Literacy and Illiteracy

Traditionally, literacy has meant the ability to read and write. As the cognitive skill requirements of work and daily life have increased, the definition has expanded. In the National Literacy Act of 1991, the US Congress defined literacy as ”an individual’s ability to read, write, and speak in English and compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job and in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potenrial.” Consistent with this, the National Assessments of Adult Literacy, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, have measured literacy along three dimensions: prose literacy, document literacy, and quantitative literacy. Each was measured on a scale defined by the skills needed to succeed at daily and work tasks ordered from simple to complex.

Over time and across nations, higher literacy rates have been associated with higher levels of economic development. This is a well-documented pattern, which has been most thoroughly analyzed by economists under the topic of ”investment and returns to human capital” (for a review of these studies, see Hanushek & Welch 2005). Indeed, increasing the spread of literacy is one of the key strategies advocated by the World Bank in its efforts to reduce poverty worldwide (Bruns et al. 2003).

Further, at any one place and time, an individual’s level of literacy has been associated with her or his place within the social class structure. Typically, the higher the parents’ social class status, the more years of schooling are given to their children. Thus, education is the most common mechanism by which parental social class status is transmitted to children. Schooling is also the most common mechanism for upward mobility. Both of these patterns have become stronger as economic development has proceeded, and the cognitive skills demanded of workers have increased.

An increasing number of studies have examined years of schooling completed and individual placement within the social class structure, and found that these are strongly related within all modern societies. Indeed, researchers have now developed research and testing instruments that have been used to systematically collect similar data across a wide variety of nations (Porter & Gamoran 2002), and have discovered very similar relationships between schooling and socioeconomic attainment within all nations. Further, studies have shown that the institutional arrangements for the delivery of schooling bear strong similarities across nations (Baker & LeTendre 2005).

For the US, these patterns are illustrated by the overtime trend in the illiteracy rate -defined as the percent of individuals who can neither read nor write. Among whites, this rate declined from 20 percent in 1870 to below 1 percent in 1979. As a consequence of slavery, the illiteracy rate among African Americans in 1870 was 80 percent. By 1979 it had declined to 1.6 percent. However, as noted above, more than the bare minimum of reading and writing skills is required to succeed in twenty first century labor markets. Thus, gaps in more advanced literacy skills, between, on the one hand, lower income, African American, and Hispanic students, and, on the other, middle and higher income or white and Asian students, have emerged as among the US’s greatest concerns. This has led to empirical studies on the determinants and consequences of these achievement gaps, and to the consideration of a variety of policies and programs designed to reduce them.

The importance of this focus on differentials in cognitive skill across class and race/ethnicity groups is emphasized by a variety of studies that show that, at the beginning of the twenty first century, such skill has increasingly become the social stratifying variable in American society. These studies have yielded the following findings. First, the years of schooling an individual completes is the primary determinant of her or his placement within the social class system, and also the primary mechanism by which parents transfer their social class status to their children. Second, during the period 1980-2000, as the economy became more knowledge based and globalized, and as union strength declined, the economic returns to schooling and cognitive skill increased dramatically. That is, adjusted for inflation, the earnings of workers with no more than a high school education were stagnant, while the earnings differential between college educated and high school educated workers increased dramatically. Third, and also during this time period, the black-white test score gap, which had narrowed between 1960 and 1980, stopped closing and remained unchanged. Fourth, the earnings differential between African American and white workers was shown to be largely explained by the cognitive skills differential between these groups.

What explains individual and group differentials in literacy, as measured by tests of cognitive skill and self-reports of educational attainment (number of years of schooling completed)? Both qualitative and quantitative studies point to parent-child interaction and children’s oral language development during the preschool period as crucial for the creation of differentials in school readiness that strongly predict performance in early elementary school. Thus, the child’s early literacy skill – oral vocabulary, grammatical usage, letter knowledge, and phonemic awareness (the ability to hear and manipulate the separate sounds in spoken language) – are among the principal predictors of success in first grade reading. Since scores on these variables tend to be lower for children from lower social class, African American, and Latino backgrounds, lower preschool literacy among these students predicts lower first grade reading attainment.

