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The National Institute for Literacy Community Literacy Summit 2007

Washington, DCMarch 19, 2007

DTI ASSOCIATES INCORPORATED

Ubiqus/Nation-Wide Reporting & Convention Coverage

22 Cortlandt Street, Suite 802 - New York, NY 10007

The National Institute for Literacy Community Literacy Summit 2007

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MS. LYNN REDDY: I'm Lynn Reddy. I'm The Institute's deputy director. We are really looking forward to this meeting because of the excellent group of speakers and participants who are here today. Some of you are quite experienced in running community literacy efforts. Some of you represent organizations that tutor or mentor or teach community members of all ages, or connect with them through other community-based services.

Several speakers have conducted extensive research on issues that bear directly on community literacy. Some of you on the other hand may be here with questions about starting a community literacy effort. We hope that this is the right place for all of us and that today can serve as an opportunity for us to learn from each other.

We at the Institute are especially eager to learn more. If you're familiar with the Institute and its work, you'll know that community literacy is a new area for us. The Institute has been working on various issues in adult literacy for the last fifteen years, and more recently, we've been looking at literacy issues across the lifespan. But truthfully we have only begun to think of our work in literacy in a way that has brought us to community literacy fairly recently.

But with the help of several of our board members, unfortunately who couldn't be here today, Dr. Bill Hiller [phonetic] and Dr. Juan Oliverez [phonetic], and our growing awareness of the grassroots energy and commitment, we found our way to community literacy and we're very pleased.

We've also been very fortunate to benefit from the expert guidance provided by our Summit Steering Committee. They represent a wonderful mix of on the ground experience, research and evaluation expertise, literacy knowledge and real interest in community literacy. They've shared their knowledge very generously with us. And to repay them, we've recruited them as speakers and discussion leaders for today's summit. So as everyone knows, no good deed goes unpunished. I hope you'll have the opportunity to meet and talk with them today. They are, Douglas Marriott, the outreach director of

DTI ASSOCIATES INCORPORATEDThe National Institute for Literacy Community Literacy Summit

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the Literacy Network of Greater Los Angeles, maybe you could raise your hand? Jay Connor, the founder and CEO of the Collaboratory for Community Support, which is headquartered in Ypsilanti, Michigan and John Mitterholtzer [Phonetic], program officer at the Cleveland Foundation.

Unfortunately, the ripple effects of the bad weather in the Northeast on Friday have kept two of our Steering Committee members away. They are Dr. Amy Arberton [Phonetic], who is the vice president for research and the director of the California Office of Public Private Ventures, and Dr. Douglas Perkins [Phonetic], Director for the Center for Community Studies at Vanderbilt University and Dr. Katherine Pavy [Phonetic] who is the President of the Discovery Alliance in Valpreso [Phonetic], Indiana had a schedule conflict, so she isn't able to join us either, but we do want to acknowledge all the help that the entire steering committee has given us over the months that we've been planning this effort.

As you've likely noticed, the Summit pays special attention to two issues, literacy instruction and performance measurement. After much discussion, the Institute staff and the Steering Committee agreed that these were areas that deserved special attention and also that represented areas that dovetailed with much of the Institutes recent work.

So whether instruction takes place in a tutoring, mentoring, after school or adult education setting, it defines the common ground in a community literacy project. Focusing on instruction reminds us that communities come together to act on a common desire to make the joys and benefits of literacy available to everyone in the community. Yet taking steps to improve the quality of instruction in projects as complex as community literacy efforts can be presents challenges. I believe this morning's speakers can suggest ways to think about literacy so that it can become the engine that propels community literacy projects' successes. Attention to performance measurement also goes hand in hand with strengthening instruction and instructional outcomes as well as an improving accountability. This afternoon's speakers will talk about using data for program improvement and for accountability purposes both.

And now, I would like to introduce our first speaker, Mr. Michael Moore. Mr. Moore, is coming up here, has taught at Michigan Technical University since 1999 in Literacy for


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Educators, teaching with technology across the curriculum and writing in social and civic context. He is also the editor of Community Literacy Journal and collaborates with community agencies in curriculum development and grant writing for community arts and literacy initiatives. Thanks for being here.

MR. MICHAEL MOORE: Thanks very much, Lynn. Good morning. First I'd like to say thank you to Lynn and Leah and Tanya for putting this together, e-mailing for weeks and months. And one of the things I've noticed and learned by e-mailing with them is that they take this very seriously. It's very encouraging, too, the work that they do. I'm very happy to be here.

I went last night to a poetry reading at Busboys and Poets, anybody know this place, locally? And here's something I noticed, that's named after Langston Hughes who was a busboy here in Washington and distributed his poetry while he was working and cleaning tables. I watched this group of, identified, they brought a group in of young students identified as at risk. They were going to read poetry together as part of this workshop they'd had the day before. And here's what I watched them do. One of them pulled a laptop out of his backpack. And it took three of them to figure out how to get a wireless connection, in this bookstore, then they figured out, without asking anybody, how to print their poems to the bookstore manager's office and then find that office and get their prints and come back. Then they started, without any prompting, giving feedback to each other on their poems. You should break this here, you should make this line break there. No teachers. And I thought, my gosh, this is what I try to teach college students how to do. And they were doing this and then they gave wonderful, beautiful readings. The point is I was watching a new kind of literacy, I think. I have to ask fourteen year olds how to find wireless connections and do that.

One of the nice things about a gathering like this is that it's ironic, it's hard sometimes for you academics and university folks for logistical reasons, institutional constraint reasons, to actually meet and interact with community workers and members and literacy workers. And so, gatherings like this I think are a real opportunity to meet.


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I edit the Community Literacy Journal with a colleague at the University of Arizona. We started it a year and a half ago because we both used to work in a field known as service learning, where people from the University would go out and do work in the community. And we started to notice over time that people were using community literacy, the phrase, the term, synonymously with service learning, which we believe is not the same. So we did what academics do, we started a journal to help define that.

And so when I began corresponding with Tanya, she explained that the Institute is doing the same thing, trying to define what it means. And I know from a couple conversations this morning out in the hall, that community folks, sometimes workers, define it differently than we have in the journal, which is out in the hallway, by the way. So I hope that today, one of the conversations that we can have, either in here or in the breakout sessions, is how do we define community literacy, from a research perspective, academic perspective, performance, funding, economics, those sorts of things.

Just a note about the journal, we've received about 100 manuscripts over the last two years. And they've been remarkably qualitative in emphasis, for those of you who do research, a lot of them influenced clearly by Paolo Ferreri's [Phonetic] work and Shirley Brice-Heath's [Phonetic] work, Ways with Words. Very little, interesting as I look through the presentations and the PowerPoints today, very little quantitative work. We've reached out to schools of education to help generate manuscripts from that side of the University. And I hope we can do more of that. We especially want writing from community literacy organizations and literacy agencies.

The other thing that I hope we can do today is to talk about, I'd like to talk about how you define community literacy and it effects the work that you do. Some people have constraints because of their funding, their research agendas, what they aspire to do, whether it's a limited or a broad version of that definition. So I'm hoping that we can have that conversation and I hope some of you can consider submitting your work to the journal. Tanya has discussed, we've talked about having some of today's papers and presentations, we'll do a special issue of the journal in 2008, with today's work.


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So I'm very happy and feel very lucky to be here.

MS. REDDY: Thank you.

MR. MOORE: Thank you.

MS. REDDY: Our next speaker should be Sharon Darling, but unfortunately she's hurt her back and also couldn't get on her flight this morning for airline reasons. So, I don't know. Things are complicated. But fortunately, we have Ms. Cindy Reed [Phonetic], who is the senior director of Community and Professional Development Initiatives at the National Center for Family Literacy, which Sharon is president of, here to stand in for Sharon and pay a special tribute to Edith Gower.

MS. REED: Thank you, Lynn. Sharon truly regrets not being here. It was unexpected. She feels she's made the travel gods angry again, and her suitcase is off in another city and so on, so. But she was so looking forward to this tribute and asked if I would read the remarks that she prepared, and I'm delighted to do this. And these are Sharon's words that I'm reading.

It is my honor today be selected by NIFL to represent the literacy community in paying tribute to someone who has contributed so greatly to community literacy and has taught us all so much about what can be accomplished when strong coalitions are formed and flourish.

Edith Gower began her literacy career volunteering in Seattle with a pro literacy affiliate. She then founded the local coalition and became the Seattle Public Library's literacy coordinator. Seeing the power of coalitions and the need to help other coalitions learn from each other, she co-founded the National Alliance of Urban Literacy Coalitions, Literacy USA, in 1995, with sixteen coalitions, which grew to sixty-five coalitions, representing 4,400 literacy service providers serving over 2.7 million learners.

She worked tirelessly to ensure that coalitions had the support they needed to grow. She, through Literacy USA, sponsored conferences, provided guidance and technical assistance on board development and other urgent needs of coalitions throughout the nation. She offered volunteer support in the form of Literacy AmeriCorps [phonetic], which


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she was part of from the very beginning in Seattle, having been started by NIFL.

She represented Literacy USA to the national literacy community serving in numerous capacities, including: secretary of the National Coalition for Literacy for five years, member of the Adult Literacy Research Working Group, advisor to the Department of Education for the CPALS [Phonetic] Project, advisor to the Equip for the Future Center in Knoxville, and she worked closely with NIFL to keep community literacy on their agenda.

Edith has been a librarian, a professional singer, owned a woodworking business making educational toys, and raised two sons. Currently, she is tearing up a beautiful big old house in Pilaseos [Phonetic], Texas, to put it back together again as a waterfront bed and breakfast called The Peaceful Pelican. I think they'll be taking reservations this summer, beginning this summer.

Edith, you have accomplished so much for the literacy community and have caused not only communities to change, but lives to change. It would not be fitting to launch this conference on community literacy without acknowledging your tireless efforts in getting us to this place.

MS. EDITH GOWER: Thank you, Cindy and thank you Sharon and thank you to the National Institute for Literacy and former colleagues. It's an honor to be here today and accept this kind tribute, but I must say a little strange.

I now live over 100 miles from an airport and I've been on a plane only once in the last year. The most glorious patch of Texas Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrushes is all abloom on the airport road. So your kind invitation was just at the right moment. I'm sure you can picture me in my blissful retirement, the sea breezes gently blowing the palm trees and wafting over me as I sit in my white wooden rocking chair on my long, southern, porch. And that's actually my twenty-minute lunch break.

I'm otherwise clad in heavy work boots and jeans and a Literacy t-shirt and flannel shirt and Stanley's finest leather work gloves, a dust mask and safety goggles and a Literacy baseball cap. I'm armed with a crow bar and now I am an expert at knocking down walls. There's a huge satisfaction and instant gratification from that. Try it, if


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you haven't. Don't hesitate to call on me if I can be of assistance to you.

This practice is far more rewarding than beating my head against walls, which I sometimes did when I was among you. I'm excited about this tribute, since it seems like an acknowledgement that it's okay, even good, to be a persistent pest and that it sometimes pays off. I always lobbied on behalf of recognition that collaboration of all stakeholders through literacy coalitions play a critical role in the coordination, funding and capacity building to promote all literacy service provision. And promoted the coordination, similarly, at the National level among government agencies, companies that would support that local cooperation.

The goal is to achieve 100% literacy through 100% community engagement. Everyone has the right to realize his or her fullest potential through ready access to high-quality services and move easily through a seamless system from cradle to grave. The literacy community has the responsibility to take the issue to the community and to bring that community back to the issue. Mayors and governors must be champions. Chambers, whips and business leaders must understand the benefits to them and their future employees in the economy of their communities. Grant-makers must see the value in requiring literacy outcomes on all grants regardless of the social need, from any applicant; literacy funding infusion.

Those providing services must be accountable and tracked on a system that makes apples out of all kinds of fruit. Learners, the primary stakeholders, must be listened to to create programs aligned to their needs. All must have a stake in the outcome by being a part of the input in to community wide literacy planning in their communities and its implementation.

It's wonderful to see you all here today. I hope this is a great day and the beginning of something new. I've been particularly wanting to see a national gathering to discuss practice and policies around access to services. How do we coordinate national, state and local hotlines and databases? What are the best practices for interviewing potential learners, getting them to where they need to be and following up? What data should be collected for service improvement and accountability?


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I thank you for this honor. You know that like at the Oscars, I didn't do anything alone and have particularly to thank the Co-founder of the National Alliance of Urban Literacy Coalition's Margaret Dowdy [phonetic], and the other board members and presidents and staff, who worked with me. And most of all, the members, the mighty family of literacy coalition leaders across the country.

Join me in knocking down the walls that divide us, the funding silos, the power fiefdoms, and build something new together that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Hammer away as if lives and our democracy depended on you; for they do. Thanks.

MS. REDDY: Thanks, Edith. That was really nice. Our next speaker is Dr. Timothy Shanahan, President of the International Reading Association and Professor of Urban Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is Director of the UIC Center for Literacy. He's been director for the Chicago Public Schools and he, truth in advertising here, he was recently appointed by the President to serve on the board for the National Institute for Literacy. He's also served in the Whitehouse Assembly on Reading and in the National Reading Panel and he is also the chair of the National Early Literacy Panel and was chair of the National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Children and Youth. So he's got the chair thing down. He's also a former first grade teacher and we're really happy to have him here today for all of those reasons and more.

DR. SHANAHAN: Thank you. Top of the morning to you, folks. I hope you've survived the St. Patrick's Day celebrations. I've barely done so.

There are lots of different ways of slicing an orange and there are many different ways of conceptualizing our community and dividing it up. Edith suggested that we knock down some of our divisions. And maybe the place to start this morning is by knocking down some of the conceptual divisions that we've allowed to creep in.

I mean, traditionally we've thought about and institutionalized literacy around age levels for the most part; pre-school, elementary, middle school, high school, adult and so on. That's not unreasonable, that's not a bad thing to do, really. So I'm not here to criticize that.


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There's nothing wrong at all with focusing literacy attention on a particular segment of the society and then developing the expertise and then the ability to actually deliver what you need to there as well as possible.

But community literacy, by its definition, is not aimed at a particular age group. It can't be. Community literacy works with schools, it works with health care facilities, works with work places and so on. And that means it has to be supple enough to respond to literacy among folks at lots of different age levels and lots of different circumstances.

The issue I've been asked to address this morning, is what is the same in those instructional efforts. What is it that has to work whether we're talking about three-year olds or whether we're talking about sixty-three year olds. And again, you know, the notion is let's knock down some of those conceptual barriers to picking this apart.

So let's start with a real simple, maybe a simplistic theory about what it takes to raise literacy. And certainly anyone who's done this for any length of time, I think come to the conclusion that it's the learner's experience that matters in this more than anything. It doesn't matter how we've organized or what we've built or what the funding stream is, that ultimately, the student with some teacher is really the whole thing that matters. Experience includes the amount of instruction, what is actually taught, how well that's taught, what the instruction is, how the student responds to the instruction, those kinds of things.

And anything else, every other variable, all the other things that you're going to be talking about today that sort of fall out of that, are important, but they're only important to the extent that they either enable or interfere with those kinds of variables. And so there might be especially good ways for community literacy programs to organize themselves and manage themselves, and it only matters to the extent that that puts the instruction in place in sufficient amounts and so on. And so the whole focus here during these next few minutes is going to be on the learner's experience and what has to happen in that instructional situation.

And in fact, I'll focus specifically on five keys to literacy success across the lifespan: amount of teaching, the content, the quality of teaching, student motivation and alignment and


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support. And my argument is that these five things matter at every level of literacy, it doesn't matter what your responsibility for literacy instruction is. These are the five things we've got to keep our eyes on.

So let's just start out with the first one. Anyone who's ever worked with me on literacy knows I always start with this first one. If I were to come out and visit your program and take a look to see if I thought you were doing a good job, this would be the first thing I would look at. And the reason is because as I read the research and look at the information that we have on what works, amount of instruction seems to be about as important as anything. It's probably the most important. It's the biggest determinant. You know, if you do meta-analysis of all the different kinds of variables and the educational research studies, you keep coming back to more teaching is better than less teaching.

Now that might not seem very exciting, but you know, it's extremely important. And literacy programs succeed or fail on this one. And again, it doesn't matter the age level or the circumstances. And frankly, allotting time is important, but using the time is even more important. You know adult literacy programs struggle, struggle, struggle to put enough instruction in place for their clients to be able to move forward. That is, that's the fight all the time. And the research, on adults, a lot of it focuses on how long can we keep people in place? How many hours of instruction can we provide? How many tutors can we keep in place? It isn't even necessarily just the students themselves, it's the people who are delivering the instructions.

In schools, you know, well, we don't have this situation with adult literacy that we have in the schools, where you have all this funding, you have all these teachers and the kids are there all day. But in fact, one of the biggest issues in primary and secondary education is how much of that time do you actually use to deliver the teaching?

And we lose, you know, huge amounts of it. I mean, if you look at the observational studies that have been done around the country over maybe the last twenty-five years or so, what you see is that in schools, we lose approximately it appears about one in five days of instruction. So you know, we buy 180, but we deliver about twenty-percent less than that. Because there are times when kids are just sitting and there


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are times when people are doing test prep instead of teaching them to read and they're; gee, you know we can't teach today, it's the day before a holiday. And you know, all kinds of stuff happens. And we lose the instructional time.

I was director of reading in the Chicago public schools. The studies in our districts say we lose one out of four days. No wonder, you know, we lose a lot more than the average school, which you know, points out why our kids struggle. We also have one of the shortest school days in the country. This is an issue no matter what level we're talking about.

And frankly, I think you can talk about this time thing as both a barrier and an enabler. I mean, one of the big reasons for example that community programs really go at family literacy and parent programs and parent involvement, is how do we essentially, how do we buy more time for the kids beyond the school day, beyond what the teachers can provide? I think you could say the same thing about preschool. I mean historically, we haven't provided preschools. You know, we do now, a few things like Head Start and so on and a certain amount of private preschools and daycares and all the different things. But a lot of kids still aren't getting that. But you're interested in raising literacy, one of the ways of doing that is expanding literacy services into spaces where it didn't exist before.

And so, children normally didn't get literacy help when they were two and three and four and five, well what if we start to build services in there, that can have a huge impact on kid's learning. Same kind of thing can be said about even just expanding the existing school day. Full day kindergarten is still a real issue.

This is one that I often use as an example because it's so easy for folks to understand. You know you have some kids that come in for two and a half hours a day and you have some kids who are there for five hours a day. And you know, the issue is does it make any difference? And in fact, it tends to.

But it tends to make a difference in some fairly; I was actually just in a place on Saturday where they were going, half-day versus full day, we still have, you know, a lot of school districts that don't have half-day kindergarten yet. And so it becomes just as obvious. Gee, let's take the


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places that have kindergarten versus the ones that don't and let's see what difference it makes. And what you see is that it makes a real difference.

In fact, maybe I should tell a story about this one. A year or so ago I got to go out to Oregon and I had, I was talking to legislators. And I was making this point about amount of instruction, but I only had about ten or fifteen minutes to talk to them, so I only could use one single example, and the example I chose was half-day full day kindergarten, because I thought even a legislator could understand this one, you know, it's so simple. Sadly, it was the same kind of set up we have today; you know, a single computer doing PowerPoint, a series of speakers. And what I didn't know was that the person before me was the person who was doing the evaluation of the state study on full day kindergarten.

So, you know, sometimes it's better not to; you know, you want to get up there and take the computer away, and no, no, I'll bring it back, I really will. And change your example, because I could use any example. You know, we could use after school programs. You know, it doesn't matter. There are so many ways of expanding instruction of using instruction well.

Well the person who was sharing this, they had essentially funded a large number of programs in the state to actually expand their kindergartens to full day, and about half of them they left at half-day, so it really gave them a wonderful opportunity to study it's impact. And they went and they tested kids on like thirteen different language and literacy measures, so they had a lot of data on these children. What they found was that at the end of kindergarten year, the kids in full day kindergarten out performed the kids in half-day kindergarten on every single measure of language and literacy. And I see people nodding. Yeah, that's not surprising, is it? Not surprising at all.

They followed those kids to the end of first grade. And they found no differences at all, you couldn't tell the kids apart. All that wonderful extra instruction the kids were doing made a huge difference, but the schools weren't set up to take any advantage of it. And so the kids had higher literacy, and the first grade teachers were happier. But the kids didn't necessarily do any better in the long run. I mean, think of it this way. You know, if in your full day


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kindergarten, you manage to learn all your letter names, which meant now you went off to first grade knowing all your letter names, you were in pretty good shape; except the first grade teachers are used to spending the first month and half or two months of school teaching letter names, they kept doing it. You know, you don't just stop because the kids know. You know, don't be silly.

And I think that shows you both sides of that issue. I mean, I think what it illustrates is the incredible importance and value of time, that every time that you guys manage to set up a community literacy program that in any way expands the amount of instruction available to people, you are making a big difference. The potential there is incredible. But depending on you know, who is going to use this literacy and how it's going to be built on by other instructional programs, you've got to find ways of coordinating. We've got to find ways of knocking down some of those institutional walls, so that it can be taken advantage of.

