**Event ID 26758**

Sandra L. Baxter: Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us today. My name
is Sandra Baxter. I am the Director of the National Institute For
Literacy and I am speaking to you from Washington DC. We are charged by
congress to provide national leadership on the issue of literacy across
the lifespan. An important part of the institute's mission is to serve
as a national resource for adult literacy programs and we serve as well
as a clearinghouse for research and resources on reading, reading
instruction and adult literacy. We are pleased today to host this forum
on the findings of the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. This study
known as the NAAL is our very first analysis of adult literacy in this
country in 10 years. The NAAL was conducted under the auspices of the
National Center for Education Statistics and the institute is pleased to
be working cooperatively with NCES to share these important findings.
This study, as I mentioned previously, is the first to look at our
nation's progress in adult literacy in well over a decade. It examines a
representative sample of adults in the United States over the age of 16.
The NAAL provides us with important information, information about
background factors associated with literacy and the skill levels of
adults in this country. The study also provides information about the
literacy needs of English language learners.

Today, we will not be focusing on those needs, but it will be the topic
of our future webcast and we hope that you will be able to join us at
that time. Our focus today is on the findings and the study about adults
with the lowest levels of literacy skills. This information should prove
useful to educators, practitioners, researchers, policy-makers and
others at all levels of government. It can be used to help improve adult
literacy programs and to improve targeted services for adult learners.
The NAAL's findings are vital to decisions that we make every day about
how to best serve our nation's adult learners.

Last January, in his State of the Union address, President Bush
announced the American Competitiveness Initiative. The initiative is
designed to encourage American innovation and strengthen our nation's
ability to compete in the global economy. The findings of the NAAL can
help us secure a better-trained, better-prepared future. Our aim is to
stimulate a vigorous and a productive conversation between the nation's
literacy experts, researchers, providers and policy-makers. Today's
forum is just one step in what we hope will become an ongoing national
conversation. Today, we will focus on the findings of the NAAL as they
pertain to adults who scored in the basic and below basic categories. We
will talk about what it means for basic skills instruction and what it
means too for workforce development program. We are very fortunate to be
joined by several nationally recognized experts to talk about this
topic. I know that you will find what you are about to hear useful and
thought provoking. I welcome all of you to take part in this most
important dialogue. Our presenters are this afternoon, Dr. Sheida White
who is the Project Officer for the National Assessment of Adult
Literacy. We also have joining us, Dr. John Strucker who is with this
National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy, and
finally we have Mr. Brian Bosworth, President and Founder of
FutureWorks. So we would like to get underway without further ado, we
would like to get underway now. Sheida?

Sheida White: Thank you Sandra and thanks for inviting me. As the
Project Officer of the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, I am very
pleased to be here and share with you findings from the 2003 NAAL. As
some of you may know, one of the main goals of NAAL is to give a
snapshot of how well adults perform in their day-to-day literacy
activities and to report their progress over time. Today, I am going to
focus on adults in the below basic and basic category only, not on
adults in the intermediate and proficient levels and not on their
progress over time. First, I will explain how we measure literacy, for
those of you who are not as familiar with NAAL and then I will talk
about the characteristics of adults in below basic and basic levels of
literacy. As you can see in bullet one, we measure the English literacy
of adults living in the United States. I want to emphasize the word
'English' here because there are a lot of people out there who are quite
literate in some other language but not English, but they would fall
into our category of non-literate in English.

Drawing your attention to the last bullet on the screen, you see that we
are assessing adults living in households as well as those who live in
prisons. And that is because we understand that there is a
disproportionate percentage of male minority young and poorly educated
adults and we want to make sure that we would increase their
representation of adults with these characteristics in the overall NAAL
sample.

Now here is our definition of literacy. In a nutshell, literacy to us is
the ability to comprehend and use written information with the emphasis
on the word 'use'. The NAAL definition is somewhat different from a
school-based definition of literacy, which focuses on learning to read
at earlier ages and reading to learn at later ages. In the case of
adults we are focusing on 'reading to do'. So, it's a very functional
definition of literacy.

Here are the three types of literacy that are assessed and having the
ability to perform in these three domains. We really enable adults to
comprehend and use written and printed material, again, which is our
definition of literacy. Oftentimes people confuse or do not distinguish
between prose and document literacy, but there is a great deal of
difference between prose and document and the kind of skills that is
required. Prose requires ability to read continuous texts like
editorials, text that is written in paragraphs and discourse and long
sentences. Documents, as we see on the other hand, relies on
non-continuous texts. Documents often contain just a single word or a
phrase and lot of blank spaces and then they display information
symbolically using graphical and special arrangements like graphs and
tables and charts and so forth. And then we have quantitative literacy,
which is the ability to use numbers that are embedded in either prose or
documents and do something with those numbers and do a variety of
computations and calculations. In this case, quantitative literacy is
somewhat different from numeracy which some of you may have heard. It's
not that it is different but it is more limited set of skills that are
required in quantitative literacy. Numeracy, in addition to quantitative
literacy skills, requires the ability to use formulas or have knowledge
of algebra and geometry.

Now, you may ask, why are we focusing on adults with below basic and
basic literacy?

The first reason is that there are three major features of NAAL that
allow us to make final distinctions among adults at the low end of
literacy. The first feature is our ability to separate those who could
not even speak English or Spanish to be able to communicate with the
interviewer and some of our interviewers were bilingual in English and
Spanish. They couldn\'t even be interviewed to tell about their age or
education or basic information. The second new feature is our new
supplemental assessment. This was designed for those whose literacy
skills were not up to the challenge of the main NAAL assessment. And the
third feature is our oral reading fluency assessment. Unfortunately, I
don\'t have any data for you today. That data will come later in the
fall. And again, like the supplemental assessment, this assessment
measures basic reading skills like decoding and word recognition. The
key difference between these two assessments, supplemental and oral
reading fluency assessment, is that these are at a word level as opposed
to the main assessment, which goes beyond that and it is at a sentence
level or paragraph level or a full discourse.

The second reason for focussing on adults with below basic and basic
literacy is that any data that adults have would have potential to help
adult education programs and other programs in their attempt to provide
more effective educational opportunities for all adults. I do want to
say that we are going to be reporting separately for adults who took the
supplemental assessment so that educators can see the unique needs of
this population as well.

And the third bullet, I was inspired by a statement I read on the
website of the Labor Department, which said that, I am going to read
this to you. Nearly two-thirds, which is over actually 67% of all the
jobs created over the next decade, will require a college degree. We
know from our own data that adults who are at the below basic and basic
levels typically end their education either before or after completing
high school. So these people do not go beyond high school, do not get
any college education.

Now I am going to go over...the next few slides will discuss the
results. I want to say that it\'s important to keep in mind that there
is always a margin of error that is associated with every level, because
I\'m going to be reporting on the four levels of literacy. Adults in one
level could be expected to perform tasks at the higher level even though
they could not do those tasks successfully with a high rate of
probability. We use four literacy levels. These levels were recommended
by the National Research Council, by a panel on performance levels in
adult literacy. First, let me start by giving you an example. What you
see on the screen is a blank certified mail receipt. The respondents
were told to...we gave them the name and address of a particular person
and we asked them to enter the name and address that we provided for
them in that form. So what they had to do was to search these documents
for the appropriate rows that were...the three rows that were sent
to...street and number and PO, state and zip code. So what is it that
they had to do in order to answer this question correctly? They had to
search...this is a form of a document. They had to search the document
and their familiarity with this genre and the structure could have
helped them respond to this question. They had to have some vocabulary
knowledge. They had to understand what zip code meant. They had to
understand the meaning of abbreviations like P.O. We learned that only
8% of adults in the below basic and about a little bit more than half,
54%, of adults at the basic levels were able to do this task
successfully. About 35% of adults did not provide a correct response,
and this translates to about 80 million people. I also want to mention
that the respondents or participants were not penalized for misspelling.
And actually their real task, it\'s a little bit small scale here, but
in a real task it\'s much larger and the boxes where they had to put
their name and address is a little bit larger, so it is more clear for
them to see that that\'s where they have to enter the information.

