Semiliterate & Illiterate High School Graduates

The scope of the problem is provided in a study conducted by Vasu and Frazier who reported that in an employer evaluation (N=1,150 employers) of the educational skills of thousands of diverse employees, only 53.9 percent of high school graduates have were found to have adequate reading skills. Other skills were reported to be inadequate: writing (51.8 percent), math (48.2 percent), thinking (40 percent), and communications (51.2 percent).

Defining adult literacy as the possession of such skills as reading, writing, speaking, and computing necessary to function as individuals, family and community members, citizens, and consumers and workers in society, the Wisconsin State Board of Vocational, Technical and Adult Education has attributed the problem to the following factors:

(1) the public school dropout rate;

(2) the continuing immigration of persons at the functionally illiterate level;

(3) the gradual erosion of basic skills levels through lack of application; and

(4) the increasing demand for higher-level basic skills. The purpose of this paper was to examine a representative sampling of the existing literature on the problem of illiterate p

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ased on the number of individuals who were welfare recipients and ABE/GED students simultaneously and who gained employment during the year following program completion. The Department of Education administered the state allocation with grants to local projects being awarded on the basis of potential (1) reduction or prevention of welfare payments, (2) improvement of the labor pool and diversification of the economic base, and (3) integration of other funds and services. Another sociological approach to handling the problem of public school graduates being illiterate has been to utilize sociological institutions other than that of the education system persay; for example, the library. In this regard, the New York Business Council for Effective Literacy has published a report which states that public libraries are uniquely positioned to assist the 72 million Americans who, by virtue of being illiterate or marginally literate, are not ordinarily library users. The Council reports that a formal link between libraries and literacy can be traced back to the 1920s when the American Library Association (ALA) established its Commission on Library and Adult Education. This action was based on the proposition that education is a li
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2155
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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