Whether they like the attention or not, the nation's estimated 20-60 million "functional illiterates" are in the spotlight. Once they were simply passed up for jobs because there were so many more qualified people to choose from. Those who managed to get work got by because the literacy and technical requirements of most jobs weren't great.
All that has changed. There are more jobs available, but, according to the Bureau of the Census, fewer 18-24-year-olds to fill them and even fewer with the skills to handle the new technical requirements of work. In 1981, there were more than 30 million 18-24-year-olds available for work. By 1995, there will be only 24 million. There's already stiff competition between business and the military for the 44% of this age group who won't go on to postsecondary education. It's estimated that by 1995 the military will need one of every three high-school graduates to maintain the supply and quality they now get by recruiting one in eight.
One result of this shortage is continuing pressure on schools to produce larger numbers of young adults with necessary and increasingly sophisticated job skills. But it also means that business and the military will have to accept many more who don't meet those standards - now commonly referred to as "functional illiterates" - and provide them with the skills they need. Unfortunately, traditional remediation and training programs are costly, and their success rate isn't great. What's to be done?
These startling figures and themes form part of the analysis in Training - The Competitive Edge by Jerome M. Rosow and Robert Zager of the Work in America Institute (WIAI, Jossey-Bass, 1998). The book responds to the question of "what's to be done?" by discussing the issues and strategies employers, unions and public agencies need to understand about effective training and development programs for new technology. The book is rich in information, but the chapter on "functional illiterates" is an eye-opener, with special implications for education reform. That chapter is based on a WIAI paper by Thomas G. Sticht, President Applied Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Inc., San Diego, CA).
According to the authors, employers faced with hiring increasing numbers of young adults who score low on basic skills tests need not despair. "Most of the people alleged to be functionally illiterate neither are nor consider themselves to be so." The authors cite a series of Department of Defense studies the reading skills of young adults. The concept of literacy was divided into three levels, with low literacy meaning below 5th grade in reading, midlevel literacy as grades 5. 0-9. 9 in reading ability, and high literacy as anything above that. According to this division, only 5% of young adults are in the low group, 4 7% are midlevel literates and 48% are in the high group.
"As far as business and industry are concerned, most of the literacy problems they encounter will have to do with the 4 7% thus classified as midlevel literates. Despite the popular impression that midlevel literates are word-blind incompetents barely able to cope in our complex society, the crucial fact is that these people can read " ( emphasis added)
The second reason employers don't have to despair about the potential of this 47% of "functional literate" is that "they often surpass more literate people mastering technical skills." The key, as E.D. Hirsch has pointed out about cultural literacy, is extent of background knowledge. For instance, the authors point out that "many highly literate women (as well as men) do poorly with technical materials about which they are poorly informed (for example, concerning automobile maintenance). Obversely, a relatively low level of basis skills may suffice for a reader highly familiar with the contents."
Dramatic evidence that the level of reading skill needed in any field is related to the reader's background knowledge comes from a Navy research project. When a group was given reading materials at an 11.3 grade level, those who knew nothing about the subject needed to be better than 11.3 readers to understand the unfamiliar materials. But those who had the highest level of background knowledge could read the 11. 3 materials even if they were only at a 6th grade reading level!
With all this encouraging news about the capabilities of a large often-maligned and under-valued segment of our population, why do employers avoid hiring them or claim they're untrainable - and why do schools continue to fail to develop their potential?
There's probably not just one answer to this question, but one big piece of it jumps out of this chapter: we are educating and training a large segment of our population with a traditional approach that does not work well for them - and when they are not successful, we give them more of the same old thing.
As the authors put it, "What midlevel literates lack is skill in the processing of knowledge and information (that is, analysis, reasoning, language). That is why they find it difficult to absorb large amounts of information quickly, when it is presented in complex textbooks or manuals and taught by the collegiate model of assigned readings, lectures, and paper-and-pencil tests." But the "standard approach to technical training or education follows the collegiate model. ... This model aggravates the midlevel literate 's difficulties in learning, because it demands the possessions of the very skills they are lacking. " ( emphasis added)
If this is so, we are wasting millions of productive lives and spending billions of unproductive dollars because we are stuck in a traditional model of education and training, even as its failures pile up.
It doesn't have to be that way. Rosow and Zager describe programs that broke the traditional training mold and worked well for "midlevel literates" whose chances of job success were deemed near hopeless. These were vocational programs for out-of-school young and mature adults, so we can't automatically generalize to schools. But all of them taught basic along with vocational skills. The difference was that basic skills were taught in a "hands-on" way, in the context of real tasks and materials.
That's the difference - and message - that the majority of education reformers who still think that the only way to raise achievement levels is to get teachers to work harder and give a better lecture or use a better textbook or simply raise course requirements ought to think about.