Transcription of Liza McFadden, Barbara Bush Literacy Foundation for the show Family Literacy #136
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour on podcast show number 136, Family Literacy, hearing for the first time on Sunday, April 20, 2014. As the original medical adviser to the Raising Readers Program and the mother of 3 children, I have long been a supporter of literacy efforts in Maine and across the country.
Today, we speak with Liza McFadden and Becky Dyer of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy which is 25 years old this year and Ms. Cassandra Grantham, Kathryn Lyndon Malone and Kathryn Anderson about Raising Readers which is in its 15th year. These organizations are doing impressive work and I hope that you’ll take a moment to listen to our conversations about the importance of literacy in our lives and how we can bring reading to our children and our families. Thank you so much for joining us.
Listeners of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast know that we are a huge proponents of literacy. I myself was with the Raising Readers literacy organization here in the State of Maine for 10 years and during the time, I actually intersected with one of our guest today. This guest is Becky Dyer. She is the research and development director at the Barbara Bush Foundation for literacy.
She’s worked in adult education for over 35 years. While working in the Maine Department of Education, she administered the Maine Family Literacy initiative in partnership with the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. Becky serves as the training and speaker for educational organizations across the country. She and her husband, Don live on Pequawket Lake, in Limington, Maine. Thanks for coming in today.
Becky: Thank you for having us.
Lisa: With Becky is Liza McFadden who’s the president of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. She’s known for her work in the development of creative and sustainable public, private partnerships that respond to critical community needs.
Liza was also appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate to serve on the National Institute for Literacy board. Liza is the mother of 2 middle school students and she has travelled from her home in Florida to join us today. Thank you.
Liza: Thank you for having us.
Lisa: Literacy, it’s something that’s getting a lot of players especially lately and as doctor who knows how important it is for patients to be able to read prescriptions and understand medical instructions, it’s not a hard sell for me. Is this always been something that you’ve usually convinced people is important?
Liza: I think part of the issue is that people really are unaware of how many people struggle with literacy and as you said how much it affects everything from your health to what you do with your life. Thirty million Americans read at less than a 5th grade reading level and that is having a devastating impact on everything.
The people who are in the lowest literacy level those reading less than a 5th grade level, 20% of them say they’re having problems today with their health in some way and that’s because a lot of times they’re not reading their prescriptions correctly. They don’t know how to use the asthma inhaler with their child correctly.
It goes and on and on. They’re maybe not eating correctly so the impact for literacy is extremely challenging because it’s … We call America’s biggest challenge of the Barbara Bush Foundation because people think that everything’s okay because they’re not seeing how much it impact and that was really how Barbara Bush in fact decided to focus on literacy. She said, “If I could focus on reading, it would be the way that we could help with some many other ills in today’s society.”
That was really the impetus 25 years ago for starting the Barbara Bush Foundation.
Becky: Yeah, I think reading illiteracy is really an epidemic and it’s hidden. There are so many people who can’t read, write and compute and we don’t think about how it impacts all of us. It increased our healthcare cost when they go to the emergency room. It increases our welfare cost when they aren’t able to get a job.
I think it’s huge for the state of Maine. There are 105,000 people in the state of Maine out of a population of just over a million who don’t read, write and compute well enough to function in today’s society.
Lisa: Talk to me about family literacy and the definition of family literacy. I know Becky, you have a background in adult education and Raising Readers is a program that you and I were both involved [inaudible 00:06:42] age 5. Why are the emphasis on the family?
Becky: Family Literacy has 3 pieces to it. We work with the parent who doesn’t have a GED or a high school diploma to improve their literacy skills so that they can lift this family out of poverty because if a parent … a child isn’t responsible for the family’s poverty, it’s the parent and until we raise the literacy levels of parents, children will continue to live in poverty.
We work with them to get their GED to prepare them for college and career. We work … The second piece of it is we work with children birth to age 8 but predominantly, we’re talking about birth to 5 to help them build the developmental skills they need to be ready to go school and to succeed in school.
Now, the third piece is the parent and child together time. We want parents to understand that they are their child’s first and most important teacher so we want them to experience activities that they can do with their child at home so we model them. We have them try them. We give them feedback. They give us feedback and then we tell them how they can extend that activity in their home.
Liza: Lisa, when the Barbara Bush Foundation was formed 25 years ago, people didn’t really realize how important learning was for infant and we know there’s this gap in particular between birth to age 3 where parents who have low literacy have a really hard time finding a place to, A, get an education for themselves and, B, have their child be educated at the same time.
