Learning and Learning Disabilities
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Learning and Learning Disabilities
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Illiteracy StatisticsIn 1910 the literacy rate in the United States was so high it was predicted that “the public schools will in a short time practically eliminate illiteracy.”1 In 1930, illiteracy rates were as follows:
In 1935, a survey of the 375,000 men working in the Civilian Conservation Corps — a government-sponsored work project to provide employment — found an illiteracy rate of 1.9 percent. And this was among men primarily of low socio-economic status.2 Apparently — contrary to today's illiteracy rates — the illiteracy rates of the first half of the twentieth century reflected, for the most part, people who never had the advantage of schooling.3 Since the 1930s, something must have happened. . . As Lionni and Klass point out, “Somewhere along the line our schools had lost the ability to routinely educate children and produce uniformly good results.”4 The erosion of America's educational performance, which seems to have started in the 1960s, and by now has assumed crisis proportions at all levels, is summarized in a 1976 Los Angeles article: After edging upward for apparently more than a century, the reading, writing, and mathematical skills of American students from elementary school through college are now in a prolonged and broad scale decline unequaled in history. The downward spiral, which affects many other subject areas as well, began abruptly in the mid-1960s and shows no signs of bottoming out.5 In its Reading Report Card (1985), the U.S. Department of Education found that 40 percent of the nation's 13-year olds and 16 percent of the 17-year-olds did not have intermediate reading skills (i.e., they could not find key information, link and compare ideas, or generalize, using materials in science, literature, or social studies). Only 5 percent of the 17-year-olds tested had advanced reading skills — the kind needed to understand complex ideas found in professional or technical journals and textbooks.6 The $14 million National Adult Literacy Survey of 1993 found that even though most adults in the survey had finished high school, 96 percent of them could not read, write, and figure well enough to go to college.7 Even more to the point, 25 percent “were plainly unable to read,” period.8 While learning disabilities and illiteracy have been, and are still growing, on the one hand, the standards of education have been declining — tragically and steadily — on the other: For years, college professors have been complaining that students entering from high school lack such basic communication skills as the ability to read and listen with comprehension, to write and speak with clarity, precision, and correct grammar, and to spell even the simplest and most common words. . . For the first hundred years of its existence, a college like Harvard would not graduate a student without a knowledge of Hebrew. Now the point is approaching when one can be graduated without a knowledge of English.9 Reading levels of young Americans fell so low in the 1970s that the Army was forced to rewrite its operating manuals in comic fashion.10 Much reading material previously used for years in American schools became incomprehensible to present-day students and had to be simplified. For example, when a well-known history book was revised with an eye toward the high school market, words like “spectacle” and “admired” were removed. Apparently they were too difficult.11 On 26 April 1983, pointing to the literacy crisis and to the collapse in standards at the secondary and the college levels, the National Commission on Excellence warned: “Our nation is at risk.” The report warned that America would soon be engulfed by a “rising tide of mediocrity in elementary and secondary school.”12 Since the Nation at Risk report, education reforms have taken place in every state. New teaching methods and programs have been tried and evaluated. But the overall goal set for the year 2000 — to educate every child to a high standard — has remained a mere dream. “The nation is at even greater risk now,” voiced Senator Edward M. Kennedy a decade after the famous report was published.13 A newspaper reported in 1997 that the standards of education are so low in the U.S. that black Americans are returning to Africa, specifically Kenya, to get better schooling.14 And if the article, published in The Atlanta Journal and Constitution in October 1999, part of which appears below, is only partially representative of conditions in the United States, it should cause great alarm: In the aftermath of the Atlanta Public School's announcement that more than half the city's third-graders may flunk come spring, administrators, teachers and parents are grappling with questions about why the scores were so low and what can be done to improve them. Superintendent Beverly Hall last week revealed the stunning results of the Scholastic Reading Inventory, a criterion-referenced test that gauges a child's reading skills against what is expected for a child in that grade. Seventy-three percent of second-graders, 55 percent of third-graders, 57 percent of fourth graders and 49 percent of fifth-graders are not reading on grade level, according to the test.15 Australian children fare no better. The percentage of children that could read and write increased from 59.1 percent in 1871, to 79.8 percent in 1901, and 90.2 percent in 1911.16 But something must have happened there too, as shown by numerous surveys conducted in the early 1970s. In Queensland, a survey given to eighth-grade students at the Mt. Gravatt High School showed 130 students out of 285 had reading problems varying from reluctance to retardation. A report on reading retardation at Liverpool Boys' High School, New South Wales, indicated that upwards of 500 pupils out of a total of 1,060 were in need of some form of remediation. The Bonorian High School advisory center in Victoria, surveyed more than 2,600 students in first and second forms (seventh and eight grades) in twelve eastern suburbs high schools. The results showed that 45.7 percent of those tested needed remedial specialist training if they were to profit from high school work, and 25 percent were found to read so badly that they could be classified as illiterate. All these surveys excluded children with acknowledged lower intelligence and migrant background.17 But worse was yet to come. A survey of Australian adult literacy, reported in The Australian in 1990, found that 70 percent of a representative group of adults could not deal with concepts or arguments at the level of a standard newspaper editorial.18 According to the British Dyslexia Association 15 percent of children leave school with inadequate literacy.19 According to a UNESCO report, more than two million Britons are completely illiterate. More than a third of the 11-year-old children arriving at many secondary schools in Britain's inner cities are such poor readers that they cannot properly understand their textbooks.20 Article Sources: |
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