Dec. 16, 2005

Graduated but Not Literate

It’s hardly shocking that a new federal report on adult literacy finds that the more formal education Americans have, the better they do on tests that measure practical literacy. “The National Assessment of Adult Literacy,” released Thursday by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics, shows that citizens with a college education were significantly better able than their peers to understand and analyze the information they confront in their everyday lives. So, as Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, director of the Institute for Education Sciences, put it at a new conference Thursday: “Education works — that’s a good thing.”

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Not only does it find that the average literacy of college educated Americans declined significantly from 1992 to 2003, but it also reveals that just 25 percent of college graduates — and only 31 percent of those with at least some graduate studies — scored high enough on the tests to be deemed “proficient” from a literacy standpoint, which the government defines as “using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.”

“This seems like another piece of hard evidence, a fairly clear indication, that the ‘value added’ that higher education gave to students didn’t improve, and maybe declined, over this period,” said Charles Miller, the former University of Texas regent who is heading the U.S. education secretary’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. “You have the possibility of people going through schools, getting a piece of paper for sitting in class a certain amount, and we don’t know whether they’re getting what they need. This is a fair sign that there are some problems here.”

The report, which extrapolates its findings from a survey of 19,000 Americans aged 16 and up, aims to measure what the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, Mark Schneider, called “reading for purpose” — how well citizens can process information to do what’s necessary to work and live (sample questions are available here).

It assesses three types of literacy: “prose literacy,” which is the ability to comprehend continuous texts, like newspaper articles and the brochure that comes with a new microwave; “document literacy,” the ability to understand and use documents to perform tasks, like reading a map or prescription labels; and “quantitative literacy,” which are the skills needed to do things like balancing a checkbook or calculating the interest on a loan from an advertisement.

Based on their scores, participants in the survey were deemed to have “basic,” “intermediate” or “proficient” literacy (Whitehurst noted that a National Research Council committee that recommended the literacy levels initially called the highest level “advanced,” but that department officials ultimately concluded that the skills required for that category — comparing viewpoints in two editorials, for instance, or calculating the cost per ounce of different grocery items — weren’t really all that advanced.)

Over all, the average prose and document literacy scores for Americans were basically flat between 1992 and 2003, though the scores on quantitative literacy rose from an average of 275 to 283, out of a maximum of 500. The scores of women rose in two of the three categories (document and quantitative literacy) over that period, while those for men fell in two of the three (rising only in quantitative). Scores for black Americans rose, while those for Hispanics declined.

Scores rose as one moved up in educational attainment, as the table below, examining prose literacy, shows. But the table also shows that scores fell from 1992 to 2003 for virtually every educational level, and the declines were steepest, by and large, the further up the ladder one moved. The contrast was even steeper in the realm of document literacy. Scores declined by three points or less for those who had at most a high school degree, while the average document literacy score for college graduates dropped by 14 points, to 303 from 317, and by 17 points for those with some graduate education (to 311 from 328).

Average Prose Literacy Scores by Education Level, 1992 and 2003

Education level	Prose Score, 1992	Prose Score, 2003
Still in high school	268	262
Some high school	216	207
GED/equivalency	265	260
High school graduate	268	262
Vocational/trade school	278	268
Some college	292	287
Associate degree	306	298
College graduate	325	314
Graduate studies/degree	340	327

As the raw scores have declined over time, so too have the proportions of the college educated who proved themselves “proficient” on the literacy tests, the study finds. Thirty-one percent of college graduates tested as proficient in prose literacy in 2003, down from 40 percent in 1992; the proportion of those proficient in document literacy were 25 percent in 2003 and 37 percent in 1992. For those with at least some graduate school, 31 percent were document literate in 2003, down from 45 percent in 1992.

Miller, Whitehurst and college officials offered a range of possible explanations for the numbers that all of them viewed as troubling. Several of them cited societal factors such as declining interest in reading and a culture that increasingly “takes as heroes people who dropped out of school in eighth grade and made a gazillion dollars,” as Ross Miller, director of programs at the American Association of Colleges and Universities, who said it was “hard not to be embarrassed by the data.”

Others noted that significantly more Americans are involved in higher education today than was the case a decade ago — 12 percent of the 2003 population were college graduates, compared to 10 percent in the 1992 study, for instance, an increase of about 4 million people — and most of that growth has come among populations that tend to be academically underprepared. “It doesn’t take a genius to look at the test scores that a lot of our urban schools produce to know something’s not quite right there,” said Ross Miller, though he made clear that he was not trying to transfer blame entirely to elementary and secondary schools.