When we opened up this Family Literacy program and the Barbara Bush Foundation has helped open up about 1500 across the nation over the last 25 years, we have waiting lists though on average of over a 100 people so that access barriers that are out there are tremendous for people who really want to change their lives and what we’re finding is that for these little kids who come into our program, they’re developmentally delayed, really significantly.
The average difference between a child whose low literate parents and one who is from well educated parent is a 30 million word gap by the time they start 1st grade. Three million words they haven’t heard that they haven’t had as many bedtime stories. They haven’t had as many people talking to them about interesting things they see in a store and people forget how much that verbal words and communications become ideas as you get bigger.
Those nouns that you are learning when you’re a little kid becomes these big ideas to change the world when you become larger so we’re very, very focused on how do we tap into helping that brain power of 0 to 3-year-olds because there is no state or federal government dollars really there and what we’ve found with our programs is 85% on average of these kids come in significantly delayed but by the end of the year of being with us, only 15% are.
Our goal is to get all these kids at kindergarten on par with their peers and that’s how we break the inner generational cycle and if we can get those parents excited about learning, that correlation between parent learning and children learning as a mom is huge. That’s what we’re trying to do.
Lisa: Describe to me exactly what it is that the Barbara Bush Foundation is doing with reading? What are some of the programs that you do?
Liza: The 1 that we’re probably most known for our Barbara Bush Foundation grants and scholarships and a Barbara Bush scholarship basically is worth a value of I’m going to say about $1800 to $23 and a family receives that but they take it to a school that is going to offer the parent and opportunity to come to school 3 to 4 days a week, work on their English language skills or earn their GED and their child is going to go into that school door with them but they’re going to go into their own classroom and as a 2-year-old, for example, start learning about colors.
Maybe the parent is learning about adjectives and then, there is this part of the day where the parent and child come together, we call it PACT time, parent and children together time, where if the parent’s reading with the child and they’re learning their colors that hopefully the light bulb is going to go off and the parents mind, “Wow! I was just learning about adjectives. Now, I’m teaching my kid adjectives and that was because I just taught some colors.”
We’re really trying to do an integrated curriculum and that’s why we think the power of that is, it doesn’t end at the school door when they go back home, they’re going to have … know to re-force and force it because it’s been modeled. Becky, you can talk about some of the programs here in Maine.
Becky: Sure. We have programs in Stanford which is a center-based program. They have a beautiful early childhood center while the parents are going to take their adulthood classes, the children are going to the early learning center. Those children can stay in that early learning center even when the parents go to your county community college so there’s 1 example.
We have one in Rockland where children are going to early literacy classes at the local library while the parents go to their adulthood classes. In Bath, they’re working with the regional vocational school in [inaudible 00:12:17] so the children are in early childhood classes with the students at Bath Vocational School so they’re learning their early childhood training with the children in the Family Literacy program while mom and dad are in the adulthood program right next door.
We have a program at LearningWorks in Portland which is predominantly English as a second language. We have 1 in Thorndike which is a virtual school because Thorndike is a 400-square-mile radius school district. They were having trouble getting families who had enough gas or reliable transportation into a program and they were only doing a home base which was not intensive enough.
They developed a virtual school. They gave families a laptop and a hot spot so they can access the internet and they go … they create their own little avatar and can go into Mt. View High School and take classes. They even have a career center. They can take community college classes and they can take parenting classes through the DHSS parent place.
We do … There are a number of different models. We want the model to fit the community and the community need.
Liza: Then we have a second program that we’ve just started in Maine and its’ called Teen Trendsetters and it’s a program where teens come in and mentor 1st, 2nd or 3rd graders who are at least 6 months behind in reading and we teach them reading to the sciences because what we want is to really excite kids about reading and we also wanted to do it in such a way that they see science is fun and exciting.
They start with baby animals and then they go to animals, then they do weather and then they do scientists and then every week or every other week, a book goes home with the child so that they can read to their parent and show them the skills that they’ve learned and we’re really excited about this program. It’s just gotten started. Becky can talk about it where it’s gotten started.
Becky: It’s a regional school unit 14 in Windham and they have had great success and now the middle school in Raymond which is part of that regional school unit also wants to get on board with their elementary students.
Lisa: Are there pockets of Maine that are less literate than other parts of the state?
Becky: I would say no, not really. In certain cities, there is a larger ESL population so that may impact their literacy level in Lewiston and Portland.
Lisa: This is English as a second language?
Becky: Yup or there could be real rural areas where there are pockets of illiteracy but the numbers aren’t as high because there are fewer people so no I think it’s widespread problem.