Those first grade teachers could have taken huge advantage of what those kids brought to first grade and could have actually sent them on to second grade advantaged. I worry about every single program that we put in place for exactly the same reason. You know, you guys put in a terrific after school program for kids so that they get a better chance to move forward, don't necessarily expect the schools to treat it like that exists. You know, and you can do that with every level of program and age level.

You know, I mentioned how much time we lose in the school day and that we need to use the school day better. That was certainly a big theme of my work in Chicago and I think it was probably the biggest factor in raising achievement for our kids. I would argue that there are things like response to instruction models which are becoming a bigger thing in the school day, where instead of moving kids into Special Education, just saying, well, this kid's really low, but he has average intelligence, let's move him off to Special Education and see if they can do anything with him. Essentially the schools are trying to figure out whether kids need things like special education. And the way they're doing it is they're seeing if kids respond to instruction, respond to intervention.


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So you have kids who the school day isn't enough and you say what else can we do for them? What if we give them additional instruction in the classroom or outside of the classroom? Will it make any difference? And of course, if it makes a big difference, then the child doesn't need this special help, and of course, if they continue to struggle and these things don't work, then maybe there is something really wrong.

Of course, after school and summer programs are a huge issue in the school. If you look historically at things like Title 1 which, you know, provides funds to K-6, K-12, education for poverty kids, what you see is that historically those programs haven't made much difference in terms of reading achievement. I mean, sadly, lots of money but not lots of pay off. But there are exceptions, you know, there are always exceptions. And the most interesting exception to me in that whole pot of studies, and one of the most consistent findings is that, you know, yes, if you take Jimmy and you send him down the hall to work with a different teacher it doesn't seem to make much difference. But if you take Jimmy and you keep him a couple extra hours at the end of the day or you take Jimmy and you keep him several extra weeks during the summer, it seems to work really well. And it doesn't even seem to matter how good some of those programs are. Because you look at them on paper and you go, that couldn't possibly work. And the extra instruction seems to pay off anyway.

What about post-high school programs? What about programs at the community colleges and out in the you know, the work places and the family literacy programs and so on? I would argue every one of those is either an opportunity to replace missed instruction from, you know, people's childhood, or to just essentially add hours or years of instruction and that that makes a huge difference in people's lives. The time matters. That is one of the things that unifies us and it's one of the things in your planning, in your decision making, you always have to make this a kind of a bottom line question. If we do it this way, how much teaching will our students actually receive?

Let's jump to another point here, because obviously time is not the only thing any more than time is only issue in why iron rusts. Of course time is necessary, but in that case you have to have liquid. I mean if you don't have water, you


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don't get oxidation and the iron won't rust. Well time, if you just put kids in schools, if you just put adults in literacy programs and you didn't really make sure of what the quality of instruction was or what was being done in that, you wouldn't succeed either.

The second biggest determinant of what needs to happen in a literacy program is what we teach, the content, the curriculum. You know, it's interesting in community literacy, when you work with lots of community groups, neighborhood groups and so on, we set up a number of these programs and help communities set up their programs in our community. You know, they always sort of want you to come in and do the literacy thing. They don't necessarily know what it means. They know it's a good idea, but they don't really quite know what it means. And a lot of times, the piece they don't quite get; oh yeah, we'll get some tutors, terrific, and you know we'll set up, we'll have desks and it will really be great. They kind of forget the real important part which is the content. What is it that we're going to teach here?

Literacy curricula is a little different than other curricula. It's a little bit more complicated. There have been a lot of reports. Lynn mentioned some of these reports, the National Reading Panel report and the National Early Literacy Panel report. Federal efforts to try to guide elementary and secondary and preschool programs to deliver the right kinds of instruction. Well I think one way of talking about hose reports is not that they tell us how to teach, but they tell us what to teach, that that's really been their real focus. And in fact, that content is hugely important.

Certainly one of the things that is certainly a very reasonable thing to teach to beginning readers, to folks who are trying to work out the code is decoding, which includes things like teaching the alphabet and teaching concepts of print, you know, what to do with the spaces between words and what direction do you read in and those kinds of things, phonological awareness, hearing the sounds of language. Phonics, knowing how the sounds and the letters match up, knowing how the patterns of spelling dictate the pronunciations. And learning high frequency words, learning words that you can learn them partly from phonics but a certain amount of just brute memorization is needed. You


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need lots of experience with these words; words like the, and of and is and you know, they don't necessarily exactly follow common English spelling patterns, but doggone it they're such common words. They come up so frequently you just have to know them and you have to learn them.

Frankly you don't get to choose whether you want to teach these things. I mean, if you're working with older readers who are reading say better than beginning levels, you can get away with skipping these because the students already know them, but generally, what you find is that you have to teach these things and certainly one of the problems that some of our schools have been having is that a lot of teachers, a lot of programs sort of want to do this by philosophy; we get to teach the parts of reading that we want to teach.

The problem with that for the learner is that they need help in figuring these things out and so if somebody doesn't show them how, they're at a great disadvantage. Of course, decoding isn't the only thing you have to learn.

It's important to learn to be a fluent reader. That is you need to be able to learn to read the text accurately, which is kind of a decoding issue. But you have to do it with sufficient speed. I mean if I slow my presentation down, oh my goodness is this annoying. The fact that, you know, they're always saying she's having trouble understanding, if I slow down she's going to get it. You can slow down too much. You can slow down so that the beginnings and the endings don't fit together, your memory isn't good enough to hold that together. It's hard to concentrate. Studies of adults listening, if I talk at much less than 100 words a minute, you have trouble following me and understanding, your mind wanders.

A lot of our children, a lot of our adults don't read very differently than the way I was just talking to you a moment or two ago. And so it isn't just oh, he gets the right words. You've got to get the right words fast enough so that it can hold together as language. And with proper expression. All we mean by that is that in fact you group the words properly, that you, you know, you phrase them, that you use the punctuation, that your voice rises and falls in the appropriate ways. Various studies are starting to show us that the prosodic shape, the sounds shape that you put on text is really one of the things that gets sent to the brain,


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you know, maybe the first thing that gets sent to the brain to be interpreted. And that if you mess up that prosodic shape, if you don't read it right, if you put the breaks in the wrong places and group the words together incorrectly, comprehension goes, whoosh. So fluency matters. And we can teach this.

Vocabulary, increasing it. As I sit on these various panels, the importance of vocabulary just comes rushing at me, whether we're talking second language learners, whether we're talking pre-school kids, whether you're talking kids who are raised in poverty, whether you're talking adults who are struggling readers, every group that I look at the data on, I come back going wow, vocabulary instruction is even more important than I used to think it was.

All I mean by vocabulary is word meanings, knowing the meaningful parts of words; prefixes and suffixes and roots, those kinds of things. And we're talking both oral and written language. So this isn't something where you go, oh, I'd really like to work on vocabulary in the preschool program that we're setting up in our community, but you know, the kids can't read yet. Start building the vocabulary now, folks. You know, building that language is critically important.

It isn't, surprisingly, it isn't that important in beginning reading. Vocabulary isn't that important. It has a very modest role to play in beginning reading success, and in fact, I think that's fooled some of us. I think it fooled me. That since it doesn't play much of a role, let's not pay too much attention to it. The problem is that it has an increasing role to play as kids move through the lifespan. So it always has some importance. This is one that changes in importance as kids get older. Decoding changes as you become a better reader, decoding issues become less important; you've got them mastered. Vocabulary goes the other way, it becomes increasingly important in instruction, but it matters at every level.

Reading comprehension matters too. We can teach people to understand. If they're not readers yet, certainly listening comprehension. But what kinds of things go into comprehension instruction? How text is organized, how does an author structure something? In my talk today I've structured it around five points. The person who can think


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around those five points and think about that structure is advantaged over the one who goes, oh, he's just telling us a bunch of stuff about literacy. It's like a list.

What to remember, some kinds of information are more important than other kinds of information. A good reader learns to cue in on those things that matter. You see it, I mean, in college students. You give them a book to read with one of those yellow highlighters. And they read along and then whoops, all of a sudden they're marking a sentence and you can tell the difference between the good readers and the poor readers in terms of what they mark. You know, they have an awareness of what's likely to matter.

And of course, there are a whole variety of strategies of thinking, ways of approaching a text. You know there are a whole bunch of studies, a number of them done with middle school kids and a number of them done with high school kids, some of these studies with adults; teaching people to ask questions of the text, and then to try to answer their own questions. It has a very powerful impact on what you understand, because it makes you active, it makes you really pay attention to the text and so on. And there are a bunch of those kids of strategies. We can teach people to think effectively about texts.

And then of course, literacy is not just an issue of reading, it's also an issue of writing. To participate in a democratic society and to do certain kinds of work, to do certain kinds of academic work, it's as every bit important to be able to write as to be able to read.

Well let me jump forward again, quality of instruction. And I've defined quality of instruction in a kind of a different way. Variations in the student's educational experience that determine learning beyond amount of allotted time and content taught. It's the variations in the educational experience. And let me give you some examples. Certainly student engagement, you know, how much are students actually involved. This almost comes down to a time issue again. If we were talking about an elementary school, discipline issues are probably a pretty big deal, are the kids even paying attention? You know, are the kids allowing the teacher to teach? Is the teacher managing things in a way that are allowing the time to be used.


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A simple example, you've all probably had the experience as a child of doing oral reading in school. But the way we tended to do that is you'd say, David, would you please read the first paragraph or the first sentence or the first page or whatever. And David would read it and you would all sit and wait for him to get done, and then he would say, okay, Patricia, now it's your turn. I'd like you to read the next paragraph. And the reading kind of proceeds like that, round robin reading.

Studies of round robin reading are very interesting. They say that actually the oral reading you're doing is not that bad, that the oral reading practice you're getting actually has a positive impact on learning. Unfortunately the oral reading that everybody else is doing doesn't have any impact on your learning. And so if you sit there for a half an hour listening to everybody else reading aloud; it's charming as all get out but it doesn't do anything for you. You know, the thirty seconds you got or the minute you got was the pay off, but what that means is that the teacher just threw away twenty-nine minutes of your learning time.

These days a lot more schools are using paired reading. And you see this in adult literacy programs too, it isn't just children and it's not even just young kids. I mean it goes, we did it through high school. But essentially you've got people paired up and one reading to the other one, and all of a sudden that half an hour of reading for a minute and listening for twenty-nine minutes becomes, gee, I read for fifteen minutes. And that means you get a lot more learning in exactly the same amount of instruction.

So you know, how much the students are involved, how much the students are engaged matters. Similarly we can talk about the content as a quality of instruction issue, how appropriate is the content to the learner? One of the findings of the National Reading Panel is that young readers and beginning readers might need some instruction in something called phonemic awareness. All we're talking about is being able to hear the individual language sounds within words. So cat has three phonemes. C. A. T. Can youngsters hear that? And in fact, a large percentage of little kids can't. So when you try to teach them decoding, it's awfully hard to learn it.


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Well, what that's lead to is an awful lot of phonemic awareness instruction in the kindergartens. That's a good idea. But, what teachers do when youngsters are struggling with phonemic awareness is that they tend to just give them more of that, let's just keep doing that. And the kids are struggling and the teachers are struggling, and everyone's going yeah, but the National Reading Panel said it was a good idea. The National Early Literacy Panel's finding in fact you can kind of treat this as a continuum and that phonemic awareness is really just part of a larger concept, phonological awareness, and that in fact one of the smart things that you can do if kids are struggling with phonemic awareness is drop back and teach some of the earlier skills like can you hear the sounds, can you hear the separation between syllables? Can you hear the separations between words? You know, the larger chunks.

Because in fact, it's awfully hard to learn the individual sounds if you can't do some of those grosser activities. All those kinds of adjustments that we make to content based on kids' levels, what they've already accomplished, are an important part of quality of instruction.

Of course there's also the level of demand that we put on kids with our instruction. And again, let me just take one example here, vocabulary. If you look at vocabulary instruction that works, and again, I'm not talking a specific level, because the research is pretty consistent on this no matter who is studied, there are a lot of efforts to teach vocabulary that are pretty much the kinds of things that you probably did as children yourselves. Which are things like, can you memorize the dictionary definition of a particular word? It's fairly low-level, it's just, you know, sort of matching up the two things. But really good vocabulary instruction, effective vocabulary instruction, effective enough to raise reading comprehension tends to be much more about the encyclopedia version of the vocabulary term than it is about the dictionary version. The definitions are much more like explanations than they are like definitions. You know, the reader, the learner has to really dig in and come to understand the meaning of the word and its connection with other words and things like that, not just the, you know, a synonym or something like that.

I'm just going to jump this thing forward because I'm running out of time fast. Let me get to number four here, student


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motivation. Student motivation is an issue across the board. It changes like some of these other things do. And it effects what goes on in learning. This is more obvious at some levels than others. You know, being a former first grade teacher, you know, you learn pretty quickly that with a group of six year olds if you smile and are a little bit enthusiastic, they'll follow you anywhere.

You know, you teach adult literacy, which I've done, and you smile and you're enthusiastic and you might lose all of them. It's just a little bit more complicated. But it's not that it doesn't still matter. It's just that it matters differently. It plays out differently. It's easier to be effective with students who are trying to learn than with those who are resistant. And it doesn't matter if they're resistant because they you know, they want to create disturbance within the classroom or whether they're; or the reason they're resisting is because they're embarrassed or afraid. It really comes out the same to you as the teacher, and it comes out to them the same in terms of their learning.

Our job of course is to encourage and support and try to keep everybody pushing towards the accomplishment of higher literacy. The research on motivation is a litter different than the research on instruction. We know an awful lot about motivation, we just don't know quite how to do it. The, we have a lot of ideas about what it is that people find encouraging or motivational and we don't have well worked out routines that oh, if you do this it just raises achievement and it's lovely. These are a little bit more art than they are science in terms of how you make them work.

But some of the things that have found to be motivational are the four Cs, curiosity, competence, challenge, collaboration. And again, I would argue that these are as true for a four year old as they are for an adult.

Curiosity, engaging people's interest. Human beings at any age level, are interested in their world. Now admittedly, people are interested in different things. So for example, if you're talking men versus women, men tend to be much more driven by those things that are going to make an economic difference in their lives or what's going to make a difference in their work lives. Women, are driven by many other things. You know? It's not bad, it's just different. People are curious about their worlds and literacy


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instruction that recognizes that and takes advantage of that probably does a bit better than literacy instruction that doesn't do that.

Of course, everybody also has a desire to be competent, to be successful, to be able to do things well. And literacy instruction that makes it clear to people what it is that they're trying to learn and that they are succeeding is extremely important. I know we did a study once on what was it that kept tutors working in adult literacy programs, and it was whether they felt like they were being successful; whether they felt like the people they were teaching were actually learning. And it didn't matter what it was. If you felt like you had taught the person a single word, and that was a good thing, they were willing to stay and come back and tutor. If you'd taught people the whole encyclopedia but it was, oh, it was just the encyclopedia and it's all they learned, you know. You're done. You know? It's this feeling of effectiveness matters, and that matters to our learners as well.

But people want to be successful at things they find challenging, that they think need to be accomplished. You know, if we're talking about twelve-year olds, they want to succeed, but they don't want to succeed at baby stuff. They want to succeed at grown up stuff. They're striving to take the next step, and our programs need to recognized that. That's why, one of the reasons why I think community literacy programs tend to be as successful as they are. They often are focused on real things in people's lives that they're really trying to accomplish. That matters, that's a big, driving force, I would argue.

And our final C is social connections, collaboration. People want to work together; people are interested in other people. That matters. Things like, you know, cooperative learning programs actually work and do a good job of teaching things like literacy and probably because the opportunity it gives for people to work together.

And let me hit the last one. And the last one is cheating in some ways, but this is actually kind of the way that I've got this conceptualized. Alignment and support is really everything else. Every other variable that you can think of you go, oh, does that matter? Is this an important one? In fact, every one of those other things that you can think of


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works to the extent that it has an impact on the first four variables. And so if you say, well, I think funding is the big issue. Okay, well funding is great. What does it do to amount of instruction? Well it's the difference between us being able to offer that program or not. Oh, that's important. Gee, you know, the funding dictates whether we have a curriculum or we don't have a curriculum and so on and so forth.

The fact is all these other variables can have positive or negative impacts, but they don't have direct impacts. They have impacts through the quality of instruction, the quantity of instruction, the content of instruction or to the extent that the students are motivated. Things like teacher quality, things like assessments, things like instructional materials and supervision and homework and you know, on and on and on. You can go through a very long list of things, but they all matter to the extent that they either inhibit or extend those other variables.

Literacy success in community literacy programs, in all literacy programs, depends on how much teaching we provide to our students, what we teach our students, whether we're teaching the right stuff, the right content; how well we're delivering that, how efficiently and effectively that teaching takes place, whether the students are working towards us or not makes a bit difference in it; and everything else, all the alignment and support matters to the extent that it drives those four things forward.

Ladies and gentlemen, than you for being here today, but thank you for being here every day. Your work is extremely important. Thank you.

MS. REDDY: I think we have time for about two questions? Yeah, and I guess there are microphones out here or you could just stand up. You've cowed them into submission. Well we're coming up on a break in about an hour, so if you think of a question between now and the break, I'm sure Tim will be available to answer your questions in a little while too. So, let's can I ask you; we'll move on to our panel then

We have two speakers next, Dr. Barbara Forman and Dr. Daphne Greenberg. Dr. Foreman is the Francis Epps [Phonetic] professor of education and associate director of the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University.


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During 2005 she served as the commissioner of education research at the Institute of Education Sciences. She has over 100 publications to her credit and serves on many editorial boards and national advisory on--

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DR. BARBARA FOORMAN: Greetings everybody. I'm talking about the community literacy for children. And my co-author Stephanie Al Otaiba should be here because essentially she contributed most of the content for the slides. She has done research using community volunteers, and I'll talk about her research a little bit.

My own research tends to be with certified teachers in school settings, so this is a bit of a stretch for what I tend to do, but I find it enormously important, so I said yes to this topic because a lot of the research I've done is before school and after school, it's just been with certified teachers.

So the critical issue here is that the No Child Left Behind emphasizes the work on prevention and early intervention and the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, also has that emphasis, and makes available fifteen percent of funds up front for prevention. So many things are coalescing her to focus on helping children learn to read and preventing failure, essentially. And as Tim Shanahan said, the more we can do that before, during, after school, year round, the better chances we have of being successful.

Obvious fact is that schools lack resources to hire the kind of specialists that we need during the school day. No Child Left Behind, Early Reading First, provide coaches, and that can be a tremendous boost for a school to help coordinate assessment and help take the result of assessment and inform instruction.

But we need more bodies. We need more adults to help reduce the student teacher ratio so that children can read to adults, get corrective feedback; that's essentially the nuts and bolts of beginning reading, to be able to hear an expert from your literacy community, to be able to read to an expert


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and have some feedback. If this can happen in the home, that's wonderful. If it doesn't happen in the home, those children are behind and we need to provide that experience of adult feedback to them.

So there has been, to make up for the lack of resources in the schools, there has been increasing interest in tutoring models that utilize volunteers, community members, senior citizens, college students are usually the people that are brought to this issue.

So this presentation focuses primarily on the effectiveness of these community volunteer efforts. And overall, the mean effect size, and an effect size is a measure of magnitude of statistical significance, and roughly .20; the effect size can, it can be negative, which is not a good thing, obviously, it means you're hurting achievement, or you're hurting your outcomes. But typically, we look at it as hopefully having some positive effect and does it go from a zero effect to something that's quite substantial.

So Cohen has given us as rough metric to use in interpreting effect sizes. .2 would be considered a weak effect, .4 a moderate effect, .6 a strong effect and anything over .6 is really something to jump up and celebrate. So the overall mean effect size for tutoring in several large meta-analyses is .40, a moderate effect.

The average effect size for volunteers, however, was .26. But, in studies that describe the tutor's training, the effect size was .59. And I'll talk more about the importance of training.

When you break these effect sizes down to particular outcome measures, word identification, for example; which is the ability to read words correctly. The effect sizes range from .42 to 1.24. And by the way, all these references are at the back of my presentation. The effect on word attack which is the ability to read non-words, which for many people is a real sign of decoding excellent, the rages of effect size is .32 to 1.24. On fluency, which is words correct per minute, the range is .48 to .53. On comprehension, you have a wide range of effects from .10 to; well, I put a mid-point there, .32 to .90 in Stephanie Al Otaiba's recent study.

Now comprehension is multi-faceted. It can be measured many ways and probably should be measured many ways. So part of


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the variability here may be just because of the way it's being measured. You can measure listening comprehension by reading a story to children and asking them to tell you what happened in a story. In reading comprehension you have multiple choice tests like on your standardized tests. You have, you can ask questions to the students ad they answer the questions back orally or you may ask them to write a summary. Half of the national assessment of educational progress items for reading comprehension are written responses. You can have a Cloze measure, where you have a student complete a sentence, they read a written sentence and they complete it at the end. That's called Cloze, C-L-O-Z-E. Many different ways then to measure comprehension which then often results in a lot of variability in the outcomes for comprehension.