He and other researchers agreed there was significantly more work to be done to determine whether (a) colleges are taking students who have been significantly underprepared by their previous schools, (b) the colleges are failing to catch those students up, or © both. The fact that Americans as a group are getting more formal education at higher levels “should have pushed up the levels of literacy in the country,” said Schneider of NCES. Why it has not, he said, “gives us pause.”

Like other commentators, Doug Hesse, a professor of English and head of the honors program at Illinois State University, who is active in the National Council of Teachers of English, has some theories. “This is exactly emblematic of what’s going on in our culture now,” he said, in that students (like most of us) are barraged with “flashes and bits of material” — “here’s a sound bit, here’s a sound bite, here’s a factoid” — and “not really much asked to use the information or analyze it in some way.”

Hesse also cited “sobering” data about the amount of time students spend on their studies. One study at Illinois State found that honors students were assigned an average of fewer than 50 pages of reading a week, and that two of five students acknowledged completing less than half of that work. “Students seem to spend a lot of time on Facebook, and when you think about the literate practices involved in Facebook, that’s probably not contributing a lot to the scores on something like this literacy test,” he said.

For Charles Miller, the head of the federal higher education commission, said it was impossible to know for sure whether the damning data in the literacy report necessarily mean that colleges are doing too little to prepare their graduates to think for themselves. But what seems evident, he said, is that colleges need to be able to measure how much they are contributing to students’ knowledge — which they can do only by more consistently testing what their graduates know and have learned.

“We don’t have a clue what they’re really learning if you don’t measure it,” he said.

— Doug Lederman

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Comments

I dislike that it says that you have to be “proficient from a literary standpoint to be functional in society". I want to know what they consider functional in society?

carly, Student at Dona Ana Community College, at 8:05 pm EDT on September 24, 2007

disaggregation

It would have been interesting if the data had been disaggregated to compare proprietary and traditional schools.

Name Withheld, Dean at Wysocki College, at 7:20 am EST on December 16, 2005

How unsurprising I find this report. I only taught at a university while a Masters-level graduate student, but how well I remember talking with the department head with whom I worked and who was approximately my age (I was about twice the age of the “traditional” grad students) — how unprepared even our “higher caliber” freshmen were for university studies, even the students from “AP” programs. Sadly, this was only a few years ago. What a shame.

Judith, at 11:47 am EST on December 16, 2005

adjunctification?

I wonder if there is a causal link between declining literacy and the increasing probability that today’s students will be taught by an overworked adjunct that has little time to grade writing...this also builds into the MC argument

bill, at 11:49 am EST on December 16, 2005

Bonus points to the first person on here that admits that they are not literate, themselves.

Larry, at 11:49 am EST on December 16, 2005

Another comparison

“It would have been interesting if the data had been disaggregated to compare proprietary and traditional schools.”

Well — as a private school volunteer — it would have been interesting if the data had been disaggregated to compare graduates of private schools and graduates of monopolistic, unionized taxpayer-funded public schools.

Bart J., at 11:58 am EST on December 16, 2005

What I think is funny about this is how many professors raise grades because students tell sob-stories or just give high grades, anyway. Even more ironic about it, is that many of those who are well-known for being pushovers are also quite vocal about how they have “high standards.” Perhaps if schools exposed the professors – by name – who gave As to everyone, we might be able to get at the root of this problem. Or, if this violates anyone’s sensibilities, professors could be held accountable, by having their students tested using a double-blind system, in a uniform manner across the country. (Though this wouldn’t solve the problem of students taking courses in subject matters that they already know quite well.)

Bart J, I am curious... are you volunteering for a private company? You seem to have a lot of anger at public schools, but you are working for free, and complaining about people who want to collectively bargain for more money! Finally, how do you figure that public universities are monopolies?

Larry, at 12:57 pm EST on December 16, 2005

Response to Poindexter

In response to the comments of Waldo Poindexter, it seems to me that there are good tests and bad tests and that he doesn’t know which one the NAAL is. He assumes it’s the latter, since to him all testing is part of a vast conspiracy on the part of “politicians and. . . their ‘professorial’ clerics,” but that strikes me as reductive.

But the more important point is that we need to make sure that students are acquiring the knowledge and skills we purport to teach, because if they’re not, that means that a huge federal and state investment is wasted and our nation is imperilled. If “tests only measure what the test items are designed to measure,” as he rightly asserts, then let’s find or design ones to measure what we want to find out about. We’re just the people who should be able to do that. If we can’t, we’re no better as researchers than we seem to be as educators.

Peg Miller, Director, Center for the Study of Higher Education at University of Virginia, at 12:58 pm EST on December 16, 2005

Shocking, but...