All right. This slide looks a little complicated. So I am going to take
you through this and I\'m actually going to read from my notes because I
don\'t want to make any error in it because it is rather complicated. To
your far left, 2% of the population or four million adults could not
take the assessments because of language barriers. As I said before, we
had interviewers who could speak English and Spanish, so many of these
adults spoke a language other than English or Spanish. So, this
population is non-literate in English. Now, you see another 3% represent
adults at the below basic...at the bottom of the below basic literacy
level, because they did very poorly on seven core easy screening tasks
that we had and this translates to 7 million adults. Now, let\'s take a
look at how adults did in prose literacy. About 10%, now this excluding
the 3%, who took the supplemental assessment, scored below basic in
prose literacy. I want to draw your attention here again that this below
basic level range from adults who could answer none of the simple course
screening questions to those who could do the task described in the
below basic level. Now, this combined 13%, the 10% and the 3%, 13% below
basic in prose literacy translates into 30 million adults in prose
literacy. Then approximately 29% scored basic in prose literacy and this
translates to 63 million adults. So this was the story with prose
literacy.

Now let\'s look at document literacy. Nine percent again, this 9%
excludes the 3% who took the supplemental assessment, performed at the
below basic in document literacy and this combines 12%, 9% and 3% below
basic in document literacy translates into 26 million adults in the
national population. About 22% or 44 million adults performed at the
basic level in document literacy. Okay, now let\'s turn now to
quantitative literacy and you see here that a considerably larger
percentage of adults, 22%, including those who took the supplemental
assessment, including the 3%, I\'m adding 19 and 3%, performed at the
below basic in quantitative literacy. This translates into 48 million
adults in a national population. This is almost not quite close to twice
as many in the below basic in document literacy, which was 26 million.
Now we have 48 million in quantitative literacy, so they are doing more
poorly. Similarly, a relatively large 32%, or 71 million adults,
performed at a basic level in quantitative literacy. Now compare this to
48 million in basic document literacy and 60 million in basic prose
literacy. We haven\'t closely examined why adults do more poorly in
quantitative literacy as opposed to prose or document literacy, but we
have a hypothesis, and that is, I recall earlier that I said the
definition of quantitative literacy was the ability to compute using
numbers that were embedded in prose and documents, okay. So in a sense I
don\'t have to have all the skills that are associated with reading
prose and documents plus the skills associated with performing
computations on numbers that are embedded in those. So in a sense, it is
a double load that\'s why, but again, this is not empirical analysis
that we have done at NCES. This is just a hypothesis that I share with
you.

All right, this is an interesting slide. It provides the characteristics
of adults with below basic document. I focused on document literacy
because of time limitations if we were to look at the prose and even
quantitative literacy, we would see very similar results. So I just
happen to choose document literacy to give you example of these
profiles.

Okay, now, this slide shows the groups at high risk of being in the
below basic literacy population. All the groups in this slide have risk
ratios that are greater than 1, which means that these groups account
for higher percentage of adults in the below basic population than in
the general population. The groups in these slides are ordered from the
highest risk ratio to the lowest risk ratio. Now, let\'s start from the
first category. Adults who did not graduate from high school made up 15%
of the entire population and they were 3.4 times more likely to be in
the below basic document literacy level than in the total adult
population. Next, although 13% of American adults spoke only Spanish or
another language before starting school, these individuals accounted for
37% of the below basic population. I do want to assure you that... know
you are interested in ESL population, we are going to report separately
for adults in ESL and we are going to compare their performance with the
performance of native speakers of English, so that we get a better
picture of those adults.

Now, let\'s look at the Hispanic group. Hispanics who represented 12% of
the adult population accounted for 34% of adults with the below basic
document literacy. Adults, 65 or older represented 15% of the total
population, but 33% of those at the lowest document literacy. Let\'s
look at the disability. One half of adults with below basic document
literacy had one or more disabilities. These are vision, hearing,
learning disability, or another category we had to call \'others\',
compared to 30% in the total adult population. I do want to remind you
that accommodation is actually inherent in NAAL, because these are
household interviews, as it is one-on-one, the assessment is on time. We
have translated a lot of materials. All the background questionnaire is
in English and Spanish. The directions to the core...the seven core
screening items are in English and Spanish although always the text that
they have to read is in English. The supplemental assessment is...we
have a whole version of Spanish and English and it is given orally. So
we have made a lot of accommodations for adults with disability or
language barriers.

We have other characteristics that I am not at liberty to share with you
today, because they are still under review. The data are still under
review. But I do want to say that they relate to poverty, overall
reading fluency, which is a measure basic reading skills, the health
literacy, whether adults are in prison or not. But since we have a panel
member here who is interested in workplace literacy, I did go ahead last
night and made a couple of very quick calculation on employment and
earning that I would like to share with you tonight in this slide.
Adults who are not employed full time, their percentage in the below
basic population is 68% and the total population is 50%, so their ratio
is 1.4. I also looked at weekly earnings that are less than \$500
because we had eight categories and I didn\'t know exactly which
category to choose, so I chose 500 as a...is that good enough?

John Strucker: It's good.

Sheida White: Okay. So weekly earnings less than 500, the percentage in
below basic is 58% and the total population is 30% and the ratio is 1.9,
which puts earning above the black adults category, whereas employment
fall at the very end. All right, now let\'s look at the characteristics
of adults with basic document literacy. The portrait of adults at the
basic level in document literacy is really quite a bit different from
the profile of adults in below basic population, namely a significantly
smaller percentage of adults in basic document literacy than in below
basic document literacy did not finish high school. A smaller percentage
spoke a language other than English before starting school. A smaller
percentage were Hispanic, and also older adults and adults with
disabilities were less likely to be in the basic level than in the below
basic level of document literacy. In other words, the only group that
has a similar percentage in below basic and basic document literacy is
black adults.

Okay, now I am going to shift a little bit in the way I present...in the
presentation of the data. In the next, actually five slides, I want to
look at the literacy levels of adults with selected demographic
characteristics. So, I will be looking at results for the total sample
of population not just the lower performing adults, which I was talking
about earlier. Now the first slide...this slide, shows the relationship
between educational attainment and literacy levels. Adults with less
than or some high school education had, as you can see, considerably
lower average document literacy score, which was 208 if you can see it,
than adults who ended their education with a GED or high school
equivalency and that was 258. Actually, you can see this particular data
in the 'First Look' report, which we published in December, but it is
presented a little bit different the very same information and that\'s
table 8. In these and in the next few slides, I want you to bear in mind
that these are purely descriptive data. We know that there is an
association between education and literacy, but we cannot infer that
lower educational attainment is a direct cause of lower literacy. For
example, poverty could cause people to both score low on our assessment,
and progress less far in the educational system. So, I would like you to
keep that in mind as you look at the rest of the slides. Now let's look
at language spoken before starting school. Among adults who had spoken
Spanish or Spanish plus another non-English language before starting
school who had spoken, I am sorry, let me rephrase it. Adults who had
spoken either Spanish or Spanish plus another non-English language
before they started school, 49% had below basic document literacy. Among
those who had spoken other non-English languages before they started
school, 20% were at the below basic level in document literacy.