Lisa: How do we identify people who have literacy issues either at Maine or nationally because as you’ve said, it’s kind of flying under the radar?
Becky: Too often, people are able to use excuses like can I take the application home and I’ll bring it back later. Sometimes that means that there’s someone at home who will help them fill it out or if they say, I forgot my glasses that sometimes the key that you might want to be paying a little more attention so there are cues that adult educators are trained to look for but without really doing a assessments, we don’t know what they’re vocabulary levels are and what their comprehension levels are.
One of the difficulties of adult literacy is that those levels can vary so you could have 2 people in the same class and one person could have a high comprehension level but a low vocabulary level and it would be just the opposite for the next person so you can’t teach them as a class because they have different needs. That’s why a lot of adult reading has to be individualized.
Liza: Is this the same nationally? Are you able to identify people at the same sorts of assessments that Becky is describing?
Liza: Yeah. We use different assessments and part of what we actually have on our website is what we call the “Gap Map” so when you asked, are there areas of the country that have a tremendous need? Absolutely. One of the reasons that we’re now spending a lot of time in Detroit is that on the front page of the paper they estimated 46% of their city has a need for greater literacy skill.
There are certainly segments where we’re looking at if we limited resources, what’s the best place to invest. The Barbara Bush Foundation, a lot of people don’t realize it’s a public charity so Mrs. Bush has lent her name for 25 years. Her son, Neil, is dyslexic and part of her passion for this is that she realizes mothers all across the country and grandmothers want to help their kids and so what we try to do is bring that spirit that she really believed in to the areas of high need.
As Becky said, there’s need in it … You can be well to do and have a child who’s really struggling with literacy. The face of literacy is not as simple to see as the face of a lot of other things. Forty-six percent of kids in Maine are not reading at the level they should be in 3rd grade. That’s unbelievable.
There’s major policy implications and I realized Maine is making a lot of focus on trying to improve the education but the fact that 46% of the kids are not reading on grade level is traumatic. I will tell you 1 thing we see in programs in Maine is the people with high school diplomas who still are really not literate and that’s just a shame. It’s a travesty that the state invest those kind of dollars and that kids can come out at the other end and still not have the skills they’re going to need for workplace.
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Lisa: It’s not a question of being literate or not literate, there are different levels of literacy, is that true?
Liza: That’s absolutely true.
Lisa: Talk to me a little bit about what that means? What these different levels are and what … How we identify people who might fall in these categories?
Liza: I think in adult literacy, there’s typically been this conversation where there’s what’s called basic literacy and basically that means that if you are … have literacy that’s less than a 5th grade level, that’s consider basic literacy. What we tried to do is walk everything over to a grade level equivalency and talk about it almost the same way you would talk about a K-12 education because we find the policy makers otherwise really struggle with understanding what’s basic literacy and what’s functional literacy?
Functional literacy and the adult literacy world is typically about an 8th grade education and there’s this saying in education that’s pretty well known, you learn to read until the 3rd grade and then you read to learn and so when we talk about the folks who are not … are less than a 3rd grade or reading proficiency, those are the people who are really struggling with a bit reading a basic sentence.
When you talk about people that are struggling with functional skills, that’s impacting their everyday lives. They’re having a difficult time understanding the bus schedule. They’re having a difficult time helping their child with some of the health issues we talked about previously. There is definitely a difference about it the levels, but I think the main thing is having folks understand that you’re not … never too early to get an education, 0 to 3 years old and you’re never too old.
I mean we have folks at any age who come back and I think that that’s really critical part to we believe that literacy is really almost like a civil right and that unfortunately in our country today, if you’re between the age of 5 and 18, it’s really clear cut that where you can go to get an education. If you’re younger than that or older than that, sometimes, it’s really challenging to understand that there’s help out there for you and that there are these opportunities that we’re talking about.
Only 6% of those in need in Maine, parents or adults, are actually getting services right now so a huge part that we are committed to is building awareness in this country. Twenty-five years ago, you could go … you would not go to a cocktail party and say you have breast cancer but I think the Coleman Foundation has done an unbelievable job of bringing that to the forefront and saying, “Look, lots of women get breast cancer. We need to do [inaudible 00:24:03]. We need to do research. We need to change people’s perception on that.”
We have not done as good of a job on saying, “There’s a literacy challenge in this country and people have a right …” Things have happened to them. They’ve had to get pulled out of school to go to work. They have the challenge of a learning disability. We haven’t given them the understanding that they … There are other ways to learn and that they can be welcomed back just like we’ve done with breast cancer.
