy is one of the pieces.
  The article points out that when we educate adults better, they then 
feel comfortable in schools and demand and get better education for 
their children.
  Two years ago, I visited 18 schools in the impoverished areas of 
Chicago and one of the things I heard from teachers over and over was 
that they wished they had more parental involvement, but frequently the 
parents do not feel comfortable coming into a school situation because 
they cannot read and write.
  If we diminish our future by cutting back on literacy funding 
everyone loses.
  I urge my colleagues to read the article by Thomas Sticht which I ask 
to be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

             [From Adult Learning, November/December 1995]

                  Adult Education for Family Literacy

                         (By Thomas G. Sticht)

       For nearly a half century, the United Nations Educational, 
     Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has led a 
     worldwide movement to promote the development of literacy 
     programs for adults and primary education for children. Many 
     successes have been documented in both of these programs. 
     Over the last quarter century, the rate of literacy among the 
     earth's adults has declined, but because of population 
     growth, the absolute numbers of illiterate adults continued 
     to grow. However, at the outset of International Literacy 
     Year in 1990, both the rate and the absolute numbers of adult 
     illiterates had declined. Still, there were an estimated 921 
     million adult illiterates in the underdeveloped nations of 
     the world, and some 42 million low literates in developed 
     nations.
       Paralleling the growth of adult literacy education in the 
     world, there has been an increase in the numbers of children 
     enrolled in primary education. Over the last four decades 
     enrollments in underdeveloped nations' primary schools rose 
     from about one-third to over seventy percent of primary aged 
     children. Yet, at the beginning of International Literacy 
     Year in 1990, UNESCO estimated that in developing countries 
     as a whole, some 386 million children and young adults aged 
     from six to seventeen years would not be attending school. 
     They are in a trajectory toward beginning the next generation 
     of illiterate adults.


                            Family Literacy

       In 1994, the International Year of the Family signaled a 
     new direction for adult and childhood literacy programs 
     worldwide, one that unites adults' literacy and children's 
     primary education. Taking stock of research and experience 
     over the last half century, the United Nations noted that:
       The family constitutes a context of informal education, a 
     base from which members seek formal education, and should 
     provide a supportive environment for learning. Literacy has a 
     dramatic effect on the dissemination of ideas and the ability 
     of families to adopt new approaches, technologies and forms 
     of organization conducive to positive social change. Often 
     affected by early school leaving or dropping out, literacy is 
     a prime conditioner of the ability of families to adapt, 
     survive and even thrive in rapidly changing circumstances. 
     Attention should also be given to promoting equal 
     opportunities for girls and young women.
       Whereas in the past, there has been tacit recognition of 
     the importance of the literacy education of adults as a key 
     factor in promoting the attendance of children in primary 
     education, the United Nations' statement makes clear that, 
     rather than being regarded as a secondary institution to the 
     schools as educational agents, the family is each society's 
     first and most basic educational institution.
       There is evidence to suggest that as developing nations 
     move toward the educational and economic status of 
     industrialized nations, the family will play a greater role 
     in the educational achievement of children. Studies of 
     twenty-nine developing and industrialized nations examined 
     the relative contributions of school quality (e.g., number 
     and quality of textbooks, teacher's educational preparation) 
     versus family background factors (e.g., parents' education 
     levels) on children's achievement in science education. The 
     research revealed that, as nations moved from being less to 
     more developed, the quality of schools diminished as the 
     primary determinant of science achievement, and the influence 
     of family background factors increased. For instance, in 
     India, school quality accounted for ninety percent and home 
     factors only ten percent of the children's variation in 
     science achievement. In Australia, on the other hand, school 
     quality accounted for only twenty percent and home factors 
     eighty percent of the variation in science achievement.