How do middle class children come to have more extensive vocabularies and standard speech patterns than lower class children? The phenomenon in question has been publicly dis cussed at least since the story of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, whose distinctively working class vocabulary and dialect are remade by Professor Higgins. During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, sociologist Basil Bernstein and anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath reported on the more restricted speech code within lower class families, and the more elaborated code within middle class families, and argued that the latter better prepares middle class children for school success. More recently, developmental psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley (1995, 1999) had graduate students audiotape, one evening each month, the speech utterances occurring between parents and children as the children aged from 12 to 36 months of age. They found that the middle class parents addressed many more words to their children than did the lower class parents, and also used many more different vocabulary words in these conversations than did the lower class parents. Hart and Risley report that by 36 months, the children were full participants in their family’s conversational culture. Not surprisingly, just like their parents, the middle class children knew and used far more different words than the lower class children. Other researchers have corroborated and extended these findings. Thus, preschool oral language literacy translates directly into elementary school reading literacy.

School readiness and acquisition also have a behavioral dimension. Perhaps most damaging to their success in school is the immaturity that many low income children bring to first grade. They often come to school unready to sit still, pay attention to the teacher and the lesson, and do their own work. Parental assistance with homework, and monitoring of the child’s school success, is often absent. By comparison, middle class parents often make raising, instructing, and assuring the school success of their children one of their principal daily activities, a pattern that Lareau (2003) refers to as ”concerted cultivation.” As a result of differential cognitive and behavioral school readiness, differential parental involvement in the school performance of their children, and resulting differential early school success, lower income and middle income children typically show very different achievement trajectories as they progress through the school grades.

The divergence of these trajectories is not surprising. Children who are engaged and successful at school typically receive positive feedback from teachers, and enjoy schoolwork, which causes them to maintain or even increase their efforts. They are typically placed in higher level ”ability groups,” where other students are engaged and motivated and more material is covered at a faster pace. They are assigned and complete more homework, and do more reading in their free time. On the other hand, children who are less engaged and successful in early elementary school typically receive less positive feedback from teachers, and get less pleasure from schoolwork, which causes them to become disengaged. They are often placed in lower level ”ability groups,” where the other students are also less engaged, and more elementary material is covered at a slower pace. They are assigned little or no homework, and do little reading in their free time. When differential patterns such as these begin in early elementary school, and continue through later elementary, middle, and high school, the ”low” and ”high” trajectory groups emerge at the end of 12th grade with very different literacy levels as measured by academic skills and motivations.

Nor does the process of differential literacy development end at this point. Lower performing children have a higher rate of school dropout, and those who graduate from high school often go straight into the labor market. There they may encounter employers who consider their literacy and mathematics skills to be inadequate for the requirements of the jobs available. By contrast, higher performing students typically undertake four more years of academic skill development in college, often followed by graduate level or professional training. Then, when these individuals enter the labor market, they take jobs which themselves have a strong component of continued learning and literacy development. The result is a society composed of adults who, at least when we compare the top and bottom of the occupational hierarchy, are strongly differentiated on the basis of their cognitive skills, which are in turn correlated with their earnings.

These effects have been magnified by the strong upward trend in female employment during the second half of the twentieth century, and the accompanying increase in female representation in highly paid, knowledge based professional employment. At the same time, income inequality across worker education and skill levels has been increasing. With assortative mating by educational level at a high level, there has been significant growth in families where both parents hold highly paid jobs requiring advanced cognitive skills. Meanwhile, at the lower educational levels, wages are stagnant, and many children are raised in single parent households. Children raised in families having these very different levels of cognitive, social, and monetary resources, typically in neighbor hoods and schools segregated by income and race, can expect very different cognitive development trajectories. Thus, in US society today, social class and race/ethnicity are correlated with literacy, broadly defined as reading, writing, and mathematics skills. This correlation is a primary cause of continuing social inequality.

References:

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