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To: marcher who wrote (45776)	12/16/2005 11:40:35 AM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

i>At this point, there appears to be no significant decline in math or literacy skills due to public education. I speculated that TV had a big role. I made no comments about education, public or private. I don't know about you, but I find it difficult to impossible to read in a house where I can't escape from the sound of a TV. I imagine that most children learning to read and trying to study have the same difficulty. What this country faces is a student population that brings to school more needs--needs related to economic disadvantage, ethnic difference, acculturation, and limited English proficiency. I grew up in an impoverished household but we made good use of the library; intellectual topics were discussed at the dinner table. My father and mother came from even more impoverished families than mine. My paternal grandparents never learned English and lived in a Jersey City slum their whole lives. Back when my father was a boy, Jersey City actually had several public schools which taught in a language other than English so please don't cite "acculturation" as if it is something new! My mother's parents lost their Missouri farm in the Depression. Both her parents died early deaths after a very hard life, one was murdered and the other died from tuberculosis. Even though neither of my parents finished above the eighth grade and had everything working against them (all those things you cited as the current obstacles) they were both very well read. My father taught himself all the math and science disciplines using his public library card. I don't ever remember my mother without a book. A prime factor in pointing to the TV as a likely culprit in the decline in literacy is because I had a first hand experience that convinced me. Our TV broke when I was seven. My father decided we could do without one even though he was a TV repairman and could fix it. My sisters and I were bitter about having our favorite TV shows taken away from us, but in retrospect it was a good move on his part because that was the year I learned to love to read. At the end of a year of being TV-less I was tackling books that were several grade levels above my grade. Although literacy has improved in developed countries (while falling over all in the world due to growth in population in developing countries) over the past ten years, there is a large window in there of adults born after the TV became a household fixture that do not possess the basic reading skills they need. On Page 5, table 2 look at the high percentage of adults who lack basic prose skills between 25-39 in 2003: nces.ed.gov