**The National Institute for Literacy Community Literacy Summit 2007**

**Washington, DC**

**March 19, 2007**

DTI ASSOCIATES INCORPORATED

# The National Institute for Literacy Community Literacy Summit 2007

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MS. LYNN REDDY: I\'m Lynn Reddy. I\'m The Institute\'s deputy director.
We are really looking forward to this meeting because of the excellent
group of speakers and participants who are here today. Some of you are
quite experienced in running community literacy efforts. Some of you
represent organizations that tutor or mentor or teach community members
of all ages, or connect with them through other community-based
services.

Several speakers have conducted extensive research on issues that bear
directly on community literacy. Some of you on the other hand may be
here with questions about starting a community literacy effort. We hope
that this is the right place for all of us and that today can serve as
an opportunity for us to learn from each other.

We at the Institute are especially eager to learn more. If you\'re
familiar with the Institute and its work, you\'ll know that community
literacy is a new area for us. The Institute has been working on various
issues in adult literacy for the last fifteen years, and more recently,
we\'ve been looking at literacy issues across the lifespan. But
truthfully we have only begun to think of our work in literacy in a way
that has brought us to community literacy fairly recently.

But with the help of several of our board members, unfortunately who
couldn\'t be here today, Dr. Bill Hiller \[phonetic\] and Dr. Juan
Oliverez \[phonetic\], and our growing awareness of the grassroots
energy and commitment, we found our way to community literacy and we\'re
very pleased.

We\'ve also been very fortunate to benefit from the expert guidance
provided by our Summit Steering Committee. They represent a wonderful
mix of on the ground experience, research and evaluation expertise,
literacy knowledge and real interest in community literacy. They\'ve
shared their knowledge very generously with us. And to repay them,
we\'ve recruited them as speakers and discussion leaders for today\'s
summit. So as everyone knows, no good deed goes unpunished. I hope
you\'ll have the opportunity to meet and talk with them today. They are,
Douglas Marriott, the outreach director of the Literacy Network of
Greater Los Angeles, maybe you could raise your hand? Jay Connor, the
founder and CEO of the Collaboratory for Community Support, which is
headquartered in Ypsilanti, Michigan and John Mitterholtzer
\[Phonetic\], program officer at the Cleveland Foundation.

Unfortunately, the ripple effects of the bad weather in the Northeast on
Friday have kept two of our Steering Committee members away. They are
Dr. Amy Arberton \[Phonetic\], who is the vice president for research
and the director of the California Office of Public Private Ventures,
and Dr. Douglas Perkins \[Phonetic\], Director for the Center for
Community Studies at Vanderbilt University and Dr. Katherine Pavy
\[Phonetic\] who is the President of the Discovery Alliance in Valpreso
\[Phonetic\], Indiana had a schedule conflict, so she isn\'t able to
join us either, but we do want to acknowledge all the help that the
entire steering committee has given us over the months that we\'ve been
planning this effort.

As you\'ve likely noticed, the Summit pays special attention to two
issues, literacy instruction and performance measurement. After much
discussion, the Institute staff and the Steering Committee agreed that
these were areas that deserved special attention and also that
represented areas that dovetailed with much of the Institutes recent
work.

So whether instruction takes place in a tutoring, mentoring, after
school or adult education setting, it defines the common ground in a
community literacy project. Focusing on instruction reminds us that
communities come together to act on a common desire to make the joys and
benefits of literacy available to everyone in the community. Yet taking
steps to improve the quality of instruction in projects as complex as
community literacy efforts can be presents challenges. I believe this
morning\'s speakers can suggest ways to think about literacy so that it
can become the engine that propels community literacy projects\'
successes. Attention to performance measurement also goes hand in hand
with strengthening instruction and instructional outcomes as well as an
improving accountability. This afternoon\'s speakers will talk about
using data for program improvement and for accountability purposes both.

And now, I would like to introduce our first speaker, Mr. Michael Moore.
Mr. Moore, is coming up here, has taught at Michigan Technical
University since 1999 in Literacy for Educators, teaching with
technology across the curriculum and writing in social and civic
context. He is also the editor of *Community Literacy Journal* and
collaborates with community agencies in curriculum development and grant
writing for community arts and literacy initiatives. Thanks for being
here.

MR. MICHAEL MOORE: Thanks very much, Lynn. Good morning. First I\'d like
to say thank you to Lynn and Leah and Tanya for putting this together,
e-mailing for weeks and months. And one of the things I\'ve noticed and
learned by e-mailing with them is that they take this very seriously.
It\'s very encouraging, too, the work that they do. I\'m very happy to
be here.

I went last night to a poetry reading at Busboys and Poets, anybody know
this place, locally? And here\'s something I noticed, that\'s named
after Langston Hughes who was a busboy here in Washington and
distributed his poetry while he was working and cleaning tables. I
watched this group of, identified, they brought a group in of young
students identified as at risk. They were going to read poetry together
as part of this workshop they\'d had the day before. And here\'s what I
watched them do. One of them pulled a laptop out of his backpack. And it
took three of them to figure out how to get a wireless connection, in
this bookstore, then they figured out, without asking anybody, how to
print their poems to the bookstore manager\'s office and then find that
office and get their prints and come back. Then they started, without
any prompting, giving feedback to each other on their poems. You should
break this here, you should make this line break there. No teachers. And
I thought, my gosh, this is what I try to teach college students how to
do. And they were doing this and then they gave wonderful, beautiful
readings. The point is I was watching a new kind of literacy, I think. I
have to ask fourteen year olds how to find wireless connections and do
that.

One of the nice things about a gathering like this is that it\'s ironic,
it\'s hard sometimes for you academics and university folks for
logistical reasons, institutional constraint reasons, to actually meet
and interact with community workers and members and literacy workers.
And so, gatherings like this I think are a real opportunity to meet.

I edit the *Community Literacy Journal* with a colleague at the
University of Arizona. We started it a year and a half ago because we
both used to work in a field known as service learning, where people
from the University would go out and do work in the community. And we
started to notice over time that people were using community literacy,
the phrase, the term, synonymously with service learning, which we
believe is not the same. So we did what academics do, we started a
journal to help define that.

And so when I began corresponding with Tanya, she explained that the
Institute is doing the same thing, trying to define what it means. And I
know from a couple conversations this morning out in the hall, that
community folks, sometimes workers, define it differently than we have
in the journal, which is out in the hallway, by the way. So I hope that
today, one of the conversations that we can have, either in here or in
the breakout sessions, is how do we define community literacy, from a
research perspective, academic perspective, performance, funding,
economics, those sorts of things.

Just a note about the journal, we\'ve received about 100 manuscripts
over the last two years. And they\'ve been remarkably qualitative in
emphasis, for those of you who do research, a lot of them influenced
clearly by Paolo Ferreri\'s \[Phonetic\] work and Shirley Brice-Heath\'s
\[Phonetic\] work, Ways with Words. Very little, interesting as I look
through the presentations and the PowerPoints today, very little
quantitative work. We\'ve reached out to schools of education to help
generate manuscripts from that side of the University. And I hope we can
do more of that. We especially want writing from community literacy
organizations and literacy agencies.

The other thing that I hope we can do today is to talk about, I\'d like
to talk about how you define community literacy and it effects the work
that you do. Some people have constraints because of their funding,
their research agendas, what they aspire to do, whether it\'s a limited
or a broad version of that definition. So I\'m hoping that we can have
that conversation and I hope some of you can consider submitting your
work to the journal. Tanya has discussed, we\'ve talked about having
some of today\'s papers and presentations, we\'ll do a special issue of
the journal in 2008, with today\'s work.

So I\'m very happy and feel very lucky to be here.

MS. REDDY: Thank you.

MR. MOORE: Thank you.

MS. REDDY: Our next speaker is Dr. Timothy Shanahan, President of the
International Reading Association and Professor of Urban Education at
the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is Director of the UIC
Center for Literacy. He\'s been director for the Chicago Public Schools
and he, truth in advertising here, he was recently appointed by the
President to serve on the board for the National Institute for Literacy.
He\'s also served in the Whitehouse Assembly on Reading and in the
National Reading Panel and he is also the chair of the National Early
Literacy Panel and was chair of the National Literacy Panel on Language
Minority Children and Youth. So he\'s got the chair thing down. He\'s
also a former first grade teacher and we\'re really happy to have him
here today for all of those reasons and more.

DR. SHANAHAN: Thank you. Top of the morning to you, folks. I hope
you\'ve survived the St. Patrick\'s Day celebrations. I\'ve barely done
so.

There are lots of different ways of slicing an orange and there are many
different ways of conceptualizing our community and dividing it up. And
maybe the place to start this morning is by knocking down some of the
conceptual divisions that we\'ve allowed to creep in.

I mean, traditionally we\'ve thought about and institutionalized
literacy around age levels for the most part; pre-school, elementary,
middle school, high school, adult and so on. That\'s not unreasonable,
that\'s not a bad thing to do, really. So I\'m not here to criticize
that. There\'s nothing wrong at all with focusing literacy attention on
a particular segment of the society and then developing the expertise
and then the ability to actually deliver what you need to there as well
as possible.

But community literacy, by its definition, is not aimed at a particular
age group. It can\'t be. Community literacy works with schools, it works
with health care facilities, works with work places and so on. And that
means it has to be supple enough to respond to literacy among folks at
lots of different age levels and lots of different circumstances.

The issue I\'ve been asked to address this morning, is what is the same
in those instructional efforts. What is it that has to work whether
we\'re talking about three-year olds or whether we\'re talking about
sixty-three year olds. And again, you know, the notion is let\'s knock
down some of those conceptual barriers to picking this apart.

So let\'s start with a real simple, maybe a simplistic theory about what
it takes to raise literacy. And certainly anyone who\'s done this for
any length of time, I think come to the conclusion that it\'s the
learner\'s experience that matters in this more than anything. It
doesn\'t matter how we\'ve organized or what we\'ve built or what the
funding stream is, that ultimately, the student with some teacher is
really the whole thing that matters. Experience includes the amount of
instruction, what is actually taught, how well that\'s taught, what the
instruction is, how the student responds to the instruction, those kinds
of things.

And anything else, every other variable, all the other things that
you\'re going to be talking about today that sort of fall out of that,
are important, but they\'re only important to the extent that they
either enable or interfere with those kinds of variables. And so there
might be especially good ways for community literacy programs to
organize themselves and manage themselves, and it only matters to the
extent that that puts the instruction in place in sufficient amounts and
so on. And so the whole focus here during these next few minutes is
going to be on the learner\'s experience and what has to happen in that
instructional situation.

And in fact, I\'ll focus specifically on five keys to literacy success
across the lifespan: amount of teaching, the content, the quality of
teaching, student motivation and alignment and support. And my argument
is that these five things matter at every level of literacy, it doesn\'t
matter what your responsibility for literacy instruction is. These are
the five things we\'ve got to keep our eyes on.

So let\'s just start out with the first one. Anyone who\'s ever worked
with me on literacy knows I always start with this first one. If I were
to come out and visit your program and take a look to see if I thought
you were doing a good job, this would be the first thing I would look
at. And the reason is because as I read the research and look at the
information that we have on what works, amount of instruction seems to
be about as important as anything. It\'s probably the most important.
It\'s the biggest determinant. You know, if you do meta-analysis of all
the different kinds of variables and the educational research studies,
you keep coming back to more teaching is better than less teaching.

Now that might not seem very exciting, but you know, it\'s extremely
important. And literacy programs succeed or fail on this one. And again,
it doesn\'t matter the age level or the circumstances. And frankly,
allotting time is important, but using the time is even more important.
You know adult literacy programs struggle, struggle, struggle to put
enough instruction in place for their clients to be able to move
forward. That is, that\'s the fight all the time. And the research, on
adults, a lot of it focuses on how long can we keep people in place? How
many hours of instruction can we provide? How many tutors can we keep in
place? It isn\'t even necessarily just the students themselves, it\'s
the people who are delivering the instructions.

In schools, you know, well, we don\'t have this situation with adult
literacy that we have in the schools, where you have all this funding,
you have all these teachers and the kids are there all day. But in fact,
one of the biggest issues in primary and secondary education is how much
of that time do you actually use to deliver the teaching?

And we lose, you know, huge amounts of it. I mean, if you look at the
observational studies that have been done around the country over maybe
the last twenty-five years or so, what you see is that in schools, we
lose approximately it appears about one in five days of instruction. So
you know, we buy 180, but we deliver about twenty-percent less than
that. Because there are times when kids are just sitting and there are
times when people are doing test prep instead of teaching them to read
and they\'re; gee, you know we can\'t teach today, it\'s the day before
a holiday. And you know, all kinds of stuff happens. And we lose the
instructional time.

I was director of reading in the Chicago public schools. The studies in
our districts say we lose one out of four days. No wonder, you know, we
lose a lot more than the average school, which you know, points out why
our kids struggle. We also have one of the shortest school days in the
country. This is an issue no matter what level we\'re talking about.

And frankly, I think you can talk about this time thing as both a
barrier and an enabler. I mean, one of the big reasons for example that
community programs really go at family literacy and parent programs and
parent involvement, is how do we essentially, how do we buy more time
for the kids beyond the school day, beyond what the teachers can
provide? I think you could say the same thing about preschool. I mean
historically, we haven\'t provided preschools. You know, we do now, a
few things like Head Start and so on and a certain amount of private
preschools and daycares and all the different things. But a lot of kids
still aren\'t getting that. But you\'re interested in raising literacy,
one of the ways of doing that is expanding literacy services into spaces
where it didn\'t exist before.

And so, children normally didn\'t get literacy help when they were two
and three and four and five, well what if we start to build services in
there, that can have a huge impact on kid\'s learning. Same kind of
thing can be said about even just expanding the existing school day.
Full day kindergarten is still a real issue.

This is one that I often use as an example because it\'s so easy for
folks to understand. You know you have some kids that come in for two
and a half hours a day and you have some kids who are there for five
hours a day. And you know, the issue is does it make any difference? And
in fact, it tends to.

But it tends to make a difference in some fairly; I was actually just in
a place on Saturday where they were going, half-day versus full day, we
still have, you know, a lot of school districts that don\'t have
half-day kindergarten yet. And so it becomes just as obvious. Gee,
let\'s take the places that have kindergarten versus the ones that
don\'t and let\'s see what difference it makes. And what you see is that
it makes a real difference.

