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The following transcript has not been edited for journal or magazine publication (see 'Interview Notes' for more details). Bold is used to emphasize our [Children of the Code] sense of the importance of what is being said and does not necessarily reflect gestures or tones of emphasis that occurred during the interview.
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David Boulton: Thank you for taking the time.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Well, I appreciate your interest.
David Boulton: I'm very interested, extremely interested. I'm delighted to
encounter somebody who's working on the front lines of literacy in the ways that
you are.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Oh, good. Tell me a little bit about what you are trying to do and what you would
like to know.
David Boulton: What we’re trying to do is to bring many different
dimensions, different perspectives, and different ways of knowing into a
learning dialogue. We want to help
parents, teachers and the public in general understand how fundamentally
important the process of learning to read is. To do that we are working to
reframe how we think about it, both in terms of its importance and how we
approach it, so as to develop more effective pathways through the challenges
involved. So
our conversations run from neuroscientists like Paula
Tallal, to code scientists
like Richard Venezky to government officials like
Russ Whitehurst and
Reid Lyon and
Chris Doherty. And, of course conversations with children and adults who
have reading difficulties. We want to include as many perspectives as we can. We
want to learn from every person that has an authentic and unique voice.
We want to bring them together into a distributed conversation and then
reflect it back to the public in a way that will really help form a different
social frame of reference for how we all think about reading.
Robert Wedgeworth: I
see. Okay.
David Boulton: So having said that, you're on the front lines of dealing
with how to help struggling readers all over the world.
I mean, not just the United States, not just the English language, but
all over the world. What I'd be interested in is, first, some background on
you and
ProLiteracy. Could we start with a brief sketch there, and follow it
with: what is your distinctive lens? How is it that you see this? How is
it that you define illiteracy and its causes? Then we can go from there into
more specific questions.
Robert Wedgeworth:
That sounds fine to me.
Robert Wedgeworth: I
am by profession an academic librarian. I was educated as a librarian. It's the
only career I've known up until the time that I came to work in the literacy
movement. I've worked in a number of public and academic institutions in the
Midwest and on the East Coast, including Brown University, Columbia University,
Rutgers University. I was Executive Director of the American Library Association
in Chicago for thirteen years. I was the university librarian at the University
of Illinois in Urbana Champaign for eight years.
After I retired from that position in 1999, I was asked to come onboard as a member of the board of directors of what was then Laubach Literacy International. Within a few months I was asked to take over the position as president and shortly thereafter I reached the conclusion that I needed to merge the two predominant adult literacy organizations in the country, Literacy Volunteers of America and Laubach Literacy International.
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Robert Wedgeworth: So the merger
of the
two into ProLiteracy was
accomplished as
of August 2002. It represents the largest nongovernmental literacy training
organization in the world, including about 1,200 affiliated local
literacy-training organizations across the United States in all fifty
states and the District of Columbia. We also operate training programs in fifty
developing countries, in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East,
where we do literacy training as well through nongovernmental partner
organizations.
David Boulton: How many adults are you currently serving?
Robert Wedgeworth: In
this country, we serve something like 200,000 adults, using about 120,000
volunteers. Over the next three years, we will serve more than a half
million adults and their families in our international network.
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David Boulton: Excellent. How many people have literacy related difficulty in life? What kind of numbers are we talking about?
Robert Wedgeworth:
Well, if we look worldwide, last year when the Director General of UNESCO made
his annual statement on the occasion of International Literacy Day in September,
he had some good news. The good news is for the first time in history over half
of the women in the continent of Africa are literate. But that's the only good
news you can see in those worldwide statistics, because we're still talking
about almost a billion people in the world who either cannot read and
write or have very low literacy skills.
In this country, the
current estimates of the extent of adult low literacy are based primarily on the
surveys that were taken in the early 1990's. At that time we estimated that there
were about ninety million adults with low literacy skills, about half of them
at the lowest level that we would determine literacy skills. In our State
of Literacy Report which we issued in November of 2003, we estimated that those
numbers are likely to increase sharply, primarily due to the rates of the
immigration, due to the rates of students who are dropping out or being pushed
out of high school, due to the growth of the number of offenders in our system
who are diagnosed with low literacy skills in state and federal prisons, and
other factors as well.
