“But essentially, when you have the same amount of money, inflation cost of living would imply that it's just going to get worse and worse.”īased on the PIAAC data, APM Research Lab took a closer look at differences in federal and state funding for two states at opposite ends of the adult literacy spectrum: Minnesota and New Mexico. “Within the last couple of years, there's been more of an emphasis on getting additional funding,” she said. However, Patterson said this funding is not enough to make sufficient impact. The funding is broken into basic funding for adult education and literacy services and the Integrated English Literacy and Civics Education (IELCE) program, which supports English language learners. Typically, ABE and literacy programs are federally funded through the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA), Title II of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) of 1998.įeinberg said this federal funding goes toward communities based on the percentage of people without a high school diploma. Department of Education National Reporting System, in the 2001-2002 fiscal year, 2.78 million adults were enrolled, while in 2019-2020, 1.1 million were enrolled. She estimates that these programs are losing about 100,000 people per year.Īccording to the U.S. Patterson said adult literacy program attendance nationally has decreased over the past two decades due to lack of funding and public schools pushing for more students to graduate high school. Many of these programs offer one-on-one tutoring and group classes for literacy, numeracy, English as a second language (ESL) and high school equivalency among other topics. But they also provide opportunities for data collection. To support adults with low literacy rates and lacking other important skills, adult basic education (ABE) and literacy programs provide environments for learning at the local level. You're have a really hard time finding things.” They may not know how to use the internet if can't spell very well. “And so, they don't have good internet access. “They likely went to schools that weren't supported by a wealthy tax base,” Feinberg said. While Feinberg said anyone can have low literacy, adults who have poor reading skills tend to live in underserved communities with few resources, or what she calls a “print desert.” In these areas, she said there is little signage beyond local stores as well as few libraries and bookstores.Įven with the internet’s ability to make books and other reading materials more universally accessible, adults who live in “print deserts” may still face serious challenges. Those on the higher end of this category can perform simple tasks based on the information they read, but adults below Level 1 may only understand very basic vocabulary or be functionally illiterate. Adults in this range have difficulty using or understanding print materials. Nationally, over 1 in 5 adults have a literacy proficiency at or below Level 1. Part of a larger international study, the PIAAC defines five levels of literacy proficiency, with Level 1 as the lowest and Level 5 as the highest. ranks 16th among the 33 OECD nations included in this study. The most recent national survey on adult literacy is from 2012-2017, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics as part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). Margaret Patterson, a senior researcher at Research Allies for Lifelong Learning. Historically, adult literacy has been underfunded and underrepresented in academic and scientific research, according to Feinberg, a sentiment echoed by Dr. It's not just people who speak funny because they're from the South. It's not just people who are racial minorities. Iris Feinberg, associate director of the Adult Literacy Research Center at Georgia State University, said anyone can have low literacy skills. Low literacy skills can profoundly affect the day-to-day success of adults in the real world, and these impacts extend to their families, too.ĭr. Literacy is broadly defined as the ability to read and write, but it more accurately encompasses the comprehension, evaluation and utilization of information, which is why people describe many different types of literacy - such as health, financial, legal, etc. This means more than half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 (54%) read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. have low literacy skills according to a Gallup analysis of data from the U.S.
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