In fact, maybe I should tell a story about this one. A year or so ago I
got to go out to Oregon and I had, I was talking to legislators. And I
was making this point about amount of instruction, but I only had about
ten or fifteen minutes to talk to them, so I only could use one single
example, and the example I chose was half-day full day kindergarten,
because I thought even a legislator could understand this one, you know,
it\'s so simple. Sadly, it was the same kind of set up we have today;
you know, a single computer doing PowerPoint, a series of speakers. And
what I didn\'t know was that the person before me was the person who was
doing the evaluation of the state study on full day kindergarten.

So, you know, sometimes it\'s better not to; you know, you want to get
up there and take the computer away, and no, no, I\'ll bring it back, I
really will. And change your example, because I could use any example.
You know, we could use after school programs. You know, it doesn\'t
matter. There are so many ways of expanding instruction of using
instruction well.

Well the person who was sharing this, they had essentially funded a
large number of programs in the state to actually expand their
kindergartens to full day, and about half of them they left at half-day,
so it really gave them a wonderful opportunity to study it\'s impact.
And they went and they tested kids on like thirteen different language
and literacy measures, so they had a lot of data on these children. What
they found was that at the end of kindergarten year, the kids in full
day kindergarten out performed the kids in half-day kindergarten on
every single measure of language and literacy. And I see people nodding.
Yeah, that\'s not surprising, is it? Not surprising at all.

They followed those kids to the end of first grade. And they found no
differences at all, you couldn\'t tell the kids apart. All that
wonderful extra instruction the kids were doing made a huge difference,
but the schools weren\'t set up to take any advantage of it. And so the
kids had higher literacy, and the first grade teachers were happier. But
the kids didn\'t necessarily do any better in the long run. I mean,
think of it this way. You know, if in your full day kindergarten, you
manage to learn all your letter names, which meant now you went off to
first grade knowing all your letter names, you were in pretty good
shape; except the first grade teachers are used to spending the first
month and half or two months of school teaching letter names, they kept
doing it. You know, you don\'t just stop because the kids know. You
know, don\'t be silly.

And I think that shows you both sides of that issue. I mean, I think
what it illustrates is the incredible importance and value of time, that
every time that you guys manage to set up a community literacy program
that in any way expands the amount of instruction available to people,
you are making a big difference. The potential there is incredible. But
depending on you know, who is going to use this literacy and how it\'s
going to be built on by other instructional programs, you\'ve got to
find ways of coordinating. We\'ve got to find ways of knocking down some
of those institutional walls, so that it can be taken advantage of.

Those first grade teachers could have taken huge advantage of what those
kids brought to first grade and could have actually sent them on to
second grade advantaged. I worry about every single program that we put
in place for exactly the same reason. You know, you guys put in a
terrific after school program for kids so that they get a better chance
to move forward, don\'t necessarily expect the schools to treat it like
that exists. You know, and you can do that with every level of program
and age level.

You know, I mentioned how much time we lose in the school day and that
we need to use the school day better. That was certainly a big theme of
my work in Chicago and I think it was probably the biggest factor in
raising achievement for our kids. I would argue that there are things
like response to instruction models which are becoming a bigger thing in
the school day, where instead of moving kids into Special Education,
just saying, well, this kid\'s really low, but he has average
intelligence, let\'s move him off to Special Education and see if they
can do anything with him. Essentially the schools are trying to figure
out whether kids need things like special education. And the way
they\'re doing it is they\'re seeing if kids respond to instruction,
respond to intervention.

So you have kids who the school day isn\'t enough and you say what else
can we do for them? What if we give them additional instruction in the
classroom or outside of the classroom? Will it make any difference? And
of course, if it makes a big difference, then the child doesn\'t need
this special help, and of course, if they continue to struggle and these
things don\'t work, then maybe there is something really wrong.

Of course, after school and summer programs are a huge issue in the
school. If you look historically at things like Title 1 which, you know,
provides funds to K-6, K-12, education for poverty kids, what you see is
that historically those programs haven\'t made much difference in terms
of reading achievement. I mean, sadly, lots of money but not lots of pay
off. But there are exceptions, you know, there are always exceptions.
And the most interesting exception to me in that whole pot of studies,
and one of the most consistent findings is that, you know, yes, if you
take Jimmy and you send him down the hall to work with a different
teacher it doesn\'t seem to make much difference. But if you take Jimmy
and you keep him a couple extra hours at the end of the day or you take
Jimmy and you keep him several extra weeks during the summer, it seems
to work really well. And it doesn\'t even seem to matter how good some
of those programs are. Because you look at them on paper and you go,
that couldn\'t possibly work. And the extra instruction seems to pay off
anyway.

What about post-high school programs? What about programs at the
community colleges and out in the you know, the work places and the
family literacy programs and so on? I would argue every one of those is
either an opportunity to replace missed instruction from, you know,
people\'s childhood, or to just essentially add hours or years of
instruction and that that makes a huge difference in people\'s lives.
The time matters. That is one of the things that unifies us and it\'s
one of the things in your planning, in your decision making, you always
have to make this a kind of a bottom line question. If we do it this
way, how much teaching will our students actually receive?

Let\'s jump to another point here, because obviously time is not the
only thing any more than time is only issue in why iron rusts. Of course
time is necessary, but in that case you have to have liquid. I mean if
you don\'t have water, you don\'t get oxidation and the iron won\'t
rust. Well time, if you just put kids in schools, if you just put adults
in literacy programs and you didn\'t really make sure of what the
quality of instruction was or what was being done in that, you wouldn\'t
succeed either.

The second biggest determinant of what needs to happen in a literacy
program is what we teach, the content, the curriculum. You know, it\'s
interesting in community literacy, when you work with lots of community
groups, neighborhood groups and so on, we set up a number of these
programs and help communities set up their programs in our community.
You know, they always sort of want you to come in and do the literacy
thing. They don\'t necessarily know what it means. They know it\'s a
good idea, but they don\'t really quite know what it means. And a lot of
times, the piece they don\'t quite get; oh yeah, we\'ll get some tutors,
terrific, and you know we\'ll set up, we\'ll have desks and it will
really be great. They kind of forget the real important part which is
the content. What is it that we\'re going to teach here?

Literacy curricula is a little different than other curricula. It\'s a
little bit more complicated. There have been a lot of reports. Lynn
mentioned some of these reports, the National Reading Panel report and
the National Early Literacy Panel report. Federal efforts to try to
guide elementary and secondary and preschool programs to deliver the
right kinds of instruction. Well I think one way of talking about hose
reports is not that they tell us how to teach, but they tell us what to
teach, that that\'s really been their real focus. And in fact, that
content is hugely important.

Certainly one of the things that is certainly a very reasonable thing to
teach to beginning readers, to folks who are trying to work out the code
is decoding, which includes things like teaching the alphabet and
teaching concepts of print, you know, what to do with the spaces between
words and what direction do you read in and those kinds of things,
phonological awareness, hearing the sounds of language. Phonics, knowing
how the sounds and the letters match up, knowing how the patterns of
spelling dictate the pronunciations. And learning high frequency words,
learning words that you can learn them partly from phonics but a certain
amount of just brute memorization is needed. You need lots of experience
with these words; words like the, and of and is and you know, they
don\'t necessarily exactly follow common English spelling patterns, but
doggone it they\'re such common words. They come up so frequently you
just have to know them and you have to learn them.

Frankly you don\'t get to choose whether you want to teach these things.
I mean, if you\'re working with older readers who are reading say better
than beginning levels, you can get away with skipping these because the
students already know them, but generally, what you find is that you
have to teach these things and certainly one of the problems that some
of our schools have been having is that a lot of teachers, a lot of
programs sort of want to do this by philosophy; we get to teach the
parts of reading that we want to teach.

The problem with that for the learner is that they need help in figuring
these things out and so if somebody doesn\'t show them how, they\'re at
a great disadvantage. Of course, decoding isn\'t the only thing you have
to learn.

It\'s important to learn to be a fluent reader. That is you need to be
able to learn to read the text accurately, which is kind of a decoding
issue. But you have to do it with sufficient speed. I mean if I slow my
presentation down, oh my goodness is this annoying. The fact that, you
know, they\'re always saying she\'s having trouble understanding, if I
slow down she\'s going to get it. You can slow down too much. You can
slow down so that the beginnings and the endings don\'t fit together,
your memory isn\'t good enough to hold that together. It\'s hard to
concentrate. Studies of adults listening, if I talk at much less than
100 words a minute, you have trouble following me and understanding,
your mind wanders.

A lot of our children, a lot of our adults don\'t read very differently
than the way I was just talking to you a moment or two ago. And so it
isn\'t just oh, he gets the right words. You\'ve got to get the right
words fast enough so that it can hold together as language. And with
proper expression. All we mean by that is that in fact you group the
words properly, that you, you know, you phrase them, that you use the
punctuation, that your voice rises and falls in the appropriate ways.
Various studies are starting to show us that the prosodic shape, the
sounds shape that you put on text is really one of the things that gets
sent to the brain, you know, maybe the first thing that gets sent to the
brain to be interpreted. And that if you mess up that prosodic shape, if
you don\'t read it right, if you put the breaks in the wrong places and
group the words together incorrectly, comprehension goes, whoosh. So
fluency matters. And we can teach this.

Vocabulary, increasing it. As I sit on these various panels, the
importance of vocabulary just comes rushing at me, whether we\'re
talking second language learners, whether we\'re talking pre-school
kids, whether you\'re talking kids who are raised in poverty, whether
you\'re talking adults who are struggling readers, every group that I
look at the data on, I come back going wow, vocabulary instruction is
even more important than I used to think it was.

All I mean by vocabulary is word meanings, knowing the meaningful parts
of words; prefixes and suffixes and roots, those kinds of things. And
we\'re talking both oral and written language. So this isn\'t something
where you go, oh, I\'d really like to work on vocabulary in the
preschool program that we\'re setting up in our community, but you know,
the kids can\'t read yet. Start building the vocabulary now, folks. You
know, building that language is critically important.

It isn\'t, surprisingly, it isn\'t that important in beginning reading.
Vocabulary isn\'t that important. It has a very modest role to play in
beginning reading success, and in fact, I think that\'s fooled some of
us. I think it fooled me. That since it doesn\'t play much of a role,
let\'s not pay too much attention to it. The problem is that it has an
increasing role to play as kids move through the lifespan. So it always
has some importance. This is one that changes in importance as kids get
older. Decoding changes as you become a better reader, decoding issues
become less important; you\'ve got them mastered. Vocabulary goes the
other way, it becomes increasingly important in instruction, but it
matters at every level.

Reading comprehension matters too. We can teach people to understand. If
they\'re not readers yet, certainly listening comprehension. But what
kinds of things go into comprehension instruction? How text is
organized, how does an author structure something? In my talk today
I\'ve structured it around five points. The person who can think around
those five points and think about that structure is advantaged over the
one who goes, oh, he\'s just telling us a bunch of stuff about literacy.
It\'s like a list.

What to remember, some kinds of information are more important than
other kinds of information. A good reader learns to cue in on those
things that matter. You see it, I mean, in college students. You give
them a book to read with one of those yellow highlighters. And they read
along and then whoops, all of a sudden they\'re marking a sentence and
you can tell the difference between the good readers and the poor
readers in terms of what they mark. You know, they have an awareness of
what\'s likely to matter.

And of course, there are a whole variety of strategies of thinking, ways
of approaching a text. You know there are a whole bunch of studies, a
number of them done with middle school kids and a number of them done
with high school kids, some of these studies with adults; teaching
people to ask questions of the text, and then to try to answer their own
questions. It has a very powerful impact on what you understand, because
it makes you active, it makes you really pay attention to the text and
so on. And there are a bunch of those kids of strategies. We can teach
people to think effectively about texts.

And then of course, literacy is not just an issue of reading, it\'s also
an issue of writing. To participate in a democratic society and to do
certain kinds of work, to do certain kinds of academic work, it\'s as
every bit important to be able to write as to be able to read.

Well let me jump forward again, quality of instruction. And I\'ve
defined quality of instruction in a kind of a different way. Variations
in the student\'s educational experience that determine learning beyond
amount of allotted time and content taught. It\'s the variations in the
educational experience. And let me give you some examples. Certainly
student engagement, you know, how much are students actually involved.
This almost comes down to a time issue again. If we were talking about
an elementary school, discipline issues are probably a pretty big deal,
are the kids even paying attention? You know, are the kids allowing the
teacher to teach? Is the teacher managing things in a way that are
allowing the time to be used.

A simple example, you\'ve all probably had the experience as a child of
doing oral reading in school. But the way we tended to do that is you\'d
say, David, would you please read the first paragraph or the first
sentence or the first page or whatever. And David would read it and you
would all sit and wait for him to get done, and then he would say, okay,
Patricia, now it\'s your turn. I\'d like you to read the next paragraph.
And the reading kind of proceeds like that, round robin reading.

Studies of round robin reading are very interesting. They say that
actually the oral reading you\'re doing is not that bad, that the oral
reading practice you\'re getting actually has a positive impact on
learning. Unfortunately the oral reading that everybody else is doing
doesn\'t have any impact on your learning. And so if you sit there for a
half an hour listening to everybody else reading aloud; it\'s charming
as all get out but it doesn\'t do anything for you. You know, the thirty
seconds you got or the minute you got was the pay off, but what that
means is that the teacher just threw away twenty-nine minutes of your
learning time.

These days a lot more schools are using paired reading. And you see this
in adult literacy programs too, it isn\'t just children and it\'s not
even just young kids. I mean it goes, we did it through high school. But
essentially you\'ve got people paired up and one reading to the other
one, and all of a sudden that half an hour of reading for a minute and
listening for twenty-nine minutes becomes, gee, I read for fifteen
minutes. And that means you get a lot more learning in exactly the same
amount of instruction.

So you know, how much the students are involved, how much the students
are engaged matters. Similarly we can talk about the content as a
quality of instruction issue, how appropriate is the content to the
learner? One of the findings of the National Reading Panel is that young
readers and beginning readers might need some instruction in something
called phonemic awareness. All we\'re talking about is being able to
hear the individual language sounds within words. So cat has three
phonemes. C. A. T. Can youngsters hear that? And in fact, a large
percentage of little kids can\'t. So when you try to teach them
decoding, it\'s awfully hard to learn it.

Well, what that\'s lead to is an awful lot of phonemic awareness
instruction in the kindergartens. That\'s a good idea. But, what
teachers do when youngsters are struggling with phonemic awareness is
that they tend to just give them more of that, let\'s just keep doing
that. And the kids are struggling and the teachers are struggling, and
everyone\'s going yeah, but the National Reading Panel said it was a
good idea. The National Early Literacy Panel\'s finding in fact you can
kind of treat this as a continuum and that phonemic awareness is really
just part of a larger concept, phonological awareness, and that in fact
one of the smart things that you can do if kids are struggling with
phonemic awareness is drop back and teach some of the earlier skills
like can you hear the sounds, can you hear the separation between
syllables? Can you hear the separations between words? You know, the
larger chunks.

