Libraries In The NEWS!!!

• 2008 Annual Conference Guest Speaker: Jonathan Mooney

  author of The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal - Holt, 2007

  Labeled "dyslexic and profoundly learning disabled with attention and behavior problems," Jonathan Mooney was a short bus rider. Ultimately, Mooney surprised skeptics by graduating with honors from Brown University. But he could never escape his past, so he bought his own short bus and set out cross-country, looking for kids who had dreamed up magical, beautiful ways to overcome the obstacles that separated them from the so-called normal world.

  Send a comment to Jonathan  mailto: jon@jonathanmooney.com

  If you were unable to attend, you can watch a video of a conversation on NewsRap with Barry Gordon (Nov 7, 2007) - 2 parts @ http://www.newsraparchives.com/nr071107a.html

  
   

• John Corcoran

  Retired Teacher Reveals He Was Illiterate Until Age 48
  San Diego ABC 10: Feb 11, 2008 by Charisse Yu

  

  Local Illiterate Teacher
   

  • Video: Retired Teacher Reveals Illiteracy
  • Video: Former Students Rave About Teacher
  • Link: John Corcoran Foundation

   

   

• Hemet Library Raises Funds for Literacy

  Some came in strollers, some in wheelchairs and many in sneakers to participate in the second annual Walk-A-Mile for Literacy on Saturday. (Press-Enterprise)

  Download story podcast

   

• KBIG-FM pod cast of Marcia Tungate's half-hour interview.
  
    
  To download the podcast, right-click "Listen" and select "Save As" from the menu.
  
   

• Huntington Beach  Video

• Reach Higher, America:
  Overcoming Crisis in the U.S. Workforce is the final report of the National Commission on Adult Literacy
  
  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
  
  Education drives the economy. Almost a decade into the 21st Century, America faces a choice: We can invest in the basic education and skills of our workforce and remain competitive in today’s global economy, or we can continue to overlook glaring evidence of a national crisis and move further down the path to decline.
  
  In Reach Higher, America, the National Commission on Adult Literacy presents powerful evidence that our failure to address America’s adult education and workforce skills needs is putting our country in great jeopardy and threatening our nation’s standard of living and economic viability. The Commission recommends immediate action to reverse the course we are on.
  
  It calls for strong, bold leadership from federal and state government, and it challenges business leaders, philanthropy, and the nonprofit sector to become part of the solution.
  
  FACING THE PRESENT
  
  America is losing its place as a world leader in education, and in fact is becoming less educated. Among the 30 OECD free-market countries, the U.S. is the only nation where young adults are less educated than the previous generation.
  
  And we are losing ground to other countries in educational attainment. More and more, the American economy requires that most workers have at least some postsecondary education or occupational training to be ready for current and future jobs in the global marketplace, yet we are moving further from that goal.
  
  By one set of measures, more than 88 million adults have at least one major educational barrier — no high school diploma, no college, or ESL language needs.
  
  With a current U.S. labor force of about 150 million (16 and older), a troubling number of prime working age adults likely will fall behind in their struggle to get higher wage jobs, or to qualify for the college courses or job training that will help them join or advance in jobs that pay a family-sustaining wage.
  
  READ ON
  
   

• Value of Volunteer Time
  
  The estimated dollar value of volunteer time for 2007: is $19.51 per hour.
  * California: $ 21.97
  
  The estimate helps acknowledge the millions of individuals who dedicate their time, talents, and energy to making a difference. Charitable organizations can use this estimate to quantify the enormous value volunteers provide.
  
  Also has Chart for:
  1) Dollar Value of a Volunteer Hour: 1980  2007
  
  2) Dollar Value of a Volunteer Hour, by State: 2006 *
  Please note that 2006 is the latest year for which state-by-state numbers are available. There is a lag of almost one year in the government's release of state level data which explains why the state volunteering values are one year behind the national value."
  
  Notes: The value of volunteer time is based on the average hourly earnings of all production and nonsupervisory workers on private nonfarm payrolls (as determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics). Independent Sector takes this figure and increases it by 12 percent to estimate for fringe benefits.
  
  Charitable organizations most frequently use the value of volunteer time for recognition events or communications to show the amount of community support an organization receives from its volunteers.
  
