Basic Skills Forum

Leveling The Playing Field

By John Tashima

This paper outlines the need for basic skills instruction, arguing that such instruction is necessary to meet the needs of a continuously evolving economy and the demands that such an economy makes on its workers. What is most convincing and interesting about this paper is how it gets into the specifics of these needs and demands.

There are three groups of students in need of basic skills instruction: students who lack sufficient English speaking skills, students with good English skills but without a high school diploma, and students with a high school diploma but who lack sufficient basic skills for the workplace. Basic skills allows these students a clear path to a high level of literacy. A significant portion of our workforce in the coming years will come from the immigrant population; by incorporating effective basic skills instruction, we can ensure that this population remains a valuable resource for our growing economy.

What constitutes basic skills has changed over time based upon the evolving nature of the economy. For example, in the past, a living wage could be earned with low levels of education because many of the workers were akin to artisans, learning their trades in hands-on apprenticeships. Now, instead of being able to evaluate a system by listening to the machines and feeling the cloth that comes out of them, workers need the ability to monitor computer systems that perform quality control. Workers need to be able to read manuals and work from them, perform simple calculations and adapt to changing situations.

In response to these changes, the Department of Labor Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) has expanded the definition of basic skills. This definition has been expanded to include the ability to:

- Read at the ninth-grade level or higher
- Use math at the ninth-grade level or higher
- Solve semistructured problems when hypotheses must be formed and tested
- Work in groups with coworkers from different backgrounds
- Communicate effectively, both orally and in writing
- Use personal computers to carry out simple tasks like word processing (13)

The connection between literacy and oral language skills is another reason to teach basic skills. Speakers with higher levels of literacy tend to “provide more of the details that a listener needs to fully understand a complicated situation” (12). Highly literate speakers tend to be able to use language more effectively to describe what can’t be directly experienced. This particular use of language is valuable in the modern workplace, where the discourse is “more like the oral discourse in school, a discourse that is modeled on writing” (13).

Competence in basic skills is also important to an individual’s non-working life. The reality of everyday life is more complicated than in the past; the average person needs to monitor electronic finances, retirement plans and health plans in a way that was unheard of a generation ago. A parent’s level of literacy also has a marked effect on the child’s ability to read. Educated parents are far more likely to provide their children with support (such as reading to them, teaching letters, visiting a library) in the crucial first three grades. Literate parents create an environment in which reading is seen as natural and important and, by extension, create a view of school as a “familiar and friendly environment” (16). This leads to what is called the “Matthew effect,” which refers to the “rich get richer and the poor get poorer” idea in the New Testament book of Matthew. If we don’t intervene and see to it that the entire population reaches a certain level of basic skills competence, we risk creating an underclass whose lack of skills leaves it “beyond the reach of opportunity and on the margins of civic and social life” (24).

Finally, basic skills is important because it will help create the informed, politically active population that is necessary for a successful democracy.

Comings, John; Reder, Stephen and Andrew Sum. “Building a Level Playing Field: The Need To Expand and Improve the National and State Adult Education and Literacy Systems.” NCSALL Occasional Paper.
2001.

http://eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/19/82/3c.pdf