Because in fact, it\'s awfully hard to learn the individual sounds if
you can\'t do some of those grosser activities. All those kinds of
adjustments that we make to content based on kids\' levels, what
they\'ve already accomplished, are an important part of quality of
instruction.

Of course there\'s also the level of demand that we put on kids with our
instruction. And again, let me just take one example here, vocabulary.
If you look at vocabulary instruction that works, and again, I\'m not
talking a specific level, because the research is pretty consistent on
this no matter who is studied, there are a lot of efforts to teach
vocabulary that are pretty much the kinds of things that you probably
did as children yourselves. Which are things like, can you memorize the
dictionary definition of a particular word? It\'s fairly low-level,
it\'s just, you know, sort of matching up the two things. But really
good vocabulary instruction, effective vocabulary instruction, effective
enough to raise reading comprehension tends to be much more about the
encyclopedia version of the vocabulary term than it is about the
dictionary version. The definitions are much more like explanations than
they are like definitions. You know, the reader, the learner has to
really dig in and come to understand the meaning of the word and its
connection with other words and things like that, not just the, you
know, a synonym or something like that.

I\'m just going to jump this thing forward because I\'m running out of
time fast. Let me get to number four here, student motivation. Student
motivation is an issue across the board. It changes like some of these
other things do. And it effects what goes on in learning. This is more
obvious at some levels than others. You know, being a former first grade
teacher, you know, you learn pretty quickly that with a group of six
year olds if you smile and are a little bit enthusiastic, they\'ll
follow you anywhere.

You know, you teach adult literacy, which I\'ve done, and you smile and
you\'re enthusiastic and you might lose all of them. It\'s just a little
bit more complicated. But it\'s not that it doesn\'t still matter. It\'s
just that it matters differently. It plays out differently. It\'s easier
to be effective with students who are trying to learn than with those
who are resistant. And it doesn\'t matter if they\'re resistant because
they you know, they want to create disturbance within the classroom or
whether they\'re; or the reason they\'re resisting is because they\'re
embarrassed or afraid. It really comes out the same to you as the
teacher, and it comes out to them the same in terms of their learning.

Our job of course is to encourage and support and try to keep everybody
pushing towards the accomplishment of higher literacy. The research on
motivation is a litter different than the research on instruction. We
know an awful lot about motivation, we just don\'t know quite how to do
it. The, we have a lot of ideas about what it is that people find
encouraging or motivational and we don\'t have well worked out routines
that oh, if you do this it just raises achievement and it\'s lovely.
These are a little bit more art than they are science in terms of how
you make them work.

But some of the things that have found to be motivational are the four
Cs, curiosity, competence, challenge, collaboration. And again, I would
argue that these are as true for a four year old as they are for an
adult.

Curiosity, engaging people\'s interest. Human beings at any age level,
are interested in their world. Now admittedly, people are interested in
different things. So for example, if you\'re talking men versus women,
men tend to be much more driven by those things that are going to make
an economic difference in their lives or what\'s going to make a
difference in their work lives. Women, are driven by many other things.
You know? It\'s not bad, it\'s just different. People are curious about
their worlds and literacy instruction that recognizes that and takes
advantage of that probably does a bit better than literacy instruction
that doesn\'t do that.

Of course, everybody also has a desire to be competent, to be
successful, to be able to do things well. And literacy instruction that
makes it clear to people what it is that they\'re trying to learn and
that they are succeeding is extremely important. I know we did a study
once on what was it that kept tutors working in adult literacy programs,
and it was whether they felt like they were being successful; whether
they felt like the people they were teaching were actually learning. And
it didn\'t matter what it was. If you felt like you had taught the
person a single word, and that was a good thing, they were willing to
stay and come back and tutor. If you\'d taught people the whole
encyclopedia but it was, oh, it was just the encyclopedia and it\'s all
they learned, you know. You\'re done. You know? It\'s this feeling of
effectiveness matters, and that matters to our learners as well.

But people want to be successful at things they find challenging, that
they think need to be accomplished. You know, if we\'re talking about
twelve-year olds, they want to succeed, but they don\'t want to succeed
at baby stuff. They want to succeed at grown up stuff. They\'re striving
to take the next step, and our programs need to recognized that. That\'s
why, one of the reasons why I think community literacy programs tend to
be as successful as they are. They often are focused on real things in
people\'s lives that they\'re really trying to accomplish. That matters,
that\'s a big, driving force, I would argue.

And our final C is social connections, collaboration. People want to
work together; people are interested in other people. That matters.
Things like, you know, cooperative learning programs actually work and
do a good job of teaching things like literacy and probably because the
opportunity it gives for people to work together.

And let me hit the last one. And the last one is cheating in some ways,
but this is actually kind of the way that I\'ve got this conceptualized.
Alignment and support is really everything else. Every other variable
that you can think of you go, oh, does that matter? Is this an important
one? In fact, every one of those other things that you can think of
works to the extent that it has an impact on the first four variables.
And so if you say, well, I think funding is the big issue. Okay, well
funding is great. What does it do to amount of instruction? Well it\'s
the difference between us being able to offer that program or not. Oh,
that\'s important. Gee, you know, the funding dictates whether we have a
curriculum or we don\'t have a curriculum and so on and so forth.

The fact is all these other variables can have positive or negative
impacts, but they don\'t have direct impacts. They have impacts through
the quality of instruction, the quantity of instruction, the content of
instruction or to the extent that the students are motivated. Things
like teacher quality, things like assessments, things like instructional
materials and supervision and homework and you know, on and on and on.
You can go through a very long list of things, but they all matter to
the extent that they either inhibit or extend those other variables.

Literacy success in community literacy programs, in all literacy
programs, depends on how much teaching we provide to our students, what
we teach our students, whether we\'re teaching the right stuff, the
right content; how well we\'re delivering that, how efficiently and
effectively that teaching takes place, whether the students are working
towards us or not makes a bit difference in it; and everything else, all
the alignment and support matters to the extent that it drives those
four things forward.

Ladies and gentlemen, than you for being here today, but thank you for
being here every day. Your work is extremely important. Thank you.

MS. REDDY: I think we have time for about two questions? Yeah, and I
guess there are microphones out here or you could just stand up. You\'ve
cowed them into submission. Well we\'re coming up on a break in about an
hour, so if you think of a question between now and the break, I\'m sure
Tim will be available to answer your questions in a little while too.
So, let\'s can I ask you; we\'ll move on to our panel then

We have two speakers next, Dr. Barbara Forman and Dr. Daphne Greenberg.
Dr. Foreman is the Francis Epps \[Phonetic\] professor of education and
associate director of the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida
State University. During 2005 she served as the commissioner of
education research at the Institute of Education Sciences. She has over
100 publications to her credit and serves on many editorial boards and
national advisory on\--

\[END 87998 CD 1\]

\[START 87998 CD 2\]

\[Crosstalk\]

DR. BARBARA FOORMAN: Greetings everybody. I\'m talking about the
community literacy for children. And my co-author Stephanie Al Otaiba
should be here because essentially she contributed most of the content
for the slides. She has done research using community volunteers, and
I\'ll talk about her research a little bit.

My own research tends to be with certified teachers in school settings,
so this is a bit of a stretch for what I tend to do, but I find it
enormously important, so I said yes to this topic because a lot of the
research I\'ve done is before school and after school, it\'s just been
with certified teachers.

So the critical issue here is that the No Child Left Behind emphasizes
the work on prevention and early intervention and the reauthorization of
the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, also has that emphasis,
and makes available fifteen percent of funds up front for prevention. So
many things are coalescing her to focus on helping children learn to
read and preventing failure, essentially. And as Tim Shanahan said, the
more we can do that before, during, after school, year round, the better
chances we have of being successful.

Obvious fact is that schools lack resources to hire the kind of
specialists that we need during the school day. No Child Left Behind,
Early Reading First, provide coaches, and that can be a tremendous boost
for a school to help coordinate assessment and help take the result of
assessment and inform instruction.

But we need more bodies. We need more adults to help reduce the student
teacher ratio so that children can read to adults, get corrective
feedback; that\'s essentially the nuts and bolts of beginning reading,
to be able to hear an expert from your literacy community, to be able to
read to an expert and have some feedback. If this can happen in the
home, that\'s wonderful. If it doesn\'t happen in the home, those
children are behind and we need to provide that experience of adult
feedback to them.

So there has been, to make up for the lack of resources in the schools,
there has been increasing interest in tutoring models that utilize
volunteers, community members, senior citizens, college students are
usually the people that are brought to this issue.

So this presentation focuses primarily on the effectiveness of these
community volunteer efforts. And overall, the mean effect size, and an
effect size is a measure of magnitude of statistical significance, and
roughly .20; the effect size can, it can be negative, which is not a
good thing, obviously, it means you\'re hurting achievement, or you\'re
hurting your outcomes. But typically, we look at it as hopefully having
some positive effect and does it go from a zero effect to something
that\'s quite substantial.

So Cohen has given us as rough metric to use in interpreting effect
sizes. .2 would be considered a weak effect, .4 a moderate effect, .6 a
strong effect and anything over .6 is really something to jump up and
celebrate. So the overall mean effect size for tutoring in several large
meta-analyses is .40, a moderate effect.

The average effect size for volunteers, however, was .26. But, in
studies that describe the tutor\'s training, the effect size was .59.
And I\'ll talk more about the importance of training.

When you break these effect sizes down to particular outcome measures,
word identification, for example; which is the ability to read words
correctly. The effect sizes range from .42 to 1.24. And by the way, all
these references are at the back of my presentation. The effect on word
attack which is the ability to read non-words, which for many people is
a real sign of decoding excellent, the rages of effect size is .32 to
1.24. On fluency, which is words correct per minute, the range is .48 to
.53. On comprehension, you have a wide range of effects from .10 to;
well, I put a mid-point there, .32 to .90 in Stephanie Al Otaiba\'s
recent study.

Now comprehension is multi-faceted. It can be measured many ways and
probably should be measured many ways. So part of the variability here
may be just because of the way it\'s being measured. You can measure
listening comprehension by reading a story to children and asking them
to tell you what happened in a story. In reading comprehension you have
multiple choice tests like on your standardized tests. You have, you can
ask questions to the students ad they answer the questions back orally
or you may ask them to write a summary. Half of the national assessment
of educational progress items for reading comprehension are written
responses. You can have a Cloze measure, where you have a student
complete a sentence, they read a written sentence and they complete it
at the end. That\'s called Cloze, C-L-O-Z-E. Many different ways then to
measure comprehension which then often results in a lot of variability
in the outcomes for comprehension.

Now it\'s hard to talk across these studies because they have different
samples. They differ in age, they differ in socio-economic status, they
differ in the ethnicity compositions. They differ in the tutors that are
used, the amount of their training, how much supervision they have. They
differ in the intensity of the tutoring, the number of minutes per week,
the number of weeks of the tutoring. And then they differ in the
measures used and the components of reading assessed. So these
variations complicate the interpretations of effect sizes.

Now my own research in classrooms observing how teachers use their time
and how they, the quality of their teaching, has shown me that a good
program is only as good as its implementation. Whenever I hear program X
is wonderful my next question is have you implemented it and when you
implement it, what do you find? Under what conditions does it work for
whom? How well? How long? All of these raise issues about the fidelity,
how well a program is implemented with a particular population in a
particular setting.

Vadasay et al. reported higher effects for high fidelity community
tutors, for tutors who were implementing their program with higher
fidelity, effect size of .85, compared to lower fidelity tutors, .06,
essentially no effect if her program wasn\'t delivered well.

Barbara Wazik has a summary of volunteer tutoring programs in *Reading
Research Quarterly*, 1998, and she makes the following points about the
successful programs, what components they shared.

First of all, they tended to use certified reading specialists to
supervise the tutors. Ongoing training and feedback for tutors, it\'s
not enough just to have you know a one hour training at the beginning of
the year and then forget about the tutors. You need to keep dropping in
and retraining and observing as needing. We call it Drift, your tutors
may drift away from good fidelity to the program unless you visit them
on occasion and have refresher groups. Structured tutoring sessions that
incorporate basic literacy elements. Particularly if people have no
background in reading to give a, have a structured tutoring session is
important and they will in fact learn about how to teach reading from
the structure, and making sure that the basic literacy elements are
included, if you\'re working with beginning readers. Consistent
intensive tutoring for struggling readers is very important. And that
also relates to the second bullet from the bottom, which is attendance.
If the students are attending and you are consistent and intensive in
your tutoring, you have a much better chance of being successful. Access
to high quality materials, high quality reading materials, and high
quality instructional materials. And then monitoring student progress to
make sure that what you\'re doing has an impact, to make sure that the
students are learning what you\'re teaching them. And then coordinating
the tutoring with classroom instruction if at all possible, to know
what\'s going on in the classroom, to even think about the tutoring
programs that you use as being in alignment with what\'s going on with
the classroom materials.

I\'m going to give a few examples of tutoring programs that have been
deemed successful. The Howard Street Tutoring Program started in 1979.
It has two forty-five minute one on one tutoring for poor readers in
grades two and three by non-paid volunteers. On the job training by paid
reading specialist, first day the supervisor teacher teaches and the
tutor watches and then there\'s a debriefing about that. And then day
two then the tutor teacher and the supervisor watches and there\'s
debriefing.

The tutor comments daily on the progress in guided reading at the
student\'s instructional level. That\'s eighteen minutes of the
tutoring. Word study; so guided reading, it\'s student doing most of the
reading hopefully, with the tutor giving scaffolding when the tutee
struggles with a word. Word study for ten minutes, and those are usually
words that consist of the patterns that the student is struggling to
master, easy reading, something that\'s right at the student\'s
instructional level where they can be highly successful, and then
reading to the child. Reading to the child from good literature that\'s
above the student\'s reading level is critically important if you\'re
going to build vocabulary. And you can even target some of the
vocabulary after reading, or during reading. That becomes sort of
another discussion, to make sure that you build vocabulary to be
prepared for what Tim mentioned; which is you can get kids decoding
beautifully, but surprise, surprise, they may not be able to comprehend,
because they don\'t have the word level meanings in their own vocabulary
to understand what they are calling out.

Then assessment, pre/posttest assessment of word recognition and
spelling on graded word list and oral reading on a graded passage.

Another program, Book Buddies, by Marcia Invernizzi and her colleagues
at University of Virginia. This was started in 1993. One on one tutoring
four days per week by trained supported and supervised volunteer tutors
for a minimum of twenty weeks.