NOTE - In January of 2006 we interviewed Mr. Wedgeworth again to get his comments on the national assessment of adult literacy (NAAL) report released in late 2005:
Robert Wedgeworth: An estimated 93 million adults out of a total adult population of around 221 million are at basic literacy levels or below basic. People who are below basic literacy levels can’t carry out the everyday functions that they would normally pursue in American society. It means that they can’t read a bus schedule and see how to get across town. It means that they can’t use most of the self-service ATMs. It means that they can’t fill out the average job application to try to get a job or get a better job. Those who are considered at basic literacy levels are still operating on a very rudimentary level in terms of math skills and in terms of reading capabilities, being unable to draw simple conclusions from reading a column in a newspaper or reading a newspaper editorial that may be comparing candidates in a local election. (Commenting on 2005 National Assessment of Adult Literacy Report)
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Robert Wedgeworth: There
are still too many people out there who do not believe that we have as many
functionally illiterate adults in this country as we do.
David Boulton: Yes, there seems to be quite a number of people who believe
that the reading crisis is being pumped up as part of covert strategy to
commercialize education.
Robert Wedgeworth: Except
for the fact that we're getting too much corroboration coming back from
different sectors of society.
David Boulton: Yes.
Robert Wedgeworth:
From the health care industry, from the...
David Boulton: Prisons.
Robert Wedgeworth:
The prisons -- as I point out in that paper.
David Boulton: It's the correlation of all of these things that gives
credibility and strength to this underlying assessment of the adult low literacy
population.
Robert Wedgeworth: Exactly.
That's right. Back in the 1970's when the U.S. Department of Education first
surfaced the issue, and even in the 1990's when they did that first national
assessment, people didn't believe those figures. In
our State of Literacy Report we predicted that the next survey would show that
the numbers of adults with low literacy skills will increase significantly over
what the previous survey showed in the early 1990's. There were many
skeptics about those statistics, but as you know, there's been substantial
corroboration of those statistics since then coming from different quarters,
coming from the prison system with the number of offenders who have low literacy
skills and coming from the health profession.
There are several
other factors that will contribute to those numbers increasing in the next
survey. One is that we've had an enormous growth in immigration to the United
States. And we know, because we frequently see the stories of immigrants who
come, they work hard, they put their children through school, and the next
generation does well. But this, based on the statistics and our experience, is
the exception rather than the rule. Many of these families take two and three
generations before they can move into the mainstream of American life.
Another fast
growing area for us is teenagers who are now being subjected to these mandated state
exams, and they are having difficulty or either they're having anxiety about
their ability to pass the state exams. So, we're getting enrollees in our
programs using our materials to help prepare themselves for those mandated
exams.
Though the numbers of students who are dropping out hasn't changed, the overall numbers are increasing by the number of students who are being pushed out. There was a major story in our local newspaper recently about push-outs. But what they failed to indicate was why administrators would be interested in pushing someone out of school who is not doing well. The motivation is that under the accountability rules that are associated with No Child Left Behind schools are penalized for students who don't do well and don't advance. So that if they have students who have other issues in their lives, like becoming parents at an early age, they have to work at night or they attend school sporadically, they're encouraged to push those students out of school so that they don't drag down the numbers that relate to the rest of the student body.
So, there are a number of reasons why these statistics are likely to
increase before they decrease. We really have to address the problem of adult
literacy head-on.
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David Boulton: People seem to think, "We can’t have that many
low-literate people."
Robert Wedgeworth:
But it's like doing any kind of projection.
David Boulton: Well, that's exactly our point as well. We just released an
article I'll share with you. The basic gist of it is what you were saying
– if we compile a list of the things children's lives are at risk for
today: parental abuse, and the various developmental physiological and
psychological disorders and add
them all together, they don't come anywhere near the risk children are at for
becoming improficient readers…
Robert Wedgeworth: Right.
David Boulton: And all the dimensions of life harm that we associate
with that.
Robert Wedgeworth: And
all of the social problems they run the risk of becoming victims of as a result
of not being able to negotiate this society.
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Robert Wedgeworth:
The American Medical Association has a
major effort now to try to support
health literacy among their patients because of the increasing costs to the
health system for people who don't understand the prescriptions that they're
given, they don't understand how to take their medications. They don't
understand the diagnoses that are given to them by their doctors and the
instructions that are attendant to those diagnoses. It's estimated that we spend
over seventy billion a year unnecessarily for people making special trips to
the emergency room or extra trips to the doctor because they failed to
understand the health issues that they have to deal with in their lives.