Now it's hard to talk across these studies because they have different samples. They differ in age, they differ in socio-economic status, they differ in the ethnicity compositions. They differ in the tutors that are used, the amount of their training, how much supervision they have. They differ in the intensity of the tutoring, the number of minutes per week, the number of weeks of the tutoring. And then they differ in the measures used and the components of reading assessed. So these variations complicate the interpretations of effect sizes.

Now my own research in classrooms observing how teachers use their time and how they, the quality of their teaching, has shown me that a good program is only as good as its implementation. Whenever I hear program X is wonderful my next question is have you implemented it and when you implement it, what do you find? Under what conditions does it work for whom? How well? How long? All of these raise issues about the fidelity, how well a program is implemented with a particular population in a particular setting.

Vadasay et al. reported higher effects for high fidelity community tutors, for tutors who were implementing their program with higher fidelity, effect size of .85, compared to lower fidelity tutors, .06, essentially no effect if her program wasn't delivered well.

Barbara Wazik has a summary of volunteer tutoring programs in Reading Research Quarterly, 1998, and she makes the following


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points about the successful programs, what components they shared.

First of all, they tended to use certified reading specialists to supervise the tutors. Ongoing training and feedback for tutors, it's not enough just to have you know a one hour training at the beginning of the year and then forget about the tutors. You need to keep dropping in and retraining and observing as needing. We call it Drift, your tutors may drift away from good fidelity to the program unless you visit them on occasion and have refresher groups. Structured tutoring sessions that incorporate basic literacy elements. Particularly if people have no background in reading to give a, have a structured tutoring session is important and they will in fact learn about how to teach reading from the structure, and making sure that the basic literacy elements are included, if you're working with beginning readers. Consistent intensive tutoring for struggling readers is very important. And that also relates to the second bullet from the bottom, which is attendance. If the students are attending and you are consistent and intensive in your tutoring, you have a much better chance of being successful. Access to high quality materials, high quality reading materials, and high quality instructional materials. And then monitoring student progress to make sure that what you're doing has an impact, to make sure that the students are learning what you're teaching them. And then coordinating the tutoring with classroom instruction if at all possible, to know what's going on in the classroom, to even think about the tutoring programs that you use as being in alignment with what's going on with the classroom materials.

I'm going to give a few examples of tutoring programs that have been deemed successful. The Howard Street Tutoring Program started in 1979. It has two forty-five minute one on one tutoring for poor readers in grades two and three by non-paid volunteers. On the job training by paid reading specialist, first day the supervisor teacher teaches and the tutor watches and then there's a debriefing about that. And then day two then the tutor teacher and the supervisor watches and there's debriefing.

The tutor comments daily on the progress in guided reading at the student's instructional level. That's eighteen minutes of the tutoring. Word study; so guided reading, it's student


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doing most of the reading hopefully, with the tutor giving scaffolding when the tutee struggles with a word. Word study for ten minutes, and those are usually words that consist of the patterns that the student is struggling to master, easy reading, something that's right at the student's instructional level where they can be highly successful, and then reading to the child. Reading to the child from good literature that's above the student's reading level is critically important if you're going to build vocabulary. And you can even target some of the vocabulary after reading, or during reading. That becomes sort of another discussion, to make sure that you build vocabulary to be prepared for what Tim mentioned; which is you can get kids decoding beautifully, but surprise, surprise, they may not be able to comprehend, because they don't have the word level meanings in their own vocabulary to understand what they are calling out.

Then assessment, pre/posttest assessment of word recognition and spelling on graded word list and oral reading on a graded passage.

Another program, Book Buddies, by Marcia Invernizzi and her colleagues at University of Virginia. This was started in 1993. One on one tutoring four days per week by trained supported and supervised volunteer tutors for a minimum of twenty weeks.

The effects sizes of 1.24 for word recognition, relative to Title 1 historical controls, so she was comparing Book Buddies to a Title 1 program, and she followed up the effects over time, which is wonderful. Very few people actually bother to do that. But in grade three, these tutored children were still quite successful in their reading.

Book Buddies has a box, a tutoring box that consists of a lesson plan, a familiar book to be re-read for fluency, word bank cards in a folder, a composition book for writing and recording word sorts, a new book to be read that day and record-keeping lists. So everything is ready, right there for the tutor to use.

Tim pointed out that sheer amount of time does matter. Stephanie Al Otaiba in her study of exceptionality studied the effectiveness of a program called TAILS, Tutor Assisted Intensive Learning Strategies. Which is a kindergarten


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version of the PALs, Peer Assisted Learning, that was developed at Vanderbilt by Doug and Lynn Fuchs.

So this tutoring version of it was delivered by community volunteers who were paid five dollars an hour, during the school day with at-risk kindergarteners; and they found that the effect sizes were larger for four days of tutoring versus two days. That's not really surprising, but it's important to actually show this. The Effect sizes were .79 for word identification, .90 for passage comprehension, .83 for basic reading skills. So those are very strong effects for four days of one on one tutoring.

But there's another study that catches everybody by surprise and we need to mention it. The study by Scott Backer, Russ Gerstin [Phonetic] and colleagues, on a program called SMART, which stands for Start Making a Reader Today. And these adult volunteers tutored first and second graders in thirty minute one on one sessions two times per week during the school year. The students to be tutored were selected by the teachers to participate in SMART. The tutors were trained in one hour sessions or on the job. Each school had a half-time SMART coordinator who recruits volunteers, finds tutoring space in school, sets time and locates books. And they got effect sizes of .44 on word identification, fluency, .48 to .53, word comprehension, .43, but passage comprehension was .32. Which is again, a little less strong. This is often the finding, you'll find stronger effects on the word level reading than the comprehension.

This program was across the state of Oregon when this study was done in 2000. The SMART handbook says that reading improves with necessary background knowledge for the story. And if the student doesn't have the necessary background knowledge, doing something to help bring that to the student; opportunities to hear different types of books; opportunities to hear letter-sound relations for unknown words; making predictions about the story to be read; and then deriving meaning from the illustrations.

The handbook also suggests four reading strategies the volunteer can use. The volunteer can read to the child, the volunteer and the child can read together, the volunteer can read a section of the text and then the child rereads that section; and then the volunteer asks the child questions during reading.


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The keys to success in all of these programs to recap are that the fidelity to program that includes, that this program needs to include an alphabetic mastery and reading for meaning components, and fidelity to that program is critical, that if you have a good program, make sure that the tutor is actually following it. You need a knowledgeable reading expert to coordinate and supervise the program. You have to consider the intensity of tutoring. More is better. The selection, training and support for tutors is critically 8important.

So I gave you my website and you have the reference list for the references I cited and I encourage you to follow up on them to get more details about their studies. Thank you.

DR. DAPHNE GREENBERG: It's an honor and a pleasure to be talking to you today. And I know that there's, or at least I think that there's a wide range of knowledge at least in terms of adult literacy in this room. So I'm hoping that my talk covers a bit for everybody in the room. Let's see.

I'd like to start off with a definition of literacy. Some of you may not realize, but there's actually a federal definition of literacy. And it's up there and in your handouts. 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 potential. And I really like this definition for a whole bunch of reasons. First of all, it shows us that literacy is not just reading, but according to this definition, it includes reading, writing, speaking, computing, solving problems.

I also like the second and third parts of this definition. Notice how it says levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job and in society. So for example, if I were to go to a literacy program, I would not need to know how to read a physics journal. But because my area of expertise is in educational psychology, I would need to know how to read journals in educational psychology. I think that that's something very important and it's going to be something that I'm going to repeat over and over again through the talk about the importance of looking at the goals and needs of our students.


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And then lastly, getting to goals. It's very important that this definition talks about achieving one's goals, developing one's knowledge and potential. What the teacher, what the administrator, what the community may think of as a goal for the student may not be what the student needs and wants to know. I think we really need to listen to our learners if they're going to come back to our programs, if they're going to want to be motivated as Tim talked about the importance of motivation. It's very important that we take into account what are their goals, what do they want to develop, what kind of potential do they want to achieve?

So who are adult literacy students? For those of you who are not very familiar with the field, I want to stress and get rid of any myth that you may have about who these students are. Adult literacy learners belong to all races, religions, ethnicities, genders, live in all neighborhoods. Basically, depending on where you are in the country, what that community at large looks like, that is who you're going to find in your adult literacy program. The adult literacy learners may be employed, they may be recent high school drop outs, they may be non-English speakers, etcetera, etcetera. You have the list in front of you.

A lot of people are surprised that they may even include high school graduates. Well, in studies that I've done and other people have done, we've found that almost twenty-five percent of people in our studies who read below the fifth grade level are high school graduates. Obviously there's something wrong with our system. But I do want to stress that we do have high school graduates in our programs.

The reason why I think this list is important is because it speaks to the heterogeneity of our population. And once again, we need to remember that one size does not fit all. We have to ask our learners what they want to know, what they need to know. There are different types of instruction to match the different needs. There's English as a Second Language, there's basic skills for those students who are below the fifth grade level who are really struggling with reading, functional skills, pre-GED, GED, and then the most upper end is developmental reading and remedial instruction. These are students who either have a GED or have a high school diploma and they want to go to college but they need certain transitional remediary services in order to function at the college level.


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There are different approaches to match the different needs. Family literacy focuses on the parent and child together. Workplace literacy focuses specifically on those skills that are needed for a specific job. Community oriented literacy often focuses on voting, on citizenship on driver's education, then there's one to one tutoring models, there's small group instruction.

Programs are located in all kinds of places, community colleges, community based organizations, worksites, libraries, housing projects, etcetera, etcetera. So getting back to that whole goal idea, what are the goals of our students? They vary quite a bit. Some come in wanting very, very, very functional needs. They want to learn how to balance a checkbook, they want to learn how to read a bus schedule, they're not necessarily interested in learning how to write an essay. They want to learn this specific skill and when they get it they want to leave.

Others come because they want religious kind of help, they want to learn how to read the Bible for example. In fact, that is the number one reason that's often given in the South for coming to an adult literacy program, they want help reading the Bible. Especially with the elderly community, they might come in because you know, they've retired from work, they're older, and they want to be able to do some pleasurable literacy skills, whether it's reading a newspaper, doing crossword puzzles, things like that.

Family literacy is often a big push. Many parents come in wanting to learn how to read to their children. Often, as their children get older, that's a motivator for them to come back to Adult literacy programs, because they want to be able to help their children with homework.

And then finally, of course a big motivator is job or economic advancement. Some jobs require a GED. Sometimes their employer tells them in order to get promoted they need to get their GED. Others want help in learning how to fill out a job application, etcetera, etcetera. Actually one important thing that I think in the last five to ten years that we've seen which is new, is that technology now is pushing a lot of people to come to adult literacy programs. For example, when ATM machines became popular, you know when the gas stations, when those things changed to become more computerized. I tutored a person who was pretty high level


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in his business, but he had a secretary that he could dictate to. And all off a sudden the secretary was taken away in terms of that function and he was required to do his own word processing. That's what motivated him to come to an adult literacy program.

According to the US census twenty-three percent of adults do not have a high school diploma or equivalent. But let me remind you that close to twenty-five percent of high school graduates cannot read above a fifth grade level. So if you combine that with that statistic, quite a significant number of our people in our country need adult literacy services. Women and men seem to be about equally distributed in their need for adult literacy. And you can see that you have about a third at the higher end and a third at the lower end in terms of ages.

I know that this is a community literacy summit, but unfortunately we're not yet at the point where we have figured out a good way of collecting data on all the community literacy programs. So I decided to pull some data from what we know about federally funded programs. Knowing full well that there are many community literacy programs that at this point in time don't receive federal funding. But at least this gives us a pictures, a little bit of a piece of the pie.

So 2.7 million adult learners are served. On average they participate under a hundred hours during the course of a year. And of those learners, about a third gained one or more educational levels during the year. And I wanted to spend a moment or two on two slides that talk about this change or improvement. Because there's a myth out there or a certain idea or feeling out there with people who are not involved with adult literacy students, who don't work with them, who don't teach them. That they think, oh, they're adults, they can't learn. If they didn't learn this stuff when they were children, then you know, it's hopeless, let's just forget about them. And that's not true. In fact, researchers have yet to find that there is a critical period by which if you don't learn these skills you can't. And in fact in a study that I'm conducting right now, I'm giving a whole slew of tests and it's with 100 hours of instruction and lo and behold, the students are making a lot of progress. And this is based on students that are reading between the third and fifth grade level. And I'm not going to bore you


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with the details about all the different tests, but I'll just tell you what they're testing.

They're testing oral expressive vocabulary, reading fluency, word ID, reading comprehension, phonological awareness, receptive vocabulary, word attack and so forth. In every area they are making improvement.

So why should we care? Well once again this is based on federally funded programs. And according to their survey about seventy-five percent of adults who attend adult literacy programs are unable to meet, quote, a minimum standard for success in today's labor markets. Therefore they are more at risk for lower-paying jobs and are less likely to be offered promotions and job training opportunities.

Just a quick run down of some of the findings of some of the studies that I and my colleagues have been making, to just give you an idea of the needs of adults who have difficulties reading. They do seem to have a deficiency in phonological based tasks. They have difficulty hearing the sounds, they have difficulty dividing up sounds and words and so forth. Their performance on oral language skills are not similar to the way adult expert readers would perform in oral language skills. They're more similar to their counterparts in children who are reading at the same grade level.

Long ago, maybe about ten or twenty years ago, there was a thought in the adult literacy community that even though the adults were having difficulty reading their oral language skills, because they are adults, are just like adults who are expert readers. Well, we have found that that's not the case. And it does make sense, because children, after they learn how to read, their largest vocabulary growth is from the books they read. So if our adults are having difficulty reading, then obviously their vocabulary is going to suffer as well.

They also have poor integration of componential skills. So for example, if they have weaknesses in fluency or weaknesses in reading comprehension or weaknesses in word attack, it's not just that they have weaknesses in those areas, they have weaknesses in integrating all the different skills together. Expert readers, whether they're children or adults, not only are strong in those areas, but the areas work together so


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that they're reading a paragraph fluently, they're understanding it, they're sounding out the words. They're reading words by sight. If you don't do that fluently, if you don't do that together, if your skills are not integrated, it's very difficult to become an expert reader.

They also seem to have difficulties in world knowledge and reasoning tasks, which makes sense. If they're not able to read the text, if they've missed huge chunks of school from K to twelve, whether it's due to illness, family moving, etcetera, etcetera, it makes sense that they would have difficulties in those areas.

And I do want to note a relative strength that they have, which is in sight word tasks. Adults who have difficulty readers have become phenomenal sight word readers, because a lot of the ways that they learned how to read was by memorizing. And it's just incredible, if you work with any of these adult readers to see how they can call out words, even though they might not be able to sound those kinds of words out.

I just want to spend a few minutes on assessment, because in order to measure progress we need to be able to assess our students. Even though this might go against accountability and so forth, I think it's very important that we focus on assessing students if they're interested. And I know that that possibly is something that's unrealistic, but I really think that it's important to assess students only when they're interested in being assessed. A lot of our students have a lot of anxiety about being tested. They have a lot of negative memories about it and so if it is at all possible, what I would like to see ideally is that there's a contract, there's an agreement between teacher, tutor, administrator; whoever's doing the testing, and the student about why it's important to be tested and what is the learner going to gain out of the testing.

And that gets to the second point. I think that we need to share the results with learners in language that they can understand. It's not a matter of telling them their grade point average or their grade equivalency. That doesn't mean anything anyway. We don't know from an empirical point of view if an adult who's reading at the fourth grade level is really like a child at a fourth grade level. And grade equivalency levels are based on the whole child developmental


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model. We don't know if that's true for adults, but we use that language because that's the language that we're used to.

I think what's more helpful for adults to know is not that they're reading at such and such level, but if you give them an appropriate assessment that you are able to tell them you have strengths in this area, weaknesses in this area, what do you want to work on? What should we work on together?

Which gets to the third bullet, that we need to work with learners as a result of the assessment that takes into account their test results and their goals. So it's not just a matter, in my opinion, of giving an assessment, because some accountability needs to be done for an agency, but there's a real reason for the learner why this assessment is taking place and that it's continuous so that they can reassess, are they meeting their goals? Are the goals realistic? Do we need to change the goals?

So in my mind, good assessment takes into account their goals. Because if we don't address their goals, they're going to leave and we all have had experience with that. And it also tests various skills. Unfortunately a lot of our tests that we give to adults are silent reading comprehension tests. And yet the research shows us over and over again that for example, on a silent reading comprehension test, you can have two people getting the same score and yet they vary greatly in terms of their fluency, decoding and vocabulary for example. And therefore they're going to need different types of instruction.

So for example in a current study that I’m doing, these are adults that are reading between the third and the fifth grade level. I'm finding so far, four different kinds of groups. They're all reading at the third to fifth grade level, but for instance, look at cluster number four. The upward areas indicate strengths. The downward areas indicate relative weaknesses and the blank spots mean that they're more or less like their peers.

So group number four for example is very different from group number two, and yet they're all reading words between a third and fifth grade level, but they're different in terms of their comprehension, their sounding out ability, their phonological awareness, their fluency, etcetera.


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So some of the key points that I think that we need to keep in mind when it comes to adult learners is that first of all learning takes time. We seem to appreciate that with children, but for some reason, with adults we kind of throw that out the window, I don't know why. But it really does take time to learn to read and no matter how much we want to rush it, we can't. So we need to be realistic about our goals, both from an accountability point of view and from a learner point of view. We also have to recognize a very important fact, that these are adults. They're going to attend, they're going to stop, they're going to come back, they're going to go to a different location.

Think about yourself. If right now you decided to enroll in a program that met two to four hours a week, for how long would you really be able to keep that up? And how consistently would you be able to attend? And what kinds of all kinds of life situations would get in your way in order to make that commitment? Well that's true for our adults. And so we need to develop strategies that are realistic for adult lifestyles that, and so that they can take away what, you know, strategies, self study and so forth that they can work on their own until they can come back another time.

We need to take into account adult issues. Childcare; for adults who have children, that's a major issue. Transportation; how are they supposed to get to this program? Do they have a car? Does the car break down a lot? Is there good public transportation? Counseling issues. A lot of our adults have issues that need resolution through counseling before they can strongly benefit from a program.

This is how I see a community coming in and helping adult literacy programs, how I see very good collaborative possibilities. With adult literacy programs providing the literacy instruction, the community support providing help with childcare, transportation and counseling.

There are all kinds of program related issues in adult literacy. Very few full-time staff, mainly part-time, volunteer; very few that are trained, many classes have multi-levels, which is problematic for both student and teacher.

So if I were asked what does the field need? I would say we need well trained teachers. We need ongoing classroom


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observations and feedback provided to our teachers. We need ongoing assessment that takes into account learner's goals and various skills. We need direct explicit instruction as needed, I want to underline that and bold that, as needed, in the areas of word reading, spelling, comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, etcetera. Not every learner is going to need explicit instruction in every single area. But for those who show extreme weaknesses in any of those areas, research does show that the best way and the most effective way and the most efficient way to teach in those areas is through explicit instruction.

Instruction needs to be sequential, so that one skill builds upon the other and community support is vital. If we don't have the community behind us, with childcare, transportation, counseling, workplace support, etcetera, etcetera, these programs are not going to succeed.

I have kind of a few finally slides, because as I was writing each slide, I thought of another point I wanted to make. But, there's a quote that I think is really; we need to follow in our field, and maybe we're beginning to do so, but we have a long way to go. And that is, the provision of clear documentation of practices that are research based and opportunities for teachers to access this information is vital. We really need the back and forth between researchers and teachers.

And I love to quite Whitehurst who says, that instruction should be based on the integration of professional wisdom with the best available empirical evidence. We have great teachers out there, we need to be listening to them. And when I say we, I mean researchers. Researchers need to be listening to teachers and there needs to be a very big partnership between teachers and researchers and give and take.

We need to listen to the voices in our field. First and foremost we need to listen to our learners. If we don't do what learners want, if we don't give them what they need, then we're not going to have programs. They are the single most important voice. We need to listen to the teachers who have the professional wisdom to tell us what works, what is realistic. Program site administrators have a whole different way of looking at things. They have funding issues to think about, space issues to think about, scheduling


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issues, etcetera, etcetera. And community needs; that's really important for community based literacy programs, to listen. What does the community need? What does the community want? You know, we hear that there's a new Wal-Mart being built in town. Maybe that's a great idea for a collaboration between some new industry that's coming to down and adult literacy programs.

So how can all this occur? Well first of all, we need time. And time seems to be a theme both in Tim's and Barbara's talk and in mine. We need to understand that learning takes time. We need support services, as I've mentioned. We need community involvement. All this requires money. Adult literacy, for too long, has had to perform miracles without money. We can't. We need money.

