-----Original Message-----
From: tsticht at znet.com [mailto:tsticht at znet.com] 
Sent: Friday, December 09, 2005 1:26 PM
To: marie.cora at hotspurpartners.com; jataylor at utk.edu; blv1 at psu.edu;
dgreenberg at gsu.edu
Subject: Have We Flat-Lined in Reading?

November 25, 2005

Have We "Flat-Lined" After Thirty Years of Intensive Care for Reading?

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

Over thirty years ago the United States admitted reading instruction
into
the intensive care unit of the nation's "Reading Failure Prevention and
Remediation Hospital." Educational researchers, educators, government
funding agencies, private foundations, publishers, and numerous citizen
groups rushed in to administer emergency care with programs such as Head
Start, then Early Head Start, numerous private preschools, kindergarten,
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), other special
programs, 
and thousands of off-the-shelf books telling parents how to teach their
infants and preschoolers how to read at home.

Unfortunately, data from the National Center for Education Statistics
released this year indicate that, despite heroic efforts, with costs
easily
in the range  of 500 billion to one trillion dollars, the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the nation's indicator of the
health of the reading instruction patient, has flat-lined. From 1971 up
to
2004, reading scores for 9, 13 and 17 year olds are so flat that if you
were a patient in an intensive care unit and had your health monitoring
indicators go as flat as the 30-year NAEP data you would be declared
dead!

A graph of average scores on the NAEP for 9, 13, or 17 year olds for the
thirty year period from 1971 to 2004, on a scale ranging from 200 to
around
320 scale scores, shows that 9 year olds increased from 208 in 1971 to
215
in 1980, then fell to 209 in 1990 and then rose again to 219 in 2004.
This
is only 4 scale score points higher than in 1980.  This is evidence of
ups
and downs over a thirty year period but no real improvement. There is a
similar lack of evidence of any improvement for 13 and 17 year olds over
this period.

The lack of evidence for gains by 9 year olds is made even more
apparent,
and disappointing,  when the data for 9 year olds at differing
percentiles
of achievement are examined. In 1971 students at the 90th percentile
scored
260, then rose gradually to 266 in 1990 and then fell to 264 in 2004.
Nine
year olds at the 50th percentile scored as indicated above. Really
poorly
reading students, those at the 10th percentile scored 152 in 1971, then
rose to 165 in 1980 and then rose again to 169 in 2004, though the
latter
was not statistically greater than 25 years ago in 1980.

Thirteen year olds  at the 10th percentile scored 208 in 1971, rose to
213
in 1988, and then fell to 210 in 2004. The least able 17 year old
readers,
those at the 10th percentile, scored 225 in 1971, rose to 241 in 1988,
and
then fell to 227 in 2004.

The data for some three decades do not show great increases in reading
achievement for 9, 13, or 17 year olds at various percentile ranks. For
the
most part, whether at the 90th percentile, the middle 50th percentile,
or
the bottom, the 10th percentile, student achievement has fluctuated a
bit
from assessment to assessment, but on balance does not seem to have made
much, if any improvement, and certainly not improvement that would have
any
significant practical consequences.

The NAEP data do show that as children go up through primary,
elementary,
and secondary school, they do get better at reading across the
percentile
spectrum. But in 2004 the bottom ten percent of 17 year olds scored
below
the median for 13 year olds, and were just 6 scale score points above
the
median for 9 year olds. These poorly scoring students will no doubt be
those who will later discover the real life importance of literacy and
will
enter into adult basic education to try to gain skills needed to support
themselves and their families.

Data for Adults

It should be recalled that adults are children who have grown up. The
purpose of reading instruction and other education in the K-12 system is
to
produce literate adults. The 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS)
provides some data bearing  on the issue of whether tens of billions of
dollars in compensatory or remedial education in the K-12 system have
brought about increases in adult literacy. The NALS assessed adult
literacy
using three scales: Prose, Document and Quantitative. A report on the
Literacy of Older Adults in America, from the National Center for
Education
Statistics in Washington  DC, November 1996 (p. 35) reported data on the
age
and literacy  proficiency for adults with varying amounts of education.
Using just the data for adults with high school diplomas or GEDs, and
just
the Prose scale, because all three scales have similar findings, the
average literacy proficiencies for three age groups were:

  Age                Proficiency
  16-24                274
  25-59                273
  60-69                262

  Adults in the 16 to 24 age range got their diplomas or GEDs in 1992 to
1984.
  Adults in the 25 to 59 age range got their diplomas or GEDs in 1983 to
1949.
  Adults in the 60 to 69 age range got their diplomas or GEDs in 1948 to
1939.

Similar findings held across age groups for adults with 0-12 or some 
post-secondary education, though with differences in the proficiency
scores
due to less or more education relative to the high school diploma/GED.


>From these NALS data, it appears that for adults graduating from high

school
 across this 62 year period, their literacy skills do not vary much  on
the
average. This would seem to indicate that regardless of whether the
schools
emphasized a code (phonics) or meaning (whole  language) emphasis during
this time, or had the benefits of feedback from  the National Assessment
of
Educational Progress (NAEP)  from the 1970s up  to the time of the NALS
assessment,  once adults get out of high school and spend some time in
other activities, excepting post-secondary  education, their literacy
skills don't differ very much, at least for the high school  graduate
adults sampled in 1992 and assessed using the functional literacy tasks
of
the NALS.

Today, as in the past, tens of billions of dollars are being spent in
special programs to raise the literacy skills of children, while at the
same time expenditures for adult literacy education have been and still
are
trivial. This goes on despite the fact that for the last 30 years the
K-12
system has been graduating millions of young adults below the 20th and
10th
percentiles of reading as measured by the NAEP, with no apparent
improvement
in the proficiency scores for students at these percentile ranks, and
there
is little evidence that this can or will be turned around anytime soon.

It is extraordinary that policies that attempt to take children away
from
their families and "fix" them in the institutional settings of
preschools
or the public schools, and then return them to their debilitating home
lives,  still command such massive amounts of funding, while there is
great
reluctance to acknowledge and meet the needs of the children's parents
for
continuing education.  This situation prevails despite the extensive
research which exists to suggest that, through the intergenerational
transfer of language and literacy, it seems highly likely that serious
investments in the education of adults could improve the educability of
their children.

Given the data of the last thirty years indicating mostly failure to
improve
children's learning of language and literacy in the schools and up into
adulthood, even those at the 10th percentile, it seems that some new
strategy for improving children's and hence adult's literacy is called
for.
There is a grossly under-funded and under-developed Adult Education and
Literacy System (AELS) in the United States with over 3,000 programs and
close to 3 million enrollees per year. But the federal level of funding
is
less than $225 per enrollee, and even with state contributions added in,
the per enrollee is just some $650 averaged across the U. S. This is
less
than one tenth what is spent per enrollee on Head Start, where it is
mostly
the children of these poorly literate adults who are being served.

Perhaps now, after spending 30 years trying, and apparently
"flat-lining" in
our attempts to raise the reading achievement of children through
schemes
that largely ignore the literacy education needs of the children's
parents,
it may be time to acknowledge the existence of this system and to
provide
the funding and other resources it needs to produce genuine and
extensive
improvements in the literacy and lives of  adults.

Massive injections of adult literacy education might just be what is
needed
to resuscitate a  reading instruction patient that is presently in a
deep
coma. And we should do this before the patient goes completely
brain-dead.

Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education
2062 Valley View Blvd.
El Cajon, CA 92019-2059
Tel/fax: (619) 444-9133
Email: tsticht at aznet.net