This is truly a depressing figure, but I wonder if there might not be a silver lining, somewhere (please let there be a silver lining...). We have, I think, moved somewhat away from book-centered learning — it’s just not very likely, especially at theundergrad level, that students are assigned a book to read, digest, and respond to. Much of our teaching revolves around articles, short fiction, films. The only lengthy work in amny courses is the textbook, which is read and taught in parts.

The point is, very little of the instruction college students receive is directed towards the skills measured by this study. It may well be that we, consciously or no, simply do not value these skills very much anymore; whether that’s true or not, we certainly don’t focus on them. Gone are the days when an undergraduate education consisted primarily of a stack of “great books” and professors who would lead them through the interpretation and explication of those significant works. Gone are the series of 2-hour lectures (the verbal equivalent of the book-length treatise), replaced by the 20-minute attention-span rule.

The question is, do these scores apply across the board to reading and learning in general — or have our students developed better skills in the areas that we do, in fact, focus on. Are they equally dysfunctional when confronted with a 20-page extract or 12-page journal article? Have they developed, in keeping with their new Internet skills, new ways of digesting shorter “bits” of data and interpretation?

I think we need to seriously ask ourselves how these findings correlate with the things we are actually teaching, and if the way we teach is not a more accurate representation of what we value than our nostalgia for a disappearing style of teaching.

Dustin, at 12:59 pm EST on December 16, 2005

Another comparison—been done

Bart J wrote: “It would have been interesting if the data had been disaggregated to compare proprietary and traditional schools.”

That study has been done by NAEP. Guess what, holding other “factors” constant, private schools do generally worse than public schools.

So much for polemicizing about union blah, blah, blah.

ALB, at 1:46 pm EST on December 16, 2005

Stapels

In my estimation, the staple fare of higher education has changed from the “classical” liberal art to the political grandstang. It is little suprise that with basics in english, math and science being replaced with classes on “cultural perspectives,” “comparative religion,” “urban issues” and “gay studies” that people have a high aptitude for social justice and talking about their professors opinions on Iraq while missing the foundational skills and career abilities they need.

Kevin, Undergraduate, at 1:47 pm EST on December 16, 2005

They Have Met The Enemy ...

As one who is not the least bit surprised by the results of this study, I am inclined to ask, “who is so naive that s/he did not see this coming? Who is so ‘out of the loop’ s/he does not understand the root causes of this phenomenon?” I will mention only one of many alarming root causes.

As an academic (mathematician) and instructional development consultant during the past forty-five years, I have read many, many letters, essays, articles, and books written by college and university professors. In recent years, a great many of these documents and tomes appear to have been written by individuals who are quite incapable of writing five consecutive coherent sentences or making even simple modus ponens arguments.

As long as we continue to be so inarticulate and illiterate ourselves and then, on top of that, demand so little of our students vis-a-vis articulation and literacy, we can expect continuation of these survey results. Perhaps some of you recall a time when if a ten-page paper had a combination of three misspelled words or grammatical errors, it was an automatic “F.” Try that today. Oh, but I forgot ... it’s the idea that counts; not the expression of it.

And to suggest that the increased number and diversity of college and university students is an important root cause of adult illiteracy is a typical academic cop-out. It’s time for our students to recognize that they have met the enemy ... and it is us. [I know, I know, that sentence is grammatically incorrect ... but I’m paraphrasing an opossum for God’s sake. And, as I recall, he had no formal education at all.]

RWH, at 2:33 pm EST on December 16, 2005

Where’s the URL?

” .. That study has been done by NAEP ..”

Brilliant, amazing writing style.

What is NAEP? Some government agency?

Where’s the data? Got a URL for it?

Great to work with geniuses.

Bart J., at 2:50 pm EST on December 16, 2005

Larrry, Larry, Larry ..

Larry, I am curious .. you have said you are second-chair attorney in 1st Amendment cases .. but refuse to tell anyone if they are public or private. Why?

Secondly, you say you have a master’s in econ, but appear not to know anything about Vedder (Ohio U). Anyone MA-econ who has read Vedder on why tuition is so high would understand my point.

Thirdly, I don’t know where you got the collective bargaining matter. Following in Vedder’s stance, unions have a right to collective bargain. And employers have the right to make final offers, prior to dismissal. That is real politik — get used to it.

As to this — “Finally, how do you figure that public universities are monopolies?” I was talking about the K-12 Public School Monopoly (% of market share: 90+). The public college monopoly only has ~80%. (The FTC begins monopoly investigations at ~55%.)

If you’re MA-economics — ever heard of a deadweight loss? Ever heard of the corrosive effect of monopoly power?

