Adult Literacy - California

Small Good News: Extra! Extra! (Help Someone) Read All About It. Huffington Post: May 4, 2009 by Karen Stabiner

If you can read this, imagine for a moment that I'm using the Cyrillic alphabet. A couple of letters here and there might seem familiar, and you might be able to guess a word or two. But mostly you'd be out of luck, which is how illiterate adults, one in seven Americans, feel all the time - 3.4 million of them in California alone.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 23% of California adults lack what the Department of Education calls "prose literacy" skills. They may be able to decipher prescription instructions or a DMV application, but they will not be reading their kids to sleep any time soon.

I mention California because we're broke, hanging onto our statewide bank balance by the slimmest of threads, 5,000 teachers fired and counting, and under those circumstances it is depressing but not surprising that the state intended to eliminate adult literacy funding from the budget. And yet at the moment statewide programs are still alive, because advocates have fought back to make sure they got continued support -- because people like Kristi Breisch feel that teaching adults to read is both an honorable and a practical thing to do. Breisch has worked for several regional offshoots of the California Library Literacy Services program, as well as for ProLiteracy Worldwide; for fifteen years she's been involved in what is essentially a save-the-word campaign, to ensure that adults to want to learn to read can find a place to do so. READ MORE !