All right, let's look at race and ethnicity here. As you can see,
Hispanic adults had lower average document literacy scores, their scale
score was 224, than adults in any of the other ratios and ethnic groups.
We did do further examination of the performance of Hispanics as a
group. As a group, it appears that the 2003 Hispanic adult population is
primarily a new population of Hispanics, one that is less exposed to the
English language. I say this because we look at the data and there are
fewer Hispanic adults today than a decade ago, who speak English before
they start school. They learned, the 2003 population, they learned
English at an older age and they arrived in the US at an older age. And
we know that amount of exposure to English is positively associated with
performance on English literacy.

Next slide, on age. As you see here, adults who are 65 and older had
lower average document literacy scores 235 than adults in younger age
groups. Similarly, adults in the oldest group scored basic than they
did...more adults actually...let me put it this way, more adults in the
oldest group scored basic than those in the younger group.

My last data-bearing slide is on disability. Adults with one or more
disability, again, we looked at vision, hearing, learning disability or
a category called 'other' had fewer average document literacy, it was
251, than adults with no disability, which had a scale score of 278.

All right, this next report tells you the upcoming reports that we have.
Let me...you can read this for yourselves. Let me draw your attention
for a moment to the last one. In planning for the 2003 NAAL, we
introduced a lot of new features. But in my view, the most important
feature that we introduced for the 2003 assessment was expanding
information at the lower end of literacy, as I said earlier, and one way
we did that was by developing two brand new assessments that we did not
have in 1992. One of these assessments was the supplemental assessment
for people who could not do the main NAAL, we gave them an entirely new
assessment, which was very...included tasks that were very
contextualized, very familiar, very tangible, and we wanted to make sure
that we get as much information about what these people, this group of
people could do. And the other assessment was an oral reading fluency
assessment to also get a better sense of basic reading skills of adults
in terms of, again, their ability to decode, recognize words, understand
the meaning of words and we feel like people who cannot...people who
don\'t have those basic skills, those basic reading skills or if they
have those basic skills and they read very slowly and with great effort
that they are going to...most likely, they are going to struggle
comprehending and using written and printed material, which is...I want
to go back and that is our definition of literacy, being able to
comprehend and use written and printed information, without having the
knowledge of basic reading skills, it is going to be a struggle to
comprehend and use written material.

I guess this concludes my remark on literacy. Here you see two reports
that we have already released, the 'First Look' report and 'Key Concept'
report. These were released in 2005. I\'d like to thank all of the
reviewers out there who took the time to get online and hopefully
interact with us in the next few minutes. I also want to thank again,
Sandra Baxter and her very competent staff for organizing this webcast
and giving us the opportunity, thank you.

Sandra L. Baxter: You are welcome. Thank you. We are glad to do it.

Sheida White: And...

Sandra L. Baxter: Yeah?

Sheida White: Yeah, go ahead.

Sandra L. Baxter: John, now that Sheida has given us a wonderful
overview of the results of the NAAL, can you talk just a little bit
about the implications of what this information means?

John Strucker: Yes, thank you Sandra and thanks again for inviting me,
and Sheida that was a great presentation.

Sheida White: Thank you.

John Strucker: You covered a lot of good stuff and I just want to touch
on a couple of things. For the most part, I am going to be talking to
you as a reading teacher and reading researcher and former adult basic
education teacher. I really want to touch on a couple of the big issues
that came up in Sheida\'s presentation because I think they do bear on
how we want to make the system work better, the adult basic ed system.

So, well the first one as you can see from my one slide, is we have an
adult black, Hispanic, white achievement gap that\'s very similar to the
one we have with children and I think that as a society, we are starting
to do a good job of looking at that among children and trying to figure
out, pool taskforces together, both of academics and policy people and
teachers. So I think we have got that one on the table and it\'s
certainly part of a lot of the federal and state legislation. But we
have to do a similar thing I think with adult education. I am going to
say this a couple of times today, but it is really striking. The labor
economists tell us that 80% of the people who are going to be working 20
years from now are already working. So they are the customers for the
adult ed system and that\'s why for each of these problems we need an
adult system response if we want to reach these folks and help them
change their lives in meaningful ways.

And in the case of the black, Hispanic, white achievement gap, what you
see, as Sheida pointed out, is that you are much more likely, a factor
of almost threefold to be in below basic level if you are Hispanic, and
the factor of almost twofold more likely to be in the below basic level
if you are African American or black. And then there are similar greater
risk factors for basic, and I guess as a reading teacher, let me
contextualize my interpretation of below basic and basic. These are new
levels compared to 1992, but the NAAL folks have been able to crosswalk
into the '92 data, so you can compare the two studies. Basically, way
back in 1975, the noted reading researchers, John Carroll and Gene
Charles said, you know what America is going to need moving into what
they foresaw, it was going to be the information age that we are now
solidly in. People are going to need sort of high school level skills
because they thought of that as a level of skills that you need in order
to learn something new as an adult, to be what we would nowadays call
lifelong learner. It\'s important to your civic life. It\'s important to
your personal life and it\'s definitely important to your employment
life and your working life. So the African American and Hispanic adults,
we need to work with them now, and so if I were back in the field as an
adult teacher I would be working with the other teachers and asking
questions about how is our outreach? Are we really reaching these folks
in our community? How is our teaching approaching going? How we are
doing with the young people who are sometimes getting pushed out of high
school? Those are the questions I would ask if I were still teaching and
I tried to ask them in a way as a researcher, and not all of the answers
are fancy and expensive. I remember that in the part of the country
where I live, Massachusetts, a lot of Hispanic adults as other
immigrants and a lot of working poor people, including African Americans
and whites are working several jobs at one time. They have so little
time during the week, and yet almost none of our adult basic ed programs
back in my home-state are open on the weekends. So, just thinking it
through like that, what can we do to increase access?

Let me jump now to the next point, and boy, I am definitely not an
expert on this one, so I am going to rely on Brian to help me when he
gets to talk. The report definitely highlights the importance of
quantitative literacy that appears to have been harder test. There were
more people distributed downward into below basic and basic than either
a document or prose so there is that to content with, but some other
studies have suggested that quantitative literacy is very, very
important for your workplace success. Some other international studies,
including ones that have collected data here in the US, suggest that you
can actually see a greater return of income to skills level with your
quantitative skills than in some of the other areas of literacy. So
it\'s an important thing for us to think about and to remember that as
we prepare people for the GED as we teach courses, especially in our ESL
departments that newcomers to this country, the ELLs, are going to need
to be just as good at quantitative literacy as they are at the other
forms of literacy. And also that...I thought Sheida\'s point was
excellent when she said that the things we remember about quantitative
is that it\'s embedded in document, and prose sometimes, and that\'s one
of the reasons why the difficulty level sort of loads on that. So
that\'s why it may be especially important for us not to neglect
teaching math to ELLs. Don\'t just assume that they can do it or they
can do it in English.

And then finally, I want to say before I get to what I really know
about, I want to say a little bit about the age distribution of literacy
skills in the US. One of the disappointing results for all of us when we
looked at the comparison between \'92 and 2003 was that the percentages
of young people in below basic and basic hadn\'t changed very much.
There was some minor movement, but there wasn\'t a big change. Putting
that together with what I said earlier about the folks who are in the
workforce today are going to be there 20 years from now, we need to
think very seriously about the young people coming into adult education,
because it looks as if they are not coming in with markedly stronger
skills than they were in \'92. Coming into the workforce and then by
extension, to adult education. I think we\'ve really got to tackle that
one head-on as well.