The effects sizes of 1.24 for word recognition, relative to Title 1
historical controls, so she was comparing Book Buddies to a Title 1
program, and she followed up the effects over time, which is wonderful.
Very few people actually bother to do that. But in grade three, these
tutored children were still quite successful in their reading.

Book Buddies has a box, a tutoring box that consists of a lesson plan, a
familiar book to be re-read for fluency, word bank cards in a folder, a
composition book for writing and recording word sorts, a new book to be
read that day and record-keeping lists. So everything is ready, right
there for the tutor to use.

Tim pointed out that sheer amount of time does matter. Stephanie Al
Otaiba in her study of exceptionality studied the effectiveness of a
program called TAILS, Tutor Assisted Intensive Learning Strategies.
Which is a kindergarten version of the PALs, Peer Assisted Learning,
that was developed at Vanderbilt by Doug and Lynn Fuchs.

So this tutoring version of it was delivered by community volunteers who
were paid five dollars an hour, during the school day with at-risk
kindergarteners; and they found that the effect sizes were larger for
four days of tutoring versus two days. That\'s not really surprising,
but it\'s important to actually show this. The Effect sizes were .79 for
word identification, .90 for passage comprehension, .83 for basic
reading skills. So those are very strong effects for four days of one on
one tutoring.

But there\'s another study that catches everybody by surprise and we
need to mention it. The study by Scott Backer, Russ Gerstin \[Phonetic\]
and colleagues, on a program called SMART, which stands for Start Making
a Reader Today. And these adult volunteers tutored first and second
graders in thirty minute one on one sessions two times per week during
the school year. The students to be tutored were selected by the
teachers to participate in SMART. The tutors were trained in one hour
sessions or on the job. Each school had a half-time SMART coordinator
who recruits volunteers, finds tutoring space in school, sets time and
locates books. And they got effect sizes of .44 on word identification,
fluency, .48 to .53, word comprehension, .43, but passage comprehension
was .32. Which is again, a little less strong. This is often the
finding, you\'ll find stronger effects on the word level reading than
the comprehension.

This program was across the state of Oregon when this study was done in
2000. The SMART handbook says that reading improves with necessary
background knowledge for the story. And if the student doesn\'t have the
necessary background knowledge, doing something to help bring that to
the student; opportunities to hear different types of books;
opportunities to hear letter-sound relations for unknown words; making
predictions about the story to be read; and then deriving meaning from
the illustrations.

The handbook also suggests four reading strategies the volunteer can
use. The volunteer can read to the child, the volunteer and the child
can read together, the volunteer can read a section of the text and then
the child rereads that section; and then the volunteer asks the child
questions during reading.

The keys to success in all of these programs to recap are that the
fidelity to program that includes, that this program needs to include an
alphabetic mastery and reading for meaning components, and fidelity to
that program is critical, that if you have a good program, make sure
that the tutor is actually following it. You need a knowledgeable
reading expert to coordinate and supervise the program. You have to
consider the intensity of tutoring. More is better. The selection,
training and support for tutors is critically 8important.

So I gave you my website and you have the reference list for the
references I cited and I encourage you to follow up on them to get more
details about their studies. Thank you.

FEMALE VOICE 4:

MS. REDDY: We\'ll move on to our next panel, Helene Kramer and Carl
Guerriere.

Helene Kramer is the Executive Director of Good Schools for All, Buffalo
Reads. She was a founding member of United Parents, which is a parent
advocacy group for children in Buffalo\'s public schools and she served
as its board chair and president. In 1994, she was elected to a
five-year term as an at-large member of the Buffalo Board of Education,
where she served in numerous leadership roles. Three and a half years
ago, Helene changed careers to become the Executive Director of good
schools for all, an organization whose mission is to improve student
achievement for all of Buffalo\'s public school children. Thanks, Helen.

MS. KRAMER: Thank you. Thank you very much. I\'m really tickled to be
here today to tell the Buffalo story. The Buffalo story is not always
about snow and cold. We\'re doing some really good things.

First of all I want to tell you a little bit about Good Schools for All.
Good Schools is actually a program component of the Community Foundation
for Greater Buffalo. Our role is as an independent neutral convener. We
offer no programs or services. There are currently just two of us on the
staff. And our mission is to; I like to say harness the power of
community. Because there\'s an enormous amount of power in the community
to help improve student achievement for Buffalo\'s public school kids

For the last several years our focus has been literacy. Why literacy?
The last three superintendents that I\'ve worked with have all made
literacy their number one priority. And that\'s largely because of the
statistics that we have in the public schools. The current statistics
are that 62% of the children in fourth grade are not proficient in
reading. Educators tell us that children learn to read through third
grade and then they\'re supposed to read to learn. So it\'s no surprise
if 62% of our kids are not at proficient levels at the beginning of
fourth grade, that at eighth grade we\'re seeing a more enormous jump to
79% of our children who are not reading at proficient levels.

I mean that\'s four out of five kids, it\'s really very, very, very
disturbing. And then not surprisingly, 38% of the children who begin
ninth grade in Buffalo\'s public schools do not graduate. And I\'m told
that that\'s a conservative figure, that it may be as high as 50%.

One of the things that happened when I saw those statistics is I went to
the superintendent and I said you know, this is terrible. I mean, what
is going on here? And the superintendent, this was two superintendents
ago, a woman named Marian Kinjedo \[Phonetic\] pulled out a piece of
paper from a desk drawer and she said, look at this Helene. It was a
results of a Bregantz \[Phonetic\] assessment of children just entering
pre-kindergarten. So these kids have not even been in the schools yet.
And over half of them, 53% as a matter of fact, were already at risk for
illiteracy because they had very limited oral vocabularies.

The children were not ready for school. 57% of them could not tell you
what the shapes were. They could not recognize letters of the alphabet.
Many didn\'t even know their own formal names. Again, these are children
who are not even in the district yet.

And then one of my colleagues from Literacy Volunteers talked about how
many adults are not reading at high levels, at proficient levels. And
she said in Buffalo it was 30% of adults that are at Literacy level 1,
what we sometimes call functional illiteracy. That equates to 65,000
people in the city of Buffalo. Then we have another 30% of adults who
are reading at Literacy Level 2, those of you who know what those levels
mean know that they can you know, read the street signs, do general
reading, read the box of cereal, the text on a box of cereal; but not
the higher level reading skills like analytical thinking or critical
thinking.

So what we began to see is that there\'s this cycle of intergenerational
literacy. And where Good Schools for All used to focus just on the
schools and children and parents of children in the schools, we began to
understand that community literacy that a community-wide literacy
campaign was really necessary if we were going to try to break that
cycle of intergenerational illiteracy.

Many of you have seen this chart. We know that a literacy level is
equated to higher annual earnings for people. And I just wanted to make
a point about this and that is that the definition of literacy and the
expectations of employers is expanding almost exponentially. We hardly
see a business anymore that doesn\'t use computers. Computers have
become so integrated into the workplace.

We\'re in a knowledge based economy, not an industrial economy anymore;
so knowing how to read and comprehend and evaluate are all skills that
more and more employers are requiring, and not to mention the fact that
we\'re dealing with a global economy; leads us to understand that
increased levels of literacy is important to our children in school, but
it\'s also important for us as adults to get better jobs and for our
cities to become more economically proficient or sustained.

What we did to get started; we don\'t do programs or services, so we
convened those that do. We convened a number of literacy organizations,
and we branded ourselves Buffalo Reads. We developed a collaborative
model, meaning that we attempted to work together on a number of things.
And I\'ll explain that a little bit more.

And I went to my board about this time and I said, you know, we really
need to do a community wide effort here and I\'d like to take some time
to do a feasibility study; which I did. I took six to eight months to do
a feasibility study. I talked to a lot of people, talked to funders,
talked to providers, looked on you know, websites; looked for best
practices. I visited my friends in Cleveland that were a little bit
ahead of where we were. Three large foundations there told me when I
visited that they were giving money to lots and lots of literacy
providers and they weren\'t seeing a lot of results. So they wanted to
do things in a different way.

These are the findings of the feasibility study. Probably not any
different in any community that we look at. And that is that I found
that the literacy providers, although they were passionate, they were
hard-working, they really loved the learners they were working with,
worked in silos. They were fragmented. There really was no system of
literacy services across the city. People operated in agency-centered
ways. They would say they were learner centered, but within the agency,
there was no system of services that was learner centered.

We found spotty quality standards in the organizations, spotty training
for staff. And for volunteers, some did it, some didn\'t. One of the
things that drives funders crazy is when they get reports about how the
money was spent, the outcomes are all measured differently; so they
don\'t know who\'s doing a good job, they don\'t know who\'s not doing a
good job.

We know from national statistics that only seven to ten percent of those
learners who need services actually get the services. And then we found
that half of those learners are dropping out within the first three
weeks. So we had a lot of capacity to built.

We also found that there was duplication of services, gaps in services,
and as I said, a lot of capacity to be developed. We were also as our
county was struggling for funding itself, as our city is struggling for
funding, our foundations were getting more and more proposals from
competing organizations. So we were competing for fewer and fewer
dollars.

Also there was a lack of data. We didn\'t know how many learners we were
serving in the community. We didn\'t know where they were coming from.
We didn\'t know what literacy levels they were at. We didn\'t know how
they were achieving after they had literacy services. So we really had
no data to base much of anything on. And probably worst of all, the
outcomes were not changing significantly.

So what we set out to do was a very lofty goal. We set a very lofty
goal. We said that we would achieve 100% literacy for every adult and
every child in the city of Buffalo. But we knew we couldn\'t do it by
doing things in the same old ways that we had always done. So we also
set out to transform this system of literacy services.

We wanted to make it learner centered and learner driven. We\'ve heard
another presenter talk about the learner has to set their own goals, and
that\'s what we\'re saying here. The campaign or the initiative had to
be comprehensive. We said we were going to serve everyone from infants
through seniors, that it was going to be coordinated, we\'ve got to
coordinate our efforts together; collaborative and integrated not only
with each other, but integrated with the Buffalo public school system so
that things were aligned.

And we set out to have a framework for quality, meaning that we wanted
agencies to set quality standards across program types. We wanted to be
able to assess the learner in the same way across program types. We
wanted to be able to measure outcomes in the same way across program
types. And we wanted to have a central data system so that we could
begin to collect data that we didn\'t currently have and which we knew
would drive quality in our programs.

There were other things that make up that framework for quality and
maybe we can talk about them later.

We also knew that we wanted to recruit and retain the learners, so if we
were only; if we had a goal as 100% literacy and if we in Buffalo
matched the national averages and we were only recruiting seven to ten
percent of our learners into programs, then we had to do a lot more to
recruit and retain those learners and make what we were doing more
relevant to their lives.

We also needed to broaden the scope and range of literacy, meaning we
wanted to get; we wanted to involve content in learning literacy. So we
said that we wanted to address the issue of workplace literacy for
people who needed jobs or wanted to get better jobs. We wanted to do
computer literacy, because to get a job you need to know how to use a
computer, health literacy and financial literacy were also important
areas where we broadened the scope of our definition of literacy. And
most important of all, create a strategic plan developed by the
community. Strategic meaning we knew we didn\'t have enough money or
enough resources to do everything, especially everything all at once.
And developed by the community because we knew that we needed the buy-in
of the community. We need their ideas or their creativity; that even
though we have over forty some organizations in the Buffalo Reads
coalition, we don\'t know it all.

This is a very busy chart. I\'m just going to point out that this is the
planning framework. So we started with a complete environmental
assessment including a needs analysis that gave us a lot of quantitative
data about the poverty in our city, about educational levels. We got
information about each of the schools and where each of the schools were
including the charter schools; an inventory of all the programs and
services because we didn\'t have a complete list. And we wanted to find
out what people were thinking, so we had twelve focus groups to put a
face on the numbers that we were dealing with.

We had seventeen different task forces that met on their own time, on
Saturdays for half a day to develop the strategic plan for literacy, we
have developed the plan and we\'re getting ready to launch in September.

Superintendent knew that I was coming here and what he said to me is,
make sure you show them my picture. So you can all tell him I did. This
is Dr. James Williams. He kicked off, this is a planning session. This
is our first planning session and he actually kicked off the session.
This was in a school. What we would do at the begging of each of our
Saturday meetings, we would all come together. You\'ll probably see
Margaret Dowdy here somewhere. She was the national consultant we used
to help us to put this planning piece together.

We had over 200 community stakeholders to help us develop the plan. So
these were the folks getting the instructions for the day. And then we
would break out into classrooms. Each task force would meet in a second
classroom to take the charge that we gave them for the day. And then we
would all come back and share what went on in each break down group. We
found out you know, what was working, what wasn\'t working; the
questions they had. And we did this over the course of six months to
develop the plan. Which we now have.

The goals that we set; I\'m going to run through these quickly because I
know we\'re behind and I\'ve still got quite a bit to go. We want to
make sure that every child is prepared to school, that every child has
all the skills and knowledge they need to be successful when they enter
pre-kindergarten or kindergarten. We want to make sure that every child
when they start in school achieves grade level standards from pre-k to
twelfth grade. And I have to tell you that these are the goals, they are
also strategies that the task forces developed under each of these goals
that tell us how we want to get there.

We want to ensure that parents and families have all the information and
all the skills they need so if a parent can\'t read and they would like
to learn how to read to help their children, then we want to certainly
be open to that and enable them to do that.

We also found that many parents didn\'t know what the schools expected.
So we want to ensure that we communicate with them so that they can work
with their children to prepare them. Because right now most of them
don\'t know what the schools want.

And that graduating high school students are fully prepared for college
level work. I think you all know that when students enter college, many,
many of them need remedial courses. And they often use up their
financial aid taking remedial courses and then don\'t have the money to
finish college. So we want to make sure that kids who graduate from high
school are fully ready for college.

We want to know that our college students will graduate and be prepared
with the knowledge and the skills they need to go on in graduate school
or to get a job.

Out of school youth which Susan talked about; we know that in Buffalo,
conservatively thirty-eight percent of the kids who start ninth grade
drop out. Those are the out of school youth. The schools don\'t know
where they are, it\'s difficult to recruit them, we want to be able to
get those kids back on track so that they can continue their education
or get jobs.

And with adult literacy, we want to improve literacy for either the
job-seekers or incumbent workers. We talked about literacy levels or how
higher literacy levels are being required, so we want to ensure that our
workers get those skills.