Bart J., Larry’s best bud at Small, private college, at 3:03 pm EST on December 16, 2005

Could I Possibly Agree With Bart J.?

I’ll admit that I’m just as annoyed as is Bart J. about (1) the use of acronyms without complete specification and (2) statements presumably backed up by research without any Uniform Resource Locator pointing a finger at where the research is described.

For Bart’s information, NAEP is the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

In a competition with myself, I like to go on-line to see how quickly I can track down something that may be interesting and about which I have very little information. Do that with NAEP and you will be stuck with a bunch of articles about their comparison of Charter Schools with other Public Schools, not the study to which ALB referred. I very quickly found ALB’s study by writing “NAEP” “private” “public” and discovered the work of Sarah Theule Lubienski and Christopher Lubienski (see http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k_v86/k0505lub.htm).

They did draw the conclusion suggested by ALB; namely, “holding [some] other ‘factors’ constant, private school students do generally worse than public schools,” and they even stated a few “relevant” statistics. But good grief, there are private schools (Andover, Detroit Country Day, Greenhills, Asheville School, etc.) and there are private schools (Clyde’s School of the Graphic Arts, Saint Mildred’s School, School of the Church of What’s Happening Now, etc.). And lumping them together? ... well forgive me ALB if I’m not convinced.

In any event NCES has demonstrated that private schools have smaller class sizes than do public schools (p <.00001). See what I mean?

RWH, at 4:49 pm EST on December 16, 2005

How good is the test?

My first response as I read the article was to wonder how it was determined that these questions evaluated basic literacy, and how many correct answers were required to meet particular levels. There was a link to more information about the study — which had a lot about the population, and about what was on the test, but nothing about how these limits were determined. It is likely out there, but I didn’t find that. So, how do we know that these results are significant? I have taught college students, and been appalled by their writing abilities, but I have no idea whether the students I was teaching were a representative sample. I have also seen that students today need to learn a heck of a lot more than I did to function in everyday life. One example — when I was in college and doing research for a paper, I went to the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature — one book — and looked up my subject, and possibly a few related ones, and then looked for the periodicals referred to. To research today the student has to know how to get to an appropriate literature index to begin searching for the subject. There are thousands of possible indexes. There is also a much greater amount of research available on any given topic, so it requires a lot more time than I had to spend to weed through and find the most pertinent information.As I say, that is one example. I just completed a master’s program, have one child in college and one who graduated. I know what they had to learn in high school and college, and what I had to do in my program. You will not convince me that students today have learned less than I had learned when I graduated from college. They haven’t learned all the same things, but they have learned a lot more.

Tricia, at 5:59 pm EST on December 16, 2005

NYU study: private schools outperform public schools

No surprise to anyone who engages common sense before ideology (e.g., parents matter, performace matters) —

http://www.nyu.edu/public.affairs/releases/detail/269

And these —

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/broo...irs/v2000/2000.1grogger_comment.html

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cac...+Catholic+public+site:.edu&hl=en

Bart J., at 12:06 am EST on December 18, 2005

For Tricia and others curious about the test: I spent some time years ago working with the 1992 survey and the items, across all three “literacy” domains, are not at all complicated. The highest level of literacy demonstrated, for instance, with items asking the respondent calculate simple interest, follow the “what to do if” instructions that might come with a toaster, etc. Again, all very, very simple stuff. While the results may be alarming, there is nothing peculiar about the test.

I wonder at the “alarm” that accompanied the 1992 survey (and is brewing around the latest). Think about it folks, is it really all that surprising? While I generally reject “ivory tower” arguments, I think it is very easy for people in higher ed, who spend their lives working with people like themselves, to dramatically overestimate the “education” of even “average” people. Regarding the change in results for people with higher ed credentials since 1992, it is also striking that the fact that higher education has been rapidly expanding (and thus taking in more people who would not have taken higher ed degrees in the past) is not suspect #1 in the forum on this article. In short, people are not quite as sharp as many of us imagine them to be and more of them are going to college.

james, at 9:26 am EST on December 18, 2005

I have a few personal observations.

1. I grew up in North Dakota — a state that consistently scores near the bottom in education spending and consistently scores near the top in test results. That leads me to believe that concentrating on a strong foundation has value.

2. As a first-generation college graduate, I know what it is like to be clueless on campus. Coupled with the distraction of Vietnam war protests, I slid through a degree even though the Strong Vocational predicted I would drop out from disinterest. I essentially “retook” college in the evenings over the next decade to “do it right". Perhaps both high school and college failed to “explain” college to me and, for one reason or another, it took me some time to appreciate the true value of tertiary education.