                        family literacy programs

       The family literacy concept makes explicit what has 
     generally been implicitly understood, and recognizes the 
     family as an institution for education and learning, and the 
     role of parents as their children's first teachers. The 
     starting point for the development of human resources within 
     a culture is the family. Families provide an 
     intergenerational transfer of language, thought, and values 
     to the minds of their newborn infants and throughout the 
     formative years of their children's lives. Families provide 
     initial guidance in learning to use the cultural tools that 
     will be valued and rewarded within the culture. Families 
     interpret the culture for their children and they mediate the 
     understanding, use, and value placed on the cultural tools 
     for learning and education, of which the capstone tools are 
     language and literacy.
       This recognition of the intergenerational role that parents 
     play as family educators places a much higher premium on the 
     importance of adult education than has traditionally been 
     accorded. Up to now adult literacy education programs have 
     generally aimed at making adults literate while the business 
     of making the adults' children literate has been left to the 
     formal school system. Under the family literacy concept, 
     however, it is now recognized that, due to the 
     intergenerational transfer of cognitive skills, including 
     language and literacy, an investment in the literacy 
     education of adults provides ``double duty dollars.'' It 
     improves the educational level of adults and simultaneously 
     improves the educability and school success of the adults' 
     children.
       Family literacy programs differ from traditional adult 
     literacy programs in that they are designed to maximize the 
     probability that adults who receive literacy education will 
     actually succeed in transferring aspects of their new 
     beliefs, attitudes, knowledge, and skills intergenerationally 
     to their children.


    the centrality of adult education to national development goals

       In most nations, adult education occupies a tertiary 
     position to the formal schooling of

[[Page S2339]]

     children. However, as noted above, evidence now exists to 
     suggest that adult education, and particularly literacy 
     education for present and potential parents, should occupy a 
     central position in all governments' educational planning. 
     Four interrelated reasons for nations to support greater 
     investments in adult education are summarized below.
       1. Better Educated Adults Are More Productive for Society. 
     Supervisors in six manufacturing companies near Chicago 
     reported that adult literacy programs made improvements in 
     job training, job performance, promotability of participants, 
     and productivity, such as scrap reduction, reduced paperwork, 
     and less wastage. Other research found that more literate 
     workers who actually use their literacy skills at work may 
     increase their productivity as much as ten to fifteen 
     percent. Adult literacy education improves work today, 
     reforming schools for children takes decades.
       2. Better Educated Adults Provide Better Communities for 
     Learning. At AC Rochester, a supplier of components for 
     General Motors automobile manufacturing in New York State, 
     management, labor union members, and educators got together, 
     and provided adult literacy programs for employees. This 
     helped increase the local tax base for community services by 
     bringing in several new contracts, including a billion dollar 
     contract with Russia.
       3. Better Educated Adults Demand and Get Better Schooling 
     for Children. Wider Opportunities for Women in Washington, 
     DC, found that mothers in women's literacy programs spent 
     more time with their children talking about school, helping 
     them with their homework, taking them to the library, and 
     reading to them. They also said they spent more time going to 
     and helping with school activities, they talked more with 
     teachers about their children's education, their 
     children attended school more, showed improvements in 
     their school grades, test scores, and reading.
       4. Better Educated Adults Produce Better Educated Children. 
     Better educated parents send children to school better 
     prepared to learn, with higher levels of language skills, and 
     knowledge about books, pencils, and other literacy tools 
     needed for school and life. Better educated mothers have 
     healthier babies, smaller families, children better prepared 
     to start school, and children who stay in school and learn 
     more.
     Make Every Adult Basic Education Class a Family Literacy 
     Class
       The San Diego Consortium for Workforce Education and 
     Lifelong Learning (CWELL) operates an Action Research Center 
     (ARC) in the San Diego Community College District, Continuing 
     Education Division. In 1994, the ARC initiated research 
     orchestrated around the theme, ``make every adult basic 
     education class a family literacy class.'' The research 
     included the publication of a simple rating scale in one 
     issue of the Community Exchange, the newspaper that the ARC 
     publishes to disseminate R&D information into the ARC 
     community.
       The rating scale asks adults to rate how frequently they 
     perform various parenting activities such as reading to their 
     children, taking them to the library, helping with homework 
     and so forth. A tabulation of responses from 131 adults in 
     five different adult basic education and English as a Second 
     Language (ESL) programs indicated that adults vary greatly in 
     how often they engage in these kinds of activities that can 
     help transfer literacy to their children. These data provide 
     a baseline for comparing parenting activities before the ARC 
     introduces activities to ``make every adult education class a 
     family literacy class.''
       With sound evaluation of these programs, it should be 
     possible to demonstrate that ``double duty dollars'' can be 
     obtained through the intergenerational transfer of literacy 
     that takes place in adult basic skills education programs. 
     Governments and other sponsors of education programs should 
     know that they can obtain multiplier effects for their 
     investments in adult basic education. They should know that 
     by investing in the education of adults, they can improve the 
     education of children.

                          ____________________