Health literacy, we know that more and more the healthcare industry is
requiring us to take care of ourselves. So we go and get a procedure and
then they give us four pieces of paper that tell us how to take care of
ourselves without any thought to how that paper is written or who
understands it. I don\'t understand it.

Financial literacy to help low and moderate income people become more
self-sufficient, not to be taken in by predatory lenders and, as my
friend Margaret Dowdy would say, who needs the ability to create wealth
more than folks who don\'t have it?

Insure that every person has access to and is trained how to use a
computer including the internet. The providers strategies for them are
to implement the framework for quality I\'d talked about before.

This is also a very busy chart and I will just tell you that I have
multiple copies of this at the table here. This is just the executive
summary of our plan. So it tells you what seventeen task forces we had.
It tells you what the goals were or are. And then there\'s a three-year
implementation plan on the back. So I\'m happy to share that with you if
you\'d like to see it.

The name of our campaign is Read to Succeed. It\'s going to change to
Read to Succeed Buffalo. It all starts here. Where is here? It starts
with every single one of you. It starts with me. It starts with the
Mayor. It starts with the superintendent. It starts with every child, it
starts with every learner; whether they\'re an adult or a child. It
starts with everyone and that\'s the message that we\'re trying to get
across; that a 100% literacy requires 100% participation.

And this; am I going, a two-minute warning. Okay. Let me see what I can
do here. These are some of the things that we\'re doing for initial
implementation. We just started implementation this year. I can talk
about that later. Rules of engagement for agencies, these are things
that we\'re saying to any agency that wants to take a piece of the plan,
these are the things you have to do. They\'re required. We\'ll have them
be asked to sign MOUs. Okay.

Measuring effectiveness. Let me spend the major part of what\'s
remaining of my two-minutes talking about this. You cannot find a
business, you cannot find anyone in the community doing effective work
that doesn\'t have an engine that collects data to help them do
everything from drive quality to learn something about their business.
What we want to do is have data so that we can get for the agencies
business intelligence. Meaning that if I see I\'ve got 100 people I\'m
serving in a particular zip code but I don\'t have a presence there,
maybe I want to move a drop-in center there if I\'m an adult literacy
provider.

Maybe I see that there\'s a need in a particular other zip code that I
need to do more work in. So having data allows us to do lots of things,
including getting return on investment information to the individual
learners, because they\'re putting time in, to the funders, because
they\'re money in, to the community because they\'re putting effort in.
So that\'s extremely important. We\'ll go through this later.

Success factors, obviously active support from our community leaders
because they help us drive this through the community. This one\'s
really important and I\'ve talked to the three major funders that have
been supporting my campaign. I tell them if you can\'t align the funding
to the strategic plan, and you continue fragmented funding, then we will
continue to have a fragmented system.

So we need them to align the funding to the strategic plan that we have.
Literacy has to be infused everywhere. So it\'s not just picking up a
book and saying we\'re going to read now, it can be infused in Arts, it
can be infused in basketball sessions in a community center, it can be
infused and must be infused everywhere. Every program that the United
Way has, every program that Community Centers have, every program
that\'s funded with Community Block Grant funds can have literacy
infused. And that way we get more literacy exponentially in the
community.

Marketing and outreach, extremely important. I think these things you
can read. And what we hope to come out of as benefits to Buffalo is
improved student achievement, which again goes back to my mission, and
lots of other good things. I thank you.

MS. REDDY: Thanks so much, Helene. Our next panelist is Carl Guerriere.
He\'s the founding Executive Director of the Greater Hartford Literacy
Council, a not for profit organization that serves as a regional broker
and a resource to coordinate and enhance literacy efforts in the
thirty-five town metro Hartford region. Before establishing the literacy
council, Carl was the program coordinator of Read to Succeed, a reading
clinic for adults with learning disabilities, reading disabilities. He
also served as reading center manager for Literacy Volunteers for
Greater Hartford. Before returning to Hartford in 1995, Carl was the
associate director of the Center for Urban Education at DePaul
University in Chicago.

MR. GUERRIERE: Thank you. And I\'m really happy to be here. It\'s an
honor to be among you who may suffer, or I shouldn\'t say suffer. Talk
to you about perspective a little bit here. Some may say suffer, others
may say, I have a condition, and that is I\'m a big picture person.
Okay. There it goes. Okay.

I\'m a big picture person and I think I\'m among a lot of you who are
big picture people as well. But when I go back to Hartford there are a
lot of people who are not big picture people and when you start talking
about collaboration, their eyes glaze over, they don\'t want to hear
about it.

The other condition I have is I wear rose colored glasses. And now I
wear these rose colored glasses not to hide from the realities, some of
the very harsh realities that Susan Taylor talked about. But rose
colored glasses that talk about another thing that you need to do, which
is basically a suspension of reality. You have to suspend reality to put
your head in the sand and forget about all these harsh realities that we
deal with. But we also need a little bit of suspension of reality to say
we can end poverty and we can have 100% literacy and we all can work
together and we can get the federal government to put money towards
literacy so we can address these issues.

The other one is my last name, which is Guerriere. And if you know
Italian, it means warrior, actually, female warriors. And so, depending
on your perspective, that could be a good or bad thing. And I also just
want to let you know I\'m going to talk about two reports that we\'ve
done and they\'re on our website which is greaterhartfordreads.org.

Community literacy, I won\'t go over this too much. But we did a major
assessment also in Hartford, Greater Hartford, and these were just some
of the places that provide literacy in for adults; this is just the
adult piece. And what you see here is what?

There\'s a little difference in some of these over here. You can see
that public schools and family resource centers and adult basic
education programs in Greater Hartford are connected. The rest are not.
And that\'s one of the challenges, or a major challenge that we deal
with here. Edith talked about breaking down walls, talking about all the
barriers that we need to break down to have people to collaborate.

Another call to action, or another person calling for a call to action,
everyone has a role in improving literacy. It must be a priority. Why?
Because the common thread connecting our nation\'s challenges, you\'ve
heard today.

Health literacy, workforce literacy, family literacy; all these issues
that are devastating our urban areas, rural areas, that are spreading
out to all parts of this nation have a common thread of literacy.

And that leadership is needed at all levels, not just top down, but also
bottom up.

Some assumptions: what we say over and over again for those
anti-collaborators, the scope of the problem is greater than any one
organization. And so you have to realize that. Or that\'s our
assumption, my assumption, my group\'s assumption, hopefully your
assumption.

That the scope of the literacy problem is beyond any one literacy
organization. We have some literacy organizations like the schools who
think that they\'re going to solve the whole problem.

And then the scope of the literacy problem is beyond literacy. And that
is our challenge. Because to really address and achieve 100% literacy,
we have to be talking about everybody working together. Well how do you
get every one to work together? And that\'s the real challenge. It\'s
not just illiteracy, it\'s not just an education problem, we have to
talk about case management. We have to talk about support services. We
have to talk about transportation and child care. And that\'s not just
under the purview of the educators.

We also have to acknowledge again, Susan Taylor brought this out, the
issues of literacy are intertwined with issues of poverty and racism.
Low literate people are over represented by people of poverty and also
people of color. Efforts employed to overcome illiteracy; therefore
efforts employed to improve literacy become efforts to improve social
justice.

Now, we know what needs to be done. If we took all of us in this room
and you gave us some of that money, I\'m sure that we could do a lot to
address the literacy issues that are facing our nation. And we have the
resources. We\'re just not allocating the resources where they need to
be allocated. So don\'t tell me we do not have the resources. The divide
is getting larger. I come from Connecticut, which has the dubious
distinction of having the greatest divide in the country in per capita
income and academic levels.

And that a paradigm shift is needed. We have to get people to think
differently, if it\'s putting on rose colored glasses, then that\'s what
we need. And we also have to acknowledge that a power shift is needed.
And it\'s all about political and economic power. For those that don\'t
have it, you have to get it some how. Our learners, as I said, many are
living in poverty; people of color, often because of those situations,
not situations, conditions, whatever, do not, have not been plugged in
to political and economic power.

Literacy providers, we live in a climate where everyone is being
increasingly asked to provide outcomes and they don\'t have the
resources and what they do is they focus on their own programs. I\'ve
got to produce outcomes, otherwise I\'m not going to get my funding.
I\'m not going to collaborate with you because you may effect my
outcomes. I\'m going to cream my students because I have to produce
outcomes.

Political leaders, yes they have political power and often economic
power. But if they do not see that collaboration is important, it\'s a
tough situation. We have a political leader, a new political leader here
in Hartford, not here in Hartford, but in Hartford; who said that
collaborations are like herding cats.

And then funders. Funders also have the money, but we also need to ask
them to ask for accountability. We have to ask them to ask programs to
use standards and we also have to ask them to encourage collaboration
that\'s done in a meaningful way.

We feel that the long-term solutions come from our state government, the
federal government and partnerships with the private sector.

The Literacy Council was formed in 2001 as an outgrowth of a city task
force. It was the Adult Literacy Providers that came together to ask our
former mayor to have a task force because it came out that Hartford has
73% of its adult population below level 3 literacy on the NALS
\[Phonetic\] test, or NALS assessment.

And then the task force then recommended that a coordinating entity be
formed and from there the Greater Hartford Literacy Council was formed.
The strategic partners were the City of Hartford, the Hartford public
schools, the Library, Capital Workforce Partners, which is the WIB
\[Phonetic\], the local workforce board, and the Hartford Foundation for
Public Giving. And so, they were instrumental and came together and I
think we made a bleep on the literacy world map because you had major
participation, financial participation from these organizations.

We have more than 100 members who represent literacy providers, human
service organizations, businesses, government organizations and
individuals.

Let\'s take a look at Hartford which was one of the richest cities last
century when it started, and then as it ended the last century was one
of the poorest in the country. This is our population which has
decreased from a high of 190,000. Our population now is predominantly
Latino. Black population, African American as well as a large West
Indian population, and the remaining is White population.

Learners, students, language other than English, 47%, living below
poverty, 31%, median income is twenty-four as you can see, and home
ownership is very low. These are among the lowest in the nation. The
median income is compared to Connecticut\'s, which has the highest per
capita income. So Hartford is really struggling.

And just to put in perspective, because in Hartford we find a lot in
poor communities we beat up on ourselves a lot; and so when I say well
Hartford has 73% below level 3, of course people say well that\'s
because you\'re a poor city. But then I put it in perspective and take a
look at the Hartford region, Connecticut and the nation; and then they
say, well okay, it\'s bad, but we also have a state and a national
problem as well.

So we find ourselves with a critical number of residents with low
literacy skills. Much about literacy assets and needs is unknown. We
have a fragmented network and we also have this thing called Yankee
Individualism. And that is we have 169 towns in that little small state
of Connecticut, and they each have their own form of government. We do
not have county form of government. Everyone does their own thing, and
you know, a fight to the death. So, collaboration is an unnatural act
between two or more consenting or non-consenting adults.

So, we did this assessment. Community Literacy Enhancement Across the
Region, and we called it CLEAR. And it\'s joining forces as a region to
address low literacy. And these were the goals: to try to begin this
integrated system of high quality services to strengthen providers of
services and to strengthen the systems that deliver literacy services.
And again, when I say this to some of the people in Hartford, their eyes
glaze over. Okay, I don\'t want to focus about those literacy systems.

Our partners were the United Way of Capital Area, and we get no money
from them. The CREC \[Phonetic\], which is a regional LEA and the WIB.
The impact of the initiative; we wanted to get an accurate snapshot of
what was going on from which to measure progress. There was community
wide involvement. We involved over 209 individuals representing 150
departments and organizations taking a very comprehensive look at
literacy. To enhance the capacity of the providers, meaningful
partnerships were created. And then we started some systemic change
efforts.

We had an oversight committee, which we think is important. The problem
is as the thing went on, they didn\'t buy into it. And that was one of
our lessons learned. And the role was to advise and coordinate the CLEAR
initiative, it was hard to get them to come to the meetings. And we
probably should have encouraged that more. And they were supported by
our staff.

We did use demographic data. We used existing reports. There\'s all
kinds of reports out there and they often sit on the shelf, so we said
let\'s take a look at those. We did a survey of our providers. We also
conducted focus groups and we looked at ESOL, learners with
disabilities, workplace literacy, health literacy, child/family, adult
and family literacy funding and policy.

And we also paid our providers to complete the survey. And we felt that
that was important. And these were the focus groups that we did. For
youth in and out of services, adults in and out of literacy services and
human service providers. Some of our best advocates are human service
providers. They are dealing day to day with people who are suffering
from low literacy.

The products is the report, like I said, which is on our website and we
also came out with some service directories related to services that are
available, a parent packet, etcetera; and we launched our website.

We looked at best practices, we looked at developing quality standards,
but taking a look at the research that\'s out there and adopting it,
advocating for policy changes; and again like I said, the service
directories.

And you see at the bottom here, we were trying to create a model for
system change and each participant fully engaged and committed. That did
not happen. We don\'t have enough, the Literacy Council does not have
enough political and economic power. We are a poor organization. We
could not bring people to the table. We did not have any political power
to bring people to the table.

And that is in part because the mayor that started our literacy council
could no longer run for another term. We have a new mayor. We are on our
third superintendent in six years. And the Workforce board president
changed. So in six years we had all this transition of leadership, and
each time we had to build new leadership.

We developed four interrelated focus areas, and these are the focus
areas. And they\'re all interrelated. So we felt we had to raise
awareness about the situation. If you raise awareness then you\'re going
to get more money, hopefully, from the powers that be to do some of the
service delivery and capacity building and then also to do some of the
system coordination. So all our services are within those four areas.

Now the challenge for organizations like ourselves; in times of limited
resources we should fund organizations that provide direct literacy
instruction. So there is not a natural inclination to fund our type of
organization. They want to fund those that do, that can show that
they\'ve improved literacy levels.

We do not need another bureaucratic layer. And so when we talk about
collaboration and we are currently fighting to form an interdisciplinary
state group to look at literacy, because there are so many state
departments that have a finger or funding in literacy, and then you have
even among the literacy providers are fighting this legislation, because
they don\'t want to see another bureaucratic layer because they\'re
worried that some of the current funding will be cut out.

And can you demonstrate your impact on improving literacy levels? And so
when you\'re an intermediary, and you\'re not responsible for improving
literacy levels, then how do you show that impact? And that\'s a major
challenge.

Briefly, we did; to answer that we did what we felt was an exemplary
amount of a Taniff \[Phonetic\] Workforce literacy Pilot project. We got
a quarter of a million dollars from the legislature to work with
literacy organizations to help them integrate workforce job preparation
with basic skills which all the research shows it\'s better to do it
that way. Also, make sure that they were able to provide support
services and a variety of other things; and at the end be able to show
that the individuals that went through this improved their literacy
levels. So we wanted to test that model, increase literacy skills, get a
snapshot of their educational needs and evaluate and also make
recommendations.

