When Butch Jones signed up to be a tutor, he knew that adult literacy was a problem in Beaufort County, but Jones was not prepared for how bad the situation really was. Literacy Volunteers of Beaufort County, a nonprofit organization, assigned Jones to a 26-year-old mother of two who was eager to improve her math and reading skills. With an 11th-grade education from the local public schools, she was reading on only a seventh- to ninth-grade level, and her math skills were on a third- to fourth-grade level, Jones says. She had gone through 12 years of school and did not know how to multiply and divide.
“I was stunned,” Jones said. “I was astonished. I can’t imagine how this happened. I don’t know if she slipped through the cracks or if she was socially promoted.”
Schools fail students, some quit
Jan Israel, executive director of Literacy Volunteers, said this is all too common. There are students who are promoted through school and don’t learn the material, and there are students who drop out to go to work.
That was Lula O‚Neal’s situation. She dropped out of the local all-black school after the seventh grade. That was the end of her formal education. Last year at age 70, O’Neal signed up for tutoring with Literacy Volunteers. After a year-and-a-half, she said she has mastered math skills up to basic algebra and has improved her reading comprehension and vocabulary.
“I can do more now than I ever could. I know more now than I ever did before,” she said. “I can go to the bank now, and I can withdraw money. I can take care of my own business with no problem.”
O’Neal said she knows many older women who have functioned their entire lives with only an elementary-school education.
“Older women like me act like they are ashamed because they can’t read,” she said. “We go to church, and they can’t read the Bible.”
These women are not alone.
According to the North Carolina Literacy Resource Center, a division of the North Carolina Community College System, in Beaufort County, 61 percent of people over the age of 18 can’t read above a fifth-grade level.
Beaufort’s literacy problem, though, is not the worst in the state. In Bertie, Northampton, and Warren counties, the North Carolina Literacy Resource Center reports that an estimated 81 percent of adults cannot read above a fifth-grade level.
These counties are more the norm than Orange and Wake counties, which have highly literate populations. In 82 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, the North Carolina Literacy Resource Center estimates that at least half of the population can’t read and do math above a fifth-grade level. The estimate is based on census data about poverty and education levels.
“The literacy stats in North Carolina are appalling,” said Chancy Kapp of the North Carolina Community College System. “Most people have no idea.”
But North Carolina’s literacy statistics are no more appalling than national statistics. According to the North Carolina Literacy Resource Center, 46 to 51 percent of the American population is operating with only a fifth-grader’s ability to read and do math.
Five levels of literacy
The National Institute for Literacy explains the five-level measurement of literacy:
“Almost all adults in Level 1 can read a little but not well enough to fill out an application, read a food label, or read a simple story to a child. Adults in Level 2 usually can perform more complex tasks such as comparing, contrasting, or integrating pieces of information, but usually not higher-level reading and problem-solving skills. Adults in levels 3 through 5 usually can perform the same types of more complex tasks on increasingly lengthy and dense texts and documents.”
“Very few adults in the United States are truly illiterate. Rather, there are many adults with low literacy skills who lack the foundation they need to find and keep decent jobs, support their children’s education, and participate actively in civic life,” the institute says.
A difficult road to recovery
In North Carolina there are few options for undereducated adults who want to go back to school. The North Carolina Community College System offers high-school graduate equivalency programs for dropouts, but adults who do not have reading and math skills cannot do the work.
O’Neal wanted to earn a high-school equivalency diploma, but she and her tutor, Terrie Pike, decided it would be too difficult.
“With her not having any science, very little history, no English literature, I finally said to her that it would be extremely stressful for her to try to attain her GED (General Education Development),” Pike said.
Former Wake County School Board Chairman Bill Fletcher suggests offering adult literacy classes in public schools. Recruiting students for the classes will be difficult because most people are ashamed to admit they cannot read, he said.
“Ultimately we as a state have to do something to encourage people to improve themselves,” Fletcher said.
Public schools’ responsibility
State government and the community college system offer no solution to the state’s adult illiteracy problem, and the best hope for producing literate adults for the future is in the K-12 grades. The N.C. Department of Public Instruction began reforms in the 1990s to increase school accountability, provide a better system to measure student achievement, and to end social promotion. It’s too early to say if the reforms are just politics, or if they are helping to produce a more literate population.
In 1995, North Carolina made the ABCs standardized testing program the law. Teacher bonuses are tied to test scores, and teams of educators from the state are sent in to work with schools that have low scores. The testing program has been criticized by teachers and parents for forcing educators to teach to a test and for putting too much pressure on young students. Fletcher questions the value of the tests to track individual student’s progress.
“The most it does is give you a snapshot on one day of what that student can do,” Fletcher said.
A new federal education law, No Child Left Behind, is raising the stakes of North Carolina’s testing program. Until now, the ABCs program has measured growth and achievement on a whole-school basis. No Child Left Behind requires schools to track the progress of groups of students. It’s not enough for the majority of the students to score well on tests. All demographic groups (i.e., minorities, low-income students, foreign-born students) must be meeting national standards for a school to earn high marks from the state and federal government.
Tied to the ABCs is North Carolina’s effort to end, or at least curb, social promotion. Social promotion is the practice of moving students to the next grade even when they have not mastered the work at that grade level. Until recently, children who fell behind in N.C. public schools were often promoted because educators believed that retaining students hurt their self-esteem. In theory, North Carolina now requires students to make “on-grade-level” scores on their state exams before being promoted. In practice, it’s a different story.
Students who don’t make a passing score the first time have several opportunities to take the test again, and they can go to summer school for special instruction. In the end, the student’s principal decides whether the student is promoted, and parents have the option of appealing the decision. The safeguards result in few students being retained. In 2000-01, fewer than 2,000 of the state’s nearly 100,000 fifth-graders were held back because of their test scores.
As well as creating an accountability system for what schools are teaching and what students are learning, state lawmakers have discussed raising the compulsory attendance age from 16 to 18. About one-third of students who enter the state’s public high schools fail to graduate four years later. North Carolina’s problems with illiteracy are connected to the dropout rate, but State Board of Education Chairman Howard Lee said he questions whether raising the compulsory attendance age is the right way to go.
“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t force a horse to drink,” he said. “I think we need to go deeper than raising the compulsory attendance age. We need to really excite kids about learning and school.”
Forcing students to stay in school when they don’t want to be there may do more damage than good. Lee said that schools need to do a better job making education relevant to students.
The necessity of education
“We do know that kids have trouble seeing the relationship between education and jobs,” he said.
With the loss of manufacturing, textile and tobacco-related jobs in North Carolina, the opportunities for low-skilled workers are shrinking. For the state’s economy, it’s imperative that schools — public, private, and charter — provide today’s students with a better education than many of their parents and grandparents received.
“One of our (North Carolina’s) most important assets is our intellectual capital,” said Michelle Howard-Vitale, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and state school board member. “We need an intelligent workforce that’s willing to work and able to work.”
In Beaufort County, the literacy tutors see people every day who have been laid off from low-skilled jobs, and do not have the training and education to find a new career. It’s seeing progress in students like O’Neal that gives the tutors faith that the program can make a difference.
“I have learned from her that nothing is impossible for a willing heart,” Pike said. “And if she can do it at her age, anybody can do it.”
Israel, the volunteer center’s director, said the program’s goal is to improve the lives of individual Beaufort County residents. They don’t have the resources to significantly affect the county’s literacy rate.
“I realize that it’s one adult at a time,” she said. “And that we are not going to change the statistic overnight.”
But at the very least, it’s a start.
Kathleen Keener is a writer living in Raleigh. She is the former education reporter for WBTV News 3 in Charlotte.