Admit that it would be I think really challenging to go to a cocktail party and say, “I don’t have a high school diploma today but I’m going back.” But yeah, you should be proud that you’re going to go back. Folks don’t realize that 1 out of 4 people haven’t made … Don’t have a high school diploma in our country, a lot of people.
I think the conversation needs to be broadened and I think that’s part of what we’re trying to do. Becky.
Becky: You think about the types of jobs that are available now that the skills that you need keep increasing but we still have a lot of people who need to work on those skills to get there. I think we need to have that conversation about how do we bring those people back into the workforce, what services can we provide to them, how do we help them navigate some of those barriers to participating in these programs. That’s 1 of the big things that we try to do is get them beyond those barriers and actually taking part in the program.
Lisa: I was filling out an application recently for a job as a physician with a major medical center and the first question was, “Can you read?” I thought that’s kind of interesting because if I can’t read, then … and this wasn’t just for me. It was for all employees of the medical system. If I can’t read, then how can I read the question that says, “Can you read?”
It’s an interesting conundrum that we are actually asking this question but we can’t really ask it in the same way that we have been. How do employers and other people … How do they deal with that issue?
Becky: I don’t know.
Liza: I know it’s very challenging for employers. I was talking with 1 of the largest employers in our country and they said, “One of the challenges we have is that the folks don’t necessarily want to admit to us exactly what their literacy levels are because they feel that will impact their chances of being able to move in the system.
You’ve hit the nail in the head. A big part of it is what I was talking about before, stigma. There’s this giant stigma associated with what … people know that education is what is going to move them forward and they realized it’s critically important yet at the same time, they’re almost … they feel disempowered about how to go and find that education and because of the great stigma, they don’t want to admit that they don’t have the education.
It is a real challenge for particularly people companies who are large companies that are employing folks who have lower wage jobs. The CEO of Walmart is on our board of directors and he was sharing with me that in 5 years, they’re not going to have nearly as many cashiers as they do today because they’re going to be … and you guys have all seen this. You can come up and you can scan your stuff yourself. They’re going to do that. I said, “How can you do that?” They’re like, “[Inaudible 00:27:34] in the Walmart Store, there’s video cameras. They’re going to make sure that it’s done appropriately and that people aren’t stealing things,” but that’s a lot less people that need to be employed.
It’s not just Walmart. It could be any company and so as we think about the shifting economy and what people skill level that people need, the reason that we have this income inequality in this country is all about education. I keep going back to the same message is it’s not too late to learn and part of what we’re trying to do is say, “Let’s open up the curtains on this need and encourage folks. Let’s have a discussion about the fact that there is a stigma.”
Say to folks, “You know what, there’s great places here that will take you in especially in Maine and offer you opportunities. The waiting list here are not what we see in other parts of the country. I think that’s really good news for listeners who might have sons, daughters, nieces, nephews who … or grandparents that want to go back to school. I think there’s the opportunity here.
Becky: I think there’s plenty of opportunity here. It’s harder for us to find the people to come to a Family Literacy program here in Maine than it is in other parts of the country which I’ve always found interesting but I think it’s a little bit cultural here. We’ve always had industries that supported people without a high school diploma. You could work in the woods. You could be in the paper plants. You didn’t have to … Back when I was a kid, there was the chicken industry, the poultry business.
You didn’t have to have a high school diploma to do those things. Parents made good money. They didn’t have to have that high school diploma. I’m not sure that it’s always encouraged within the family. There’s not a value of education necessarily in some families. There are a lot of people who could benefit from our programs. It’s just always harder for us to identify them and get them in the door.
Lisa: Do you think that we are getting better about recognizing, 1, learning disabilities and how the impact of learning disabilities on our literacy levels and 2, learning styles that some people may not have a disability in the absolute sense of the word but they may learn differently. Do you think that’s something that we’re seeing more and more as we study the brain and it’s become an important part of our society?
Becky: I think so. I think we’re more aware of what some of those learning disabilities are and we have some techniques in our basket that we can work with people. For example, some students can’t be around fluorescent lights, those overhead lights reflect differently on the paper and so just putting a baseball cap on that child and blocking that fluorescent light sometimes makes a difference or sometimes, the words on a piece of paper that’s white is they just can’t see it so you print the stuff for them on a colored piece of paper. Maybe, they do better if it’s on a green piece of paper or yellow or pink.