So we did this comprehensive assessment and all these other things that
you probably know and some others have talked about that are good; case
management, quality staff instruction and then these individualized
learning programs.

We needed to facilitate a program shift, and this is the big thing that
we\'re advocating, that programs need to have targeted technical
assistance. They really need someone to really hold their hand and help
them change to make that paradigm shift. People are used; we\'re
creatures of habit, we\'re used to doing the same things over and over.

And what we found were like for the people who were counseling the
mostly women into this program, they had to change their mentality to
say, to try this program because it didn\'t fit in to what the federal
guidelines---

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DR. PETRICE SAMS-ABIODUM: \--our programs is because of the shame and
guilt. When I say literacy, the image that comes to mind for the people,
a lot of the people we want to serve, is the issue of illiteracy.
Another tool that we\'re using to do that is *13 Lessons*, it\'s a way
to have a community kind of discourse, a dialogue that combines the
arts, literacy awareness, dialogue and advocacy. Just in closing, back
to where I began, it for us, or for me; it is not just about literacy.
It is about hope. And if we don\'t have hope, you know, how do you
measure hope? You know. I don\'t know. So rebuilding of New Orleans is
one of our biggest challenges. I believe that this country has ever
faced. It is also one of our greatest opportunities to use data,
information and best practices to build a stronger New Orleans. Anybody
that knows something ought to be wanting to put it there in New Orleans,
because the slate is clear and we\'re looking for best approaches and
practices. And that\'s really what we see at the Lindy Boggs Center.

And finally, by examining institutional change, we have an opportunity
to realign systems that will integrate literacy where it can become a
tool, I believe, for personal, economic and community empowerment. Thank
you all.

MS. REDDY: Thanks so much. Excuse me. Our next speaker is Doug Marriott.
He joined the staff of the Literacy Network of Greater Los Angeles as
the outreach director in 2005, to support the implementation of Literacy
At Work, the LA Workforce literacy project, which is a major new
initiative creating coordinated workforce development, and it\'s
administered by the network. As the outreach director, Doug helps bring
together literacy providers from Los Angeles County for professional
development and capacity building and helps develop partnerships with
area businesses to offer on site trainings. He also does a lot of other
great things, which I\'m not going to tell you about to give him a
little more time to talk.

MR. DOUG MARRIOTT: Good afternoon. It\'s a real pleasure to be here.
I\'ve learned a lot throughout today. And I don\'t know if I\'m batting
clean up here, but a good thing about going at the end is I get to focus
on what\'s been said prior and even appropriate some of the language.

So I\'m here to talk about challenges in measuring and collecting data
for evaluation and I\'d like to do that with a case study; an exciting
project that\'s taking place in Los Angeles right now that came out of
the Literacy At Work Project. And so I\'ll get right to it.

I\'m going to give you a little bit of background about the Network.
What our guiding principals are and a little bit about the background of
the Literacy At Work project and what it hopes to become and is
becoming. I\'ll talk about general project challenges that include
measurement and collecting data for effectively building on what we\'re
creating. And then the case study, the unique and successful case of the
MTA training. I kind of believe it\'s community literacy in action.
There\'s been a lot of talk about breaking down silos, breaking down
walls and bringing organizations together. And I believe in some form,
this is an example of that.

So the guiding principals in the network. We envision a Greater Los
Angeles where all people are empowered by literacy to achieve their full
potential in our community, a community which is socially just,
culturally dynamic and economically productive. Our goal is to make
literacy resources easily accessible to learners, literacy service
providers and employers in our community through partnerships, advocacy
and direct program services.

Out front, I\'m proud to share this with you. This is our, it\'s called
That Literacy Phone Book. It\'s the fifth edition. And it lists
resources throughout counties in Greater Los Angeles. It lists them by
the type of program and it also has, which I believe is very important,
it\'s got testimonials of people in each area. And there\'s a sign up
sheet if you\'d like a copy of it. I\'d be happy to send one your way.
But this is kind of where; the Network grew out of this, to become an
umbrella organization to provide a directory and resource and referral
services, where people could go and access areas in their community to
find literacy resources. But it\'s become a lot more in the past
fourteen years.

Online, you can go to theliteracynetwork.org and punch in your zip code
and find literacy providers in your area. There\'s also a twenty-four
hour hotline in English and Spanish that people can access. We have the
Literacy in Media awards, they\'re coming up in April. We focus on
achievements in media where literacy is highlighted. We have a summit
that usually falls on International Literacy Day on September 8^th^,
where we bring providers together and share best practices and talk
about what\'s happening in Southern California.

We have a volunteer program that recruits, trains and places volunteers
at partner sites that spun off of Literacy At Work. I believe all of
these services kind of overlap, because the goal is to provide people
with the tools to achieve their individual goals within the literacy
realm.

And Literacy At Work develops and implements workplace and workforce
literacy trainings for workers within Los Angeles. And that\'s what I\'m
going to speak about.

The project grew out of this study, which I also, there\'s also copies
out front, which the United Way funded the research and it came that 53%
of adults in Los Angeles are at level one or level two. And as we know
that means challenges reading a bus schedule or filling out a job
application. And many of these are native English speakers. It\'s across
the board and the statistics are gone into detail in that book. The
solution, many people came together and I believe that\'s actually an
example of community literacy as well; when providers come together as a
community to address a problem. And Margaret\'s been mentioned a couple
times and she helped on this project as well.

It\'s a challenge to bring community providers together, but they were
brought together to create a plan. And the plan was to create a
different way to address these needs, because clearly by the adult
school or the community college or by non-profits themselves, there is a
challenge to address these great needs in Los Angeles.

So the plan included to develop a twenty-five hour training or
certification program where we recruited instructors. And we went
through a training that focused on workplace and workforce needs. And
out of that training was developed a quality standards handbook; which
people talked about quality standards and things that could be measured,
I have my didactic materials here.

And this is the quality standards that came out of it, which was then
adopted by the community college district and used in their English
language programs. So there is kind of a base mark. It says things that
you all know. It says that instruction needs to be learner-centered, it
needs to focus on the goals; that adults, when they come into program
need to be aware of resources within their community, which that ties it
back to this. When they get through the program, what are the next
steps. And I\'d be happy to send one of these your way too.

Implementation just began this past spring. And it\'s included workplace
trainings at businesses. We\'ve done them at social service
organizations. One of the businesses was in the garment industry, where
the owner of the company very altruistic woman, does great stuff and I
was sharing information about this; she said I\'d really like to do a
training just to, I really believe in what you\'re doing and I think we
can do this. And it\'s contract training, it\'s not free. The funding is
varied depending on the situation, but she invested in this training,
because she liked the spirit of what Literacy At Work is about; but then
she found quantitative improvement with her workforce. Which usually
it\'s the other way around. Usually you talk to employers and you say,
we\'re having trouble, people are not doing this and we want to see
results in ten hours. You know, what can you do for us? But then you
hear, when you do do a training at the site, you hear from the employers
the qualitative. You hear that people are interacting more with each
other, the work environment is improved, people are saying hello to each
other.

Anyway. So, on to the MTA bus driver project. This came about this past
summer. There was a little bit of a crisis with the MTA, which is the
number one Transit Authority in the country, by the way. They needed
about 300 drivers and they found that people were coming into their
training and they didn\'t have the basic skills to proceed through this
six week training. So they were spending millions of dollars in
overtime. And Antonio Villarigosa \[Phonetic\] is on the board of the
MTA. And he challenged people within the organization, find me a
creative and aggressive solution to address this. How can it be that in
Los Angeles we can\'t find 300 bus drivers?

So they went through this study and the gentlemen; they started asking
around the community and they called one of our partners at the Literacy
At Work project, which is LA Valley College, and they have a great job
director there and he called me up and he said, Doug, what do you know
about driving busses? And I said, nothing, Lenny, but I\'m ready to work
with you. And so we met and this is how the collaboration kind of broke
down.

This is; LA Valley College was kind of a lead on the project. They
planned the coordination. They specialize in job training and customer
service instruction. But they realized that a literacy element was
really important to the training. So as Literacy At Work was developing
they called us; the Literacy Network provided Literacy At Work
instructors. We did services, we trained instructors, we do the
customized curriculum development. We have volunteer support and
resource and referral information. And we helped working with all of the
entities shown here, create a pre-training for the MTA.

Now the Work Source Center, it\'s like the Workforce Investment Board,
funds this group, helped with recruitment and what turned out to be key
was data management, support services and case management; kind of the
wraparound services that are needed. So it\'s not just the instructors
keeping track of who\'s there, but there\'s actual social services
behind it.

And then the vital component to any workplace or workforce literacy is
the employer. At the end of this training, the goal is that they get
through the MTA training and become bus drivers. So the MTA played a
very active role. They provided everybody in the program with free
transportation. They gave them all bus passes. They came and they gave
the orientation. They had their HR specialist come. And they started
little by little coming to the graduations. And as the graduations
started rolling out, they came more and more. And their top level, their
top level staff there started really enjoying coming to these
graduations and I\'ll share why soon.

So this is kind of brief flow chart of what we created for the project.
And this shows the importance of evaluation and data management. There
was recruitment. People came in and received an orientation. They got an
overview and they were told this is what it is. If you\'re willing to
invest your time, these are the services you\'ll receive for free, but
you\'re a partner in this project. If you\'re up for it, this is what
you\'re going to expect. Then they were given a basic skills assessment,
and I\'ll speak about that in the moment. But that was required, because
we need to know where people are at, where to place them, so we can help
them be successful.

And then there was a breakdown of three tracks. And that was determined
by the skills assessment. And in track one it could be a sixteen week
course in ESL, track two was about a five week course and the first
track was a two week course, but they were all at least forty hours of
instruction. Even if it was two weeks, it was at least forty hours of
instruction. And it included Literacy At Work Services. It included
discussing multiple intelligences, it included talking about learning
styles; it included study tips and reading strategies, all embedded in
the material that they would need to be successful in their bus driver
training.

So, ongoing challenges for the project have to do with the fact that
many providers use different assessment tools. And since we were
partnering with the Work Source Centers, we had to use the assessment
tool that they were mandated by the state to use. And so these are kind
of the three areas of challenges, skills assessment, performance
measurement and data management.

In the area of skills assessment, there\'s a need for a uniform tool to
use with all the adult learners to place them in the program. Yet at the
same time we needed to meet the needs of all of the partnering agencies
and adult learners. With a lot of our trainings we do use learning
surveys to ask how people see themselves as learners at the end and we
also use the quality standards. But we needed a specific tool.

And so the solution was the standardized assessment tool, it was Coss\'s
\[Phonetic\] Workplace exam. It\'s been determined that it\'s suitable
for ABE and ESL learners to determine where they\'re at with certain
workplace and workforce trainings. And this is what was given for the
placement model.

We also used the MTA customer service exam as a tool, as a pre and post
assessment. Because many people were getting, we asked MTA what are you
using? And they showed me this twenty-eight question multiple choice
test, you know, that had a lot to do with critical thinking and test
taking skills. And they said, yeah, people aren\'t passing this. And so
we changed that a little bit and still used it in a fashion, but it
wasn\'t the determining factor to limit people from going through this
program.

In terms of performance measurement, the neater expectation was a
customized training course to prepare participants for success at Metro.
And the challenge was doing this curriculum to meet the parallel
missions of all the collaborators and individual needs of the
participants.

In this case the goal is really clear. You have adult learners who want
the goal of being a bus driver. And we brought in drivers to talk to
them. We talked about what it is to drive for Metro. So the goal was
pretty clear. But how to help them towards that goal, we had to be very
flexible.

And so what we came up with was a training that included job readiness,
customer service, ESL when needed, basic skills training in reading,
writing and study skills, critical thinking skills and all of it
contextualized to the needs of successfully completing the Metro
training.

And each training adapted. After we did a training, we\'d say what
worked, what didn\'t work, what resonated, what didn\'t resonate. And
it\'s still unfolding as we go. I believe each training, and the
trainings are still taking place; there was a graduation last week. And
every training improves, because the system is flexible enough to make
those changes.

And finally, data management. There was a need or expectation that each
participant that went through the program needed to be followed. We need
to evaluate their needs and provide accurate accounting for all
partners. We\'re the Literacy Network, we\'re a non-profit. We have
funders we need to report to. We definitely need to track who is
successful in the program; the same goes with the community college that
we\'re partnering with, as well as the Work Source Center. And most
importantly, and this kind of drove it; the employer. The employer
wanted to know who goes through our program and who is successfully
placed. And we have had meetings with them to talk about that, and
that\'s been really fascinating, because they pull out the files and we
say, what happened to this person? Why did they drop out? And they said,
well, they came in, they had a great attitude, they went to all the
study halls and all that, they had trouble driving. And we said, so, you
know, that really wasn\'t; that wasn\'t what we were contracted to do.

But we talked a lot about; some gentleman mentioned the four Cs. I think
that\'s what we were focusing on, the four Cs there was no D, so. But,
we did add, that did actually inform the curriculum. We added like an
observation activity with that. An observation where all the
participants would go out and observe on a bus, visualize themselves
behind the wheel, talk to the drivers there to kind of prepare them
better for that next step.

So the solution with data management, it helped that we were partnering
with the Workforce Investment Board\'s Work Source Center, because they,
by law, need to manage all the data. So they ended up dedicating a staff
member to manage all the data. This, then, is linked to the Literacy
Network, the Community College and MTA, so there\'s no overlap and
we\'re all using the same data and following the same people.

The results to date: between August 2006 and January 2007, there were
seven trainings. There\'s been two more since I did this. But they
reached 233 participants. 219 completed the trainings and earned
certificates. Of those 219, 198 passed their MTA interview and began new
employment orientation. The MTA statistics show the agency is halfway to
meeting its goal of 300 new operators. The vacancy rate is down. 161
from a high of 315. It\'s really been incredible results.

And it all happened very quick; but it happened because I think the
groups involved were willing to step outside of their walls and work
together and share in a common mission. And you\'ll see in this photo
here, that\'s the mayor, the president of the University is there, the
president of the Literacy Network is there as well. And that gentleman
there, his name is Alphonso Chavez. And every time people went through
the training, we said, we brought in drivers to talk, what\'s it like to
be a driver. And I would tell each group, because fortunately I was, I
teach some of the groups as well. Our goal is that you come back in
uniform and talk to the next group. And Alphonso came back. And Alphonso
had been working as a handyman, making \$8.15 an hour. And got into this
program and got through and became a bus driver. But what most impressed
me when he came back, he said that the program changed the way he looked
at himself as a learner.