And why should we care? Well there's tons and tone of research that keeps showing that low literacy has major impact on health costs in our country. Low literacy has major impact on workplace accidents, workplace mistakes. Intergenerationally, we know study after study which looks at the educational levels of parents and educational levels of children and how children progress in school, we know that if we don't address the parent's educational needs, it's going to be very hard, no matter how hard we try with that child, to bring that child up so that that child is no longer at risk. We need to be working on both aspects, the parent and the child.

And then finally, but definitely not least, is just the whole democratic notion of which our country is formed on. It should be a right of every adult to be able to seek appropriate education in our country. And if we really, really care about democracy and the value of democracy in our country, then we need to recognize that in order to have a healthy democracy, we need to have an educated populous. We need to have a population that can listen and understand all those big words that the politicians throw out there. We need to have a population that can read all the different arguments and reason it out and see the flaws. We need a population that is literate in order to have a healthy democracy, to have a health voting behavioral; types of behaviors.

So, in closing, I really want to applaud NIFL for convening us all together and I think that it's a major recognition,


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one that's long overdue of the importance of community literacy coalitions in terms of providing quality literacy services to the community. And my hope and desire is that we won't all leave today and think, oh, that was nice. But instead, that this will be the first step of many long steps and I guess my hope is that after we leave here today NIFL will be inspired to form a committee that will actually focus on community literacy needs and will say, okay, as a result of today, these are some of the next action steps that we want to address through this committee. Thank you.

MS. REDDY: I'm guessing that no one's yet in the questioning mood? Oh. Oh. Great.

MALE VOICE: For Daphne. When you said, when you started talking about the findings in the adult education programs and learners survey, you said we don't yet have a way to collect data. And I was wondering, besides the obvious problem or reason, because they're not federally funded, we don't know who they are all the time. But have you thought about or speculated ways that we, or people in the room or the Institute might play a more active role in doing that? Because that seems crucial for a lot of people's jobs to know that.

DR. GREENBERG: I agree. In fact, there's, I know that NIFL has a literacy directory and maybe that's a first step in terms of collecting. But I'm wondering, there are a whole bunch of experts in the room, does anyone have an idea of how we can start to try to collect the data from, specifically from community literacy programs? How can we figure out who is out there and be able to collect the kind of data that we need? Yes?

FEMALE VOICE: I also have a question. Thank you very much for your presentation. I was thinking forums like this, and other forums and tapping into the kind of agencies that offer literacy, but definitely forums like this, keep a database, keep it connected, and just having some way for community based programs to tap into that database and get information.

DR. GREENBERG: That's a great idea. So what you're suggesting for example, in the future when there are other community literacy summits, to somehow set up a database in advance that each organization that comes into can plug into and


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enter their data and that might be a way to start collecting some data.

FEMALE VOICE: I hadn't thought that far, but that's an excellent idea.

DR. GREENBERG: Okay, the two of us together.

FEMALE VOICE: And my question is, I run an adult literacy program here in the District and all those components are a part of what we do. But I was wondering if there is any data that you know of, any research that talks about your, the presenter before you talked about the amount of instruction. An example, not a case but an example of one, I had an adult learner who just scored four grades higher pretest and posttest in a matter of a few months. So he's doing a classroom based one on one tutoring. He's coming to our orientation classes you know [Unintelligible]. Is there any research that supports these kind of multiple instructions?

DR. GREENBERG: Right, in terms of how much time is necessary in order to make the kind of progress—

FEMALE VOICE: [Interposing] Not the time, but the varying parts of—

FEMALE VOICE 2: [Interposing] The diversity of activity.

DR. GREENBERG: Right. Like comparing tutoring versus small group, etcetera, etcetera, all those different component. There aren't actually any studies that have looked at it quite at that way. I know of a few studies including mine that are looking at amount of hours of instruction, how many hours do you actually need to start to make a difference and in fact, a colleague of mine is doing a similar study to mine. I'm doing small group based instruction and he's following a similar approach with tutoring. And we plan to compare those two. But you know, you touch upon something very important, which is there's so little research at this time that can help guide us. And we kind of have to do the impossible. We have to move forward with our teaching while we're trying to gather the research. David?

DAVID: I think there are some interesting ways to look at the problem of collecting data in the community. And I think it makes a difference when we're talking about funded programs or non-funded programs. I think we're not going to collect data on the non-funded programs. However, within funded


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programs, we already do collect a lot of data on publicly funded programs. What we don't systematically do as far as I'm aware anywhere, is collect data on funded programs within the private sector. And in the District of Columbia, there has been some discussion in the past year about systematically collecting data from funded programs by bringing together the corporations and foundations that provide [Unintelligible] and connecting that to the publicly funded program data collection system.

DR. GREENBERG: Great. And maybe that's something that we can encourage through summits such as these where you have foundations and community literacy organizations working together. And I'm wondering if coalitions might be interested in working together with all the different foundations to collect the data? Yes?

FEMALE VOICE 3: Hi Daphne. I'm [Unintelligible] from Literacy Worldwide. There are several national organizations represented here today that do in fact collect data about outcomes from community based, library based and other programs. And in fact, there's a project right now funded by Verizon to bring our various [Unintelligible] together to collect that data—

DR. GREENBERG: [Interposing] Excellent.

FEMALE VOICE 3: And record that. So the American Library Association Dale Lipshulz [Phonetic] is right here, Pro Literacy Worldwide represents many community based adult literacy programs. [Unintelligible] Literacy USA has data. We all have data, so it's just a question of, I think there hasn't been a single repository like The Institute that takes all that data from these various national organizations and puts it together or does something else [Unintelligible].

DR. GREENBERG: So maybe what you're proposing and all of you are proposing is an excellent next step, or an action step that we would like to see that comes out of this summit, is some kind of way to collect all of this data that is apparently is already being collected and we just need to collate it and put it out there. Thank you. Yes?

FEMALE VOICE 4: Hello Daphne. A lot of the data is still being collected in silos. And when you look at the goals of the community literacy coalition, you'll see that for the first time you've got all sorts programs that are cross-funded,


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bringing that data together. So I think a suggestion would be that we look at some of the [Unintelligible] that are beginning now to collect data [Unintelligible] so that as we go to the national level we can really see, what are all those components. Because you can't really talk about the funded and the non-funded system. There is no non-funded system. It's other funded.

DR. GREENBERG: Good point. Without funding you can't have anything, right. But what I hear you saying is if we do take this action step seriously, we don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel, that there are coalitions that are beginning to do this kind of work and we can learn from them what works and doesn't work and so forth.

MS. REDDY: And Daphne, I think that you can tell them that some of our afternoon speakers represent communities where those efforts are [Unintelligible].

DR. GREENBERG: Apparently I was just informed that some of our afternoon speakers are going to address this particular issue. Yes?

MR. CARL GUERRIERE: I think the federal government should give a lot of money to NIFL and end the war in Iraq and spend that money—

[Applause]

MR. GUERRIERE: And then when you fund everybody, you require that they use all the standards and all the good practices that we're going to talk about today, and then we're going to be able to report all the data.

[Laughter]

DR. GREENBERG: Great idea.

MS. REDDY: And on that note, perhaps we'll take a; oh no. Sorry.

FEMALE VOICE 4: I just want to make a quick point about the data collection and your point about how it takes time for adult learners to show progress. And I would encourage that [Unintelligible] measurements that would take that into account because some of the federal funded requirement are that you show these results very quickly, which are not always [Unintelligible].


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DR. GREENBERG: Yes. I realize that a lot of what I said may or may not be realistic depending on what your particular requirements are. And I guess I would urge people who are from federal institutions to take into account that we may not be seeing grade level equivalency gains that we are supposed to be seeing according to these guidelines and instead, with our adult students, we may need to be a little bit more innovative and creative in terms of how we measure progress, and it may be more in terms of life-time or quality of life measures, such as feeling comfortable in going to PTA meetings for the first time, understanding what the doctor is saying for the first time, things like that that may have more concrete and more measurable gains quicker than actually doing, jumping that whole grade level. I think there was one more question or two more? It's up to you how you want to run it.

MS. REDDY: Take these two.

FEMALE VOICE 5: I was [Unintelligible] nationals [Unintelligible] down the data and [Unintelligible] local areas to maybe local intermediaries for education or workforce [Unintelligible] the question, I see [Unintelligible] struggling with it, like in Philadelphia, especially with older youth, disconnected youth, those eighteen to twenty-four year olds that are dancing in between youth and adult systems and different literacy programs, and they're sort of struggling with, wow, you can't pull down data on any of these kids. You don't even know how many young people [Unintelligible] in our state. So I think there's a need for multiple areas and I think there are [Unintelligible] and youth workforce areas [Unintelligible] helpful in bringing that message home.

DR. GREENBERG: Definitely and not only those organizations that you mentioned, but homeless organizations, there are a lot of homeless kids, runaways, kids in foster systems that also need to be tapped that are in between that age group. And I believe one more question?

JOYCE: I actually don't have a question. I'm Joyce [Unintelligible] and I'm with a newly organized coalition and one of those thing that I first noticed when I got there was the need for data. So what we're doing right now and we'll know in May for sure about funding, but I have actually written a grant to one of our foundations in our city to fund a data management system for all of the providers in the city


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so that we are hoping that we will be able to purchase it for them, and for those that are small we wouldn't put it at their site. I'm going to have a site license myself so that they would actually send the data to me. And if we can, because we had a few providers that were getting state dollars that had a program in place, but everybody didn't, so of course, have data from everyone. We're going at it that way, by actually purchasing; we're looking at literacy [Unintelligible] so we can purchase it while the providers are [Unintelligible].

DR. GREENBERG: Excellent.

MS. REDDY: Okay, thanks everyone. Why don't we go ahead and take a break and reconvene at 10:30?

[Crosstalk]

[ENDOF 87998 CD 2]

[START OF 87998 CD 3]

MS. REDDY: You're all set technology wise?

FEMALE VOICE: Yes.

MS. REDDY: We're going to resume our program now with a presentation by Susan L. Taylor, who is the editorial director of Essence magazine and the driving force behind one of the most celebrated African American own businesses of the past three decades. A fourth generation entrepreneur, Ms. Taylor was the founder of her own company, Nequai Cosmetics, before becoming Essence's fashion and beauty editor and in 1981, it's editor-in-chief. She's the author of three books, In the Spirit: The Inspirational Writings of Susan L. Taylor, Lessons in Living, and Confirmation: The Spiritual Wisdom That Has Shaped Our Lives, which was co-authored with her husband, Khepra Burns. In 1999, Ms. Taylor became the first African America woman to receive the Henry Johnson Fisher award from the Magazine Publishers of America, the magazine industry's highest honor. In 2002 she was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame and she has received numerous, numerous awards. It's a very long list that takes up the whole rest of the page.

MS. SUSAN TAYLOR: I asked her to read none of that.


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MS. REDDY: I couldn't resist though, so. Without further ado, Ms. Taylor.

MS. TAYLOR: Thank you, Lynn. Thank you very much. This has been such and incredible learning for me and I'm so happy that Sandra Baxter asked me to join and to be here today.

And I'll just tell you that as editorial director of Essence , I've been thrown out of my easy chair. I've been at Essence for thirty, oh my god, thirty-seven years. This will be my thirty-seventh year there. And the community is not well. I'm here today to talk about an initiative that I've launched and it's called Essence Cares.

But I'm glad that I'm here with people who I know can make a difference in communities throughout the country, because the children are not well. Fifty-eight percent of Black fourth graders in this nation are functionally illiterate. Suicide is the number one killer of white boys. They are taking their own lives, second in the nation only to Native Americans and we don't have to think long and hard about why Native Americans would be killing themselves.

When we think about what's happening on college campuses, I don't know how many of you just saw this incredible study, and it's what I see because I travel to college campuses all the time; that the rate of alcohol addiction and drug addiction is sky-rocketing on our college campuses. We're looking at Black boys running roughshod through the streets killing one another. White boys killing themselves. And we have to ask ourselves why would our white sons, who are the inheritors of all the goods and gifts that America has to offer, why would they be taking their lives?

Our young white girls cutting themselves, starving themselves to death. Black girls dying of AIDS, the number one killer of young Black women is AIDS. And so the children aren't well and that has thrown me into my community in more deep a way and deeper than I ever thought that I'd be involved again.

I live in community, I stay in community, but I'm an editor. And I don't know much about launching a movement, but it's what I'm doing or have done. We have a big event at Essence , and it's called The Essence Music Festival. And it brings about 250,000 African Americans to New Orleans over the Fourth of July weekend. Last year we were forced to go to


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Houston because of course you know we were flooded out of New Orleans. After thirty-seven, then it might have been thirty-five or thirty-six years on the job, I said I think I need a sabbatical. And so my husband and I took a trip to Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania, East Africa. And I was thinking about the upcoming music festival. It was right after Katrina had just washed away lives in New Orleans. And I said what could I do at these daytime empowerment seminars. We have three nights of concerts on five stages at the Superdome. And during the day we have what are called empowerment seminars and when our publisher came to me thirteen years ago to talk about the idea that a man by the name of George Ween [Phonetic], who was the founder of the outdoor concert model, having founded the Jazz festival, what's the name of the famous one?

MALE VOICE: Newport.

MS. TAYLOR: Newport. That's right, the Newport Jazz festival. He; I said yes, let's go to New Orleans, but we can't go and party the night away and not offer something to people in the second poorest state in the nation, something that is free and open to the public. And that's when I created these wonderful forums that I had gotten an idea about from another group that was doing them in Upstate New York. And they're called empowerment sessions and we bring all of the phenomenal speakers and ministers and teachers and it's a good old time.

And our Black folk are there, especially women, they're about for the daytime seminars, between 8,000 and 9,000 people, all free and open to the public. And it's motivating, inspiring, phenomenal.

But as I was laying there, you know, in my bed in East Africa, and I was saying that my community is doing worse and worse at a time when some of us are doing better and better. What might I do with the 250,000 people coming to New Orleans that would make a difference in the life of the community so we're not just coming and having a good time. And we always did call it a party with a purpose.

And I got an idea that I would create a program that would ask every able, stable African American Black person in this nation to put his or her hand on a young, vulnerable person's shoulder. I was saying don't send me the folks who are off


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to Howard and Harvard. I'm talking about our incarcerated young people, who are coming out of prisons and who no one wants to touch. Young men and women with felonies who can't get jobs and who are thrown right back into, you know, an underworld that means that they're back in prison again. What about those who are dropping out of school.

There's a foundation, there may be somebody here who's from the Schott [Phonetic] foundation, I had received a report from Dr. Rosa Smith [Phonetic] who was the chief operating officer there, the president. And I was stunned to read, and I'm just coming from Cincinnati, that Cincinnati had the lowest rate of high school graduation among Black boys. It was eighteen percent. I was in Cincinnati to speak at a health conference and the woman who picked me up from the hotel, which was contiguous to the convention center I was speaking in. As we were walking there, she said to me, I'm so sad today because I've just lost my son three weeks ago. He was murdered right here in Detroit.

I was horrified. What are you doing here? She said, I just can't breathe. I needed to volunteer. And so I came and offered my help. As I walked in to the convention center, the former mayor, Dwight Tillary [phonetic], said to me I just got a stunning, stunning phone call. A man, an activist in the community was just shot on the steps of City Hall. Coming from a city council meeting. I said, oh my God. Three days later I learned that he died, read it in the New York Times.

On my way out of the convention center, a group of women got up and walked with me. And one of them, not knowing what the first woman had said to me very sadly said, you know, I just lost my son last week. He was murdered. I was like, my God. I come back to Cincinnati to speak at the University of Cincinnati. A young man who picks me up from the airport, he's a Ph.D. student, and I said to this young African American male, what the hell is going on here, all of these murders? And he said, my own mentee, sixteen years old, had a drug trafficking business between Memphis and here in Cincinnati and I didn't even know he was doing that. He was just murdered.

And the story goes on. The driver, who took me back to my hotel that night said, oh, there was chaos the night before. The person who picked me up in the morning said, didn't you


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hear? Three days later, after I got home, T.I, who is a phenomenally very popular rapper, his best friend was murdered in Cincinnati. And so, you know, it just fueled my commitment to say that I'm stepping out of my comfort zone and I've put out just this incredible call to Black America. And wherever people are gathered, I show up. I'm traveling all the time.

Sandra Baxter came with me to a program that I'm involved with, and it's, the name of it is Friends of Island Academy. The young people coming out of jail, they're coming out of Riker's Island for the most part, right off the coast of Manhattan, off the shore there. And it was incredible. I came and I spoke and I brought a police officer and a social worker and she spoke. And people trusted her so much that a young man actually, and it took a lot of bravery, these children are from, these young people are from between sixteen and twenty-two. One of the young men just explained how difficult it is for him to comprehend anything. He said I read it, I see it, but I don't understand it. The kind of bravery that that took to say, to state in front of thirty-five, you know, young men, a few women but primarily men, was enormous.

And Sandra Baxter spent a good deal of time with him trying to help him understand that there is help available for him, and now is involved you know, with that organization, NIFL is, and helping the woman who's the director, Beth Navan [phonetic] to really give those students what they need.

And so, the call to action, what I did last year is I just reached out to the people who I've worked with over the years. I reached out to Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte and you'll see them on a video that I’m going to play, Mariah Carey and Sean Combs, some of the Hip Hop community, Oprah Winfrey, Terrence Howard, and just said help. You know, we're going to create a video. The challenge is really getting people to care. Everybody cares, but everybody is busy. Every body's stressed out. And I'm saying, our children, young people who are in incarceration and I've been going into prisons for a long time; but why? Because I grew up right there on 116 th Street and Park Avenue, in the heart of the area that heroine first made a real strong presence in.


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It came out of those jazz clubs in the 1950's and into the veins of the arms of my friends. And I watched some of my friends being sent back south as families fell apart. And those of us where were lucky enough to get out, we left. My father and mother picked up, moved the children to Queens. But you know? I want to say ten years after we got there, all those problems that were right there in Harlem were out there in Queens. The families who could afford to move, they moved further out on Long Island. You know? And you know what's at the end of Long Island, it's the Atlantic Ocean. There's nowhere to go. There's nowhere to run. We have to drop our buckets and fix this.

And so what we don't see on the nightly news and what we don't read about is that for every problem, there's a solution. And the challenge is, I just asked myself, are you willing? You know, this is a; I'm at the end of my career, not at the beginning. There's a time when I'm like thinking about, oh, the beach and the Caribbean and how I could be laying out and I'm just, I'm exhausted; after helping to build this phenomenal product. You know, but we can't stop.

I'm putting a smile on my face and I won't stop until we fix this. And I'm here today to ask for your help. Let me just play for you a video that explains in part what it is we're doing. It's narrowed to just mentoring. But, and Bruce Gordon, whose name you're going to hear called, you know, he was the president of the NAACP, and he just resigned two weeks ago. And so let me play the video and then I'll explain what it is we're doing and just ask for your help. Thank you.

MALE VOICE: Okay, these are the facts. One third—

FEMALE VOICE: [Interposing] Of all Black children are living in poverty.

MALE VOICE: Living in poverty.

MALE VOICE: These are the facts. These are the facts.

FEMALE VOICE: 6.6% of all African American births—

MALE VOICE: [Interposing] Are to mothers under the age of eighteen.

FEMALE VOICE: The infant mortality rate for black babies is more than twice that of the national average and rising.


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FEMALE VOICE: These are the facts.

MALE VOICE: The vast majority of schools in New Orleans are still closed.

FEMALE VOICE: Still closed.

MALE VOICE: Every day in America, more than 1,000 Black children are arrested.

FEMALE VOICE: One in every eight black men aged twenty-five to twenty-nine—

FEMALE VOICE: [Interposing] Twenty-five to twenty nine.

MALE VOICE: Is incarcerated. The young black women aged twenty-five to thirty four—

FEMALE VOICE: [Interposing] HIV AIDS is the leading cause of death.

FEMALE VOICE: The leading cause of death.

MALE VOICE: And the leading cause of death for our boys, for our young Black men, is homicide.

FEMALE VOICE: But these are also the facts. From the hundreds of rebellions that took place on slave ships to the nineteen trips Harriet Tubman made on the Underground Railroad, or the fearless voice of Ida B. Wells to the immoveable warrior named Rosa Parks, from the students who sat in in Greensboro to the students who walked out in Soweto, we have always fought back, always cared for our own, always resisted injustice. We are the people who refuse to die.

At Essence we believe that we all not only have a mission for the mandate to save the lives of our children, heeding the desperate cry for help from our young people, we've launched Essence Cares, a call to action to secure our youth. All we're asking of you is this: demonstrate your love for our young people by committing to donate to our trusted national organizations or community leaders. Mentor our vulnerable young people, volunteer and support them.

MALE VOICE: Join the NAACP.

MALE VOICE: Their work advanced our race.

FEMALE VOICE: They've given us victories like Brown vs. the Board of Education.


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MALE VOICE: And they're the vanguard—

MALE VOICE: [Interposing] that shapes policy—

FEMALE VOICE: [Interposing] And changes our children's lives.

MALE VOICE: Bruce Gordon, the visionary president, needs all of our support to win.

MALE VOICE: The organizations of Ride with Fire and Voter Registration Drive—

FEMALE VOICE: [Interposing] Is one place where you can make a difference.