The other thing we are finding in a lot of states and it is not news to
this audience I am sure, is that there are a lot of kids coming in to
adult ed who are a lot younger now because of the high-stakes testing,
they are dropping out of school or unfortunately in some cases, getting
pushed out of out of high school, and they are showing up in our adult
literacy programs. We need to get better at teaching. They are different
developmentally. They are in a different place from people of my age and
younger and they are...their skills are slightly different. I think we
need to learn more about them. We need to get better in addressing those
young people. And, let me see if there is anything I missed on that
point before I go on to the big one. Yeah, I guess, just as a slogan,
thinking about the age distribution of literacy skills in the United
States, I don\'t think we are going to grow our way out of the adult
literacy problem despite all of the good reforms we have instituted in
the last few years. I am a supporter of \'No Child Left Behind\', which
we spent more money on it, but its going in the right direction. I think
we are doing a lot of good things in K12, but that isn\'t going to grow
us out of the problems that the NAAL report identified for us.

So let me talk finally about what we know about the people in below
basic and basic as readers. As Sheida said, we are really eagerly
awaiting the results of the data that they collected on these folks in
terms of oral reading and the supplementary assessment. And that\'s
going to be great and I can\'t wait to see that. But I will talk a
little bit about what we know from other studies that we have done in
the last few years about the reading skills of these two groups of
people. Again, not a surprise to most of you who are in the field but
let me just quickly review. The folks who are in below basic, let\'s
just divide them into English language learners and native speakers.
Among the native speakers that\'s where, as Sheida pointed out, you see
the highest percentage of people who report learning disabilities as
well as other disabilities. And most learning disabilities involve
reading even if they aren\'t labeled as reading disabilities. So these
are people who have identified reading problems. Other studies we have
done show that there is a higher percentage of their native US born
people who have been in special education, have gotten extra help, whose
teachers realize they needed extra help, and whose parents realized they
needed it. So these are people with a real reading problem, and that
problem for the below basic folks takes place at the word level. They
are the people who just have trouble decoding and they have with what
the National Reading Panel called 'Alphabetics', the basic decoding
skills at the word level. They also have vocabulary problems, we know
from other studies and we also know that they are not fluent, but in
terms of what they need to work on right then and there, decoding could
make a big difference for them.

The other folks in that population are the ELLs. Now, they are not the
people of course who were in the category of couldn\'t take the test,
that 3%. These are people who had some conversational ability in
English. And in a way that\'s a way to describe who they are. They have
got conversational ability but their literacy skills in English haven\'t
been developed. And we know from clinical practice and from teaching and
from being out on the field that one of the big variables and how fast
those folks develop their English reading ability is how much reading
ability they had in native language, and there is a great variation in
that across this population. But it tells us, as teachers that we need
to pay attention to that and adapt instruction to that and then we can
probably teach them more efficiently. Some people have had very little,
they haven\'t been...had a chance ever to go to school in native
language and so they are starting quite in the home and there are other
people who have high school above skills in native language. We need to
be able to figure that out and then teach them appropriately.

And then the other thing about these folks is, again, it\'s remarkable
how fast these ELLs have picked up English conversation. But don\'t let
that fool you. If you actually get a chance to assess their reading
skills in English, it turns out they are extremely idiomatic when they
talk to you. If one person walked in and joined us with this panel, we
think gosh! That person speaks great English but when they went to do
embedded literacy tests, such as the NAAL, those tests were hard for
them. Let\'s talk a little bit about the basic people. I think this is
an extremely important population we don\'t want to neglect, because
they are close to intermediate. And we know from other studies that
intermediate is the point where you see big changes to the positive in
income, civic participation, personal reading habits, all the things
that embed literacy in our life and make it so meaningful and important.

So the basic adults, what about them? Well, the native speakers, again,
starting with them, they are people what that we know, can decode basic
words but not very fluently. They read slowly, and I guess the other
thing I feel about them is even when they recognize a word correctly,
they recognize it somewhat tentatively. They are not yet confident
enough about their reading, so that they can pay attention to what the
text is saying to them rather than the mechanics of having to decode the
words. So it\'s partly an issue of speed and rate for them when they
read connected text and it\'s also an issue of just confidence. How
confident are they that the word they read is what they read? And then
the other thing we know about them is that they have kind of 6, 7^th^
grade just to be rough, that\'s very rough, but I would say 6^th^ to
7^th^ grade vocabulary ability. It\'s not the worst in the world, but
it\'s not enough to make them sort of self-sustaining lifelong learners.
Not enough, as Sheida\'s figures showed. If the new jobs that are coming
up in the economy are going to require two to four years of post
secondary education, these are folks whose vocabulary foundations
aren\'t that great. And they are good on familiar words. They are good
on probably basic words in the reading that they do in their everyday
life and they are also probably okay in context. The auto mechanic reads
the auto manual pretty well, but he may not have the foundation words he
needs to go to community college and study something new, if he hurts
his back and can\'t work on cars anymore. So those are the two kinds of
words, the content words like photosynthesis or something like that
depend on biology and then there are also kind of glue words that go
across disciplines, words like minimum and maximum. Words like periphery
that could occur in any discipline and they are kind of the glue words
of academic discourse and so we found that folks in that level really
need those words, including the native speakers.

The ELLs, the English Language Learners, again with them, the key thing
is their need of language education. They can either be in a situation
where they have to learn those words and concepts anew as they go to
school in English or they can be folks who know those concepts in native
language and just need to translate them, so, I don\'t know, whatever
the Spanish word for photosynthesis is, if the person can recognize that
content and if they learned about it in high school in Mexico, then
they\'re on top of that one, so...and even if they aren't cognates, if
it\'s just a translation from another language but if they know the
concept, the underlying concept of how plants grow. So, those are some
of the things we know about these adults. I think, the more we know
about them...I am really looking forward to the report that will be
released in 2007, the more we know about them, the more we can focus
teaching, especially the ones who are at the upper level of basic, if
you are thinking about the scale scores, the transition between basic, I
think, and correct me if I\'m wrong Sheida, an intermediate is about 264
or something like that. So, the folks who are getting up into the 260s
are pretty darned close and if we can identify then, they would be sort
of people who\'d show up in our adult intermediate reading classes and
pre-GED classes. If we can identify their specific needs, their needs
for fluency and that sort of literate, academic vocabulary, it may be
that we can get them into the intermediate level faster and that opens
up a lot of opportunities for them in terms of involvement in
post-secondary and all the other things that we talked about.

So, let\'s see if there is...well, there is always more than we have
time for. Let\'s see what comes out in the questions. I would like to
turn it over now to our colleague, Brian Bosworth from FutureWorks.

Brian Bosworth: Thank you John. Thank you Sandra for inviting me, and
thank you Sheida for that remarkably lucid summary of incredibly
complex, and to my mind, very depressing data. So, it was very useful. I
am with FutureWorks. FutureWorks is a small research...policy research
and development and consulting firm located in Boston, Massachusetts.
And my remarks today are going to be based on that research and
consulting work that we do, hopefully, some intersection of theory and
practice.

Before I move to those remarks, let me just underscore a point that John
made that I think is very important. We are not going to, as he put it,
grow our way out of this national literacy problem. That\'s particularly
true when you look to the economic consequences of this. As he points
out, a huge percentage of the people who are going to be our workers 20
years from now, are our workers today. And a huge percentage of them
can\'t perform the basic skills associated with economic success in a
contemporary environment. Now whether you are an optimist, that programs
like \'No Child Left Behind,\' are somehow magically going to make this
problem go away for the young people coming through the school system or
whether you\'re a dour cynic, like some of us, who believes everything
will get worse before it gets better. You have to agree that the sheer
numbers in terms of the size of the age cohorts coming out of high
school and the size of the workforce do not give any of us any
confidence that we can somehow keep our eyes closed and see this problem
go away just as a result of demographic change. It won't happen.

