Inequity and Literacy

/ The Old Crank

My office sits right between the Occupy D.C. protesters in McPherson Square and another group of protesters camped out in Freedom Plaza. It’s become something of a standard technique now to brand education causes with the “occupy” label, and I realize that this has rhetorical usefulness. But I’m also wondering whether these protests around the world are — or could be — influencing adult literacy advocacy in a substantive way — or at least how we think/talk about the issue.

Yesterday I read the speech delivered by Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, the Founder and Chairperson of BRAC, upon receiving the first WISE Prize for Education at the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) on November 1st. In his speech, Abed made the connection between the occupation protesters and education, referring to education as the “great equaliser.” But what was interesting to me was that improving adult literacy in Bangladesh was BRAC’s first step towards addressing the inequities in that country:

Today, I will talk about how we at BRAC used education as one of the central themes in addressing the issue of inequity over the last four decades. In these difficult financial times, as more and more people rise up to speak for the “99%”, occupying streets across various cities of the world, the issue of inequity has been thrown into the forefront of world politics. How do we begin to address this? We start with education – because education is the great equaliser.

At the time of BRAC’s inception 40 years ago, three quarters of Bangladesh’s population was illiterate. The very first development plan for BRAC aimed to bring 100% literacy to the adult population of the 200 villages in Bangladesh where we were then operating (my emphasis). But the working men and women of these villages saw little utility in literacy and numeracy skills. We therefore put into practice Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s principles on conscientisation, enunciated in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire believed that the confluence of action and reflection created new knowledge and that, through reflection, learners became actors, not mere observers, and authors of their own decisions. Subsequently, all of BRAC’s community and capacity development activities have been based on these principles.

He goes on to discuss the progression of their work from adult literacy to the education of children — describing it as occurring “naturally in the course of addressing inter-generational poverty” — and the use of technology in education. You can read the entire speech here.

Abed’s speech is not a direct call to increase adult literacy around the world in order to address the inequity issues being raised by the occupation protests, but it does put literacy and social change in the context of these protests.

I’d be interested to learn about any discussion of adult education opportunity in the U.S. in the context of the occupation protests. Or any discussion about adult literacy at all in the context of these protests. Are these protests re-framing or influencing adult literacy advocacy? I’d also be interested to hear about any involvement of adult learners in any of the occupation protests.

What the President’s Creating Pathways to Opportunity Report Says About Adult Literacy

/ The Old Crank

Last week the White House released a report, Creating Pathways to Opportunity, describing the ways in which, in their view, they have worked to ensure that “all Americans have the tools to weather these difficult economic times and a clear pathway to achieve economic stability and security.”

The report mentions adult literacy in several places. It’s interesting to read where the administration pinpoints adult literacy within the framework of their education and workforce development efforts.

One of the places adult literacy is mentioned is, not surprisingly, in the section on “Building a 21st Century Workforce:”

A lack of basic literacy and numeracy skills is a challenge that must be addressed for many low-income Americans. If individuals who lack these basic skills are ready to acquire them in order to get a job, then we should be ready to provide an entry point through community partnerships with K-12 schools, community colleges, non-profits, and community-based organizations. For students who have not yet learned the basic skills needed to succeed in college or work while they are in high school, community colleges are receiving support to improve remedial and adult education programs, accelerating students’ progress and integrating developmental classes into academic and vocational classes. [page 29]

The other place where adult literacy appears is in the Adminstration’s discussion of the Promise Neighborhoods initiative. In fact, the vignette featured in this section is about how a Promise Neighborhood project in Athens, Georgia, assisted a parent access adult edcuation services:

Mary (name changed), a public housing resident and mother of a two-year-old, was participating in a “Living Room Conversation” on early care and learning, a focus group hosted by a neighborhood leader with Whatever It Takes, the Athens, GA Promise Neighborhood. She strongly and vocally agreed with the other five parents that “reading to your young child is very important.” When the neighborhood leader asked the parents if they read to their children, all but Mary immediately said yes. When pressed, she said that she didn’t, and when asked why, said that she did not know how to read. Her feelings of embarrassment and shame quickly gave way to gratitude as the other parents asked if she wanted to learn how to read and told her that the public adult literacy/GED program had relocated onto the same campus that houses Whatever It Takes. She enrolled in basic literacy class, has a long term goal of obtaining a GED and post-secondary education, and has a short-term goal of reading to her daughter. Due in part to the community outreach efforts of the Athens Promise Neighborhoods, Mary is serving as a role model for her daughter on their path to educational success. [page 33]

In this report, the Administration places adult literacy solely in the context of certain other initiatives it has been championing — expanding the role and capacity of community colleges, and Promise Neighborhoods. Reading this, one would not have a sense of what the U.S. system of adult education looks like — or that there even is one. Instead, adult literacy instruction is described here as an adjunct to other initiatives. In the Promise Neighborhood example, the outreach by the Athens Promise Neighborhood is credited with getting Mary into an adult literacy program, but it’s not clear what the federal role is in funding that program, or the extent of the program’s collaboration with the Athens Promise Neighborhood initiative.

What’s also interesting is that the Administration recognizes — in the this document, anyway — two purposes for adult literacy education: the first, not unexpectedly, is to improve employability; but in addition, in the Promise Neighborhood example, there is a recognition that adults working to improve their literacy has a positive impact on their children.

GDP Growth and Unemployment

/ The Old Crank

Dean Baker’s take on the news today that the U.S. economy grew by 2.5 percent in the third quarter is clear, concise, and worth reading. Here is a snippet:

It is very difficult to view 2.5 percent growth as much less than disastrous. At this rate the economy is growing just fast enough to keep pace with the growth of labor force.

That means we are making zero progress in reducing the unemployment rate. If the economy continues to grow at a 2.5 percent pace, the unemployment rate will remain around 9 percent indefinitely with tens of millions of people unemployed, underemployed or out of the labor force altogether.

He doesn’t think there was ever a strong chance of a second recession, but thinks that the media promoting that possibility in recent weeks is why this data is being reported so positively.

Steve Jobs on Technology and Education, 1996

/ Hans Moleman

From an interview with Steve Jobs in Wired, published 15 years ago:

Q: Could technology help by improving education?

I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

It’s a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I’m one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I’ve seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers – so it’s not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, “Let’s start a school.” You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they’d start schools. And you’d have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.

They’d do it because they’d be able to set the curriculum. When you have kids you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don’t learn until you’re older – yet you could learn them when you’re younger. And you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school?

God, how exciting that could be! But you can’t do it today. You’d be crazy to work in a school today. You don’t get to do what you want. You don’t get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?

These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn’t it. You’re not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school – none of this is bad. It’s bad only if it lulls us into thinking we’re doing something to solve the problem with education.

Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.

It’s not as simple as you think when you’re in your 20s – that technology’s going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won’t.