MALE VOICE: The Urban League has fought for Black people for over 100 years, working against segregation.

FEMALE VOICE: Partnering with Martin Luther King, Jr. and A. Phillip Randolph.

MALE VOICE: Today under the leadership of former New Orleans Mayor, Mark Morreal—

MALE VOICE: [Interposing] They have developed a job preparedness program for young people.

MALE VOICE: The organization needs your participation.

MALE VOICE: To continue to fight, for us. And across the country so much more is being done to raise the standard of living—

MALE VOICE: [Interposing] For Black children.

MALE VOICE: For our Black children.

MALE VOICE: The Legal Defense Fund needs your support.

MALE VOICE: To assure affirmative action stays in place for young people.

FEMALE VOICE: Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund will succeed in reopening schools along the gulf coast.

MALE VOICE: And lift our children out of poverty.

MALE VOICE: But only if you stand with her.

MALE VOICE: If you stand with her.

MALE VOICE: Mad Dads are one of the bravest men in the nation.


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MALE VOICE: They are in prisons and take to the streets in the most crime ridden communities.

MALE VOICE: Embracing our struggling young men, and—

FEMALE VOICE: [Interposing] Inspiring them to lead their lives in a positive and productive manner.

FEMALE VOICE: The United Negro College Fund has always worked to ensure—

MALE VOICE: [Interposing] The survival of our institutions of higher learning. And make sure—

MALE VOICE: [Interposing] That our college-bound young people have—

MALE VOICE: [Interposing] The resources that they need.

MALE VOICE: Big Brothers, Big Sisters—

FEMALE VOICE: [Interposing] Of America.

FEMALE VOICE: Is shepherding the mentoring efforts of 100 black men—

MALE VOICE: [Interposing] Who's initiative was spearheaded by Thomas Lawrence, Jr. [Phonetic].

FEMALE VOICE: And Operation Hope.

FEMALE VOICE: In an effort to end the cycle of poverty that cripples too many of our children's lives provides free financial literacy programs—

FEMALE VOICE: [Interposing] Throughout schools and communities.

FEMALE VOICE: Linking arms and names, each one of us can make a difference in the lives of our young people. There are so many ways in which you can help.

MALE VOICE: You too—

FEMALE VOICE: [Interposing] You too—

FEMALE VOICE: [Interposing] You can mentor one of the 2.4 million children.

MALE VOICE: 2.4.

FEMALE VOICE: 2.4 million.


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MALE VOICE: Almost two and a half million children.

FEMALE VOICE: Who has a parent [Unintelligible].

MALE VOICE: You can get five—

FEMALE VOICE: [Interposing] Five.

MALE VOICE: Five friends.

FEMALE VOICE: Five friends to register.

MALE VOICE: To register and vote.

MALE VOICE: You can demand your church.

FEMALE VOICE: You can demand your church.

MALE VOICE: You can demand your church be open for children after school and on Saturdays.

MALE VOICE: In order to teach our kids an accurate account of their history, just as the—

FEMALE VOICE: [Interposing] The leadership of the national Baptists organizations has committed to do.

MALE VOICE: More than 15 million convicts—

MALE VOICE: [Interposing] [Unintelligible] or giving their whole hearts to this critical effort.

FEMALE VOICE: They understand that our churches can create the communities—

MALE VOICE: [Interposing] That our children are longing for.

FEMALE VOICE: We can make a difference. We can change our world. We can, we will save our children.

MALE VOICE: So I'm in.

FEMALE VOICE: I'm in.

MALE VOICE: I'm in.

MS. ANGELA BURT MURRAY: I'm Angela Burt Murray, Editor in chief of Essence Magazine. Absolutely. I'm in.

MALE VOICE: I'm in.



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MS. MABEL IVORY: I'm Mabel Ivory, director of community development and partnerships for Essence Magazine. And without a doubt, I'm in.

MALE VOICE: I'm in.


MS. MICHELLE BANKS: I'm Michelle E. Banks, president of Essence , and proudly, I'm in.

MALE VOICE: I'm in.



MALE VOICE: Are you?

FEMALE VOICE: Won't you join in too? We've live through harder and harsher times than these. Like then, the most revolutionary thing we can do right now is to love one another. This is what God is calling us to do, to secure the most vulnerable among us, our children, our children, our beloved children.

MS. TAYLOR: And so, I'm just coming back from Cincinnati. Oh my gosh. I just joined the Board of the Underground, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. Just, I said, I'm not joining another thing, I'm just focusing on Essence Cares. But John Pepper [Phonetic] is a friend of mine. He's the former Chairman and CEO of Proctor and Gamble, and he's now the CEO of the Freedom Center. And I'm so glad that I said yes and I'm so glad that I went, for a big community event.

Because the Freedom Center really is a monument that is, it's the most incredible edifice you've ever laid your eyes on. So technologically advanced and just beautifully designed and it probably cost, I don't know, 100 million dollars to build. But it's a repository of our joint history, the history of African Americans and Caucasians, White Americans, working together, with Native Americans, to help Black people flee across that Ohio river to freedom.

And this is what we're really asking today. We have got to link arms and names. We've got to stand shoulder to shoulder. We've got to work together across all those


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things, race, class, color, ethnicity, that divide us, or we won't survive. The children aren't well.

And so what I'm asking is that we do what those brave White folks did, that could have cost them their lives, their homes, their children, their livelihood. They put that candle in the window so that slaves, who they didn't even know, I’m saying if caring individuals could be so committed to justice, to freedom, to democracy, to put a candle in the window and to give safe harbor to people they did not even know who looked nothing like them, how can we allow the young people; I'm talking about African Americans at this moment, who's ancestors gave hundreds of years of free labor to this nation?

America is the wealthiest nation in the world, because of the work that; slavery didn't begin in 1619, it began in 1502, when it crossed the Atlantic Ocean and into Brazil and up the coast and into the Colonies. And so Black folks are really under heel still. You know, when you think about the years of slavery, when we were property, and think about Jim Crow and then only in the 1960's did we have Civil Rights laws that gave us protection at the polls and opportunities for jobs and housing, and they're still not really available in ways that they should be.

So the community is struggling. And I'm asking all of us, including the middle class Black folks here, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, it's really all hands on deck, for our children, all of our children.

If we don't do this, if we don't find a way to engage young people, and I can tell you, I love hearing you talk about curriculum and that it has to be relevant. You know what it does to hear also about how girls and boys and males and females learn differently and are interested in different things. As a Black boy, for a Black boy sitting in a classroom, and learning about all of the heads of states, learning about all the great conquerors throughout the world and never learning anything about anybody who looks like him. Toussaint Louverture, the hero, you know of Haiti, who in 1802 defeated Napoleon's army, the first independent Black nation in the Western hemisphere was Haiti. But every time we read about Haiti, we read about the poorest state in the Western hemisphere.


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So there are a lot of African Americans who feel as through there is a conspiracy to keep black people underfoot. The schools, the majority of them in our underserved communities and our inner city communities are not working. And it's not just that some of the teachers are overwhelmed and some are not well-trained and that; it's more basic than that. There are schools in the wealthiest country in the world, right here in the United States of America, where there are no water fountains in our communities, where, you know, the toilets don't flush; where there are no stalls, no doors on the stalls of the toilets; where children are learning out of books that were printed when I was in school; where they don't have textbooks; where the pages are missing; the information is old. How can those children compete?

And something happens, you know with Black boys. There's a scholar in Chicago, his name is Jawanza Konjufu [Phonetic], who's looked at what happens to Black boys around the third and fourth grades. Because they start disengaging. We have to ask ourselves why.

Black males have been demonized in this society and not just recently. We have to go all the way back. And you look at the images that were portrayed of black people in the 1700's and the 1800's, the horse was smarter than the man and the woman was Mammy and you know her head was under wraps and her lips were so full that they reached down to our chins. And we were like ignorant and dumb.

Tarzan, I grew up watching that and it was the White man in the jungle who had all the information and knowledge and the Africans were just like, woo-woo-woo, tell me what to do Bawana Jim [Phonetic]. So these are the things that were, you know, that were fostered in this society, the information that was inculcated in all of us.

And so you have young boys now, when a Black boy misbehaves, it's not even misbehaves, God knew what I was getting when he gave me a daughter. I mean, boys just play differently. We know that, they tumble, they have to do kung-fu, they have to; you know, all of that. When Black boys behave that way, they are treated differently than when White boys do, even by Black teachers. Because we've all seen the same media that is telling us; I know you know about Dr. Kenneth Clark's Doll Study.


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Is everybody familiar with that? The Doll Study that was done in the 1950's that really lead to Brown vs. the Board of Education and the integration of schools. And basically he did a study that shows, he's a psychiatrist, really well-known, that Black children had really ingested the idea that White was better, that it was right, that Black was deficient, and so that's what the lawyers who were fighting through the NAACP for fairness in education really used, part of the data they used.

That study was just repeated by a 16 year old girl, who and if anybody wants to see a portion of it, you can e-mail me, [email protected] is my private e-mail address. We have, what, we have billions of readers, we have 8 million readers, so that's my private e-mail address, [email protected] . This young girl just repeated that study and it is a heartbreaker. To see her in 2007, I think it was done last year, put the White doll and the Black doll before these black kids and to see the kids go; so which doll do you think is prettier? The white doll. Which doll do you think is smarter? The White doll. Which doll do you think is a good doll? The White doll. Which doll would you like to be like? The White doll.

So our people are really wounded. But you know, it's not; whatever happens in Blackville only happens their first. The spiraling rate of you know, divorce and a whole host of other things, you know Andrew Hacker's [Phonetic] work, the beautiful and brilliant psychologist who wrote the book Two Nations: Separate and Unequal and he just said, whatever happens in White America to White kids is eventually going to happen to Black kids. What happens to Black kids is going to happen to White kids. And maybe that's what God's trying to teach us: that we are each other's keeper. That we are each other's harvest and that we are each other's magnitude and bond.

And it's not enough for me to say, you know, I got mine. Because I love the way I live. I'm serious. I've got my great apartment, a little summer house, I travel when I want to and I live first class. But that's not going to make us feel good at the end of the day? And you all are the experts. It's like how do we fix this? Let's fix the schools. Let's fix every single public school in this nation so it's delivering top tier education. Because you know what


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mailto:[email protected]


happens, an underserved school is the pipeline to a for-profit prison system.

You look at what's happening in New Orleans. A big story in the New York Times about three months ago; and they're showing you know, these Black men on the road, in chains, fixing roads and then also being farmed out, and it's legal in this state. And not only in that state, being farmed out, to the farmers. You know, by the Sheriff who wants to get points. So he's, they're planting the crops for two cents a day or whatever it is.

I was in Coleman, Florida, visiting the Coleman prison. It's a prison that is, really run by a pretty advanced and I want to say progressive warden. And the prisoners had invited me. I write a column in Essence called "In the Spirit" and it's very popular among men and women, but men too. And they invited me and I was in Florida and said, I'm just going to go. So I went there and it was just absolutely stunning to me to see this incredible edifice, edifices, so beautiful. If they had grass surrounding them I would have thought that I was at, you know, some industrial complex, it was so very beautiful.

Anything in this economy that is tied to Wall Street is expected to grow. If we have a for-profit prison system, you're going to have to feed it with something. You can invest in it now. Corrections Corporation of America is one of the entities that's building prisons, and they're doing it on the backs of poor Black people and Latinos. And you know, the people we never hear about are our White sisters and Brothers who are struggling along in Appalachia, Upstate New York. You don't see poor White people in Manhattan, where I live. You don't. They removed all those folks who I used to see early in the mornings, twenty years ago, foraging through trash cans. Older women, primarily, looking for food.

So I'm just saying in the wealthiest country in the world we can do better than this. I'm not pointing the finger at the White House. Because we didn't do any better in the democratic administration. Black people were still under heel. And I'm just asking you to do what we must do, to fix public education. I'm not a psychologist, before I take my seat. I'm not an economist, but I know how to fix poverty.


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Because the people who are out there killing one another in our community are uneducated people; they have dropped out of school. Mad Dads, who you just heard about in that video; I love these men. Let's fund them. Those are guys who just got tired of the violence and just said; we're going where no one else will go. We are going to the most crime-ridden areas, we're going to the brothers and sisters who are standing on the corner who are selling drugs. They break up into little groups and they go out on Friday nights and they just say, we love you, we're right here and we're going to help you.

Why are you here? Well, I dropped out of school, I stopped going in the eighth grade. So, if the teacher, you know, is going to punish you in second grade because you're wild and crazy and you just need to be told to sit down and have some curriculum that's going to be engaging to you and you now are on a track that means that you're going to further disengage; by the time that you're in eighth grade and this chaos at home? Come on let's face it, some of us were raised by crazy people. But there were other lines of defense, you know what I mean, and other supports that got us through.

But the first time I realized the chaotic situation, I was called to speak at; I'm there. I was called to speak at a school called the Eagle Avenue School in the Bronx. I was like, why am I going into a grammar school? I don't have any; this was years ago. I don't have anything to say to these kids. But the principal, come on, please, please. Okay. And so I went. And she said to me, I want you to know that some of the youngsters who you'll speak to today haven't had a hot meal since they left here on Friday. And some of them come to school in the wintertime without coats on. And sometimes they are just coughing and they're ill and they have fevers, but they come here because they know it's a safe place.

You know, Black folk didn't bring drugs into this country; we don't dump them into our communities. But Black men today are not going to do the work that their grandfathers did for minimum wage. I mean they need to and they need to sweep the streets well and mop the floors well and move to the next level. But those videos that come into our community have said, kill the cops, kill one another, it's all about violence and misogyny. The videos that White kids are listening to, please go on, you know to MTV. And look at MTV


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Night or MTV after hours. You would be sickened to see this rock thing with the guitar that never ceases and listen to the messages. Because I had somebody interpret them. They're talking about eating babies, they're talking about suicide. They're talking about; it's the anti-Christ. It's really sick stuff. And a lot of this is what's giving birth to the violence that we see growing in this society that really needs to be the model of what we ay we want the other people in the world to be. A model of democracy and people of every race and color and creed really just doing the critical work of getting along and building a beautiful society, because there's peace nowhere on this beautiful earth.

And I just ask you to please help us. Two programs, it's the Children's Defense Funds Freedom Schools. They absolutely work and Marion Wright Edelman is building them as much as she can across the nation. What Essence is going to do as we go back into New Orleans for the Essence Music Festival and we leave about 125 million dollars there in three days, we're going back because the people of New Orleans have been abandoned and we're not reading anything about the pain there any more, only the crime.

And you know the crime you're going to have if you have schools, seventy percent of the schools are still closed. The children are running roughshod through the streets. There's nowhere for them to go. And so of course, they're going to get in trouble. So what we're going to do is we're going to give ten percent of all ticket sales to the Children's Defense Fund's Freedom School right there in New Orleans. We're going to engage our readers. Essence is now owned by Time, Inc. We're working with the Chairman of Time Inc., Ann Moore. All the magazines, there are over 100 of them, let's try to raise money. I'd like to see Freedom Schools, it's an after school program, that really teaches literacy; a love for learning and reading and it gives them a hot meal and sends them home and teaches them their culture too.

If we could have one of these in every community that needs it, they can be in churches. Get five small churches. Fund it. So that we can just abate the crime in our communities. And the second program is one that I read about in the LA Times. And it's called Village Nation. Stunned. If I didn't read about it in the LA Times, and one of the three


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African American male teachers who started it had told me about it, I wouldn't have believed them.

But what they did in a school where Black children had fallen below the Latino students in their achievement, the Latino students, for them English was a second language. And the African American students were far below them. Far below them. Which is the case all across the country.

These young men said we're tired of this. And basically what they did was they had a very progressive Jewish principal. And he said okay, go for it. Don't ask the parents, don't get permission, just do it. What they did was they segregated the black students in an assembly, brought them together, put their scores, their lack of competency, up on a screen. The children felt very ashamed when they saw themselves below the Latinos, far below the White students. And then they just started talking to them about, you know, what children need? The word we need to say: love. Encouragement, you can do it, you can really learn. You really can. They felt ashamed when they saw those scores.

And then, what they did was they began motivating them and saying that we are the village elders, these young guys. And when you need help you come to us. But you can learn. Curriculum didn't even change. In three months; it's stunning. Whatever that measurement is in the state of California, they say if it increases six points it's a good thing. In three months it went up thirty-six points. In six months it went up sixty some odd points. And in a year, another thirty something points. This is what got the story in the LA Times. And now those students are not only outdistancing the White students in their school, but in the whole district. And it's now a preferred school, which has made all the real estate values around them go up.

So if anybody is interested, and you can also e-mail me, Village Nation. I'd like to see that in every underperforming school. And they teach teachers how to help our young people just believe in themselves.

So I just really want to thank you all and I thank Dr. Baxter for inviting me to be here today. This is such an incredible learning for me. So I'll be available for any more information that you need to know, and it's [email protected] . You can go on to essence.com and


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click on to Essence Cares and really learn more about the program. Thank you.

MS. REDDY: Thank you so much, Susan. That was wonderful. Does anybody have a question or two? Quiet again. Well I think Susan will be here for a little while and we'll be having discussion groups momentarily. So I'm sure if you bump into her in the hall or in a group, you'll be able to talk with her. Thank you. And I guess W w e'll move on to our next panel, Helene Kramer and Carl Guerriere. Excuse me.

This is probably a bad idea for me to start doing anything with those. Did you want to go first, or either?

MS. HELENE KRAMER: Sure.

MS. REDDY: Okay. Okay. As soon as our panel finishes arguing over who's going to go first. I'll introduce them while they're working it out.

Helene Kramer is the Executive Director of Good Schools for All, Buffalo Reads. She was a founding member of United Parents, which is a parent advocacy group for children in Buffalo's public schools and she served as its board chair and president. In 1994, she was elected to a five-year term as an at-large member of the Buffalo Board of Education, where she served in numerous leadership roles. Three and a half years ago, Helene changed careers to become the Executive Director of good schools for all, an organization whose mission is to improve student achievement for all of Buffalo's public school children. Thanks, Helen.

MS. KRAMER: I have a presentation somewhere. No signal, I don't know what that means. Technology advice? While we're doing this I just wanted to say thank you to Susan and just tell you that I'm in. I wonder how many of you, if you raise your hands, how many of us are in? Right. We're all in. We appreciate what you're doing.

MALE VOICE: Which one is yours?

MS. KRAMER: Kramer. There we go. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm really tickled to be here today to tell the Buffalo story. The Buffalo story is not always about snow and cold. We're doing some really good things.

First of all I want to tell you a little bit about Good Schools for All. Good Schools is actually a program


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component of the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo. Our role is as an independent neutral convener. We offer no programs or services. There are currently just two of us on the staff. And our mission is to; I like to say harness the power of community. Because there's an enormous amount of power in the community to help improve student achievement for Buffalo's public school kids

For the last several years our focus has been literacy. Why literacy? The last three superintendents that I've worked with have all made literacy their number one priority. And that's largely because of the statistics that we have in the public schools. The current statistics are that 62% of the children in fourth grade are not proficient in reading. Educators tell us that children learn to read through third grade and then they're supposed to read to learn. So it's no surprise if 62% of our kids are not at proficient levels at the beginning of fourth grade, that at eighth grade we're seeing a more enormous jump to 79% of our children who are not reading at proficient levels.

I mean that's four out of five kids, it's really very, very, very disturbing. And then not surprisingly, 38% of the children who begin ninth grade in Buffalo's public schools do not graduate. And I'm told that that's a conservative figure, that it may be as high as 50%.

One of the things that happened when I saw those statistics is I went to the superintendent and I said you know, this is terrible. I mean, what is going on here? And the superintendent, this was two superintendents ago, a woman named Marian Kinjedo [Phonetic] pulled out a piece of paper from a desk drawer and she said, look at this Helene. It was a results of a Bregantz [Phonetic] assessment of children just entering pre-kindergarten. So these kids have not even been in the schools yet. And over half of them, 53% as a matter of fact, were already at risk for illiteracy because they had very limited oral vocabularies.

The children were not ready for school. 57% of them could not tell you what the shapes were. They could not recognize letters of the alphabet. Many didn't even know their own formal names. Again, these are children who are not even in the district yet.


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And then one of my colleagues from Literacy Volunteers talked about how many adults are not reading at high levels, at proficient levels. And she said in Buffalo it was 30% of adults that are at Literacy level 1, what we sometimes call functional illiteracy. That equates to 65,000 people in the city of Buffalo. Then we have another 30% of adults who are reading at Literacy Level 2, those of you who know what those levels mean know that they can you know, read the street signs, do general reading, read the box of cereal, the text on a box of cereal; but not the higher level reading skills like analytical thinking or critical thinking.

So what we began to see is that there's this cycle of intergenerational literacy. And where Good Schools for All used to focus just on the schools and children and parents of children in the schools, we began to understand that community literacy that a community-wide literacy campaign was really necessary if we were going to try to break that cycle of intergenerational illiteracy.