Which, that\'s really the goal. And literacy being part of this, that
message of life-long learning, that we\'re all on a continuum, that to
be a successful MTA operator, you need to see yourself as a life-long
learner, because it\'s technical. Those busses have computers and
cameras. It was a message and he shared that with the group. He came
back and talked to the group. Which was really special.

So the conclusions that we can draw from this is that there\'s a need
for continual process improvement, and that would be impossible without
data management. Without data management capturing where people were at
during the training, we wouldn\'t be able to adjust and make the
changes. All stakeholders must share a vision for what program success
will look like, with mutually agreed upon outcomes to be evaluated. And
parallel missions, mutual respect for roles, resources, creativity and
flexibility are key components to project success.

You know we hope too that this will be a model kind of an example that
we can build on. It\'s something that\'s flexible in that we can\'t do
it alone. That was said earlier. Like, a school district can\'t do it
alone and a community college district can\'t do it alone. And although
I really believe in community based literacy projects, they can\'t do it
alone either. We\'ve got to partner in leverage and there are ways to do
it.

And I\'m going to end with a quote. Carl kind of you know inspired me
with the rose colored glasses. But there was a group here that graduated
recently. And sometimes I start off the trainings with quotes. And it
touched; at the end, the guy repeated the quote I said. Which, made me
feel pretty good.

And so, it\'s \"I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw
that life was duty. I acted, and behold, duty was joy.\" And so, I
appreciate all your work. I feel honored to be among you. And I look
forward to more good work. Thanks a lot.

MS. REDDY: Thanks. What a totally great way to end the presentation. So
I\'m thinking. I\'m thinking. Maybe I\'ll consult you. So we could
either kind of reconfigure the tables a little bit and stay here, so you
could sort of merge with your fellow tables so we have a smaller number
of fuller tables. Or if you\'re feeling like it would be nice to have a
change of scenery, we could go to the other rooms. Anybody have a
feeling?

FEMALE VOICE: Stay here.

MS. REDDY: Okay. Alright, the feeling is stay. So if you have, if you
have empty spaces at your table, could you welcome people from other
tables? Or if you\'re a small table and would like to meet some new
people you could mix it up. Oh right, and the task of course is; I
almost forgot. There is a second blue sheet, the afternoon discussion
questions. So again, if you want to spend about twenty minutes or so
talking about any or all of those second blue sheet discussion
questions, that would be great.

\[Crosstalk\]

\[END OF 87998 CD 5 (1)\]

\[START OF 87998 CD 5 (2)\]

FEMALE VOICE: Measuring and also what is the meaning of readiness for
children. And then another challenge was consistency in doing
assessments correctly. And also another challenge would be reflecting
the achievement gap that people start with that sometimes does not get
measured when you look at where they end up with; that reflect the
achievement that people start at very different levels.

The next question is what are potential solutions for these challenges?
We came up with two. As far as common measures, to bring agreement among
providers to support in the interest of the community to use that need
for improvement of the community as the motivation for bringing
agreement. And then also, another suggestion was to use graduates of the
programs to be part of the assessment and outcome process; that people
might be more willing to open up to graduates rather than outsiders. And
the last thing, the resources that would be most helpful in improving
performance measurement and data collection, our table felt, would be
leadership on a national level that would be accessible leadership on a
national level, bringing together coalitions across coalitions that
would also be listening to the field. Thank you.

FEMALE VOICE: Ladies and gentlemen, I need to tell you that I am the new
person on the block, so if I say anything that\'s wrong, just forgive
me, okay? But you know how it is when you go into a school building for
the first year as a teacher and they give you all the bad kids? Okay.

Here I am. Okay. As we started our discussion we thought about the idea
that in terms of immediate, intermediate, yes intermediate organizations
as opposed to those who deliver the direct instruction and interaction
with the participants, might be cause for some different kinds of data
to be assessed by each of those intervening organizations or by the
organization that helps in fact those who deliver the direct
instruction.

And what we decided, or what we heard in this group is that there are
some ways because there are some curriculum programs, even, that will
allow for some data to be collected and to be evaluated in terms of
student outcome and student performance. The Wilson\'s curriculum is
being; is something that is being used in the state of Massachusetts, I
believe it is. And they also use the Woodcock Johnson, which has been
around a long time for us to use in schools with students to find out
grade level and other particular data in terms of students\' performance
in a classroom setting, most especially those who need basic skills who
are working at a third grade through eighth grade level. There is a
CASAS, is it Casas? Casas. Okay, pre and posttest that helps with low
level testing of student performance. So I\'ve kind of gone into the
solution while I\'m talking about some of the challenges or identifying
some of the things that were happening with our group conversation. So
I\'ve kind of skipped ahead of myself. But again, please forgive me.
Okay?

I think that our group decided that one of the problems was, again, what
data which organization needs to have, so that at some point you will be
able to measure apples to apples. But because we know that we have
literacy organizations all over, who do different things with the group
of people who come to them; how in the world do you do that? So you may
want to first of all just find out which groups are doing what kind of
instruction and then determine the kind of testing that would be most
beneficial for that structure so that then you could pull out that data
and disaggregate the data so that you would be better able to find out
just how well those organizations were doing.

I think I\'ve got most of what we said. Is that right group?

MALE VOICE: I told my table that I wouldn\'t report this afternoon,
since I had already done service this morning. And they said, oh no. We
have to have continuity.

So there were three main things that we discussed as we looked at
performance measures. One is that when we talk about community literacy,
we may be talking about two different but related things. One being
community literacy in k-12. And the other being community literacy for
adults. And here\'s how they differ. Community literacy in k-12 as we
understand it from this morning\'s presentations focuses primarily on
reading and writing for kids that may take place in school or in
community organizations and settings that\'s provided by tutors. That\'s
pretty clear, pretty straightforward.

The problem is that if you take that definition and apply it to adults,
reading and writing is only a part of what adults learn in community
literacy programs. They also learn numeracy, they learn to prepare for
the GED or adult diploma programs. They do college preparation programs.
The majority of students across the states, in many states, are now
English language learners. There\'s work related learning and so forth.
In other words, this is a much wider range of definition for adults when
we\'re talking about community literacy. And the reason it\'s important
for us to pay attention to that as we begin to look at performance
measures for learners and for programs; it\'s going to be different for
whether we\'re talking about k-12 or for adults.

However, having said that, there may be some things that are the same.
So that leads us to the second issue, which is one of the issues that
appears to be the same as the issue of intensity. So we learned this
morning that in k-12 it\'s very beneficial to children, young adults,
learning to read; if you can increase the time on task. If you increase
the intensity of instruction by providing tutoring in the school or in
the community.

Intensity is an issue in literacy learning and in adult basic education.
It\'s the same issue for adults. Adults who come to programs and study
four hours a week in class are not going to make much progress. In fact,
there is some evidence that they\'re not going to make enough progress
to really show significant gains. If we could increase that intensity to
six, eight, ten, maybe even twelve hours a week, people are going to
make faster progress. Adults are going to learn faster. We have evidence
and research to show that. John Cummings \[Phonetic\], John? Are you
still here? John can point to that.

So how can we do that? What are some of the ways that we can achieve
that challenge? And we didn\'t get a chance to talk about all of the
ways. But one of them that we looked at briefly is the opportunity to
provide blended learning; that is face to face learning and online
learning that are connected. So that somebody who comes to class for
four hours a week is also learning on line and that what they\'re
learning online is directly connected to the instruction that\'s taking
place in class.

The last issue that we talked about and Marty Finsterbush \[phonetic\]
who is the Executive Director of Value, which is the national adult
learner organization, raised this issue; is that many adult learners are
now expressing concern that they\'re being over tested. That they\'re
being tested too early when they come to programs, that that\'s the
first thing that happens, before they\'re even asked why they\'re in the
program or what they want to achieve in the program; that they\'re
tested. And there are many reasons why we shouldn\'t be doing that.

That\'s one. Which is that we\'re discouraging adult learners. The
second is Tom Stitch \[Phonetic\], researcher Tom Stitch just pointed
this out years ago; which is that we\'re getting actually falsely lower
scores when we test as soon as people come into programs. So this is
something that we need to pay a lot of attention to.

A last issue that Marty raised in this context is that very often the
assessments that we\'re giving, the pretests that we\'re giving learners
are not a benefit to them. They don\'t see the results. They don\'t see
how it\'s connected to what they came to the program to do. It\'s
beneficial for funders, it may be beneficial to programs if they use
that data for program improvement. But it\'s not often shared with adult
learners in a way that makes sense to them so that they can see where
they are and how that connects to their goals.

MS. REDDY: Remaining two tables? Three tables? Two?

MR. GUERRIERE: We didn\'t follow the questions very well. And that\'s
because a lot of people here have a lot of good information that we want
to share and we haven\'t had time to share that information. It also
means that people are trying to understand each other better. And so the
bottom line, I guess for number four is we really hope that NIFL can
help us continue this conversation. Because we\'d like to do this every
month, would you say? Yes.

When I took a train to come down here, I asked the people who sat next
to me what community literacy was. And they all say the literacy level
of the community. So I think we have a challenge here when you\'re
measuring for performance or success, we have to be talking the same
language. And I think that\'s what\'s happened. That\'s the reason why
we didn\'t really answer all the questions, because we\'re all trying to
understand each other because all the people at our table are not from
the same place.

But we talked about a lot of the stuff that\'d been talked about today,
qualitative data vs. quantitative data and how we have to; we all know
that we can measure success in reading, but what does that really mean?
And Petrice talked a lot about that. In the community, we have at least
in Connecticut you can put down, and the National Reporting Service
data; you know, people who, who got a drivers license and stuff; other,
the other category. But that\'s part of the challenge. The other part is
to disaggregate the data, would be a message that we talked a lot about
in our group; which is when you\'re looking at a community and I\'m sure
it\'s the same in your communities as well, we have the Connecticut
mastery test. And every city is measured on how well it\'s doing. And
obviously with No Child Left Behind. But obviously for the adult
learners as well, we have data. And I think Harry pointed that out. If
you can break it up at the people who are possibly come in scoring lower
and what percentage increase you have. But anybody here from Illinois?

Okay, good. When I was at the DePaul University Center for Urban
Education I believe the state of Illinois was really promoting instead
of the state or cities looking at you know, all third graders what their
scores were, we\'re looking at some of the individuals. So taking a look
at the individuals and how much they improved over time. This is
particularly important in urban areas and I guess other areas as well. I
don\'t know.

But in some of the schools we work with they have a mobility rate of
200, 300% so that the third graders that are in one classroom are not
the same ones that are there at the end of the school year. So in a lot
of the urban areas we\'re talking about, Hartford had 180,000 people,
we\'re down to 125,000 because when you do make it, you move out of
Hartford. And so the city is constantly left with this concentration of
poor people. So disaggregate the data I think was one of the main
messages we had.

And group, any other solutions that we came up with? No? I think the
other message would be just what I said at the beginning. We have to
continue the conversation. We have to understand each other better. We
talked, Petrice talked about this and we\'re doing it in Hartford as
well. We\'re focusing on workforce literacy, because that\'s also
related to reducing the poverty and so that the whole business community
needs to understand the conversations that we\'re having as well. And
so, we all need to talk more.

MS. REDDY: I\'m only letting Meg talk if she swears that she\'s not
giving the Institute any more assignments.

MEG: I think I actually have to echo Carl a little bit that we had some
really interesting ideas at our table and realized that there\'s a lot
of wealth of information in this room of things that a lot of us have
tried and measurement both at the provider level and also at the
coalition or intermediary level. And so we have an ask of NIFL. And what
we thought would be a really great investment of your resources would be
to really look at doing some more research and evaluation in what we are
doing in our communities and what\'s been really successful in
developing really effective performance measures, not only at the
provider level, but also at the coalition level. Some of us had
interesting ways to quantify things and we think that if we could kind
of gather all of those ideas and put them together into one resource, it
would be really useful, not just for the short term goals but also more
longer term community change and system-level change.

MS. REDDY: I think everybody should hire Harry Hatry. That\'s my answer.
So I think we\'ve come to the wrap up. And Jay Connor is going to do it.
And I\'m going to tell you some things about him just as soon as I can
get my little cheat sheet up here.

Jay is the founder and the CEO of the Collaboratory for Community
Support and an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan. He has
extensive leadership experience in the business, non-profit and public
policy arenas. From his work with leaders of diverse constituencies in
communities across America, Jay has seen that in order to be effective,
emerging community leaders must be comfortable at the intersection not
only of organizations and cultures, but also at the intersection of the
non-profit business and government sectors. This is a key message of his
book, published in Spring 2003 by Wilder Press called *Community
Visions, Community Solutions: Grant-making for Comprehensive Impact*.
Before founding the Collaboratory, Jay was the president and CEO of
Non-Profit Enterprise at Work and Non-Profit Management Support
Organization in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has written for the *National
Civic Review*, *Foundation News* and *Commentary*, Board member PNN
online, *Non-Profit World* and various academic journals. So here\'s the
wrap up guy.

DR. JAY CONNORS: Hello. It\'s a pleasure to be here, if I can figure out
how to, oh, wait a second. There we go. Great.

I want to thank Lynn first of all for that introduction. I\'m going to
remind my office just to send a couple sentences next time, not the
whole thing. Because now my twenty minutes starts now. Okay, good

When Lynn and Tanya and I were talking about the wrap up today, I was
kind of given a challenge in terms of, try to weave all of the themes,
Jay, that you hear throughout the day together with some of the context
of the work that you do looking across organizations, across systems and
to community solutions.

And so a month ago, when we had that conversation, I said, oh, super.
This is going to be fun. As this weekend approached, I was like, wait a
second. I\'m not at all sure what the themes are going to be as we come
out from today\'s session. But let me just share with you what a
pleasure it\'s been to be here today, because the themes, the
discussions that we have here about how to approach community literacy,
are exactly the themes that we see across different community systems in
terms of how to get to solutions. How can we, as communities, do a much
better job in the work that we\'re about in our communities.

And so the first question really is why community literacy? And I think
several of us, and I know the steering committee that I participated in,
were asking the question, is community really the envelope if you will
or the repository where all of these transactions, all of these
activities across the age span take place? Is that our definition of
community, is that why we\'re thinking of community literacy from a
provider or a research vantage point?

And I think actually what we\'ve seen in our work and what we\'ve
certainly heard today is that why community literacy is that community
is where the solutions are. As we\'re understanding and we\'ve heard it
from the very beginning when Edith was talking about breaking down those
barriers, breaking down those silos; is that we\'ve heard it that the
only way really to get to that sustainable change is how we can get the
entire community somehow on that same page with us.