All right, I want to make six key points this afternoon. I am going to
try to do it briefly. As I discussed, the implications of these literacy
issues on workforce and our national competitiveness. Point one, these
literacy deficits have a devastating, devastating consequences for
individual workers and consigns them for low wage jobs. In preparing for
this discussion, I went back and looked at the 1992 NAAL's data. You
remember that had five levels in it and suggested that fully 40% of the
adult workforce fell in the bottom two of those five levels. That report
also told us that the people in level one made only about two-thirds as
much money as the people in level three, and only about one-third as
much money as the people in level five. Sheida tells us that the 2003
data bears out that same sharp earnings differential. We\'re all
familiar with the earnings differentials associated with education
attainment. But it\'s important to focus in on these education earnings
differentials associated with literacy.

One of the points I want to make also, and I was struck by the data, is
how the gap grows over time. When a young person aged 21, let\'s say a
few years out of high school, low literacy, is out there kicking around
in the workforce with those entry level jobs, chances are they\'re not
making that much less than that 21 year old out there who has got very
high literacy levels. So the gap isn\'t that great at that point, but
stretch that out to age 35, age 45, the time at which an individual is
trying to build assets for the next generation, trying to buy a home,
trying to put money away for college, it\'s at this point that the
earnings differential is absolutely huge and makes the difference
between a generation of poverty or escaping from that generation of
poverty. Now, the evidence also suggests to us that we can make a
difference here. A few states for example, have evaluated their
workforce training programs, that they have had an operation for several
years by looking at wage records and examining what happens to the wages
of individuals who received training on the job with employer support in
basic skills, and they found consistently high increases in the wage
rates, the earnings rates of individuals as a result of this kind of
training. Even for individuals, who are well under their 30s, well under
their 40s.

The second point, low literacy levels in the workforce erode
productivity and limit global competitiveness of US firms. Now, we have
to concede the evidence here isn\'t nearly as strong as it is to the
issue of economic success of individuals. It\'s hard to isolate the
factors associated with individual firm productivity and with national
competitiveness. We do have some estimates that annually productivity
suffers to the tune of 60, 70, some say as high as \$80 billion as a
result of literacy deficits. The NIFL website, however, also has some
optimistic information in this regard by telling us that according to
research from the National Center of Educational Quality of the
Workforce, a 10% increase in average education attainment, that would be
like a one grade level increase, has greater returns to productivity
than would, let\'s say a 10% increase in hours worked or a 10% increase
in capital stock. So, companies like individuals can make a difference
through investment strategies. But with the high levels of literacy
deficits that we hear about, you would think that American business and
industry would simply grind to a stop that we could not in any way
compete in a global economy.

Well, that leads me to a third point, and that is that most employers
have developed what I would term or what they would term \'workaround
strategies\' that manage the literacy deficits of their workforce. Now,
is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, it\'s a good thing, in the
sense that it enables them to continue relatively high levels of
productivity and relative high levels of competitiveness when they are
faced with significant literacy deficits among their workers. What are
examples of these workaround strategies? Really they fall in the area of
work organization, organizing work such that the tasks to be performed
that require higher levels of, let\'s say math\'s skills or writing
skills, are performed not by the frontline workers but by first level
supervisors. Also fall into the category of technological workaround
strategies, using technology to deal with issues that under some
circumstances could be dealt with by individuals with higher levels of
literacy than they perhaps have. We\'re all familiar with the fast-food
restaurants for example that have a picture instead of a number on the
key of the register. And that\'s just one example. Now, workers
themselves also find these adapted behaviors.

In fact, if let\'s say, 40% of our workforce is at a level of literacy
achievement or literacy attainment that falls below what one would
reasonably think would be success in a workplace, well, how do they
survive, even at the lower wage levels that they survive? They do it
with their own adaptive strategies and we all hear and see examples of
those on almost a daily basis if you are out working with firms. But,
what happens in a dislocating economy with a lot of change, a lot of
rapid changes that when people lose that job in which they have
developed those adaptive behaviors and now they are forced to find a new
job that's when the literacy deficits come to the foreground and really
impair their ability to connect. In a sense that same thing could be
said to happen to firms in a global economy. It\'s in times of
disruption, of market change, when the firm is shifting from one market
segment to another market segment or adding new product mix, in those
times of change and dislocation, literacy deficits among workers come
very fast to the foreground.

Fourth point I want to make, most employers say they are as concerned or
even more concerned about other workplace basic skills as they are about
traditional measures of literacy and what do they mean by those other
workplace skills? Technology skills or computer literacy is increasingly
important to all employers. They identify career management and lifelong
learning skills, and by this I mean the navigational skills associated
with career management and lifelong learning. The employers identify,
thinking critically, acting logically and solving problems as a critical
basic skill. They identify finding and using information, knowing when
to ask a question, knowing when you don't have the right information to
answer that question and knowing where to go to get that information.
They identify teamwork as a basic skill. The ability to work in groups
with others cooperatively. They identify basic employability skills as
well, sometimes called social skills, attendance, timeliness, work
ethic, showing up sometimes is the most critical basic skill. Employers
do identify math, reading, writing as important deficits in their
workplace. But we find, through our survey work that employers are more
likely to suggest some of these other basic workplace skills are as
important or more important to them than the conventional measures of
literacy.

The fifth point I want to make is that employees are not now getting
much help in solving their workplace literacy issues. But just pushing
more generic programs to firms will have little effect. This is what you
might think of as a wet noodle theory of change. You can push one end of
a wet noodle for a long time and not see the other end of it move. What
we need is more demand-pull. We need to work on organizing demand among
employers and among employees to solve some of these workplace deficit
issues. Again, back to the 1992 NAAL survey, and I would be interested
to see if there is any information, which bears this out in the 2003
survey. Of those 40% a numbers of workers who were back in 1992 at the
two lowest levels of literacy, only 5% of all workers said they had
received any help with their basic skills in the preceding five years
from the time of that survey and just looking at those at level one, the
bottom level, only 6% of those said they had received in the past five
years any help with their literacy issues. And of those, only 40% of
this 5% says that help came from employers or from unions. In other
words, was workplace oriented or workplace based as it was directed.

So that leads me then to this final point that, just as I said before,
just pushing out new strategies from the supply side are not likely to
be very helpful. We need to encourage demand side strategies that work
broadly on the basic workplace skills as employers and employees define
them and that use the workplace and the employer in the design and the
delivery of instructional programs. What would be the characteristics of
such demand side programs? Well, they would be employer driven. They
would probably have some significant employer financing involved in them
to make sure that there is a buy-in and a commitment to consequence, a
commitment to success. They would use providers that have workplace
experience, not just providers whose adult basic education experience
has consisted solely of dealing with adults or high school dropouts in
traditional K12 classroom settings. They would have a broad focus on all
basic skills. They would not look narrowly at just math and reading and
writing skills. They would be contextualized in the language and the
situations of the workplace. They would use work as a way to develop the
workplace basic skills. They would be focused on a credential, a
credential, which satisfies entrants to the next level of education and
training. Not a credential, which simply says, well you got this far so
far, but a credential that opens up access to the next level of
education and training typically at the postsecondary level. So there
would be a clear standard of what this workplace literacy meant.
Employers would acknowledge that standard, that credential would have
portability both among other employers and to education and training
providers in the postsecondary system.

I think that it\'s unlikely that we are going to see a significant
change and reform from the federal level to deal with most of these
workplace literacy issues. Certainly, in the past 5 to 10 years, the
good things that are happening are happening at the state level. They
are limited, but there are still some very positive activities underway
by states is in redesigning their workforce training programs and in
some cases figuring out how to use their adult basic education program
in a way that makes a difference in the workplace. I look forward to
further conversations with you and to your questions about how we might
support the more rapid emergence of those kinds of programs. Sandra?