Many of you have seen this chart. We know that a literacy level is equated to higher annual earnings for people. And I just wanted to make a point about this and that is that the definition of literacy and the expectations of employers is expanding almost exponentially. We hardly see a business anymore that doesn't use computers. Computers have become so integrated into the workplace.

We're in a knowledge based economy, not an industrial economy anymore; so knowing how to read and comprehend and evaluate are all skills that more and more employers are requiring, and not to mention the fact that we're dealing with a global economy; leads us to understand that increased levels of literacy is important to our children in school, but it's also important for us as adults to get better jobs and for our cities to become more economically proficient or sustained.

What we did to get started; we don't do programs or services, so we convened those that do. We convened a number of literacy organizations, and we branded ourselves Buffalo Reads. We developed a collaborative model, meaning that we attempted to work together on a number of things. And I'll explain that a little bit more.


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And I went to my board about this time and I said, you know, we really need to do a community wide effort here and I'd like to take some time to do a feasibility study; which I did. I took six to eight months to do a feasibility study. I talked to a lot of people, talked to funders, talked to providers, looked on you know, websites; looked for best practices. I visited my friends in Cleveland that were a little bit ahead of where we were. Three large foundations there told me when I visited that they were giving money to lots and lots of literacy providers and they weren't seeing a lot of results. So they wanted to do things in a different way.

These are the findings of the feasibility study. Probably not any different in any community that we look at. And that is that I found that the literacy providers, although they were passionate, they were hard-working, they really loved the learners they were working with, worked in silos. They were fragmented. There really was no system of literacy services across the city. People operated in agency-centered ways. They would say they were learner centered, but within the agency, there was no system of services that was learner centered.

We found spotty quality standards in the organizations, spotty training for staff. And for volunteers, some did it, some didn't. One of the things that drives funders crazy is when they get reports about how the money was spent, the outcomes are all measured differently; so they don't know who's doing a good job, they don't know who's not doing a good job.

We know from national statistics that only seven to ten percent of those learners who need services actually get the services. And then we found that half of those learners are dropping out within the first three weeks. So we had a lot of capacity to built.

We also found that there was duplication of services, gaps in services, and as I said, a lot of capacity to be developed. We were also as our county was struggling for funding itself, as our city is struggling for funding, our foundations were getting more and more proposals from competing organizations. So we were competing for fewer and fewer dollars.


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Also there was a lack of data. We didn't know how many learners we were serving in the community. We didn't know where they were coming from. We didn't know what literacy levels they were at. We didn't know how they were achieving after they had literacy services. So we really had no data to base much of anything on. And probably worst of all, the outcomes were not changing significantly.

So what we set out to do was a very lofty goal. We set a very lofty goal. We said that we would achieve 100% literacy for every adult and every child in the city of Buffalo. But we knew we couldn't do it by doing things in the same old ways that we had always done. So we also set out to transform this system of literacy services.

We wanted to make it learner centered and learner driven. We've heard another presenter talk about the learner has to set their own goals, and that's what we're saying here. The campaign or the initiative had to be comprehensive. We said we were going to serve everyone from infants through seniors, that it was going to be coordinated, we've got to coordinate our efforts together; collaborative and integrated not only with each other, but integrated with the Buffalo public school system so that things were aligned.

And we set out to have a framework for quality, meaning that we wanted agencies to set quality standards across program types. We wanted to be able to assess the learner in the same way across program types. We wanted to be able to measure outcomes in the same way across program types. And we wanted to have a central data system so that we could begin to collect data that we didn't currently have and which we knew would drive quality in our programs.

There were other things that make up that framework for quality and maybe we can talk about them later.

We also knew that we wanted to recruit and retain the learners, so if we were only; if we had a goal as 100% literacy and if we in Buffalo matched the national averages and we were only recruiting seven to ten percent of our learners into programs, then we had to do a lot more to recruit and retain those learners and make what we were doing more relevant to their lives.

We also needed to broaden the scope and range of literacy, meaning we wanted to get; we wanted to involve content in


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learning literacy. So we said that we wanted to address the issue of workplace literacy for people who needed jobs or wanted to get better jobs. We wanted to do computer literacy, because to get a job you need to know how to use a computer, health literacy and financial literacy were also important areas where we broadened the scope of our definition of literacy. And most important of all, create a strategic plan developed by the community. Strategic meaning we knew we didn't have enough money or enough resources to do everything, especially everything all at once. And developed by the community because we knew that we needed the buy-in of the community. We need their ideas or their creativity; that even though we have over forty some organizations in the Buffalo Reads coalition, we don't know it all.

This is a very busy chart. I'm just going to point out that this is the planning framework. So we started with a complete environmental assessment including a needs analysis that gave us a lot of quantitative data about the poverty in our city, about educational levels. We got information about each of the schools and where each of the schools were including the charter schools; an inventory of all the programs and services because we didn't have a complete list. And we wanted to find out what people were thinking, so we had twelve focus groups to put a face on the numbers that we were dealing with.

We had seventeen different task forces that met on their own time, on Saturdays for half a day to develop the strategic plan for literacy, we have developed the plan and we're getting ready to launch in September.

Superintendent knew that I was coming here and what he said to me is, make sure you show them my picture. So you can all tell him I did. This is Dr. James Williams. He kicked off, this is a planning session. This is our first planning session and he actually kicked off the session. This was in a school. What we would do at the begging of each of our Saturday meetings, we would all come together. You'll probably see Margaret Dowdy here somewhere. She was the national consultant we used to help us to put this planning piece together.

We had over 200 community stakeholders to help us develop the plan. So these were the folks getting the instructions for the day. And then we would break out into classrooms. Each


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task force would meet in a second classroom to take the charge that we gave them for the day. And then we would all come back and share what went on in each break down group. We found out you know, what was working, what wasn't working; the questions they had. And we did this over the course of six months to develop the plan. Which we now have.

The goals that we set; I'm going to run through these quickly because I know we're behind and I've still got quite a bit to go. We want to make sure that every child is prepared to school, that every child has all the skills and knowledge they need to be successful when they enter pre-kindergarten or kindergarten. We want to make sure that every child when they start in school achieves grade level standards from pre-k to twelfth grade. And I have to tell you that these are the goals, they are also strategies that the task forces developed under each of these goals that tell us how we want to get there.

We want to ensure that parents and families have all the information and all the skills they need so if a parent can't read and they would like to learn how to read to help their children, then we want to certainly be open to that and enable them to do that.

We also found that many parents didn't know what the schools expected. So we want to ensure that we communicate with them so that they can work with their children to prepare them. Because right now most of them don't know what the schools want.

And that graduating high school students are fully prepared for college level work. I think you all know that when students enter college, many, many of them need remedial courses. And they often use up their financial aid taking remedial courses and then don't have the money to finish college. So we want to make sure that kids who graduate from high school are fully ready for college.

We want to know that our college students will graduate and be prepared with the knowledge and the skills they need to go on in graduate school or to get a job.

Out of school youth which Susan talked about; we know that in Buffalo, conservatively thirty-eight percent of the kids who start ninth grade drop out. Those are the out of school youth. The schools don't know where they are, it's difficult


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to recruit them, we want to be able to get those kids back on track so that they can continue their education or get jobs.

And with adult literacy, we want to improve literacy for either the job-seekers or incumbent workers. We talked about literacy levels or how higher literacy levels are being required, so we want to ensure that our workers get those skills.

Health literacy, we know that more and more the healthcare industry is requiring us to take care of ourselves. So we go and get a procedure and then they give us four pieces of paper that tell us how to take care of ourselves without any thought to how that paper is written or who understands it. I don't understand it.

Financial literacy to help low and moderate income people become more self-sufficient, not to be taken in by predatory lenders and, as my friend Margaret Dowdy would say, who needs the ability to create wealth more than folks who don't have it?

Insure that every person has access to and is trained how to use a computer including the internet. The providers strategies for them are to implement the framework for quality I'd talked about before.

This is also a very busy chart and I will just tell you that I have multiple copies of this at the table here. This is just the executive summary of our plan. So it tells you what seventeen task forces we had. It tells you what the goals were or are. And then there's a three-year implementation plan on the back. So I'm happy to share that with you if you'd like to see it.

The name of our campaign is Read to Succeed. It's going to change to Read to Succeed Buffalo. It all starts here. Where is here? It starts with every single one of you. It starts with me. It starts with the Mayor. It starts with the superintendent. It starts with every child, it starts with every learner; whether they're an adult or a child. It starts with everyone and that's the message that we're trying to get across; that a 100% literacy requires 100% participation.

And this; am I going, a two-minute warning. Okay. Let me see what I can do here. These are some of the things that


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we're doing for initial implementation. We just started implementation this year. I can talk about that later. Rules of engagement for agencies, these are things that we're saying to any agency that wants to take a piece of the plan, these are the things you have to do. They're required. We'll have them be asked to sign MOUs. Okay.

Measuring effectiveness. Let me spend the major part of what's remaining of my two-minutes talking about this. You cannot find a business, you cannot find anyone in the community doing effective work that doesn't have an engine that collects data to help them do everything from drive quality to learn something about their business. What we want to do is have data so that we can get for the agencies business intelligence. Meaning that if I see I've got 100 people I'm serving in a particular zip code but I don't have a presence there, maybe I want to move a drop-in center there if I'm an adult literacy provider.

Maybe I see that there's a need in a particular other zip code that I need to do more work in. So having data allows us to do lots of things, including getting return on investment information to the individual learners, because they're putting time in, to the funders, because they're money in, to the community because they're putting effort in. So that's extremely important. We'll go through this later.

Success factors, obviously active support from our community leaders because they help us drive this through the community. This one's really important and I've talked to the three major funders that have been supporting my campaign. I tell them if you can't align the funding to the strategic plan, and you continue fragmented funding, then we will continue to have a fragmented system.

So we need them to align the funding to the strategic plan that we have. Literacy has to be infused everywhere. So it's not just picking up a book and saying we're going to read now, it can be infused in Arts, it can be infused in basketball sessions in a community center, it can be infused and must be infused everywhere. Every program that the United Way has, every program that Community Centers have, every program that's funded with Community Block Grant funds can have literacy infused. And that way we get more literacy exponentially in the community.


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Marketing and outreach, extremely important. I think these things you can read. And what we hope to come out of as benefits to Buffalo is improved student achievement, which again goes back to my mission, and lots of other good things. I thank you.

MS. REDDY: Thanks so much, Helene. Our next panelist is Carl Guerriere. He's the founding Executive Director of the Greater Hartford Literacy Council, a not for profit organization that serves as a regional broker and a resource to coordinate and enhance literacy efforts in the thirty-five town metro Hartford region. Before establishing the literacy council, Carl was the program coordinator of Read to Succeed, a reading clinic for adults with learning disabilities, reading disabilities. He also served as reading center manager for Literacy Volunteers for Greater Hartford. Before returning to Hartford in 1995, Carl was the associate director of the Center for Urban Education at DePaul University in Chicago.

MR. GUERRIERE: Thank you. And I'm really happy to be here. It's an honor to be among you who may suffer, or I shouldn't say suffer. Talk to you about perspective a little bit here. Some may say suffer, others may say, I have a condition, and that is I'm a big picture person. Okay. There it goes. Okay.

I'm a big picture person and I think I'm among a lot of you who are big picture people as well. But when I go back to Hartford there are a lot of people who are not big picture people and when you start talking about collaboration, their eyes glaze over, they don't want to hear about it.

The other condition I have is I wear rose colored glasses. And now I wear these rose colored glasses not to hide from the realities, some of the very harsh realities that Susan Taylor talked about. But rose colored glasses that talk about another thing that you need to do, which is basically a suspension of reality. You have to suspend reality to put your head in the sand and forget about all these harsh realities that we deal with. But we also need a little bit of suspension of reality to say we can end poverty and we can have 100% literacy and we all can work together and we can get the federal government to put money towards literacy so we can address these issues.


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The other one is my last name, which is Guerriere. And if you know Italian, it means warrior, actually, female warriors. And so, depending on your perspective, that could be a good or bad thing. And I also just want to let you know I'm going to talk about two reports that we've done and they're on our website which is greaterhartfordreads.org.

Community literacy, I won't go over this too much. But we did a major assessment also in Hartford, Greater Hartford, and these were just some of the places that provide literacy in for adults; this is just the adult piece. And what you see here is what?

There's a little difference in some of these over here. You can see that public schools and family resource centers and adult basic education programs in Greater Hartford are connected. The rest are not. And that's one of the challenges, or a major challenge that we deal with here. Edith talked about breaking down walls, talking about all the barriers that we need to break down to have people to collaborate.

Another call to action, or another person calling for a call to action, everyone has a role in improving literacy. It must be a priority. Why? Because the common thread connecting our nation's challenges, you've heard today.

Health literacy, workforce literacy, family literacy; all these issues that are devastating our urban areas, rural areas, that are spreading out to all parts of this nation have a common thread of literacy.

And that leadership is needed at all levels, not just top down, but also bottom up.

Some assumptions: what we say over and over again for those anti-collaborators, the scope of the problem is greater than any one organization. And so you have to realize that. Or that's our assumption, my assumption, my group's assumption, hopefully your assumption.

That the scope of the literacy problem is beyond any one literacy organization. We have some literacy organizations like the schools who think that they're going to solve the whole problem.

And then the scope of the literacy problem is beyond literacy. And that is our challenge. Because to really


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address and achieve 100% literacy, we have to be talking about everybody working together. Well how do you get every one to work together? And that's the real challenge. It's not just illiteracy, it's not just an education problem, we have to talk about case management. We have to talk about support services. We have to talk about transportation and child care. And that's not just under the purview of the educators.

We also have to acknowledge again, Susan Taylor brought this out, the issues of literacy are intertwined with issues of poverty and racism. Low literate people are over represented by people of poverty and also people of color. Efforts employed to overcome illiteracy; therefore efforts employed to improve literacy become efforts to improve social justice.

Now, we know what needs to be done. If we took all of us in this room and you gave us some of that money, I'm sure that we could do a lot to address the literacy issues that are facing our nation. And we have the resources. We're just not allocating the resources where they need to be allocated. So don't tell me we do not have the resources. The divide is getting larger. I come from Connecticut, which has the dubious distinction of having the greatest divide in the country in per capita income and academic levels.

And that a paradigm shift is needed. We have to get people to think differently, if it's putting on rose colored glasses, then that's what we need. And we also have to acknowledge that a power shift is needed. And it's all about political and economic power. For those that don't have it, you have to get it some how. Our learners, as I said, many are living in poverty; people of color, often because of those situations, not situations, conditions, whatever, do not, have not been plugged in to political and economic power.

Literacy providers, we live in a climate where everyone is being increasingly asked to provide outcomes and they don't have the resources and what they do is they focus on their own programs. I've got to produce outcomes, otherwise I'm not going to get my funding. I'm not going to collaborate with you because you may effect my outcomes. I'm going to cream my students because I have to produce outcomes.


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Political leaders, yes they have political power and often economic power. But if they do not see that collaboration is important, it's a tough situation. We have a political leader, a new political leader here in Hartford, not here in Hartford, but in Hartford; who said that collaborations are like herding cats.

And then funders. Funders also have the money, but we also need to ask them to ask for accountability. We have to ask them to ask programs to use standards and we also have to ask them to encourage collaboration that's done in a meaningful way.

We feel that the long-term solutions come from our state government, the federal government and partnerships with the private sector.

The Literacy Council was formed in 2001 as an outgrowth of a city task force. It was the Adult Literacy Providers that came together to ask our former mayor to have a task force because it came out that Hartford has 73% of its adult population below level 3 literacy on the NALS [Phonetic] test, or NALS assessment.

And then the task force then recommended that a coordinating entity be formed and from there the Greater Hartford Literacy Council was formed. The strategic partners were the City of Hartford, the Hartford public schools, the Library, Capital Workforce Partners, which is the WIB [Phonetic], the local workforce board, and the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving. And so, they were instrumental and came together and I think we made a bleep on the literacy world map because you had major participation, financial participation from these organizations.

We have more than 100 members who represent literacy providers, human service organizations, businesses, government organizations and individuals.

Let's take a look at Hartford which was one of the richest cities last century when it started, and then as it ended the last century was one of the poorest in the country. This is our population which has decreased from a high of 190,000. Our population now is predominantly Latino. Black population, African American as well as a large West Indian population, and the remaining is White population.


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Learners, students, language other than English, 47%, living below poverty, 31%, median income is twenty-four as you can see, and home ownership is very low. These are among the lowest in the nation. The median income is compared to Connecticut's, which has the highest per capita income. So Hartford is really struggling.

And just to put in perspective, because in Hartford we find a lot in poor communities we beat up on ourselves a lot; and so when I say well Hartford has 73% below level 3, of course people say well that's because you're a poor city. But then I put it in perspective and take a look at the Hartford region, Connecticut and the nation; and then they say, well okay, it's bad, but we also have a state and a national problem as well.

So we find ourselves with a critical number of residents with low literacy skills. Much about literacy assets and needs is unknown. We have a fragmented network and we also have this thing called Yankee Individualism. And that is we have 169 towns in that little small state of Connecticut, and they each have their own form of government. We do not have county form of government. Everyone does their own thing, and you know, a fight to the death. So, collaboration is an unnatural act between two or more consenting or non-consenting adults.

So, we did this assessment. Community Literacy Enhancement Across the Region, and we called it CLEAR. And it's joining forces as a region to address low literacy. And these were the goals: to try to begin this integrated system of high quality services to strengthen providers of services and to strengthen the systems that deliver literacy services. And again, when I say this to some of the people in Hartford, their eyes glaze over. Okay, I don't want to focus about those literacy systems.

Our partners were the United Way of Capital Area, and we get no money from them. The CREC [Phonetic], which is a regional LEA and the WIB. The impact of the initiative; we wanted to get an accurate snapshot of what was going on from which to measure progress. There was community wide involvement. We involved over 209 individuals representing 150 departments and organizations taking a very comprehensive look at literacy. To enhance the capacity of the providers,


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meaningful partnerships were created. And then we started some systemic change efforts.

We had an oversight committee, which we think is important. The problem is as the thing went on, they didn't buy into it. And that was one of our lessons learned. And the role was to advise and coordinate the CLEAR initiative, it was hard to get them to come to the meetings. And we probably should have encouraged that more. And they were supported by our staff.

We did use demographic data. We used existing reports. There's all kinds of reports out there and they often sit on the shelf, so we said let's take a look at those. We did a survey of our providers. We also conducted focus groups and we looked at ESOL, learners with disabilities, workplace literacy, health literacy, child/family, adult and family literacy funding and policy.

And we also paid our providers to complete the survey. And we felt that that was important. And these were the focus groups that we did. For youth in and out of services, adults in and out of literacy services and human service providers. Some of our best advocates are human service providers. They are dealing day to day with people who are suffering from low literacy.

The products is the report, like I said, which is on our website and we also came out with some service directories related to services that are available, a parent packet, etcetera; and we launched our website.

We looked at best practices, we looked at developing quality standards, but taking a look at the research that's out there and adopting it, advocating for policy changes; and again like I said, the service directories.

And you see at the bottom here, we were trying to create a model for system change and each participant fully engaged and committed. That did not happen. We don't have enough, the Literacy Council does not have enough political and economic power. We are a poor organization. We could not bring people to the table. We did not have any political power to bring people to the table.

And that is in part because the mayor that started our literacy council could no longer run for another term. We


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have a new mayor. We are on our third superintendent in six years. And the Workforce board president changed. So in six years we had all this transition of leadership, and each time we had to build new leadership.

We developed four interrelated focus areas, and these are the focus areas. And they're all interrelated. So we felt we had to raise awareness about the situation. If you raise awareness then you're going to get more money, hopefully, from the powers that be to do some of the service delivery and capacity building and then also to do some of the system coordination. So all our services are within those four areas.

Now the challenge for organizations like ourselves; in times of limited resources we should fund organizations that provide direct literacy instruction. So there is not a natural inclination to fund our type of organization. They want to fund those that do, that can show that they've improved literacy levels.

We do not need another bureaucratic layer. And so when we talk about collaboration and we are currently fighting to form an interdisciplinary state group to look at literacy, because there are so many state departments that have a finger or funding in literacy, and then you have even among the literacy providers are fighting this legislation, because they don't want to see another bureaucratic layer because they're worried that some of the current funding will be cut out.

And can you demonstrate your impact on improving literacy levels? And so when you're an intermediary, and you're not responsible for improving literacy levels, then how do you show that impact? And that's a major challenge.

Briefly, we did; to answer that we did what we felt was an exemplary amount of a Taniff [Phonetic] Workforce literacy Pilot project. We got a quarter of a million dollars from the legislature to work with literacy organizations to help them integrate workforce job preparation with basic skills which all the research shows it's better to do it that way. Also, make sure that they were able to provide support services and a variety of other things; and at the end be able to show that the individuals that went through this improved their literacy levels. So we wanted to test that


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model, increase literacy skills, get a snapshot of their educational needs and evaluate and also make recommendations.

So we did this comprehensive assessment and all these other things that you probably know and some others have talked about that are good; case management, quality staff instruction and then these individualized learning programs.

