Return-Path: <nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id e9HIhJ927906; Tue, 17 Oct 2000 14:43:19 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2000 14:43:19 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <s9ec646d.036@langate.gsu.edu> Errors-To: alcrsb@langate.gsu.edu Reply-To: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: "Daphne Greenberg" <ALCDGG@langate.gsu.edu> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-WOMENLIT:1062] Re: October Forbes Article re: "The X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise Internet Agent 5.5.3.1 Status: O Content-Length: 7877 Lines: 47 Has anyone had a chance to look at the Forbes article that Robert mentioned in his posting? Anyone feel like "chatting" about it? I am curious to know what listserv members think about it and for those of you who have not/cannot download it, I have copied the article for you to read (you can find it at the end of my message). I have the following thoughts/questions: 1. I think that the author is completely missing the boat about prisoners and poor literacy. He asks "whether we really want our bank robbers and drug dealers to become more proficient in dealing with life's complexities." That is not the reason why people cite the high percentage of inmates' low literacy skills! People do it for 2 reasons: a) to explain the urgency of providing literacy skills to both children and adults (the implication is the hope that at least for some of the inmates, if they didn't also have the obstacles of low literacy, they might not have had to resort to crime), b) the inmates need literacy skills that will help them (if they want) to have one less obstacle to getting jobs and higher education when they get out of jail. 2. The other thing that really stuck out for me was his statement: "The tests for literacy have increasingly come to look like IQ tests" What do people think about this? 3. Some people at NIFL are toying with the kind of response that should be formulated. I am wondering if a response is the best way to approach this kind of article. Is it better to ignore-I mean do we do more harm by calling attention to it, or is the attention already there, and therefore we should respond. If we respond, what do you think would be the best way to respond? Here is the article for those of you who have not had a chance to read it: The Crisis That Isn't Dan Seligman, Forbes Magazine, 10.02.00 A CASUAL READER, OR EVEN A casual illiterate, could be forgiven for assuming that illiteracy presents a huge national problem. Coming at us from all directions are authority figures proclaiming that it is a grave threat. George W. Bush has called it a "national emergency." Surveys find that 30% of the adults in Appalachia are "functionally illiterate." The figure for Dallas is said (by the National Institute for Literacy) to be 29%. One learns from the U.S. Department of Education Web site that between 40 million and 44 million people "read at a level less than necessary for full participation in society"--whatever that is. Most of these folks are possibly among the 60 million people who could, according to Time Warner, benefit from more literacy education, like the company's own Time to Read program. Several years ago the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) was encouraging you to worry about the fact that 70% of the U.S. prison population is illiterate. You have possibly never read an article stating that the country's illiteracy problem is much overblown. Until now, that is. Anybody trying to get up to speed on literacy instantly hits a discouraging speed bump: There is no agreed-upon definition of literacy. Instead, as you have possibly already intuited from the examples above, there are infinite data based on endlessly shifting standards. Take that 70% prison figure, for example. It comes with a rather daunting footnote, which states: "About seven in ten prisoners ... are apt to experience difficulty in performing tasks that require them to integrate or synthesize information from complex or lengthy texts or to perform quantitative tasks that involve two or more sequential operations and that require the individual to set up the problem." This raises two questions: One is whether we really want our bank robbers and drug dealers to become more proficient in dealing with life's complexities. (The NCES answer is a resounding yes: "Literacy programs for inmates cannot afford to be shortchanged.") The other question is: On that rather demanding definition of literacy, what proportion of the nonprison population is illiterate? Answer: almost 50%. Severely criticizing the arbitrariness of all these measures is an excellent entry on illiteracy in the Encyclopedia of Human Intelligence, published by Macmillan in 1994. The entry notes that differing popular definitions have yielded illiteracy estimates for American adults ranging from less than 1% (when the standard is an ability to sign your name) to more than 90% (when the standard is an ability to delineate the difference between two employee fringe benefits after reading a detailed description of each). A cherished detail from the encyclopedia is the figure on ability to comprehend a New York Times editorial. Of this challenging task the encyclopedia states: "More than 60% could not understand the main idea." My heart goes out to them. Perhaps your biggest surprise in exploring all these data will be the revelation that "illiteracy" nowadays does not refer merely to reading ability. When you see references to "functional illiteracy," you can generally assume that what's being gauged is a whole range of mental abilities. The most recent national sample of literacy is a 1992 study, done under contract for the NCES by Educational Testing Service (ETS)--the outfit best known for SATs and other college placement tests. The study, based mainly on written examinations and interviews conducted with a nationally representative group of 13,600 adults, looked at "prose literacy" (ability to comprehend different kinds of writing), "document literacy" (ability to deal with timetables, read maps, fill out forms, etc.) and "quantitative literacy" (e.g., ability to calculate monthly mortgage payments, given some information about annual percentage rates). In each of these categories the ETS ranked individuals in one of five groups. But note that what's being measured here is not what you've been thinking of all your life as "literacy." The cluster of abilities being examined is obviously a proxy for plain old "intelligence." The tests for literacy have increasingly come to look like IQ tests, and there is every reason to believe that the test-score distributions look very much like that familiar old bell curve--the one made famous a few years back, when it was the title of a bestseller by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. All of which means, inevitably, that there is a continuum of abilities from the bottom to the top and that the population of people with inadequate abilities can be made arbitrarily large by the placement of the cutoff line on that curve. Just as it always has been, life is tougher for those in the left tail. But that's hardly anything new. And it's hardly a crisis. If you want to say that 34 million adult Americans are illiterate, feel free. But please do not tell us that government or any other institution is going to transform this situation. It will forever be true that those in the lower percentiles are not contributing as much as we are, and they and millions of employers would wish them to. If your figure is 34 million, then you are implicitly telling us that the lowest one-sixth of the population do not meet your standards for literacy. But it will take more than an act of Congress to get them up to the 17th percentile. >>> irrobert@swbell.net 10/16 10:39 AM >>> You can find this piece at: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/1002/6609086a.html You just may want to respond to Mr. Seligman! Robert Pinhero Robert M. Pinhero Centex Consulting PO Box 684031 Austin, Texas 78768-4031 Voice: 512-236-1052 Cellular: 512-626-1668 Fax: 603-590-4691 Business email: mailto:centex_consulting@yahoo.com Literacy related email: mailto:irrobert@swbell.net Literacy web sites: http://members.aol.com/tallnet/tallnet.html http://members.aol.com/sclanet/index.htm
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