3. I’ve worked at an Ivy and I’ve worked at a “25 Best Four-Year Liberal Arts College". I’ve discussed classes in detail on many occasions with coworker students and I’ve been very impressed with coursework demands. Clearly, quality is still being demanded where I have had the opportunity to look for it. That makes me think we need further reseach to clarify subpopulations. It could very well be that many people are being channeled into college who really should attend vocational school and that is affecting average scores even though the great number of students are still doing quality work.

On this final point, however, I am concerned that I have seen the rise of a “consumer” model in higher education that approaches a shallow “political correctness". If a student isn’t doing well at college, the college is at fault in not providing a satisfying experience. That is quite the reverse of an earlier model where it was an earned privilege to be accepted into a college.

There is probably no simple answer to this decline. Most likely, many factors in many quarters are to blame.

smchris, at 12:20 pm EST on December 18, 2005

I bet more students today are “literate” in C++ than ten years ago.

Mr. Econotarian, at 4:48 am EST on December 19, 2005

Humans have an inflated view of their intelligence

We always seem to be shocked when we see that despite attending school for many years, most humans are not very capable. The simple fact is that most humans are not very bright. No amount of instruction will change that fact. We would do well to spend far less money trying to educate the ineducable and spent more resources on those with the higher probability of success. But on a higher ed form, that idea would probably not gain many adherents.

g. Nagle, MSEE, at 9:09 pm EST on December 29, 2005

I am surpised that nobody so far noticed the comment titled “Stapels” [interesting spelling] posted by a college student that speaks volumes about the dumbing down of higher education. Ironically, the comment confirms what the “customers” want, namely “foundational skills” to help them in their career goals; in other words, they do want an education that is skill-based, short-term goal oriented. And any attempt to engage them in other intellectual training may irritate them and strike them as irrelevant. The motto seems to be “if it is not directly related to what I want to do when I graduate it is useless.”

That student could have easily been in one of my classes, a freshman composition class, that yes, requires them to read texts and develop arguments and think critically. And he could have been one of those (thank God not many) who are puzzled why we are not spending more time doing grammar or not doing English, whatever English means to them. However, the foundational skills that student was asking for are supposedly developed in K-12 eduation. I teach in Ohio, in a large urban public university. If I were to measure the literacy of my college freshmen in my english classes according to the Language Arts proficiency standards for 12-grade graduate (as those are described by the Ohio Board of Education) about half of my students in my first semester college english composition class would not meet them. As a matter of fact some of them would barely meet the standards of 10th grade. College is not the place to teach / concentrate on the foundational skills; it is the place to hone them and move beyond them. Students should already possess them to a degree that would make it possible for them to use them to educate themselves further and engage actively in public affairs and decision making processes.

I wonder if that student ever considered the value of having the privilege to be part of those discussions about the war or this or that; and read and write about them in meaningful ways that can change communities. But maybe in that service-end education it will not be needed. After all, even customer service representatives are displaced, outsourced, and replaced by much cheaper labor overseas.

When the majority of the people can read and function at a 10-grade literacy level in an economic system that will use this to their disadvantage (and sadly perpetuate it)it will be very hard to ever achieve true education and social change. Education is also supposed to be enlightment; to spark interests and creativity; to propell individuals to do better, not necessarily financially only, to be truly free. Most people I know are slaves to lifestyles and ecnomic necessities dictated by socio-economic structures that unforunately do not value in-depth education.

I guess, it’s better to eat in the dark when they feed you unsavory goods that you wouldn’t have eaten otherwise.

Angela B., Instructor at Large Public University in the Midwest, at 4:35 am EST on January 5, 2006

Generation 13

In California alone we now have a whole generation of public school students who have grown up in the devastating wreckage of Proposition 13, the anti-tax initiative which sent California’s public schools plunging from among the best in the U.S. to among the worst in the nation.

Meanwhile in his new book Jonathon Kozol argues — convincingly, I feel — that American public schools have been completely resegregated in the last two decades.

Should we then be surprised that the authors of these political travesties now run into our schools, wringing their hands, declaring to those of us who have stayed in the trenches all the while that our students’ “literacy” (as measured by their hideously expensive, largely ineffective, and intellectually insulting multiple choice mass-testing machinery) has declined in America.

No Duh.

Scott Lankford, Professor of English at Foothill Community College, at 4:35 am EST on January 5, 2006

Value added??

Actually no. It would seem from the table in the article that the quality of inputs has declined but unless we assume that the scale is linear we can’t assume that the ‘value added’ has decreased.

Another potentially confounding factor is that more of the weaker students may be attending college.

Rob Rittenhouse, Assoc. Prof at McMurry University, at 6:00 pm EST on February 20, 2006

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