We needed to facilitate a program shift, and this is the big thing that we're advocating, that programs need to have targeted technical assistance. They really need someone to really hold their hand and help them change to make that paradigm shift. People are used; we're creatures of habit, we're used to doing the same things over and over.

And what we found were like for the people who were counseling the mostly women into this program, they had to change their mentality to say, to try this program because it didn't fit in to what the federal guidelines—

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DR. PETRICE SAMS-ABIODUM: --our programs is because of the shame and guilt. When I say literacy, the image that comes to mind for the people, a lot of the people we want to serve, is the issue of illiteracy. Another tool that we're using to do that is 13 Lessons, it's a way to have a community kind of discourse, a dialogue that combines the arts, literacy awareness, dialogue and advocacy. Just in closing, back to where I began, it for us, or for me; it is not just about literacy. It is about hope. And if we don't have hope, you know, how do you measure hope? You know. I don't know. So rebuilding of New Orleans is one of our biggest challenges. I believe that this country has ever faced. It is also one of our greatest opportunities to use data, information and


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best practices to build a stronger New Orleans. Anybody that knows something ought to be wanting to put it there in New Orleans, because the slate is clear and we're looking for best approaches and practices. And that's really what we see at the Lindy Boggs Center.

And finally, by examining institutional change, we have an opportunity to realign systems that will integrate literacy where it can become a tool, I believe, for personal, economic and community empowerment. Thank you all.

MS. REDDY: Thanks so much. Excuse me. Our next speaker is Doug Marriott. He joined the staff of the Literacy Network of Greater Los Angeles as the outreach director in 2005, to support the implementation of Literacy At Work, the LA Workforce literacy project, which is a major new initiative creating coordinated workforce development, and it's administered by the network. As the outreach director, Doug helps bring together literacy providers from Los Angeles County for professional development and capacity building and helps develop partnerships with area businesses to offer on site trainings. He also does a lot of other great things, which I'm not going to tell you about to give him a little more time to talk.

MR. DOUG MARRIOTT: Good afternoon. It's a real pleasure to be here. I've learned a lot throughout today. And I don't know if I'm batting clean up here, but a good thing about going at the end is I get to focus on what's been said prior and even appropriate some of the language.

So I'm here to talk about challenges in measuring and collecting data for evaluation and I'd like to do that with a case study; an exciting project that's taking place in Los Angeles right now that came out of the Literacy At Work Project. And so I'll get right to it.

I'm going to give you a little bit of background about the Network. What our guiding principals are and a little bit about the background of the Literacy At Work project and what it hopes to become and is becoming. I'll talk about general project challenges that include measurement and collecting data for effectively building on what we're creating. And then the case study, the unique and successful case of the MTA training. I kind of believe it's community literacy in action. There's been a lot of talk about breaking down


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silos, breaking down walls and bringing organizations together. And I believe in some form, this is an example of that.

So the guiding principals in the network. We envision a Greater Los Angeles where all people are empowered by literacy to achieve their full potential in our community, a community which is socially just, culturally dynamic and economically productive. Our goal is to make literacy resources easily accessible to learners, literacy service providers and employers in our community through partnerships, advocacy and direct program services.

Out front, I'm proud to share this with you. This is our, it's called That Literacy Phone Book. It's the fifth edition. And it lists resources throughout counties in Greater Los Angeles. It lists them by the type of program and it also has, which I believe is very important, it's got testimonials of people in each area. And there's a sign up sheet if you'd like a copy of it. I'd be happy to send one your way. But this is kind of where; the Network grew out of this, to become an umbrella organization to provide a directory and resource and referral services, where people could go and access areas in their community to find literacy resources. But it's become a lot more in the past fourteen years.

Online, you can go to theliteracynetwork.org and punch in your zip code and find literacy providers in your area. There's also a twenty-four hour hotline in English and Spanish that people can access. We have the Literacy in Media awards, they're coming up in April. We focus on achievements in media where literacy is highlighted. We have a summit that usually falls on International Literacy Day on September 8th, where we bring providers together and share best practices and talk about what's happening in Southern California.

We have a volunteer program that recruits, trains and places volunteers at partner sites that spun off of Literacy At Work. I believe all of these services kind of overlap, because the goal is to provide people with the tools to achieve their individual goals within the literacy realm.


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And Literacy At Work develops and implements workplace and workforce literacy trainings for workers within Los Angeles. And that's what I'm going to speak about.

The project grew out of this study, which I also, there's also copies out front, which the United Way funded the research and it came that 53% of adults in Los Angeles are at level one or level two. And as we know that means challenges reading a bus schedule or filling out a job application. And many of these are native English speakers. It's across the board and the statistics are gone into detail in that book. The solution, many people came together and I believe that's actually an example of community literacy as well; when providers come together as a community to address a problem. And Margaret's been mentioned a couple times and she helped on this project as well.

It's a challenge to bring community providers together, but they were brought together to create a plan. And the plan was to create a different way to address these needs, because clearly by the adult school or the community college or by non-profits themselves, there is a challenge to address these great needs in Los Angeles.

So the plan included to develop a twenty-five hour training or certification program where we recruited instructors. And we went through a training that focused on workplace and workforce needs. And out of that training was developed a quality standards handbook; which people talked about quality standards and things that could be measured, I have my didactic materials here.

And this is the quality standards that came out of it, which was then adopted by the community college district and used in their English language programs. So there is kind of a base mark. It says things that you all know. It says that instruction needs to be learner-centered, it needs to focus on the goals; that adults, when they come into program need to be aware of resources within their community, which that ties it back to this. When they get through the program, what are the next steps. And I'd be happy to send one of these your way too.

Implementation just began this past spring. And it's included workplace trainings at businesses. We've done them at social service organizations. One of the businesses was


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in the garment industry, where the owner of the company very altruistic woman, does great stuff and I was sharing information about this; she said I'd really like to do a training just to, I really believe in what you're doing and I think we can do this. And it's contract training, it's not free. The funding is varied depending on the situation, but she invested in this training, because she liked the spirit of what Literacy At Work is about; but then she found quantitative improvement with her workforce. Which usually it's the other way around. Usually you talk to employers and you say, we're having trouble, people are not doing this and we want to see results in ten hours. You know, what can you do for us? But then you hear, when you do do a training at the site, you hear from the employers the qualitative. You hear that people are interacting more with each other, the work environment is improved, people are saying hello to each other.

Anyway. So, on to the MTA bus driver project. This came about this past summer. There was a little bit of a crisis with the MTA, which is the number one Transit Authority in the country, by the way. They needed about 300 drivers and they found that people were coming into their training and they didn't have the basic skills to proceed through this six week training. So they were spending millions of dollars in overtime. And Antonio Villarigosa [Phonetic] is on the board of the MTA. And he challenged people within the organization, find me a creative and aggressive solution to address this. How can it be that in Los Angeles we can't find 300 bus drivers?

So they went through this study and the gentlemen; they started asking around the community and they called one of our partners at the Literacy At Work project, which is LA Valley College, and they have a great job director there and he called me up and he said, Doug, what do you know about driving busses? And I said, nothing, Lenny, but I'm ready to work with you. And so we met and this is how the collaboration kind of broke down.

This is; LA Valley College was kind of a lead on the project. They planned the coordination. They specialize in job training and customer service instruction. But they realized that a literacy element was really important to the training. So as Literacy At Work was developing they called us; the Literacy Network provided Literacy At Work instructors. We


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did services, we trained instructors, we do the customized curriculum development. We have volunteer support and resource and referral information. And we helped working with all of the entities shown here, create a pre-training for the MTA.

Now the Work Source Center, it's like the Workforce Investment Board, funds this group, helped with recruitment and what turned out to be key was data management, support services and case management; kind of the wraparound services that are needed. So it's not just the instructors keeping track of who's there, but there's actual social services behind it.

And then the vital component to any workplace or workforce literacy is the employer. At the end of this training, the goal is that they get through the MTA training and become bus drivers. So the MTA played a very active role. They provided everybody in the program with free transportation. They gave them all bus passes. They came and they gave the orientation. They had their HR specialist come. And they started little by little coming to the graduations. And as the graduations started rolling out, they came more and more. And their top level, their top level staff there started really enjoying coming to these graduations and I'll share why soon.

So this is kind of brief flow chart of what we created for the project. And this shows the importance of evaluation and data management. There was recruitment. People came in and received an orientation. They got an overview and they were told this is what it is. If you're willing to invest your time, these are the services you'll receive for free, but you're a partner in this project. If you're up for it, this is what you're going to expect. Then they were given a basic skills assessment, and I'll speak about that in the moment. But that was required, because we need to know where people are at, where to place them, so we can help them be successful.

And then there was a breakdown of three tracks. And that was determined by the skills assessment. And in track one it could be a sixteen week course in ESL, track two was about a five week course and the first track was a two week course, but they were all at least forty hours of instruction. Even if it was two weeks, it was at least forty hours of


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instruction. And it included Literacy At Work Services. It included discussing multiple intelligences, it included talking about learning styles; it included study tips and reading strategies, all embedded in the material that they would need to be successful in their bus driver training.

So, ongoing challenges for the project have to do with the fact that many providers use different assessment tools. And since we were partnering with the Work Source Centers, we had to use the assessment tool that they were mandated by the state to use. And so these are kind of the three areas of challenges, skills assessment, performance measurement and data management.

In the area of skills assessment, there's a need for a uniform tool to use with all the adult learners to place them in the program. Yet at the same time we needed to meet the needs of all of the partnering agencies and adult learners. With a lot of our trainings we do use learning surveys to ask how people see themselves as learners at the end and we also use the quality standards. But we needed a specific tool.

And so the solution was the standardized assessment tool, it was Coss's [Phonetic] Workplace exam. It's been determined that it's suitable for ABE and ESL learners to determine where they're at with certain workplace and workforce trainings. And this is what was given for the placement model.

We also used the MTA customer service exam as a tool, as a pre and post assessment. Because many people were getting, we asked MTA what are you using? And they showed me this twenty-eight question multiple choice test, you know, that had a lot to do with critical thinking and test taking skills. And they said, yeah, people aren't passing this. And so we changed that a little bit and still used it in a fashion, but it wasn't the determining factor to limit people from going through this program.

In terms of performance measurement, the neater expectation was a customized training course to prepare participants for success at Metro. And the challenge was doing this curriculum to meet the parallel missions of all the collaborators and individual needs of the participants.

In this case the goal is really clear. You have adult learners who want the goal of being a bus driver. And we


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brought in drivers to talk to them. We talked about what it is to drive for Metro. So the goal was pretty clear. But how to help them towards that goal, we had to be very flexible.

And so what we came up with was a training that included job readiness, customer service, ESL when needed, basic skills training in reading, writing and study skills, critical thinking skills and all of it contextualized to the needs of successfully completing the Metro training.

And each training adapted. After we did a training, we'd say what worked, what didn't work, what resonated, what didn't resonate. And it's still unfolding as we go. I believe each training, and the trainings are still taking place; there was a graduation last week. And every training improves, because the system is flexible enough to make those changes.

And finally, data management. There was a need or expectation that each participant that went through the program needed to be followed. We need to evaluate their needs and provide accurate accounting for all partners. We're the Literacy Network, we're a non-profit. We have funders we need to report to. We definitely need to track who is successful in the program; the same goes with the community college that we're partnering with, as well as the Work Source Center. And most importantly, and this kind of drove it; the employer. The employer wanted to know who goes through our program and who is successfully placed. And we have had meetings with them to talk about that, and that's been really fascinating, because they pull out the files and we say, what happened to this person? Why did they drop out? And they said, well, they came in, they had a great attitude, they went to all the study halls and all that, they had trouble driving. And we said, so, you know, that really wasn't; that wasn't what we were contracted to do.

But we talked a lot about; some gentleman mentioned the four Cs. I think that's what we were focusing on, the four Cs there was no D, so. But, we did add, that did actually inform the curriculum. We added like an observation activity with that. An observation where all the participants would go out and observe on a bus, visualize themselves behind the wheel, talk to the drivers there to kind of prepare them better for that next step.


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So the solution with data management, it helped that we were partnering with the Workforce Investment Board's Work Source Center, because they, by law, need to manage all the data. So they ended up dedicating a staff member to manage all the data. This, then, is linked to the Literacy Network, the Community College and MTA, so there's no overlap and we're all using the same data and following the same people.

The results to date: between August 2006 and January 2007, there were seven trainings. There's been two more since I did this. But they reached 233 participants. 219 completed the trainings and earned certificates. Of those 219, 198 passed their MTA interview and began new employment orientation. The MTA statistics show the agency is halfway to meeting its goal of 300 new operators. The vacancy rate is down. 161 from a high of 315. It's really been incredible results.

And it all happened very quick; but it happened because I think the groups involved were willing to step outside of their walls and work together and share in a common mission. And you'll see in this photo here, that's the mayor, the president of the University is there, the president of the Literacy Network is there as well. And that gentleman there, his name is Alphonso Chavez. And every time people went through the training, we said, we brought in drivers to talk, what's it like to be a driver. And I would tell each group, because fortunately I was, I teach some of the groups as well. Our goal is that you come back in uniform and talk to the next group. And Alphonso came back. And Alphonso had been working as a handyman, making $8.15 an hour. And got into this program and got through and became a bus driver. But what most impressed me when he came back, he said that the program changed the way he looked at himself as a learner.

Which, that's really the goal. And literacy being part of this, that message of life-long learning, that we're all on a continuum, that to be a successful MTA operator, you need to see yourself as a life-long learner, because it's technical. Those busses have computers and cameras. It was a message and he shared that with the group. He came back and talked to the group. Which was really special.

So the conclusions that we can draw from this is that there's a need for continual process improvement, and that would be


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impossible without data management. Without data management capturing where people were at during the training, we wouldn't be able to adjust and make the changes. All stakeholders must share a vision for what program success will look like, with mutually agreed upon outcomes to be evaluated. And parallel missions, mutual respect for roles, resources, creativity and flexibility are key components to project success.

You know we hope too that this will be a model kind of an example that we can build on. It's something that's flexible in that we can't do it alone. That was said earlier. Like, a school district can't do it alone and a community college district can't do it alone. And although I really believe in community based literacy projects, they can't do it alone either. We've got to partner in leverage and there are ways to do it.

And I'm going to end with a quote. Carl kind of you know inspired me with the rose colored glasses. But there was a group here that graduated recently. And sometimes I start off the trainings with quotes. And it touched; at the end, the guy repeated the quote I said. Which, made me feel pretty good.

And so, it's "I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I acted, and behold, duty was joy." And so, I appreciate all your work. I feel honored to be among you. And I look forward to more good work. Thanks a lot.

MS. REDDY: Thanks. What a totally great way to end the presentation. So I'm thinking. I'm thinking. Maybe I'll consult you. So we could either kind of reconfigure the tables a little bit and stay here, so you could sort of merge with your fellow tables so we have a smaller number of fuller tables. Or if you're feeling like it would be nice to have a change of scenery, we could go to the other rooms. Anybody have a feeling?

FEMALE VOICE: Stay here.

MS. REDDY: Okay. Alright, the feeling is stay. So if you have, if you have empty spaces at your table, could you welcome people from other tables? Or if you're a small table and would like to meet some new people you could mix it up. Oh right, and the task of course is; I almost forgot. There is


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a second blue sheet, the afternoon discussion questions. So again, if you want to spend about twenty minutes or so talking about any or all of those second blue sheet discussion questions, that would be great.

[Crosstalk]

[END OF 87998 CD 5 (1)]

[START OF 87998 CD 5 (2)]

FEMALE VOICE: Measuring and also what is the meaning of readiness for children. And then another challenge was consistency in doing assessments correctly. And also another challenge would be reflecting the achievement gap that people start with that sometimes does not get measured when you look at where they end up with; that reflect the achievement that people start at very different levels.

The next question is what are potential solutions for these challenges? We came up with two. As far as common measures, to bring agreement among providers to support in the interest of the community to use that need for improvement of the community as the motivation for bringing agreement. And then also, another suggestion was to use graduates of the programs to be part of the assessment and outcome process; that people might be more willing to open up to graduates rather than outsiders. And the last thing, the resources that would be most helpful in improving performance measurement and data collection, our table felt, would be leadership on a national level that would be accessible leadership on a national level, bringing together coalitions across coalitions that would also be listening to the field. Thank you.

FEMALE VOICE: Ladies and gentlemen, I need to tell you that I am the new person on the block, so if I say anything that's wrong, just forgive me, okay? But you know how it is when you go into a school building for the first year as a teacher and they give you all the bad kids? Okay.

Here I am. Okay. As we started our discussion we thought about the idea that in terms of immediate, intermediate, yes intermediate organizations as opposed to those who deliver the direct instruction and interaction with the participants, might be cause for some different kinds of data to be assessed by each of those intervening organizations or by the


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organization that helps in fact those who deliver the direct instruction.

And what we decided, or what we heard in this group is that there are some ways because there are some curriculum programs, even, that will allow for some data to be collected and to be evaluated in terms of student outcome and student performance. The Wilson's curriculum is being; is something that is being used in the state of Massachusetts, I believe it is. And they also use the Woodcock Johnson, which has been around a long time for us to use in schools with students to find out grade level and other particular data in terms of students' performance in a classroom setting, most especially those who need basic skills who are working at a third grade through eighth grade level. There is a CASAS, is it Casas? Casas. Okay, pre and posttest that helps with low level testing of student performance. So I've kind of gone into the solution while I'm talking about some of the challenges or identifying some of the things that were happening with our group conversation. So I've kind of skipped ahead of myself. But again, please forgive me. Okay?

I think that our group decided that one of the problems was, again, what data which organization needs to have, so that at some point you will be able to measure apples to apples. But because we know that we have literacy organizations all over, who do different things with the group of people who come to them; how in the world do you do that? So you may want to first of all just find out which groups are doing what kind of instruction and then determine the kind of testing that would be most beneficial for that structure so that then you could pull out that data and disaggregate the data so that you would be better able to find out just how well those organizations were doing.

I think I've got most of what we said. Is that right group?

MALE VOICE: I told my table that I wouldn't report this afternoon, since I had already done service this morning. And they said, oh no. We have to have continuity.

So there were three main things that we discussed as we looked at performance measures. One is that when we talk about community literacy, we may be talking about two different but related things. One being community literacy


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in k-12. And the other being community literacy for adults. And here's how they differ. Community literacy in k-12 as we understand it from this morning's presentations focuses primarily on reading and writing for kids that may take place in school or in community organizations and settings that's provided by tutors. That's pretty clear, pretty straightforward.

The problem is that if you take that definition and apply it to adults, reading and writing is only a part of what adults learn in community literacy programs. They also learn numeracy, they learn to prepare for the GED or adult diploma programs. They do college preparation programs. The majority of students across the states, in many states, are now English language learners. There's work related learning and so forth. In other words, this is a much wider range of definition for adults when we're talking about community literacy. And the reason it's important for us to pay attention to that as we begin to look at performance measures for learners and for programs; it's going to be different for whether we're talking about k-12 or for adults.

However, having said that, there may be some things that are the same. So that leads us to the second issue, which is one of the issues that appears to be the same as the issue of intensity. So we learned this morning that in k-12 it's very beneficial to children, young adults, learning to read; if you can increase the time on task. If you increase the intensity of instruction by providing tutoring in the school or in the community.

Intensity is an issue in literacy learning and in adult basic education. It's the same issue for adults. Adults who come to programs and study four hours a week in class are not going to make much progress. In fact, there is some evidence that they're not going to make enough progress to really show significant gains. If we could increase that intensity to six, eight, ten, maybe even twelve hours a week, people are going to make faster progress. Adults are going to learn faster. We have evidence and research to show that. John Cummings [Phonetic], John? Are you still here? John can point to that.

So how can we do that? What are some of the ways that we can achieve that challenge? And we didn't get a chance to talk about all of the ways. But one of them that we looked at


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briefly is the opportunity to provide blended learning; that is face to face learning and online learning that are connected. So that somebody who comes to class for four hours a week is also learning on line and that what they're learning online is directly connected to the instruction that's taking place in class.

The last issue that we talked about and Marty Finsterbush [phonetic] who is the Executive Director of Value, which is the national adult learner organization, raised this issue; is that many adult learners are now expressing concern that they're being over tested. That they're being tested too early when they come to programs, that that's the first thing that happens, before they're even asked why they're in the program or what they want to achieve in the program; that they're tested. And there are many reasons why we shouldn't be doing that.

That's one. Which is that we're discouraging adult learners. The second is Tom Stitch [Phonetic], researcher Tom Stitch just pointed this out years ago; which is that we're getting actually falsely lower scores when we test as soon as people come into programs. So this is something that we need to pay a lot of attention to.

A last issue that Marty raised in this context is that very often the assessments that we're giving, the pretests that we're giving learners are not a benefit to them. They don't see the results. They don't see how it's connected to what they came to the program to do. It's beneficial for funders, it may be beneficial to programs if they use that data for program improvement. But it's not often shared with adult learners in a way that makes sense to them so that they can see where they are and how that connects to their goals.