And that was question that I started asking maybe about ten, fifteen
years ago, is how do communities get to solutions? And the context or
the reason why I asked that question is we did a project with a
non-profit management support organization, which provided consulting,
training, board building, grant-making for non-profit organizations,
community-based organizations, school systems, governmental
organizations, in Southeast Michigan. And after about three years we
were able to go and take a look at the success of those individual
organizations. And frankly, on almost any one of our measures, and
Harry, we had some fairly good data points that we were looking at; on
almost any one of those measures, those individual organizations were
much better off after that two or three year period.

The dilemma is as we ask the next question, is the communities where
those organizations work, those communities where those organizations
deliver services, are they markedly better off? And the answer was no.
Is that; so we were able to see that no matter how strong individual
organizations become, that doesn\'t mean that the communities get to
solutions, that the communities get to outcomes.

And so that forced us to ask the next question, and Lynn mentioned it
and I know Doug has referred to it before. We wrote the book after we
looked at how do communities become successful across North America. And
the book is *Community Visions, Community Solutions*. And I\'m going to
use our lessons learned there as kind of the template, if you will, for
weaving today\'s themes in place.

But I think the largest lesson from that book; I\'m going to steal a
quote from Francis Ford Coppola. Do we know who Francis Ford Coppola is?
A director of the Godfather series, *Apocalypse Now?* Some people would
argue that Coppola is perhaps the best and maybe the worst director out
of Hollywood. And even it\'s implicit in this question asked him that a
journalist asked him. Francis, what\'s the difference between making a
good movie and making a bad movie? And Coppola waited for a second. And
the journalist was asking, will you want to get DeNiro in a sequel or
something like that. But what Coppola said had nothing to do in terms of
the right actors or the right script or based on the right book. He
said, \"When we make a good movie, everyone is making the same movie.\"

And that in essence is what we\'ve seen around our communities that are
able to get to successful solutions. There\'s a way that those
communities are able to grapple with how is it that all the different
activities that we do actually come together to form a solution, to form
a movie, if you will, that we\'re trying to make in those communities?

And I think we heard it, whether it was in Buffalo or from Hartford or
certainly from New Orleans and Los Angeles this afternoon; is that one
of those keys was how do we get on that same page? How do we make that
same move? And if making the same movie seems somewhat intuitive, we
also heard from Edith and other, why it\'s so difficult in our
communities to do that. Because in almost every single one of our
communities across North America, is we\'ve organized our work very much
in a silo mentality, very fragmented. One agency provides a grant
requirement and then another agency might ask for something different or
slightly different that would cover a different age group. We look at
that silo map that we have up there and there\'s really three different
lines to look at.

The top line are the different funding sources. And a typical agency
working in the community on literacy will probably have access to
thirty-four different funders. Oftentimes those funders will have a
different requirement in terms of what the fiscal year is, a different
requirement in terms of what their definition of a child is. As David
was mentioning, a different demographic in terms of our target audience
is k-12 or we\'re looking at adult learners. And how we define ourselves
as a funder oftentimes comes from the fragment that we\'re focused on as
opposed to the outcome that we\'d like to see occur within our
communities.

And rarely do these funders ever talk to each other. Sometimes we\'re
fortunate to have a session like we have today where a number of funders
come to the same place. But that\'s more unusual than usual. Oftentimes
the funders are very much in their silos saying, you agencies and
organizations, communities; and this is government as well as corporate
funders, bring us your requests and we\'ll give you the dollars that we
feel is right. As opposed to what are we trying to accomplish in the
communities? And the agencies, the organizations, the schools respond in
the way of where those resources come from. And they often and rarely
talk to each other.

And what that leaves is that the community is very much, as we\'ve heard
from almost every one of our speakers today, that the community is in
the shadow of that work. It isn\'t the driving force for that work that
we\'re trying to accomplish.

One example and it\'s outside of literacy that I want to share with you
that I think really drives this point home is that; and they use this
term in Michigan in about the 1990s. Michael, you\'re from Michigan,
maybe you\'ll remember this. Is that if you were a dysfunctional family
in the state of Michigan in the 1990s it was likely you\'d be
interviewed four to seven different times in that calendar year. Now if
you weren\'t dysfunctional at the beginning of the year, you certainly
were by the end. By why did we interview them those many times? We
interviewed them those many times because we then owned the name and
that\'s how we were able to get the grants dollars. That\'s how the
revenue would flow.

A theme that has been weaved in throughout the day is data, data
management; how do we get that data? How do we compile the data? Well if
the funders still drive resources to community organizations, simply by
owning the data, it\'s going to be very difficult for us to think about
bringing that data together and combing that data. So there has to be
that discussion at the funders in terms of how to focus on funding the
solution and not funding the fragment.

Again, very quickly. The problems with the silos, and we\'ve talked
about it implicitly and explicitly today, is that they clearly leave a
very fragmented map. And we know within our communities all the
different organizations, daycare providers, ESL program providers,
workforce programs, that oftentimes don\'t communicate or don\'t even
see themselves as doing the same thing. And that, fundamentally,
dissipates our leverage, our resources, the dollars that we have. I
think Carl mentioned, it\'s not a question of the dollars, it\'s a
question of how we apply those dollars. And I think we also have a sense
that with those fragmented services, the community doesn\'t own
literacy. We\'ve left it that we, as program providers or as academics
doing research or as agencies, literacy is our problem. But no, literacy
can only be solved in the community and the community understanding that
literacy is itself, just like on the train conversation that Carl
mentioned on the way down here; is communities need to see and do see
their literacy rate as a reflection of themselves.

And we have to be out of that old social contract that said for we as
agencies or organizations that you stay at arm\'s length, community,
give us your tax dollars or your donations and we\'ll fix the problem.
We can\'t fix the problem, because the problem exists in the community.
We can be shepherds or servants to getting to that solution, but we
can\'t fix the problem because the problem is how we as communities
interact with each other.

And again, by not having a focus in terms of the whole and seeing the
fragments, we certainly have a lack of clarity about what the outcome
is. What is it that we\'re trying to do? What is that same movie that
we\'re trying to accomplish within our communities? And think the worst
part of it form all of us is that it is tremendously deceptive. Because
there are good people doing good things and we haven\'t moved the
needle. And in many cases we\'re seeing the results less than the
results we saw five, ten, fifteen years ago. Because we aren\'t talking
about and applying our resources to get to that solution.

Let me just give you one map. There were folks here that were from
Rochester, is that Rochester, New York? Good. Because this is a slide
from Rochester, Minnesota. And I was afraid. This is the slide for
Rochester, Minnesota\'s early childhood development system.

This is a system that creates boxes out of those funding silos. And if
the boxes don\'t work well enough, they\'ll apply new dollars to build
arrows. The question that I think we have to ask each one of ourselves
is if all of our children succeeding when they walk into that
kindergarten door is our goal, is our making the same movie, would we
ever create a system that looked like that?

So as we have the discussions today, we have to fundamentally ask
ourselves is do we want to rearrange a box on that deck of the Titanic,
or do we want to fundamentally make sure that the work that we\'re doing
has the impact that changes the conditions within our communities.
Because right now a lot of time is spent in terms of looking at is my
box getting funded or is this the right arrow to put in? And is that
getting our children successful coming into Kindergarten?

I\'m going to give you a real quick slide. And Michael before mentioned
there isn\'t enough quantitative work in this field. There really is, we
just don\'t always put it under the umbrella of community literacy. And
I think we need to begin to understand that what NIFL has done today
probably more important than anything else, is put a stake in the ground
about community literacy. Put a stake in the ground in that systemic
response, to we as communities, are going to do the work that we need to
do to get better solutions and better outcomes in our literacy.

What this map is is a map of every single box, every single reference on
this page, is statistically significant. In other words, you can\'t pull
anything away and get to that top box, which is children\'s literacy
achievement. And this is a longitudinal study done with 775 families,
published in 2005, *The Journal of Ed Psych*. And it talked about the
fact that every single one of these boxes are required to get to
children\'s literacy achievement. What\'s so interesting is the two
boxes on your left is the traditional bricks and mortar of the school.
It\'s the school teaching, it\'s the quality of teachers. All of the
other boxes take place in the community. Everything else that drives us
to that childhood achievement takes place in the community.

And let me put some weights on these results. And if I talk about the
ability to get children\'s literacy achievement and the results that
they were looking at was in Illinois, it\'s the third grade reading
test, and it was performance on the third grade reading test. And this
was the driver that they were trying to move and they were trying to
change. And that they were able to see that by the time that child
walked into the Kindergarten door, they could predict upwards of a 60 to
70% confidence level whether that child was going to be successful at
that third grade reading rate.

Again, it drives us to the fact that what takes place in that entire
community is how we are able to move that system. And so David\'s point,
I think earlier, of making the split between k-12 and adult, cold be
absolutely right in terms of if we think about how do we apply best
techniques or best practices. But what this slide says, and other work
that we\'ve seen in our communities, is truly to get to that move, we
have to engage the entire community. We have to engage community across
the systems involved.

When we were making a presentation in Decatur, Illinois, Caterpillar
looked at this slide and they said, finally, we know what we can do in
our workforce training to help change the literacy rates in the entire
community. Because they looked at this slide and they saw, my god,
parent education, parent involvement, given parents the kinds of tools
to be able to go back and read to their children, the time off to be
able to participate in their programs was a powerful insight to them.

So again, if that entire system is the enterprise, the community through
all of our work, through other community initiatives, through the
schools, then what we need to do is understand that we as coalitions, we
as practitioners, we as researchers need to be much more intentional
about our collaborations. Are we simply collaborating with the usual
suspects; collaborating with those that have been in coalitions with us?
Or as Doug shared with us from Los Angeles, are we able to collaborate
with those organizations that will get to the solution?

And so we define our collaboration by those organizations that have in
their control and in their research, the solution. Daphne this morning
mentioned in terms of the community supports of childcare, of
transportation, of counseling. Well we need to be much more intentional,
not hope that child care or counseling are involved, but say if in fact
our belief is change state and literacy; we in our coalitions and our
work need to say how do we engage the daycare providers? How do we
engage childcare? How do we engage otherwise we\'re not going to be able
to get the change that we\'re talking about.

And this is the last slide, then I think I\'m going to leave you as well
as I think NIFL, because I think it helps define what are the
opportunities for the Institute. And what we\'ve seen when looking at
community systems whether we\'re talking poverty reduction, economic
development, healthcare, community literacy, teen pregnancy, is that if,
in fact, communities are going to get to a change state, they need to
address four fundamental things. And they need to address it from the
point of view of how will the community provide this at the point of the
solution. They need to think about resources going to the solution, not
resources fragmented in that way.

And we talk about Cleveland, we\'ve talked about Buffalo. I know Carl\'s
trying to work with the Hartford Foundation and say, we need to have the
foundations, the resources in the communities come to the outcomes, not
broken down in the fragments. And we\'re seeing more and more
communities doing that. We need to be able to make decision-making
around what Harry referred to as those successful practices. If you
don\'t know where you\'re going, much like that map that we showed you
in terms of Rochester, almost any idea is going to be a good idea.

What we need to do is if we know where we\'re going, understand how we
can strategically apply resources to get there. Because in the context
of not knowing where you\'re going, courtesy will trump impact. You will
be courteous and some people will get some dollars here because oh,
they\'ve been in the community for twenty-five years. Or other people
get some dollars their because their friend is a friend on a board. We
need to be able to drive how are we going to use our dollars to get to
that change state.

The next one is the point about accountability and data to that change
state. And I think we\'ve certainly referenced that a lot today.

And the last point is really I think the comment that was on the train
station, or on the train coming down with Carl; is that if the community
sees you and the schools as charged with literacy and we\'re not
succeeding, like Decatur, Illinois says their schools can never succeed;
then you have one issue. If the community can say literacy is us,
literacy is who we are and fundamentally is the key to being able to be
our future, then the community owns the work that we\'re doing. And so
it takes us out of the situation of collaborating and competing, takes
us out of the situation of rolling the boulder up the hill, puts us in
the position as the servants to the community to get to this community
solution. Thank you very much.

MS. REDDY: Are there any questions for Jay or final thoughts?

DR. CONNORS: Yes. This was a real-time synthesis of what was heard, so
we really owe Jay a special debt of gratitude, because that\'s sort of
hard to do as it\'s happening. I\'ll give you this, the URL for where
all the materials that you\'ve seen today can be found and I\'ll think
we\'ll be consulting with our steering group and others to add
additional information. Gosh, I\'m sorry. It\'s a long URL but we will
e-mail it to you. But if you\'re up for a long URL, it\'s
[www.nifl.gov/community/communtiyliteracy.html](http://www.nifl.gov/community/communtiyliteracy.html).
So nifl.gov/; oh. Nifl.gov/nifl/community/communityliteracy.

MS. REDDY: Yes. NIFL.gov; I missed that the first time.
NIFL.gov/NIFL/community/communityliteracy.html And I\'m really just
going to sort of restrict my wrap up comments in part because I guess
I\'m not going to have a voice, to saying thank you so much for coming.
I\'d like to thank all our steering committee members again, our
presenters, all of you for your thoughts and for your commitment for the
work that you do. I think we\'re going to; you know we\'ve heard a lot
of interesting possibilities for next steps for us. And so I think
we\'re going to go back to the office and kind of think things over.
We\'ll be working with Michael I think to publish some sort of products
from this meeting in the next issue or the very next; the spring issue
of the, of his journal. And do you want to, Michael, can I put in a plug
for you? Do you have a date for your conference?

MR. MOORE: I believe it\'s next summer it will be at Temple University.

MS. REDDY: In summer of 2008, stay tuned for a conference sponsored by
Michael.

MR. MOORE: And Eli Goldblatt \[Phonetic\] who teaches at
\[Unintelligible\].

MS. REDDY: Okay. At Temple in Philadelphia. But in the meantime, too, we
would encourage you; I would encourage you to e-mail Tanya with your
thoughts. And that\'s <T-S-H-U-Y@nifl.gov>. But no, we mean to be in
touch with you. If you have further thoughts, I know this has been a lot
of information to take in and I certainly feel it\'s been a lot of
information to take in. And my guess is maybe in a few days we\'ll all
have you know, some further thoughts. So please share them with us. And
we know, we know who you are now.

MS. REDDY:

So thanks so much, it\'s been a long day. You\'ve hung in there. Thanks
everybody. Have a good night.

\[Crosstalk\]

\[END TRANSCRIPT\]