David Boulton: I read a report that that referred to data from the American Medical Association, a report without substantiation yet, that hypothesized that in addition to the seventy billion or so you just mentioned, a significant percentage of our nation’s annual health care costs are spent on low literate people who aren't taking care of themselves in variety of ways that more literate people do.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Yes. It's really difficult to make accurate estimates of the cost of health
literacy, other than being able to record the number of times people show up at
an emergency room for special treatment because they don't understand their
medication, or other unnecessary visits to the doctor. Others are estimates that
are really hard to pin down. But we know that these other instances do occur.
It's simply at this point it's difficult to estimate them with any accuracy.
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UNESCO on Literacy and
Longevity:
David Boulton: One of the things reported in the UNESCO report was the
correlation between literacy and longevity.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Yes.
David Boulton: The correlation between longevity and literacy was as
strong as the correlation between longevity and anything else they measured.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Well, yes, because just think about it on a very fundamental level. If you think
about the number of people who die every year from famine, from not getting
adequate health care and nutrition, and you compare that to the number of people
who die from wars or terrorism, or some of the other things that dominate the
headlines, these other quiet departures from life are not as dramatic as war
or terrorism, but they're certainly more deadly in terms of losses of human
life. We know for a fact that we can teach people how to grow more crops
and better crops. We can teach people how to engage in basic health and
nutrition. This is what we do in our international literacy programs.
Adults in other
countries, especially developing countries where life is so hard, people spend
an enormous amount of time every day just being able to feed and clothe and
house themselves. Just to invite a person in that situation to learn how
to read just for the sake of reading is not going to make any impression on
them.
So our literacy
programs in developing countries are focused around problem areas of life:
Health and nutrition, justice, human rights, environmental concerns, basic
education. When people do understand how learning how to read and write
will help them change the nature of their lives and the lives of their families,
they're more motivated to come to literacy programs.
It is their
program. They decide, in each community, what will be at the center of their
learning. If they want to, for example, improve the quality of the water
that's available in their village then we will teach in that context the
importance of health related to the quality of the water. They learn the
vocabulary related to water and pollution and the types of pollutants, and that
sort of thing. They're learning how to read, but they're also learning how to
deal with this problem, and how to dig trenches for latrines and other things
that will keep the human waste from running into their source of water.
But they're learning
how to read and write in the context of a specific problem. It may be building a
community center, or it may be some other community project that is of great
importance to them; so that when they come to learn how to read, they're not
learning how to read and write in the abstract, they're learning to read and
write to use that as a tool to help them improve their lives. It could be to
learn how to market fruits and vegetables that they grow in the market so that
they won't be cheated.
All of our
international literacy programs are focused on literacy for social change,
social change meaning acquiring basic skills that will help them change the
pattern and the nature of the lives that they're currently living.
David Boulton: Excellent. So you help to understand that this is a stairway,
and step-by-step are the steps that they choose, that are most important to
their lives as far as the context they're going to move through.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Exactly.
David Boulton: You are allowing them to make it relevant to their lives.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Well, they determine what are the important things that they want to change
about their lives, and how reading and writing can help them as a tool to change
those circumstances.
The interesting thing
about the international partner programs is that while the adults come to
school, the beneficiaries are the children and other members of the family at
the same time, because they go back and teach their children and other members
of the family what they learned from us.
Outside the U.S., the
larger proportions of the people who come to our training programs are women.
This is consistent with UNESCO's statistics, in that the larger proportions
of people who are functionally illiterate around the world tend to be women.
Part of this is cultural and a part of it is economic. In many cultures girls
tend to become mothers while they're still children themselves, and so they don't get the opportunity to gain more schooling. For boys, they may
have a little more opportunity, but they too have to go to work at an early age
in order to help support the families.
David Boulton: I've got a
couple more questions. But is there anything that you think is really critical,
that should get heard, get out, be better understood?
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Robert Wedgeworth:
There are two things that strike me about the material that you sent to me. One is that like most orientations towards formal education, we tend to put
nearly all of our resources into teaching children how to decode, and we put
very few of our resources into what is the more critical step, and that is
developing reading comprehension skill. And the only way you develop reading
comprehension skill is through continuing practice with increasingly more
difficult reading material.
David Boulton: Well, my sense is -- and I appreciate diving right into this,
is that these two are very related. First of all, "decoding" is a
misleading term. I mean, you could say that it's decoding in a phonetic
language, but when you talk about a written system that has such letter sound
correspondence ambiguities, what we are really describing is disambiguation.