  READ ON
  
   

• Ending All Literary Crises
  
  Stephen Krashen
  Language: May 2008, p 20
  
  Stephen Krashen presents:
     some very good news about childrens literature
     some very bad news about access to books
     and a solution to end all literacy crises
  
  READ ON
  
   

• Matching Styles to Learners
  
  Rita Dunn, Yvonne Pratt-Johnson, Andrea Honigsfield
  Language: May 2008, p 28
  
  Learning styles based instructional approaches to integrate English learners
  in instructional activities while exposing them to necessary academic language and
  content.
  
  READ ON
  
   

• Word Frequency Lists Tell Us Who We Are
  
  Richard Lederer
  Jewish World Review: March 15, 2007
  
  For those who think that our civilization is obsessed with time, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary recently added support to the theory by announcing that the word time is the most often used noun in the English language. The dictionary relied on the Oxford English Corpus  a research project into English in the 21st century  to come up with the lists.
  
  The Oxford English Corpus gives us the fullest, most accurate picture of the language today. It represents all types of English, from literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines to the language of chatrooms, emails and weblogs. And, as English is a global language, used by an estimated one third of the world's population, the Oxford Corpus contains language from all parts of the world  not only from the UK and the United States, but also from Australia, the Caribbean, Canada, India, Singapore and South Africa. It is the largest English corpus of its type  the most representative slice of the English language available.
  
  According to the Corpus, the is the most commonly used word overall, followed by be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, and I. Typical of such frequency lists, the most used words are hard-working function words that hold sentences together. The study also reveals that these ten words and their variations account for 25% of all written content.
  
  These top ten are all single-syllable words. In fact, the 60 most frequently used words on the list are monosyllabic, as are 94 of the first one hundred. This concision and simplicity are the heart and soul of our language, just as the Anglo-Saxon tongue is.
  
  READ ON

• Illiteracy in America

Click Here For The LiteracySpace Blog

ABCs World News with Charles Gibson featured a special series, Living in the Shadows: Illiteracy in America that examined the hidden phenomenon of illiteracy in this country:

Part 1: Feb 25; Part 2: Feb 26, 2008.

• Employee Literacy Assistance Act

  For many years, California employers have been guided by a little-known Labor Code section called the Employee Literacy Assistance Act.

  This act applies to every private California employer with 25 or more employees. It requires these employers to reasonably accommodate and assist any employee who reveals a problem with illiteracy and who requests employer assistance to enroll in an adult literacy education program, provided that this accommodation does not create an undue hardship for the employer.

  "Employer assistance" in this respect includes, but is not limited to, providing the employee with the locations of literacy education programs or arranging for a literacy education provider to visit the employee's workplace.

  The employer is not, however, required to provide time off with pay for an employee to enroll in or attend such a program.

  The Labor Code further provides that an employee who discloses a problem with illiteracy and who satisfactorily performs the job in spite of that problem may not be discharged because of his or her disclosure.

  As with all personal employee information, the employer must make reasonable efforts to safeguard the fact that the employee has revealed an illiteracy problem. READ MORE

  For more information on the legislative progress of The Striving Readers Act of 2007, currently in Committee, Click Here.
  
   

• Nation's Report Card

  NAEP: 2007 Trial Urban District Assessment

  Math scores continued to rise in the Los Angeles Unified School District, but reading is showing no improvement with fourth-graders ranking among the lowest among urban districts, according to a federal report released Nov 15.

  Every two years, 11 urban districts, including Los Angeles, test their fourth- and eighth-grade students in math and reading. The outcome of these tests, known as the Trial Urban District Assessment Results, are part of the National Assessment of Education Progress -- commonly called "the nation's report card."

  School district officials and administrators caution that comparing results can be tricky: California tends to include more special education and limited English-speaking students. Houston and Austin schools exclude most of those students. READ MORE
  
   

• Workplace Education - Policy Brief

  National Commission on Adult Literacy

  Current workplace education: funding, strategic plans, partnerships, outcomes, challenges and future options in 20 states:

  AK CA CT FL GA IN KY LA MA MN MS NY NC OH PA SC TX VA WV WI. READ MORE

   

• ESL

  Adult Literacy Education in Immigrant Communities: Identifying Policy and Program Priorities for Helping Newcomers Learn English.

  by the Asian American Justice Center. READ MORE

   

• Power of Talk

  For children between birth and age 3, the most powerful number is 30,000.

  That's the number of words children need to hear every day from their parents and caregivers to ensure optimal language development and academic success, according to the research of Drs. Betty Hart and Todd Risley and confirmed by Colorado-based Infoture, Inc., and their analysis of over 46,000 hours of speech data  the largest database of parent-child audio information in the world.

