Literacy – Spanning North America :: Cornwall ON :: Gettysburg PA :: Tucson AZ :: Cape Girardeau MO

Literacy: Spanning North America     

Tri Co Literacy

It’s All About Literacy For Volunteer

Glengarry News (Press Reader): 2.27.2019 by Steven Warburton

For the past two years, Apple Hill area resident Alison Tucker has been helping local residents improve their literacy skills. It doesn’t matter if they are recent immigrants or students looking to upgrade their skills, Mrs. Tucker will work with anyone who wants to enhance their English skills.

The England-born Mrs. Tucker, who worked as a nurse for 40 years and also taught at St. Lawrence College, does her volunteer work through the TriCounty Literacy Council, whom, she says, offered her the perfect retirement project.

“I was looking to do something that I love and I wanted it to be volunteer work,” she says. “I didn’t want to be tied to a schedule.”

The Cornwall-based TriCounty Literacy Council specializes in addressing adult literacy needs in the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry. It does this by helping upgrade literacy skills, prepare students for GEDs, conduct computer training and provide occupational training for entry-level positions.

Despite all of this, Mrs. Tucker says there isn’t a whole lot of awareness about the program in rural areas.  READ MORE >>

@LincolnIU12

Reading Changed His Life Forever

Gettysburg Times: 2.28.2019 by T.W. Burger

In a March 2002, interview with Times reporter Dick Watson, James Gourley said learning how to read changed his life forever.

“I never would have believed the opportunities that opened up as a result of knowing how to read,” he said.

“Now, I read everything I can get my hands on,” he said.

After a couple of years of work with the Adams County Literacy Council, he achieved his goal.

He was 40 years old at the time.

After that, he began speaking to students around the county on behalf of the literacy council. In 1996, he was awarded the Laubach Literacy’s national award of excellence and joined its national speaker’s bureau.

James R. Gourley Jr., of Orrtanna, died on Jan. 29, 2019, in the York Hospital. He was 71.

In the same Times interview, James revealed that his life before literacy had been one of shame and fear his lack of literacy would be found out. He fooled friends, neighbors, children and employers into thinking he was literate. At home, he would pretend to be too tired to play monopoly or help with homework.

Twice, he quit jobs because he was promoted to positions where he would have to deal with paperwork.

Instead, he went into construction work.  READ MORE >>

@LitConnectsAZ

Literacy Connects Aims To Improve Local Economy, Lives

Arizona Daily Star: 3.01.2019 by Ann Brown

Literacy Connects percolated from a 2007 regional town hall, which identified increasing literacy as the best way to ensure a prosperous economy and improved quality of life for everyone.

Town hall participants were shocked by the appalling fact that only 23 percent of Americans read proficiently, says Betty Stauffer, executive director of Literacy Connects.

In Arizona, an estimated 530,000 adults read at or below a fifth-grade equivalent, according to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy.

Literacy has a direct link to economic development. Employers want a well-trained, qualified workforce. It also has an impact on everyday lives of those who must read and comprehend things like contracts, voter guides and notes from children’s teachers.

Literacy Connects emerged in July 2011 after many meetings, facilitated discussions and strategic planning sessions about the best way to offer quality literacy services. Five organizations merged: Literacy Volunteers of Tucson, Reading Seed, Reach Out and Read Southern Arizona, Literacy for Life Coalition and Stories That Soar.  READ MORE >>

Cape Girardeau AEL

Literacy Center Branch Opens In Marble Hill

SE Missourian: 3.02.2019 by Dawn Bollinger

The Cape Adult and Literacy Center opened a new branch at the Bollinger County Library in January.

Getting an education matters; however, sometimes people do not have the opportunity to graduate from high school along with their peers.

The Adult Education and Literacy (AEL) program located in Cape Girardeau works to help rectify that situation. By offering HSET (High School Equivalency Test) classes to prepare students to take the HSET exam, formerly know as the GED, the center makes it possible for adults to advance in their current jobs or to begin new careers through advanced educational skills, or even to continue to college.

DESE (Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) put into place the guidelines for all Adult Education and Literacy programs in the state.

Adult Education and Literacy consists of three levels: Adult Basic Education, Adult Secondary Education, and English Language Acquisition classes. The program emphasizes basic skills such as reading, writing, math, and English language acquisition, if necessary.  READ MORE >>

Low Literacy Limits Half of Philadlephia Workforce Study Finds:

Low Literacy Limits Half of Phila. Workforce
Study Finds: Many of the working-age adults in the city fall short in math and reading, the research shows.
philly.com: June 28, 2009 by Jane M. Von Bergen

More than half of Philadelphia's working-age adults, about 550,000 people, cannot handle the basic arithmetic and reading necessary to succeed in the majority of jobs in the city.

"If you have low literacy, you have a labor market that doesn't welcome you," said Paul Harrington, a labor economist who created a study of workforce readiness for the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board.

The study will be released tomorrow.

The average Philadelphia score for prose literacy - meaning the ability to read simple instructions and pull some facts out of a paragraph - is 260 out of 500.

Yet people who are health-care technicians, secretaries, teachers, engineers, architects, scientists, computer technicians, drafters, managers, librarians, bankers, insurers, security guards, repairmen, and community organizers - the majority of jobs in Philadelphia - need higher scores, from 277 to 336, to accomplish their tasks.

