Team Mobilizing To Unlock Futures
A 1995 survey, paid for by the Coors Brewing Co., found that 90 percent of the chief executives for Fortune 1,000 companies consider illiteracy a workplace problem - but only about 20 percent have programs to deal with it.
In the case of many communities, Spokane among them, the problem is often the reverse. Programs are in place, but relatively few people seem to understand them or the extent of the need for them.
Thus, the Literacy Advocacy Team, a program announced last week in Spokane, has a major task to perform. Created by the Washington state Office of Adult Literacy, team members will lobby, will campaign for volunteers and will raise community awareness about illiteracy.
That undertaking will pay off only if the public is open to it, meaning people must be willing to share their resources - their time and talents as much as their cash - to become part of the solution.
In the six Eastern Washington counties served by Community Colleges of Spokane, says Sally Grabicki, associate dean of instruction for adult basic education, some 53,000 adults have neither a high school diploma nor a GED.
They aren’t working for Fortune 1,000 companies. They mostly aren’t working for anyone.
Literacy is essential to self-sufficiency. Those who can’t read, as if that weren’t handicap enough, generally also lack other skills they need for employment and citizenship. Unable to provide for themselves, they account for a large share of the hard-core unemployed and the prison population.
Their shortcoming is not necessarily one of ability or even of will. Sometimes, it’s a matter of being shown the way.
Studies by Head Start and others, for example, point to the mother’s educational level as the greatest single indicator of how well a child will do in school.
Most students enrolled in the Community Colleges of Spokane’s work-based learning experience program, excluding those learning English as a second language, have no sustained employment experience of their own - a continuation of their parents’ and grandparents’ situation.
Breaking that cycle is not only the right social policy, it is an economic imperative, especially as welfare reform efforts remove unemployment as an option for the unskilled.
Curbing illiteracy promises important dividends now, but enormous ones in the future.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Doug Floyd/For the editorial board