  Children who hear at least 30,000 words per day will thrive regardless of race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status. READ MORE

   

• Health Literacy - Economic Impact

  A new economic impact report, Low Health Literacy: Implications for National Health Policy, was released to the public on October 10, 2007. The lead author of the report was John Vernon, PhD, a health economist from University of Connecticut, Department of Finance.

  The report reveals that an initial approximation places the order of magnitude of the cost of health illiteracy to the US economy in the range of $106 billion to $238 billion annually. This represents between 7 percent and 17 percent of all personal healthcare expenditures. READ MORE

   

• The 4th Grade Slump: What's Wrong With The Brains of Slumping Children?
  by Gerald Coles  Educations Place for Debate

  Without a hint of irony, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, having first contributed mightily to the current creation of the 4th grade slump, the dramatic downhill slide of reading ability in many poor children around 4th grade, has now announced it is awarding $30 million to research centers to study the 4th grade slump! READ MORE READ MORE

   

• High Schools Producing the Most Dropouts Identified
  from John Hopkins report: "Locating the Dropout Crisis"

  Graduation is hardly a given for freshmen in 2,000 of America's public high schools, according to a new study by researchers at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at The Johns Hopkins University.

  Using data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics, researchers Robert Balfanz and Nettie Legters measured the "promoting power" of 10,000 regular and vocational high schools that enroll more than 300 students. They compared the number of freshmen in each school to the number of seniors there four years later.

  The results are troubling. Nearly half of the country's African American students and two out of five Latino students attend one of these "dropout factories," compared with just 11 percent of America's white students, the researchers said.

  The study found that the high schools producing the largest number of dropouts are concentrated in 50 large and medium-sized cites and 10 southern and southwestern states. The study presents tables showing the number and concentration of high schools with weak promoting power by state (broken down by locale and minority concentration) and for the nation's 100 largest cities. READ MORE

• Elderly - Health Literacy

  People over 65 who cant read or understand basic health info prescription bottles, appointment slips, or even their doctors, etc.- are more likely to die sooner than more literate seniors. "Inadequate health literacy is associated with less knowledge of chronic disease and worse self-management skills for patients with hypertension, diabetes mellitus, asthma and heart failure," according to a study at Northwestern University.

  From Scientific American: July 23, 2007
  Confused older patients die sooner
  By Ishani Ganguli

  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Understanding doctors' orders can be a matter of life or death for senior citizens: those who had trouble comprehending their physicians died sooner than their more savvy peers, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

  Medicare clients who were confused by pill bottles or appointment slips were 52 percent more likely to die over the six years of the study, especially from heart disease.

  "Patients with inadequate literacy know less about their diseases ... They are much more likely to be hospitalized," said Dr. David Baker of Northwestern University, who led the research.

  "It's not just higher hospital rates. It's significantly higher mortality."

  Baker and colleagues followed 3,260 Medicare patients 65 and older in four U.S. cities. To test the volunteers' so-called health literacy, which drops with age, they quizzed them on how well they understood prescription bottles, appointment slips and insurance forms. MORE
  
   

• Literacy: Not a Static Commodity

  Literacy skills show decline with age:

  Reading for pleasure helps fight drop
  Edmonton Journal: July 7, 2007 by Shannon Proudfoot,

  CanWest News Service

  Most Canadians, but especially those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, experience "significant" literacy loss as adults, a Statistics Canada report shows.

  The decline in skills begins at age 25, peaks around 40 and then tapers off around 55 years old. For example, adults aged 40 scored an average of 288 on a standardized literacy test in 1994, but in a second survey nine years later, that had dropped to 275 -- a loss of reading ability equal to half a year of schooling.

  Over their lifetime, the average Canadian will lose about one grade's worth of literacy skills, the report estimates.

  "Literacy is not a static commodity that is acquired in youth and maintained throughout life," it concludes.

  More education mitigates the decline, with university graduates scoring about 30 points higher than high school grads. People who didn't complete secondary school scored nearly 50 points lower than those who did, while employed Canadians scored 12 points higher than those not in the labour force.

  The reading people do at work helps, but not nearly as much as reading a variety of materials for pleasure at home.

  The data came from a series of international literacy surveys conducted in 1994 and 2003, with StatsCan gathering the Canadian component. This report focused on native-born Canadians, though other surveys show immigrants have significantly more literacy difficulties. More

  For Overview & Highlights:

  ABC Canada

  ALL Literacy Survey