Illiteracy unseen in communities

Illiterate adults affect communities both socially and economically

Imagine being a mom who has to rely on public transportation to get a sick child to the doctor’s office but can’t read a bus schedule or tell time. Imagine being worried about giving a child the wrong dosage of medication because you can’t read the label.

This is what is known as functional illiteracy and it is a daily reality for many.

Functional illiteracy, according to Kent State

University, is defined as reading between a fourthgrade and sixth-grade level.

Literacy is a broad term, says Katie Kucera, communications directors for Seeds of Literacy, an adult literacy program in Cleveland. Most people think it means reading or writing, but, it’s also about numbers and the ability to process numbers and the ability to analyze and problem solve.

“There is not a lot of information out there,” on illiteracy, said Jo Steigerwald, development director at Seeds of Literacy. ”It’s an invisible thing that exists and it shouldn’t.”

According to the Ohio Literacy Resource Center, an estimated 44 million people in the United States are unable to fill out an application, read a food label or read a simple story to a child.

Seeds of Literacy echoes those statistics, reporting that 66 percent of Clevelanders are functionally illiterate resulting in difficulty understanding bus schedules, utility bills or instructions from a doctor.

The ASPIRE program — formerly known as ABLE — is an adult education program that works with adults on learning basic math and reading skills and obtaining a GED. It is administered by the Ohio Department of Higher Education with a program at Auburn Career Center that serves about 500 adults a year in Lake and Geauga counties. It also works with inmates at the Lake County Jail, Geauga County Safety Center and NEOCAP.

The majority of people incarcerated have low literacy skills, according to the Ohio Literacy Resource Center.

There is a direct correlation between illiteracy and crime, Kucera says.

Adult illiteracy can impact individuals not only on a social and economic level. It can affect their health.

“Adults with low literacy skills have more medication errors, longer hospital stays, healthcare cost that are four times higher and increased mortality rates,” according to Seeds of Literacy.

Additionally more than half of adults can’t use a BMI graph to find healthy weight, understand a vaccination chart or read a drug label.

Seeds of Literacy also reports that 87 percent of the job openings posted on OhioMeansJobs.com are closed to people without a high school diploma.

This drastically decreases the chances of those who are functionally illiterate or lack a high school education of finding a job that will enable them to support themselves.

“Having increased literacy skills helps achieve independence,” Kucera said.

“In Ohio, 24 percent of all people over the age of 18 do not have their high school diplomas (Ohio’s Future at Work). And according to the estimates by the U.S. Department of Labor, literacy problems cost the U.S. businesses about $225 billion a year in lost productivity. These costs result from employee mistakes, injuries, absenteeism, tardiness, missed opportunities, and other problems associated with low literacy,” the Ohio Literacy Resource Center reported.

Illiteracy can span generations.

One of the biggest contributing factors to a child’s literacy is their mother’s literacy skills, according to Kucera. A mother who cannot read or solve simple math problems is unable to help her child succeed academically. The National Commission on Adult Literacy reported in 2008, that the United States is the only country among 20 free-market countries whose current generation is less educated than the previous one.

Many of these numbers could be under reported as there is no research to measure the true scope of illiteracy in United States.

The most recent research was conducted in the late 1990s and 2003.

Lack of funding has

“In our culture there is shame about not being literate and not completing school. And if it’s shameful you are not going to talk about it and you’re likely not going to admit to a researcher that you can’t read.” — Jo Steigerwald, development director at Seeds of Literacy

been a major factor when it comes to literacy studies, according to Kucera.

The National Literacy Standards Organization no longer exists. The federal funding to it was cut in the 1990s and never replaced, said Steigerwald.

Without the studies and with the stigma of shame attached to illiteracy, people simply don’t know about the issue, Steigerwald said. “With adult literacy there is not an immediate impact. There is no measure you can calculate quickly and that makes it difficult to get funding,” Kucera said.

Steigerwald notes that it comes down to trying to do research with a population that, for the most part, is under the radar.

“Adults in poverty aren’t considered in a lot of places. They don’t contribute to the marketplace and don’t often vote,” Steigerwald said. “In our culture there is shame about not being literate and not completing school. And if it’s shameful you are not going to talk about it and you’re likely not going to admit to a researcher that you can’t read.”

Literacy is a complicated issue, and we don’t want to think that illiteracy exist, according to Steigerwald.

“It infiltrates all aspects of our lives: health problems, children not doing well in school, it’s all pervasive,” Steigerwald said. “It all hangs on a lot of policy issues that we need to change on a bigger level.”