Sandra L. Baxter: Great Brian. Thank you so much Brian, and thank you
too Sheida and John. We would like to encourage our audience to become a
part of this discussion. If you look at the bottom of your screen, you
should see instructions on how you can submit questions, comments to us
so that we can talk with you, have a discussion among ourselves that you
can join in about the findings in some of the views that you have heard
expressed here today. While you are doing that though we do have some
questions and I will turn to our very first one. John, this is a
question for you. Could you talk a little more about ways to improve
decoding in order to improve fluency, especially for the below basic
student?

(Multiple speakers)

John Strucker: ...decoding to improve...?

Sandra L. Baxter: To improve fluency.

John Strucker: Well, I think that we know a fair amount about how to
work with the decoding problems of the folks in below basic, and there
are several studies in the field right now funded by the National
Institute of Child Health and Development. They are looking into ways to
improve our teaching of those kind of below basic skills at the word
level and most of them involved some sort of generically (inaudible)
structured language approach, it could be called the Wilson Reading
System. It could be called Orton-Gillingham or Lindamood-Bell, and I
don't need to offend anybody by leaving out some of the other ones but
they are ones we use to take a student through basic reading in a very
structured way where there is lots of opportunity for over learning and
distributed practice. These are folks who didn't pick up reading when it
was taught the way it was taught, whenever they were in first grade and
kindergarten and they need to go more slowly and usually it\'s because
of their reading and other language disabilities.

In terms of the folks who were the non-native speakers of English,
Sandra, one of the mistakes I think we used to make back when I was
teaching 15 years ago or so is we felt, well, here comes this guy into
class who already reads Spanish and Spanish has the same syllable
structure as English, he will pick up English. I think it would have
served us better and I think nowadays you find that out in the field
most practitioners in beginning ESL are doing a much better job of
actually teaching the English sound symbol system to newcomers to the
language making it easier for them. Why should they have to guess about
it, you know? So I think that's one of one Sandra, where we do know what
to do. The only problem is that it\'s awfully expensive because it takes
a lot of specialized training for the teachers to deliver that
instruction.

Sandra L. Baxter: Okay, thank you John. We have another question, this
one from Florida, for Sheida, how can the national figures be used at a
local county level, and also when will the state and county level data
be available?

Sheida White: We get that question a lot. As far as the last part of the
question, the state and county level estimates or projections should be
available this fall and they would go on our website and you will see
the results for your state and for your county in prose literacy for low
literacy adults. That\'s the answer to that, and what was the first
part?

Sandra L. Baxter: How can those data be used at the local level?

Sheida White: At the local level how they...actually I am not the
person, I think one of you who is more into practical implication of
the...

John Strucker: Of how would you actually use the...

Sheida White: I just gave you the data. Yeah.

John Strucker: Yeah, yeah. Maybe we can both respond to this. In the
past, states...some states actually bought into this study and got extra
data collected on your state, right?

Sheida White: Right.

John Strucker: But those were only a few states. But then the other
thing is my colleague, my NCSALL colleague, Steve Reeder out at Portland
state working with other researchers developed a way that you can sort
of do a synthetic NAALs on your county or community, based on local
demographic data. And some of the other characteristics that occur both
on the NAAL assessment, and the background questionnaire and that you
can also gather about your local population. So, I am hoping that
someone whether it\'s Steve Reeder or somebody else or maybe somebody
from NCES will step up and provide that template so that localities can
create those local data. And then what you do with them, I think, gosh!
I would just look for surprises, things like, gee, I didn\'t know we
were getting so many young people or that so many young people are in
this category or gee, the problem in our town is in low literacy in
general, but it seems in our town to be really confined to certain
ethnic groups and communities, so we got to target that. So I guess if I
were, again back in harness that\'s what I would be looking for in those
results.

Brian Bosworth: Yeah. Most of our education and training system in this
country is highly decentralized and operates at a regional level. Our
Workforce Investment Act that provides funding for job training and for
incumbent workers as well as dislocated workers is highly decentralized
with to...let\'s say, between 10 to 20, even 25 regions within a
particular state. And as those decentralized bodies make decisions about
how to allocate limited resources, it would be really important for them
to be able to know these characteristics of their limited English
proficiency and low literate population so that they could organize the
right kinds of programs, emphasize the right kinds of activities and
engage with employers at the local level in a design of those. Our
community college system, another place that deals with a lot of low
literate individuals is also highly decentralized. So the more we can
bring data down to the level where colleges at the local level, where
workforce investment boards at the local level can organize that to
solve problems and work with employers in that region, I think the
better chance we have of creating some of the demand side strategies
that I have been emphasizing.

Sandra L. Baxter: Okay thank you. From Pennsylvania, from the
Pennsylvania School Of Medicine, we have a question. We have heard about
the association between educational attainment and literacy. Which one
more strongly predicts outcomes like income, self reported health or
other outcomes?

Sheida White: Okay. Literacy is associated with education. Literacy is
associated with health, and literacy is associated with income and if we
go back to...fine, can you go back to the slide that I showed, this
would be slide 11. You can see that education is...this is not it, the
profile, slide 11. Anyway, it\'s the slide that...yeah, this one. Yes.
You will see that at the very top of the list you will see that
education is the strongest correlate of literacy. In terms of income, I
gave you some data in terms of weekly earnings. It\'s not in here
because I just did the analysis last night. Weekly earnings that are
less than 500 that would...in that list that you have it would be the
5^th^ after age that would fall under that in terms of relationship to
education. We do have data on health literacy but I am not at liberty to
share that at this time because the data has not been released yet. Were
there other variables...?

Sandra L. Baxter: Yes

Sheida White: Is that it?

Sandra L. Baxter: Yes.

Sheida White: Okay.

Sandra L. Baxter: Yeah.

Sheida White: So that\'s where we are, and as I said earlier, we also
have data on poverty, which takes into consideration not only income but
also the size of the family. We will have data on basic reading skills
from our oral reading fluency assessment. You will have data on the
prison status as well as health literacy. All of these are correlates of
literacy, but in terms of the relationship to one another, hopefully,
you will get that within next month or so.

Sandra L. Baxter: Thank you.

John Strucker: Just a quick comment on that, I think what\'s so
important to bear in mind about studies like the NAAL is that they both
have background questionnaire data and then skills data. So previous to
the NAALs in 1992, people had not measured literacy in a mass way. So
it\'s the second time we have ever measured skills. So we can say not
just the person said they graduated from high school and we believe them
or not or they probably did, but given that, what are their skills
actually compared with other adults. And so it enables the study like
the NAAL and previous studies to sort of say, what\'s the biggest return
to skills? Is it education per se in terms or attainment or is it how
good you actually are at performing these skills embedded in real life
tasks?

Sandra L. Baxter: All right, thank you John. We have a question from
Jean in Providence and Jean would like to know, okay here we are, I see
a prison report is coming out. Do today\'s slides include the overall
population, the inmate population or is this information excluding them?

Sheida White: The data that I presented today included adults living in
household as well as those in prison population.

Sandra L. Baxter: Okay. All right, another question for you Sheida.
Earlier you showed a sample task from a NAAL study, are there other
sample tasks or questions available from the 2003 study? If so, where
can we find those?

Sheida White: Well, actually I must admit that this sample test that I
showed you was not from the 2003 assessment. It was from \'92, but it
shows the type of tasks that are included in 2003, even though it was
not in 2003. We used it also in 2003. It was used in 1992 and 2003, but
we have not released the items for 2003 yet because we don\'t know
exactly which ones of those items we are going to be using for our next
cycle of the assessment. And those we cannot share with the public. But
we do have, on our web site, we do have over a hundred items from 1992
assessment and they are just as good as the 2003 assessment in
communicating the kind of objectives and the goals and the knowledge and
skills that we are measuring.

