Preserving Our Democracy through Literacy

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WERE Alexis de Tocqueville to make a return visit to this country, he wouldn't need to make extensive revisions to his 1835 commentary Democracy America. Everything is still in constant motion. Our voluntary and civic sectors remain expressions of habits of the heart. As a social philosopher, the young Frenchman recognized that Americans had developed a set of social mores that reflected enlightened self-interest. We hung together because, the long run, that's how the barns were built. Basically, this same kind of self-interest became the primary reason for the development of the common school: citizens needed to be convinced that paying taxes to educate someone else's children would benefit society as a whole -- and so would serve their own interests. De Tocqueville also predicted that, if the rugged individualism of the American character were not tempered by civic responsibility, we would become a lesser democracy the eyes of the world. Unfortunately, that decline may be playing out policies and attitudes toward American education today. The support for the privatization of education and for public financing through vouchers that can be used private schools are obvious examples of the erosion of a communal interest schooling. More subtle is some of the underlying opposition to the kind of accountability that seeks to educate all children well. Excuses easily overcome effort. People would rather complain about bad assessment systems than learn how to improve them. Most important, if all of us, especially those with the power and influence to make public education more efficient, don't demand higher common standards, we will all end up living a society with dwindling economic and political power. The truth is that, when we look at the data on adult literacy -- that most important aspect of a viable economy -- the U.S. is, as a nation, mediocre compared to other high-wealth countries. Moreover, the United States exhibits the greatest inequality between those who perform highest literacy and those who perform lowest. We spend more per capita on education than most high-wealth countries. We have the highest level of educational attainment. But our college graduates rank near the bottom literacy scores. We should be angry about this record. And we should also be very worried about the future, when our population will be composed of even larger percentages of people whom the education system has failed to make literate. This information about literacy comes from two surveys -- the National Adult Literacy Survey of the early 1990s and the International Adult Literacy Survey of the late 1990s. The Educational Testing Service analyzed the scores from these surveys on several dimensions, and its report, The Twin Challenges of Mediocrity and Inequality, foreshadows some ways the kind of decline that de Tocqueville foresaw. We are losing concern for others and accepting a permanent low-skills underclass. Let's consider the data only for young adults, aged 20 to 25, those closest to benefiting from the current education system. When compared to 14 high-wealth countries, our best performance prose literacy is found among those with 16 or more years of education. Yet our mean score ranks us only eighth of 14 countries on the prose items. For those with less than 12 years of schooling, our highest rank is 13th; for those with a high school education (12 years), we were last on all three forms of literacy -- prose, document, and quantitative. …