It's a process of buffering up these code elements and working out the right
sounds for them according to the context in comprehension and the rules of
spelling. And as you know, it's...
Robert Wedgeworth:
But it's the same. What I'm saying is: the difference between learning how to
use a tool and developing facility in a use of that tool.
What I'm saying is: we
tend to put most of our resources into teaching people how to use the tool, and
the other more critical part of it, developing that facility, we sort of assume
it will happen. From our experience, most of the adult readers who come to
us learn how to decode at one time or another, but they never really develop the
reading comprehension skill.
David Boulton: I understand what you are saying.
Robert Wedgeworth:
They never got the continuing practice, and that continuing practice with good
habits that develops reading comprehension skill. That's the reason I
mentioned that point. I think it's underemphasized constantly in getting the
general public to understand that reading is a difficult skill to acquire, and
it's an even more difficult skill to maintain and improve.
David Boulton: Excellent.
I'm in total alignment with you. I have a somewhat
different language here that I think would be beneficial in our dialogue, but I
don't differ with you at all. I think you're right on in promoting the necessity of comprehension.
The question is what is
the relationship between decoding and comprehension and...
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The Role of
Adults in Assisting Children who are Learning to Read
Robert Wedgeworth:
The next point I will make with you is a little different, because here
again it comes out of our experience as an adult literacy organization; and that
is, we underestimate the role that adults play in assisting children to learn
how to read. In most cases when we think about that we think about adults
helping children with their homework, helping them with their reading material.
David Boulton: Right.
Robert Wedgeworth: There are many, many examples. When a child grows up in a home where they never see someone write a check, they never see someone reading a newspaper; unlike me, their fathers don't sit down and teach them how to calculate batting averages so they can read the sporting page. Those are the kinds of things that are incredibly important.
Now, if you take
this country alone, when we look at what we're doing in trying to put the
emphasis on teaching children to read, in most of the families these things can
be successfully reinforced by the parents or the other adults around the
children. But you have a fairly substantial number of adults and parents who
are incapable of giving that kind of reinforcement to their children.
David Boulton: Right.
Robert Wedgeworth: And
we know for a fact that a child who grows up in a home where the parents are
functionally illiterate has about a fifty percent risk of becoming a
functionally illiterate adult himself or herself.
David Boulton: Absolutely. I am with you.
Robert Wedgeworth: So
those are the only two points that emerge that I wanted to share with you, based
on the material that you have developed here.
David Boulton: I appreciate your distinctions and your added clarification,
and your call for more visible inclusion and presentation of those dimensions in
what we're doing.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Yes. I think they add a different dimension to our understanding of how we
address this critically important problem.
David Boulton: Yes.
Robert Wedgeworth:
You're not alone. It's the general way we talk about learning to read and
reading in our society. Based on your knowledge, you know that it is easier
to learn how to read in some languages than it is in others and sometimes we don't appreciate that difficulty for English speakers as
well.
David Boulton: Well, we are pretty focused on English, not because we are
not interested in all the others, but because of the unique challenges in
English that I want to get attention on.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Yes, yes. And in that sense, it makes those factors that I emphasize much
more...
David Boulton: All the more critical.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Important than it may be in other languages.
David Boulton: Are you familiar with Paula Tallal's
work?
Robert Wedgeworth:
Yes.
David Boulton: Okay. Then she ties in, as well as a number of other people,
with what you're describing about the criticality of the developing environment
of the child, with respect to the complexity of language in play, the frequency
or speed of speech. There's so many different things that are part of pulling
the child's attention and differentiation into language at such a level of
sophistication and distinction and granularity and processing frequency and so
forth, that they have a greater chance of taking off into the on-ramp of reading
when they experience it.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Yes. The problem that I see with those arguments, though is that for policy makers and leaders, it's too
abstract.
David Boulton: Agree. But I wasn't trying to talk with them.
I'm talking with you right now.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Understood, yes. No, I'm fully in agreement with what you're saying.
David Boulton: Absolutely. My favorite quote is Einstein's: "Make
everything as simple as possible, but no simpler," in the sense that
getting people to understand something at a level that doesn't actually take
them to the depth that's necessary to function with it isn’t helpful --
I'm interested in pushing that edge, let's put it that way.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Okay.