Sandra L. Baxter: Okay, thank you and we have...

John Strucker: I encourage people to go to those items. They are
really...if you are a teacher, they are really a lot of fun to look at
and then if you really are feeling kind of adventurous, what I did with
the NAALs data in 1993, is I took some items and asked some of my
students to do them for me and then afterward we sat down together and
talked about them, what reading teachers call a \"think aloud\" and it
was very interesting to see why they got them right and why they got
them wrong and I hope that it helped my teaching, I think it\'s...

Sheida White: Yes, and you would get information on our website as to
what percentage of people got those items right and also what kind of
knowledge and skills they have.

Sandra Baxter: Great. That was a great point to add John. From Canada,
we have viewers from Canada today. The question is, what research needs
to be done to better understand the needs of ELL learners at low
literacy levels. I know we said we wouldn\'t focus in on ELL today, but
we are getting a number of questions and I think we should at least
answer a few of these.

John Strucker: I guess I will start with that one and then other people
should chip in. Again, from my lens as a teacher, what I'd most like to
know about the ELLs in some precise way is what\'s their level of native
language literacy, because that would really dictate for me the
instructional approach that I took with them. And, so if we were
Spanish, in theory that\'s pretty easy because there are lots and lots
of tests that are available in English and Spanish and some that are
directly relate to each other like the...there is a Spanish version of
the Woodcock Johnson called Woodock Muñox, for example. But for the
other languages, its much more of a challenge and one of my dreams is
always that someone in the government, and Sandra and Sheida, someone in
the government would pull together for us some reading tests that could
be done in the major languages of the folks who are coming to the United
States. Maybe just a really short task that was only a few paragraphs
but it would at least enable us to peg them as, say highly literate in
Chinese and moderately literate or somewhat low literate and that might
help us to teach better and place them better in classes for English
language learners so that\'s my two cents on that one.

Sandra L. Baxter: Okay. Sheida.

Sheida White: I think vocabulary is an area where ESL adults have
particular difficulty in...because unlike native speakers of English who
have the listening vocabulary, and so their problem is essentially
decoding the word and then they can map their overall vocabulary to the
text that is before them. Oftentimes, ESL adults do not have the overall
vocabulary, so they have to learn that in addition to learning the...how
to read the words and so it's a little bit more difficult for them to do
that. So I would say vocabulary is a particular area where ESL adults
can benefit from.

Sandra L. Baxter: Thank you. Brian, we have question for you from the
Los Angeles Unified School District. How do we motivate employers to
support workplace-training programs?

Brian Bosworth: I think it takes a combination of subsidy and support to
motivate employers. I have heard many employers say, why should I bear
the cost of dealing with the literacy deficits of my workers? The school
system failed these workers, not me. Now they come to me and I am
expected, well they are actually not expected, but their concern is that
they are expected to take too much responsibility for improving the
literacy problems of their workers. Some states have begun to think
about some tax subsidies, some tax credits. The state of Missouri, the
states of Arkansas, Kentucky, Georgia, all have some tax credits in
place that support employers making an investment in the basic skill
development of their workers and I think those are worthy of study,
worthy of research to find out what impact they are having. In addition,
I think we can really help employers if by sector we work with employer
organizations to help understand more the returns to investment in skill
development for workers. There is some national information available on
sort of a crude basis but the only way that we can work with most
employers is to give them information about returns to investment in
their sector. In other words, hospitals want to know what\'s the return
on investment to basic skill development for people in hospitals? Don\'t
tell me what it is out there in the manufacturing sector, I want to know
what it is in my sector of employment. We really don\'t have much good
data on that and I think that that kind of research and preparation of
case statements for employers on a sector basis could be very helpful.

I think knowledgeable providers, organizations that know how to work
with people in a workplace setting that know how to use contextualized
curriculum, can gain a lot of credibility with employers. What
discourages many employers is that their only contact with helpers, with
organizations out there who want to do something about these literacy
deficits, are with providers who aren\'t very knowledgeable about their
environment and about the limitations that they are faced with. Who
want, for example, them to send their employees off to some other
location to achieve basic skill development instead of trying to figure
out how to incorporate that into the workplace setting both on the clock
and off the clock, but on the workplace setting. Much more
experimentation, much more proactive behavior by key provider
organizations could make a real difference here.

Sandra L. Baxter: And a related question from here in the district
Brian, with the rapid increase of immigrants as a share of low wage job
holders, what is the responsibility and role of employers in providing
ESL instruction?

Brian Bosworth: You know, I have thought a lot about that question. I
don\'t have an easy answer to it. I think that\'s a very tough one.
Clearly, the debate we are having in this country right now about
immigration and about hiring low wage immigrant workers to do "jobs that
people in this country won\'t do" is I think forcing all of us to
confront the question of what is our obligation to individuals who come
to this country to earn money, to support their family, to get ahead and
then are put into low wage...what for us are low wage jobs without much
career development opportunity, and many times denied access to public
service, effectively denied access to public services that might help
them with their literacy issues. So I have said, don\'t really have an
answer to that question. I think it\'s a very tough one and I think it
has to be resolved as part of our national discussion and debate about
our responsibilities to low wage immigrant workers in this country.

John Strucker: Brian, don't you think that's when also we see a lot of
workaround? I mean, it seems to me even going back to when my
grandparents were immigrants, one of the workarounds for English problem
was to have a mid level and low level supervisors who spoke the native
languages of the worker and...

Brian Bosworth: Right, of course right.

John Strucker: ...so that that\'s a big one, where there is a kind of a
tendency toward workaround and depending on the work that\'s right
there.

Brian Bosworth: Right. We are up in Massachusetts John, you and I both
live up there and over the period, from I think 1990 to 2000 and maybe
this is a more contemporary number, it goes up to 2005, new foreign-born
workers accounted for virtually 100% of new workers coming into the
Massachusetts economy. Our economy could not have grown in that period,
in that state, and this is true may other states as well, if it were not
for those low-wage immigrant workers. So our responsibility to figure
out how to help those low-wage workers move up the ladder and increase
their productivity and increase their contribution to the state and
regional economy is not just an act of charity. It\'s an act of
selfishness on our part to figure out how we can get higher levels of
productivity out of low-wage immigrant workers and I think that that
will take us pretty quickly to decisions about how to make investment in
their basic skill acquisition.

John Strucker: Yeah, and the other thing I was thinking too, just as you
were saying that is that we also should be thinking about their
children, many of whom will stay here and become US citizens and be in
the schools and will they be children who sort of are right in with and
can catch up quickly with the native born kinds or are they going to be
always kids who are playing catch up, this sort of so-called generation
1.5...

Brian Bosworth: Right, right.

John Strucker: ...and we are not doing ourselves any favors by...so I
think it\'s an inter-generational literacy problem that we tackle it by
providing the English language learning.

Brian Bosworth: I think you are right.

Sandra L. Baxter. Well, let\'s shift our attention for a moment. From
New York we have a question about instruction. What role do you see
distance learning playing in the instruction of basic and below basic
adult learners?

John Strucker: Wow! Increasing is the short answer. I think that I am
pretty old fashioned and so I have come late to be a believer in
distance learning. In general, the way I think about distance learning
is, the better you are at whatever it is you are having to learn, the
better distance learning works. So I could imagine a bunch of brain
surgeons learning a new stitching technique by a distance learning as
long as the camera work were good. You know, they have all been to
medical school and stuff like that and they all have very comparable
levels of skills and ability in that area. Having said that, what I also
know is that, again from my colleague, Steve Reeder\'s work out in
Portland, that our learners are more self-starters than we ever realized
when it comes to literacy learning. He discovered in a longitudinal
study that these people even though they may not have been enrolled in
programs, were doing a lot more self-study than we ever realized. And
the self-study that they are now doing because of the Internet does
involve distance learning. Not all of it is organized, but anyway. So,
(inaudible) success stories in distance learning certainly for ELLs,
those ESL learner movies. One of them I think is called Destinos (ph) is
the Spanish one, what\'s the one, Crossroads Café, right?

