Title of Article: “New online tool aids literacy programs”
Publisher: eSchool News online
Date of Publication: November 6, 2007
Author: eSchool News staff and wire service reports
The Verizon Foundation has funded an online literacy program tool that has been developed by the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL). According to Kathy Brown, senior vice president of public policy and corporate responsibility for Verizon, “In today’s workforce a person must have the ability to read, write, speak, compute, and solve problems at higher levels of efficiency. These are skills necessary to function on the job and that require higher levels of skills than what’s taught in high school.”
In an effort to assist literacy programs nationwide, this online resource “provides a detailed questionnaire that asks about a literacy program’s methods, the education level of its students, parental involvement, and current methods used to assess the program’s success.”
The information provided through the questionnaire is then taken into account to come up with a score of 1-5 to rate a program’s performance in “several areas.” As a program’s “grades” are taken into account, receiving scores of 3 or lower automatically makes resources available for educators who wish to further develop their program in specified areas of need. This resource is free of charge.
This assessment, labeled the Verizon Literacy Program Self-Assessment Tool (VLP-SAT) is one of many free offerings of the Verizon Foundation. One of the Foundation’s well-known resources is Thinkfinity.org, a “free online portal, where visitors can access more than 55,000 standards- and research-based educational resources. These include free online courses, K-12 lesson plans, best practices, program assessment tools, teaching and learning tools, model programs that demystify technology for parents, and abundant research highlighting the importance of literacy development.”
Brown is also cited a National Adult Literacy survey that estimated: “adult illiteracy costs the U.S. $17 billion a year from loss in common tax revenue; welfare, unemployment, crime and incarceration; and training costs for business and industry—causing a negative impact on the U.S. economy and society."
2 comments:
I am glad to see the involvement of parents for this study. So many parents have no clue what their children are or are not doing. Parents should be held more accountable for their child's actions and progress.
The National Adult Literacy survey estimates an astronomical loss for the country's economy. The question is: does illiteracy cause manufacturers to outsource the jobs to Asia where the labor is cheaper than here?
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