David Boulton: I appreciate where you're coming from. As in my
conversations with Dr.
Whitehurst, and Dr. Lyon and other people, I understand
that each of us is living in a different realm, and the language that we use,
the conceptuaries we live and learn in, need to work together to identify where
the fulcrums are to getting heard and to getting traction.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Yes. And even though I spent most of my professional life with advanced
researchers, scholars and university students, we still feel the impact of what
doesn't happen at the other levels of education.
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Robert Wedgeworth: I can remember the Chronicle of
Higher Education did a survey, I think back in the 1980's, a whole range of
questions that they asked university and college faculty across the nation.
There were only two questions that really stood out from the others in terms of
responses and that is that the faculty generally agreed that they had to do things
at the university level that they shouldn't have to do. And of course, the
obvious thing was remedial education.
David Boulton: Yes.
Robert Wedgeworth:
The other thing was that they were saying that there were too many students
who arrive at the university who aren't prepared to do university work.
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David Boulton: Yes. Well, this comes all the way back to where we were
earlier. Beyond the skill of reading as an extra brain information processing
system - beyond reading as an external utility skill, there's something deeper
about the significance of reading, about how the infrastructure that develops in
order to process reading leads to being able to be more self-reflexive, better
able to process abstractions, and so forth, that we're just beginning to
understand.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Yes.
David Boulton: And their poor educational performance is only partially
because they're unable to negotiate the code, the primary cause of this is
children are learning to become pre-consciously ashamed of the feel of their
learning.
Robert Wedgeworth: This
is particularly a problem in African American families.
David Boulton: Yes.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Having come from one, I understand it very well, because what we are finding
is that the sons and daughters of some of my contemporaries who have grown up in
middle class or even affluent communities don't want to be seen as being
knowledgeable.They deliberately hang back from excelling academically
because they're embarrassed.
David Boulton: Yes. That's a different level of the shame mechanism than
we're talking about, but it's connected.
Robert Wedgeworth: They're
ashamed or embarrassed of their learning.
David Boulton: Yes. And it's not just an idea. I don't know how
familiar you are with the affect sciences, but we learn early on to become
shame escape artists.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Right.
David Boulton: And so children are put into this situation where they are
being confused in a way that's radically unnatural to their brains and how they
naturally learn to process reality. Their general response to that is to
feel like there's something wrong with them.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Yes.
David Boulton: And that leads to this shame and wanting to avoid those
processes that trigger it. And that generalizes to the state of the world.
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Robert
Wedgeworth: Well, yeah. I do agree with that. But here again, I will say, that
in all too
many cases -- and our experience reflects it from the adults this come to us --
in all too many cases, there is a specific physiological or identifiable reason
why people have avoided those situations.
David Boulton: Physiological?
Robert Wedgeworth:
Yes. About sixty percent of the adults who come into our literacy training
programs have some kind of learning disability.
David Boulton: How does that reconcile with the general consensus in LD
research that only four or five percent of the population has learning
disabilities?
Robert Wedgeworth:
Because our programs are volunteer literacy programs. If you're at a higher
level of ability judged by the federal standards, you'll generally go into a
class that you either pay for or you can get for free that's run by the school
system or some part of the formal educational system. But ours is a one-on-one
tutoring system, so as a result, even the adult basic education people refer
their toughest cases to us. So, we're seeing a concentration of the people, and
that's the reason that I'm saying that about sixty percent of the people who
come to our programs have some kind of learning disability. It may be dyslexia,
or it may simply be that they have an undiagnosed hearing problem.
David Boulton: Or an eyesight problem, something that's creating a
physiological substrate level of difficulty.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Exactly. That when undiagnosed as a child, they engaged in behavior
that the system reacted to rather than the cause and slipped through the system without people knowing that they had some
physiological problem that kept them from learning.
David Boulton: An important intersection here -- the shame aversion we
talked about earlier is so powerful, that when we talk to children that are
struggling and that have crossed a certain threshold with shame, with respect to
it, they are trying to avoid the shame by framing their experience in a way that
takes them out of responsibility for it. So either ‘reading isn't that
important’, or ‘I'm stupid’, or they
come up with some definition of what's going on that they can use to escape the
shame with. It’s very learning disabling.
Robert Wedgeworth:
Okay. But that also comes into effect as they get older too, because what we
observe in adults is that -- let me lead you to a different area of research.
David Boulton: Good.