MS. REDDY: Remaining two tables? Three tables? Two?

MR. GUERRIERE: We didn't follow the questions very well. And that's because a lot of people here have a lot of good information that we want to share and we haven't had time to share that information. It also means that people are trying to understand each other better. And so the bottom line, I guess for number four is we really hope that NIFL can help us continue this conversation. Because we'd like to do this every month, would you say? Yes.


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When I took a train to come down here, I asked the people who sat next to me what community literacy was. And they all say the literacy level of the community. So I think we have a challenge here when you're measuring for performance or success, we have to be talking the same language. And I think that's what's happened. That's the reason why we didn't really answer all the questions, because we're all trying to understand each other because all the people at our table are not from the same place.

But we talked about a lot of the stuff that'd been talked about today, qualitative data vs. quantitative data and how we have to; we all know that we can measure success in reading, but what does that really mean? And Petrice talked a lot about that. In the community, we have at least in Connecticut you can put down, and the National Reporting Service data; you know, people who, who got a drivers license and stuff; other, the other category. But that's part of the challenge. The other part is to disaggregate the data, would be a message that we talked a lot about in our group; which is when you're looking at a community and I'm sure it's the same in your communities as well, we have the Connecticut mastery test. And every city is measured on how well it's doing. And obviously with No Child Left Behind. But obviously for the adult learners as well, we have data. And I think Harry pointed that out. If you can break it up at the people who are possibly come in scoring lower and what percentage increase you have. But anybody here from Illinois?

Okay, good. When I was at the DePaul University Center for Urban Education I believe the state of Illinois was really promoting instead of the state or cities looking at you know, all third graders what their scores were, we're looking at some of the individuals. So taking a look at the individuals and how much they improved over time. This is particularly important in urban areas and I guess other areas as well. I don't know.

But in some of the schools we work with they have a mobility rate of 200, 300% so that the third graders that are in one classroom are not the same ones that are there at the end of the school year. So in a lot of the urban areas we're talking about, Hartford had 180,000 people, we're down to 125,000 because when you do make it, you move out of Hartford. And so the city is constantly left with this


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concentration of poor people. So disaggregate the data I think was one of the main messages we had.

And group, any other solutions that we came up with? No? I think the other message would be just what I said at the beginning. We have to continue the conversation. We have to understand each other better. We talked, Petrice talked about this and we're doing it in Hartford as well. We're focusing on workforce literacy, because that's also related to reducing the poverty and so that the whole business community needs to understand the conversations that we're having as well. And so, we all need to talk more.

MS. REDDY: I'm only letting Meg talk if she swears that she's not giving the Institute any more assignments.

MEG: I think I actually have to echo Carl a little bit that we had some really interesting ideas at our table and realized that there's a lot of wealth of information in this room of things that a lot of us have tried and measurement both at the provider level and also at the coalition or intermediary level. And so we have an ask of NIFL. And what we thought would be a really great investment of your resources would be to really look at doing some more research and evaluation in what we are doing in our communities and what's been really successful in developing really effective performance measures, not only at the provider level, but also at the coalition level. Some of us had interesting ways to quantify things and we think that if we could kind of gather all of those ideas and put them together into one resource, it would be really useful, not just for the short term goals but also more longer term community change and system-level change.

MS. REDDY: I think everybody should hire Harry Hatry. That's my answer. So I think we've come to the wrap up. And Jay Connor is going to do it. And I'm going to tell you some things about him just as soon as I can get my little cheat sheet up here.

Jay is the founder and the CEO of the Collaboratory for Community Support and an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan. He has extensive leadership experience in the business, non-profit and public policy arenas. From his work with leaders of diverse constituencies in communities across America, Jay has seen that in order to be effective, emerging community leaders must be comfortable at the intersection not


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only of organizations and cultures, but also at the intersection of the non-profit business and government sectors. This is a key message of his book, published in Spring 2003 by Wilder Press called Community Visions, Community Solutions: Grant-making for Comprehensive Impact. Before founding the Collaboratory, Jay was the president and CEO of Non-Profit Enterprise at Work and Non-Profit Management Support Organization in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has written for the National Civic Review, Foundation News and Commentary, Board member PNN online, Non-Profit World and various academic journals. So here's the wrap up guy.

DR. JAY CONNORS: Hello. It's a pleasure to be here, if I can figure out how to, oh, wait a second. There we go. Great.

I want to thank Lynn first of all for that introduction. I'm going to remind my office just to send a couple sentences next time, not the whole thing. Because now my twenty minutes starts now. Okay, good

When Lynn and Tanya and I were talking about the wrap up today, I was kind of given a challenge in terms of, try to weave all of the themes, Jay, that you hear throughout the day together with some of the context of the work that you do looking across organizations, across systems and to community solutions.

And so a month ago, when we had that conversation, I said, oh, super. This is going to be fun. As this weekend approached, I was like, wait a second. I'm not at all sure what the themes are going to be as we come out from today's session. But let me just share with you what a pleasure it's been to be here today, because the themes, the discussions that we have here about how to approach community literacy, are exactly the themes that we see across different community systems in terms of how to get to solutions. How can we, as communities, do a much better job in the work that we're about in our communities.

And so the first question really is why community literacy? And I think several of us, and I know the steering committee that I participated in, were asking the question, is community really the envelope if you will or the repository where all of these transactions, all of these activities across the age span take place? Is that our definition of


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community, is that why we're thinking of community literacy from a provider or a research vantage point?

And I think actually what we've seen in our work and what we've certainly heard today is that why community literacy is that community is where the solutions are. As we're understanding and we've heard it from the very beginning when Edith was talking about breaking down those barriers, breaking down those silos; is that we've heard it that the only way really to get to that sustainable change is how we can get the entire community somehow on that same page with us.

And that was question that I started asking maybe about ten, fifteen years ago, is how do communities get to solutions? And the context or the reason why I asked that question is we did a project with a non-profit management support organization, which provided consulting, training, board building, grant-making for non-profit organizations, community-based organizations, school systems, governmental organizations, in Southeast Michigan. And after about three years we were able to go and take a look at the success of those individual organizations. And frankly, on almost any one of our measures, and Harry, we had some fairly good data points that we were looking at; on almost any one of those measures, those individual organizations were much better off after that two or three year period.

The dilemma is as we ask the next question, is the communities where those organizations work, those communities where those organizations deliver services, are they markedly better off? And the answer was no. Is that; so we were able to see that no matter how strong individual organizations become, that doesn't mean that the communities get to solutions, that the communities get to outcomes.

And so that forced us to ask the next question, and Lynn mentioned it and I know Doug has referred to it before. We wrote the book after we looked at how do communities become successful across North America. And the book is Community Visions, Community Solutions. And I'm going to use our lessons learned there as kind of the template, if you will, for weaving today's themes in place.

But I think the largest lesson from that book; I'm going to steal a quote from Francis Ford Coppola. Do we know who


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Francis Ford Coppola is? A director of the Godfather series, Apocalypse Now? Some people would argue that Coppola is perhaps the best and maybe the worst director out of Hollywood. And even it's implicit in this question asked him that a journalist asked him. Francis, what's the difference between making a good movie and making a bad movie? And Coppola waited for a second. And the journalist was asking, will you want to get DeNiro in a sequel or something like that. But what Coppola said had nothing to do in terms of the right actors or the right script or based on the right book. He said, "When we make a good movie, everyone is making the same movie."

And that in essence is what we've seen around our communities that are able to get to successful solutions. There's a way that those communities are able to grapple with how is it that all the different activities that we do actually come together to form a solution, to form a movie, if you will, that we're trying to make in those communities?

And I think we heard it, whether it was in Buffalo or from Hartford or certainly from New Orleans and Los Angeles this afternoon; is that one of those keys was how do we get on that same page? How do we make that same move? And if making the same movie seems somewhat intuitive, we also heard from Edith and other, why it's so difficult in our communities to do that. Because in almost every single one of our communities across North America, is we've organized our work very much in a silo mentality, very fragmented. One agency provides a grant requirement and then another agency might ask for something different or slightly different that would cover a different age group. We look at that silo map that we have up there and there's really three different lines to look at.

The top line are the different funding sources. And a typical agency working in the community on literacy will probably have access to thirty-four different funders. Oftentimes those funders will have a different requirement in terms of what the fiscal year is, a different requirement in terms of what their definition of a child is. As David was mentioning, a different demographic in terms of our target audience is k-12 or we're looking at adult learners. And how we define ourselves as a funder oftentimes comes from the fragment that we're focused on as opposed to the outcome that we'd like to see occur within our communities.


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And rarely do these funders ever talk to each other. Sometimes we're fortunate to have a session like we have today where a number of funders come to the same place. But that's more unusual than usual. Oftentimes the funders are very much in their silos saying, you agencies and organizations, communities; and this is government as well as corporate funders, bring us your requests and we'll give you the dollars that we feel is right. As opposed to what are we trying to accomplish in the communities? And the agencies, the organizations, the schools respond in the way of where those resources come from. And they often and rarely talk to each other.

And what that leaves is that the community is very much, as we've heard from almost every one of our speakers today, that the community is in the shadow of that work. It isn't the driving force for that work that we're trying to accomplish.

One example and it's outside of literacy that I want to share with you that I think really drives this point home is that; and they use this term in Michigan in about the 1990s. Michael, you're from Michigan, maybe you'll remember this. Is that if you were a dysfunctional family in the state of Michigan in the 1990s it was likely you'd be interviewed four to seven different times in that calendar year. Now if you weren't dysfunctional at the beginning of the year, you certainly were by the end. By why did we interview them those many times? We interviewed them those many times because we then owned the name and that's how we were able to get the grants dollars. That's how the revenue would flow.

A theme that has been weaved in throughout the day is data, data management; how do we get that data? How do we compile the data? Well if the funders still drive resources to community organizations, simply by owning the data, it's going to be very difficult for us to think about bringing that data together and combing that data. So there has to be that discussion at the funders in terms of how to focus on funding the solution and not funding the fragment.

Again, very quickly. The problems with the silos, and we've talked about it implicitly and explicitly today, is that they clearly leave a very fragmented map. And we know within our communities all the different organizations, daycare providers, ESL program providers, workforce programs, that oftentimes don't communicate or don't even see themselves as


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doing the same thing. And that, fundamentally, dissipates our leverage, our resources, the dollars that we have. I think Carl mentioned, it's not a question of the dollars, it's a question of how we apply those dollars. And I think we also have a sense that with those fragmented services, the community doesn't own literacy. We've left it that we, as program providers or as academics doing research or as agencies, literacy is our problem. But no, literacy can only be solved in the community and the community understanding that literacy is itself, just like on the train conversation that Carl mentioned on the way down here; is communities need to see and do see their literacy rate as a reflection of themselves.

And we have to be out of that old social contract that said for we as agencies or organizations that you stay at arm's length, community, give us your tax dollars or your donations and we'll fix the problem. We can't fix the problem, because the problem exists in the community. We can be shepherds or servants to getting to that solution, but we can't fix the problem because the problem is how we as communities interact with each other.

And again, by not having a focus in terms of the whole and seeing the fragments, we certainly have a lack of clarity about what the outcome is. What is it that we're trying to do? What is that same movie that we're trying to accomplish within our communities? And think the worst part of it form all of us is that it is tremendously deceptive. Because there are good people doing good things and we haven't moved the needle. And in many cases we're seeing the results less than the results we saw five, ten, fifteen years ago. Because we aren't talking about and applying our resources to get to that solution.

Let me just give you one map. There were folks here that were from Rochester, is that Rochester, New York? Good. Because this is a slide from Rochester, Minnesota. And I was afraid. This is the slide for Rochester, Minnesota's early childhood development system.

This is a system that creates boxes out of those funding silos. And if the boxes don't work well enough, they'll apply new dollars to build arrows. The question that I think we have to ask each one of ourselves is if all of our children succeeding when they walk into that kindergarten


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door is our goal, is our making the same movie, would we ever create a system that looked like that?

So as we have the discussions today, we have to fundamentally ask ourselves is do we want to rearrange a box on that deck of the Titanic, or do we want to fundamentally make sure that the work that we're doing has the impact that changes the conditions within our communities. Because right now a lot of time is spent in terms of looking at is my box getting funded or is this the right arrow to put in? And is that getting our children successful coming into Kindergarten?

I'm going to give you a real quick slide. And Michael before mentioned there isn't enough quantitative work in this field. There really is, we just don't always put it under the umbrella of community literacy. And I think we need to begin to understand that what NIFL has done today probably more important than anything else, is put a stake in the ground about community literacy. Put a stake in the ground in that systemic response, to we as communities, are going to do the work that we need to do to get better solutions and better outcomes in our literacy.

What this map is is a map of every single box, every single reference on this page, is statistically significant. In other words, you can't pull anything away and get to that top box, which is children's literacy achievement. And this is a longitudinal study done with 775 families, published in 2005, The Journal of Ed Psych. And it talked about the fact that every single one of these boxes are required to get to children's literacy achievement. What's so interesting is the two boxes on your left is the traditional bricks and mortar of the school. It's the school teaching, it's the quality of teachers. All of the other boxes take place in the community. Everything else that drives us to that childhood achievement takes place in the community.

And let me put some weights on these results. And if I talk about the ability to get children's literacy achievement and the results that they were looking at was in Illinois, it's the third grade reading test, and it was performance on the third grade reading test. And this was the driver that they were trying to move and they were trying to change. And that they were able to see that by the time that child walked into the Kindergarten door, they could predict upwards of a 60 to


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70% confidence level whether that child was going to be successful at that third grade reading rate.

Again, it drives us to the fact that what takes place in that entire community is how we are able to move that system. And so David's point, I think earlier, of making the split between k-12 and adult, cold be absolutely right in terms of if we think about how do we apply best techniques or best practices. But what this slide says, and other work that we've seen in our communities, is truly to get to that move, we have to engage the entire community. We have to engage community across the systems involved.

When we were making a presentation in Decatur, Illinois, Caterpillar looked at this slide and they said, finally, we know what we can do in our workforce training to help change the literacy rates in the entire community. Because they looked at this slide and they saw, my god, parent education, parent involvement, given parents the kinds of tools to be able to go back and read to their children, the time off to be able to participate in their programs was a powerful insight to them.

So again, if that entire system is the enterprise, the community through all of our work, through other community initiatives, through the schools, then what we need to do is understand that we as coalitions, we as practitioners, we as researchers need to be much more intentional about our collaborations. Are we simply collaborating with the usual suspects; collaborating with those that have been in coalitions with us? Or as Doug shared with us from Los Angeles, are we able to collaborate with those organizations that will get to the solution?

And so we define our collaboration by those organizations that have in their control and in their research, the solution. Daphne this morning mentioned in terms of the community supports of childcare, of transportation, of counseling. Well we need to be much more intentional, not hope that child care or counseling are involved, but say if in fact our belief is change state and literacy; we in our coalitions and our work need to say how do we engage the daycare providers? How do we engage childcare? How do we engage otherwise we're not going to be able to get the change that we're talking about.


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And this is the last slide, then I think I'm going to leave you as well as I think NIFL, because I think it helps define what are the opportunities for the Institute. And what we've seen when looking at community systems whether we're talking poverty reduction, economic development, healthcare, community literacy, teen pregnancy, is that if, in fact, communities are going to get to a change state, they need to address four fundamental things. And they need to address it from the point of view of how will the community provide this at the point of the solution. They need to think about resources going to the solution, not resources fragmented in that way.

And we talk about Cleveland, we've talked about Buffalo. I know Carl's trying to work with the Hartford Foundation and say, we need to have the foundations, the resources in the communities come to the outcomes, not broken down in the fragments. And we're seeing more and more communities doing that. We need to be able to make decision-making around what Harry referred to as those successful practices. If you don't know where you're going, much like that map that we showed you in terms of Rochester, almost any idea is going to be a good idea.

What we need to do is if we know where we're going, understand how we can strategically apply resources to get there. Because in the context of not knowing where you're going, courtesy will trump impact. You will be courteous and some people will get some dollars here because oh, they've been in the community for twenty-five years. Or other people get some dollars their because their friend is a friend on a board. We need to be able to drive how are we going to use our dollars to get to that change state.

The next one is the point about accountability and data to that change state. And I think we've certainly referenced that a lot today.

And the last point is really I think the comment that was on the train station, or on the train coming down with Carl; is that if the community sees you and the schools as charged with literacy and we're not succeeding, like Decatur, Illinois says their schools can never succeed; then you have one issue. If the community can say literacy is us, literacy is who we are and fundamentally is the key to being able to be our future, then the community owns the work that we're


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doing. And so it takes us out of the situation of collaborating and competing, takes us out of the situation of rolling the boulder up the hill, puts us in the position as the servants to the community to get to this community solution. Thank you very much.

MS. REDDY: Are there any questions for Jay or final thoughts?

DR. CONNORS: I didn't even know we had time.

MS. REDDY: Oh yeah. Final thoughts? Not necessarily even a question, just comments? Jeff? That wasn't.

FEMALE VOICE: [Unintelligible]

DR. CONNORS: We'll have it on the NIFL.

MS. REDDY: Yes. Actually perfect segue.

DR. CONNORS: I was actually building it as the day went on.

DR. CONNORS: Yes. This was a real-time synthesis of what was heard, so we really owe Jay a special debt of gratitude, because that's sort of hard to do as it's happening. I'll give you this, the URL for where all the materials that you've seen today can be found and I'll think we'll be consulting with our steering group and others to add additional information. Gosh, I'm sorry. It's a long URL but we will e-mail it to you. But if you're up for a long URL, it's www.nifl.gov/community/communtiyliteracy.html . So nifl.gov/; oh. Nifl.gov/nifl/community/communityliteracy.

MALE VOICE: That's two NIFLs?

MS. REDDY: Yes. NIFL.gov; I missed that the first time. NIFL.gov/NIFL/community/communityliteracy.html. And we'll e-mail it.

And I'm really just going to sort of restrict my wrap up comments in part because I guess I'm not going to have a voice, to saying thank you so much for coming. I'd like to thank all our steering committee members again, our presenters, all of you for your thoughts and for your commitment for the work that you do. I think we're going to; you know we've heard a lot of interesting possibilities for next steps for us. And so I think we're going to go back to the office and kind of think things over. We'll be working with Michael I think to publish some sort of products from


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http://www.nifl.gov/community/communtiyliteracy.html

this meeting in the next issue or the very next; the spring issue of the, of his journal. And do you want to, Michael, can I put in a plug for you? Do you have a date for your conference?

MR. MOORE: I believe it's next summer it will be at Temple University.

MS. REDDY: In summer of 2008, stay tuned for a conference sponsored by Michael.

MR. MOORE: And Eli Goldblatt [Phonetic] who teaches at [Unintelligible].

MS. REDDY: Okay. At Temple in Philadelphia. But in the meantime, too, we would encourage you; I would encourage you to e-mail Tanya with your thoughts. And that's [email protected] . But no, we mean to be in touch with you. If you have further thoughts, I know this has been a lot of information to take in and I certainly feel it's been a lot of information to take in. And my guess is maybe in a few days we'll all have you know, some further thoughts. So please share them with us. And we know, we know who you are now.

I would like to say, David, do you have a date for the Community Literacy—

DAVID: Within the next two to three months.

MS. REDDY: So the way you subscribe and you can either subscribe just for this particular conversation if you don't want to be on a discussion list all the time, or you can not subscribe at all and come back later and look at the archive version of the discussion, but if you go to nifl.gov. you'll find your way to, I think it's in the upper right hand corner; a discussion list button. And then you can sort of follow the instructions for signing up for the discussion list.

And if we're really on our game we'll have clips, maybe David will be using clips from the presenters.

DAVID: It could be.

MS. REDDY: It could be.

DAVID: And there's a flyer in your packet that gives you some information about subscribing to—


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MS. REDDY: [Interposing] Oh right.

DAVID: To all the discussion lists, including [Unintelligible].

MS. REDDY: Thank you. Any final thoughts, anyone? Oh, sorry.

MALE VOICE: I'm always in the light here. I just want to give a plug for the Value conference, which is going to be in Hartford this year. So that's July 5 th through 7 th . So it's about empowering adult learners, if you want to find out more about that, talk to Marty.

MS. REDDY: And I think we'll put up contact information also for presenters and steering committee, so you guys are on the hook too. So if you think of a follow up question for our group here, I'm sure they'd be happy to, you know, make suggestions or kind of engage in conversation with you.

So thanks so much, it's been a long day. You've hung in there. Oops. Oh right, and I almost forgot. Is anybody going to BWI?

MALE VOICE: Yes.

MS. REDDY: And Jay, do you guys all want to?

DR. CONNORS: Sure. I was just [Unintelligible] but yes.

MS. REDDY: That was; it's Helene. Helene and Jean from Rochester. Okay. Thanks everybody. Have a good night.

[Crosstalk]

[END TRANSCRIPT]


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Documents

UBIQUS Document - LINCS | Adult Education and Literacylincs.ed.gov/webcasts/com-lit/NIFL_CLTranscrip.doc · Web viewOnline, you can go to theliteracynetwork.org and punch in your