Some of those techniques are now in our basket so we can pull them out when we need them. Yes, I think we’re better prepared all the way around to deal and recognize some of those disabilities. As far as learning styles, I think we all need to practice. I don’t think just because I’m a hands-on learner means that I should be given hands-on learning all the time. I think we need to learn those different styles and be able to utilize all of them but in a concept that’s going to particularly difficult for me, I might want to start first doing something hands-on and then build the skills with the other learning styles.
Liza: I heard something shocking recently which is 1 out of 3 people after they finished high school never read a book again in their lives. I personally am someone who loves books so I found that very disheartening and shocking and sad. At the same time, we knew that people who read, it’s almost when they read, their blood pressure goes down. They feel healthier. Reading is to your mind what working out is to your body and so for healthy lifestyle, reading is incredibly important. You have to work out that brain to get brighter and smarter.
We know so much now more about the brain than we did. There was a …. Many years ago in National Reading Panel and they took all the research that has been done all across the world and collapsed it with, “What are the things you really need to know to teach reading? What are the things that are really going to make a difference?” That’s part of what we try to teach in our classes to our parents so that they’re going to spend, yes, 25 a minutes a day of reading to your child at night. It’s important. Everybody feels like they know that, right, but only 1 out of every 2 parents does it.
You can say it and you can think and yet … for some of us, those memories of lying in bed with our parents telling us stories at night are some of the best memories we’re ever going to have in our life and yet 1 out of 2 people doesn’t pass it on to their child to have that memory and to me, that’s sad but then, there’s other things that we didn’t know to do and maybe we didn’t do, I didn’t necessarily … I now have an 11 and 12-year-old, I didn’t know to do it with my child and that is, it’s also as important to have that child as young as possible picking up a pen or a pencil and writing those words or type … you can say typing those words now, right.
However, using the keystrokes to start writing their name again and again and again, rapid repetition of numbers and letter is for them, for those child to be able to say again and again the ABCs, the counting 1 through 10 and then doing it with their hands are equally as important as those reading. I think there’s tips like that we tried to use in our programs, drive home with parents and the things that all of us as parents can get a little bit better at and frankly, we’re going to make our own minds healthier as we stretch our minds about how we can be great learners.
Lisa: How to people find out about the Barbara Bush Foundation For Family Literacy either in the State of Maine or other places in the country?
Liza: Well, the easiest way is probably to go on our website, the Barbara Bush Foundation, and you can learn a lot about us. We just put up a brand new website so in the midst of trying to tell our stories as best we can. There’s a gap map up there if people are interested in getting more statistical information. There are good descriptions of the scholarship program and the teen trendsetter program and some of the other kinds of work that we’re doing.
I would recommend that and Becky’s contact information is up there if there’s specifically interested in finding out more about programs in Maine.
Becky: We also are on Facebook and Twitter.
Liza: Yeah.
Becky: They can …
Liza: Thirty thousand followers on Facebook. Please, join us. We’re lots of fun.
Becky: Here in Maine, we do … We’ve been operating here in Maine since 1996 so we’ve had family literacy programs here in Maine, The Barbara Bush Foundation has been generous. We’ve funded about 300 programs at over $5 million total here in Maine in those years. This year, for the 6th year in a row, we’re doing our annual literacy conference. It’s called the 6th Annual Literacy Connections Conference. This year, it’s Celebrate Family Literacy.
We have over 300 early childhood through adult education and even community college literacy providers attend this conference. They do learn about us through the conference this year for the last 6 years they have anyway.
Liza: If you’re a new mother, you should receive our love relearn journal when you’re coming out of the hospital. It was kicked off by Mrs. Barbara Bush and Mrs. LePage in June and it is a book chock filled with tips on how to help your child with literacy nutrition and it’s about what we’re talking about earlier, healthy mind and a healthy body and how they go together and how to do that for every stage and age of your child.
We’re trying to do a little bit more to get out there and let Mainers know the Barbara Bush Foundation. Just like the Bush family, this is our vacation home and our real home too and we enjoy being here and we want people to know that we’re here to share and grow with you.
Lisa: Having met Mrs. Barbara Bush once or twice part of Raising Readers, she’s a dynamic individual and I’m sure she won’t remember me but please give her my thanks for having played such an important part in Family Literacy and congratulations on 25 years with Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.
We’ve been talking with Liza McFadden who’s the president of the Barbara Bush Foundation, the Foundation for Family Literacy and also with Becky Dyer who’s a research and development director. Thank you so much for coming in and for all the work you’re doing, bringing reading to the families in Maine and across the nation.
Becky: Thank you for all your support of literacy that you’ve been doing and thank you for this opportunity to share our work.