Tuolumne County is a small northern California county of approximately 52,000 folks. Your question is timely since many of us will be attending the National Center for Family Literacy conference and will have the opportunity to interact with Rep. Goodling. Responding to you may help me frame the comments I would like to put to him. Our Even Start program is primarily center-based, and one of our most important goals is community building, both within the group itself and then extending from the partcipants to the larger community. We facilitate interdependence and it seems to be working.
Family literacy is about whole-ness and connections and relationships and integration.
Therefore, it is about thinking, about facilitating this kind of thinking on the part of people who, perhaps, have had less than positive experiences in school, an early forum for thought. Family literacy is about what we value. If we do not value learning, then our children will not value learning. Therefore, parent involvement, per se, is meaningless unless parents feel the value of their involvement. Policy makers need to take seriously the research which says that the education level of moms can over-ride the debilitating effects of poverty on the academic success of children.