Sandra L. Baxter. Yeah.

John Strucker: That\'s been very effective and can be used in distance
learning in connection with classroom stuff. I think it\'s hard to do
distance learning for things like a structured language approach for the
dyslexic or reading disabled learner. They need quicker feedback than
most of the formats I can think of to deliver. And they also probably
need the human support. I think distance learning could work pretty well
for a bunch of things as we get into the folks in the basic level and we
are just beginning to scratch the surface of that. And I am very
impressed when there is...the only problem is that some of this stuff is
being produced faster than we have a chance to vet it and see if it
really works. It all looks plausible and out of common (ph) and we will
invest our hard-earned technology dollars in a new approach but it\'s so
hard to find out whether it will actually work or under what
circumstances or with whom. So it\'s one of those things, it\'s like
other instructional materials and fantastic potential, but how you
actually use it could be the key to whether it works well or not.

Brian Bosworth: Well that was an equivocal answer.

Sandra L. Baxter. From Arkansas we have a question about better
targeting our outreach efforts to adult learners. We have offered
weekend classes in both adult ed and ESL. We marketed these classes
through various venues, but attendance has been too low to continue the
classes. Any suggestions on what they can do?

Brian Bosworth: Well, I think my quick suggestion and I hate to sound
like a broken record is that offering the instruction in the workplace
in partnership with the employer where most of these folks are for 40
hours a week, isn\'t a bad strategy in terms of securing participation
and securing attendance. Now that requires a willingness to modify
curriculum and modify instructional strategies, to go off the providers'
own site on to a work site. So it requires change on the part of the
instructional services delivering organization. But I think that
workplace-based solutions or strategies for dealing with some of these
literacy deficits offer more potential than has yet been realized by
other approaches.

John Strucker: The attendance and turnover problem is really endemic and
the more I think about it, it\'s really just reflects adult life. I
mean, I remember how hard it was for me to go to graduate school when I
had three little kids and I had to work and go to school and also
somehow try to be a father in that situation and that\'s really the case
for our adult learners and maybe going just for a GED not a PHD but
it\'s the same pose on them. Your kid gets sick and you have to miss a
couple of nights or you\'ve got caregiver responsibilities with another
relative, your childcare breaks down that week. All these things happen
to our learners and I think that in the long run, it's going to be one
of the hardest problems for the system to solve. And I would love to see
more onsite childcare. But in fact, when my kids were little, that
wouldn\'t have helped that much with me either. You would be in a
situation of having to pack up little ones and schlep them across town
on the bus to...there are no easy solutions except coming back to the
last question I equivocated on, possibly distance learning, and you
could imagine a system and again, Steve Reeder calls this \"giving
literacy a way\". You can imagine a system that was set up so that when
you were in class and able to come to class, it was fairly structured
and you would always know where you were. So if you had to miss a couple
of nights or even haven\'t for been a couple of weeks, you would now
what they were covering and in a pretty good rational order and then you
could come back without as much lost ground.

What if that were also supported by distance learning, so that while you
were not in school for the time you ought to miss, you could track the
class and try to do some of the stuff. That would be very difficult to
pull together, but I have a feeling that moving in that direction may be
the only way to get out of the problems of adult life. Because our
researchers suggested, NCSALL research that they are not missing class
and missing sessions for frivolous reasons. It\'s usually the same stuff
that happens to the rest of these adults.

Brian Bosworth: Right, right.

Sheida White: I have ...

John Strucker: ...which is why workplace is better in a way.

Sheida White: I have an opposite perspective. When we released the data,
our 'First Look' report in December 2005, there were a lot of media
reports on the data. And so I collected all of those and I studied them
very carefully and I came across many, many statements made by adult
education directors and people like that, saying that there is a long
list of people who want to enroll in adult education classes, but there
really aren\'t enough seats for them. That was very eye opening for me
that they couldn\'t even get enrolled in classes and the demand was
there, but there are just not spaces for them.

Brian Bosworth: Well that\'s certainly the case in Massachusetts where
there is a long waiting list for participation in the formal adult
education programs.

John Strucker: There is more skid toward English language learning, I
think...

Brian Bosworth: Yes it is, absolutely, yeah.

John Strucker: Yeah, because we just haven\'t stepped up, you know as
you were saying earlier in our state for that.

Sandra L. Baxter: From Los Angeles a question about the levels. Sheida,
what are the reasons behind changing the levels of assessment of
literacy skills from five to four?

Sheida White: Okay. The main reason, as I said earlier, was to get a
better distinction, a final distinction at the low end of literacy.
Level one, in 1992, was very broad. It included people. We couldn\'t
tell if people didn\'t do well on those tasks who were placed in level
one, we couldn\'t tell whether these people couldn\'t decode, was it
that they couldn\'t recognize words, or they didn\'t have basic skills
or they had the basic skills and they couldn\'t draw inferences of what
they were reading. We had a combination of people of all levels of
skills put together in that broad category. We feel that we have helped
that situation by creating the new levels because now we have a category
called non-literate in English and that category itself is broken into
two final categories. A group who are not even included in our reports,
it is of people who cannot even communicate with the interviewer and we
are not reporting on them, and then we have a group of people who can do
other tasks. They cannot do the math type of tasks, but they can do
other tasks, and so we get a better sense of what it is that they can
do. And so with all these distinctions, we are able to see what it is
that adults at the low end can do and cannot do with a final
understanding and distinction. I think that was one of the major
reasons, and also we wanted the process to be very public and open and
very scientific and we feel that we have accomplished that by having a
national...NRC, what does that stand for...?

John Strucker: National Research Council.

Sheida White: Research Council, yes, thank you.

Sandra L. Baxter: Yeah.

Sheida White: It was just an arm of the National Academy of Sciences to
help us. They went through a process of nearly two years and it was very
detailed and comprehensive and very scientific and rigorous and we are
very happy about that process.

Sandra L. Baxter: Okay, thank you very much. Unfortunately, this will
have to be our last question. I want to thank all of you who have
written in so many questions for us. We are not going to get to all of
them today, but this is the last one from Florida. Sheida mentioned from
calculations she did regarding income levels and how they relate to
literacy levels. When will this and other income-related information be
available?

Sheida White: Oh gosh! I wasn\'t quite sure that this information was
going to be printed anywhere. I have to check to see if the draft
reports that we have on comprehensive report is going to include this or
not. If it is not going to include this particular piece of information,
you have my slides in archive. I will update that and I would add more
information on this particular topic and include it on our website.
Would that be good enough?

Sandra L. Baxter: That\'s fine. Okay, fine, thank you.

Sheida White: Okay.

Sandra L. Baxter: Well, unfortunately that is all the time that we have
for questions today. As those of you who work in the field everyday
know, meeting the needs and the challenges associated with adult
learners and training them, helping become very equipped for the
workplace, those challenges are really difficult. We do believe that the
information contained in the National Assessment for Adult Literacy, the
viewpoints here and expressed by other experts around the country are
going to be helpful in thinking about how to meet and overcome those
challenges. I would like to thank our panelists today, Dr. Sheida White,
Dr. John Strucker, Mr. Brian Bosworth for being with us, and I want to
thank you, the viewers, for taking time to join in and participate in
this dialogue. We, at the National Institute for Literacy, are pleased
to be a part of this dialogue and we encourage you to reach out to us
with your questions, your comments and your ideas. Again, thank you for
joining us and from Washington, good afternoon.