In Philadelphia, 75 percent of the jobs require that level of literacy. Yet half of Philadelphia's work-age adults cannot handle the tasks.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > > >

While Harrington's study was conducted exclusively for Philadelphia, the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics provides some comparisons using 2003 literacy data.

Among the nation's major cities, Philadelphia is about average, with 22 percent of work-age adults achieving only the lowest literacy level. New York and Boston are slightly worse, and the District of Columbia, Chicago, Dallas, and Houston are slightly better. Los Angeles is considerably worse, and Phoenix and Baltimore are considerably better.

The Harrington study of Philadelphia, which marries the 2003 national literacy data with 2005 local demographic information from the U.S. Census, comes at a time when national attention is focused on workplace training as part of President Obama's stimulus plan.

Even though adult literacy is a key component in employment, it sometimes falls through the cracks, said Sallie Glickman, chief executive officer of the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > > >Glickman estimates that $12 million a year for seven years (or $84 million) spent on work specific intensive literacy courses would net more than $370 million in taxes and savings in the city as workers earning more would pay more in taxes and would require less of the city services connected with poverty.

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Literacy challenges, said David Donald, chief executive of PeopleShare Inc., a Center City staffing agency, mean that workers cannot find jobs.

"Companies are increasingly requiring people to use a computer just to apply for a job," said Donald, who serves on the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board. "We know some people don't know how to use a computer."

If literacy is a problem for employers, it is a bigger problem for those who cannot read. READ MORE !

NAAL Supplemental Studies: Basic Reading Skills and the Literacy of the America's Least Literate Adults:

Basic Reading Skills and the Literacy of the America's Least Literate Adults: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) Supplemental Studies: NCES 2009481

The 2003 NAAL assessed the English literacy skills of a nationally representative sample of 18,500 U.S. adults, age 16 and older. It was the 1st national assessment since the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS).

The Adult Literacy Supplemental Assessment (ALSA) was given to adults unable to successfully answer the core literacy tasks. Instead of completing the main literacy assessment, these adults completed the ALSA. The Fluency Addition to NAAL (FAN) was given to all adults who participated in the NAAL project following the completion of the main literacy assessment or the supplemental assessment.

The Adult Literacy Supplemental Assessment [ ALSA ] and the Fluency Addition to NAAL [ FAN ] look at the literacy strengths and weaknesses of the least literate adults, those whose literacy level would prevent them from completing the "main NAAL."

ALSA measured basic, word-level literacy skills. It consists of 31 tasks such as letter identification, number identification, word identification, and word reading, and 13 tasks that assess higher literacy skills, such as text searching and inference. There also are 35 tasks related to background knowledge.
~ What letter is this?
~ Please read this [number] for me.
~ Please point to the word "water."
~ What does the label say people should do if they take too much of this?
~ What kind of information does this section provide?
~ Have you ever seen this before? [to determine participants' background knowledge]

FAN measured oral reading fluency: reading aloud, in English, from letter lists, digit lists, word lists and text passages. Directions and questions are provided in English or Spanish.

~ total words read correctly
~ total words read per minute (whether correctly or not)
~ words read correctly per minute
~ words read correctly as a percentage of total words read

Some Findings:

~ ~ 7 million adults, about 3%, could not complete even the most basic literacy tasks in the main assessment and were given the supplemental assessment.
~ ~ Adults who took the main literary assessment were able to read, on average, 98 words correctly per minute (wpm), in comparison to 34 wpm by those in the supplemental assessment.
~ ~ The average Basic Reading Skills [ BRS ] score for adults in the supplemental assessment was 64 points lower than the score for adults in the main assessment population.
~ ~ There was a higher percentage of older adults, 65 and older, in the supplemental assessment.
~ ~ The % of adults living below the federal poverty threshold in the Below Basic prose and supplemental assessment populations was also higher than the percentage of adults in these populations from other income categories. Among adults with Below Basic prose literacy, 44 % lived in families with incomes below the poverty line, as did 58 % of adults in the supplemental assessment.

Educators, policymakers, and others can also use this previously unavailable literacy information to develop programs and materials that aid the least-literate Americans in such areas as employment, health, and civic participation.

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 !

NAAL 2003: State and County Estimates

NAAL 2003: Indirect County and State Estimates of the Percentage of Adults at the Lowest Literacy Level for 1992 and 2003 just released.

The *2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) assessed the English literacy skills of a nationally representative sample of 18,500 U.S. adults (age 16 and older) residing in private households. NAAL is the first national assessment of adult literacy since the *1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS).

State estimates – Tables

~ in Full Report (pdf file), Table B-1:
Indirect estimates of the % lacking Basic prose literacy skills and corresponding credible intervals, by state: 2003

County estimates - Tables @
~ can view county-by-county for each state
~~~ note: can copy counties table and then sort by %'s
~ can view state numbers by individual state or compare 2 states
~ the only table of all 50 states is Table B-1 mentioned above

*2003 SAAL states: KY, MD, MA, MO, NY, and OK
*1992 SALS states: CA, IL, IN, IA, LA, NJ, NY, OH, PA, TX, and WA