Many years ago, I worked in a pilot family literacy program funded through Even Start and Head Start targeting low-income families where the parent(s) were receiving welfare benefits and did not have high school diplomas. Our program was designed to help improve educational and economic outcomes not only for our students, but for their children. Many of my students (the parents of young children) walked into my classroom nearly totally illiterate, unable to read books fluently at even the first or second grade level. Naturally, they didn't read to their young children, and they didn't help their older children with homework. How could they?
One of the most rewarding parts of my job was hearing students tell how they were so proud and happy because they had been able to read a story to their toddler for the first time in their lives, or how good it felt to be able to help their fourth grader with his multiplication homework. Some of my students had very low IQs, to be sure - I have some heartbreaking memories of a few students who were clearly incapable of holding down any kind of job, let alone earning a high school diploma, but who were denied SSI because they scored two or three points too high (so, an FSIQ of 72 or 73) on an IQ test - but many of my students had average intelligence but significant learning disabilities, and most were not only the children of illiterate parents themselves, but were also the victims of the rural Florida school system in the 1960s and 1970s. The majority had never had any phonics instruction in their lives. Most had not been given remedial instruction in school, but had been given passing marks and advanced from grade to grade until they were old enough to drop out.
About 50% of my students went on to pass the GED and earn a Florida state high school diploma. Nearly 80% of my students who remained in the program for six months or more improved their reading and math scores on the TABE by more than 4 grade levels. These gains had a significant impact on their families in terms of their income and, more importantly for this discussion, in terms of the level of academic support they were able to provide for their children. There is an extraordinarily close relationship between parental literacy level and child academic achievement. The U.S. Department of Education reports that the single strongest predictor of a child's academic achievement is the mother's literacy level. I guess this post is primarily to point out that while there is certainly a strong correlation between IQ and literacy level, neither literacy nor income is a perfect proxy for IQ, or my students would not have been able to make such dramatic changes in both in such a short time. It is also to point out that it is both cruel and unreasonable to blame low income parents who may be functionally illiterate for not doing a better job educating their children at home.
One of the key factors in the success of our program was that, at the time, Florida allowed welfare recipients to count educational activities as hours engaged in a "work activity", so they could attend school and still retain their welfare benefits. Those rules changed in the mid-90s to exclude education from the definition of "work activities", which, in my opinion, helped radically reduce the potential for upward economic mobility and helped ensure that the inter-generational cycle of poverty would continue.
Some interesting reading:
http://www.proliteracy.org/NetCommunity/Document.Doc?id=18http://www.air.org/files/The20Literacy20of20Americas20College20Students_final20report.pdfhttp://www.ascd.org/publications/newsletters/policy-priorities/fall06/num47/toc.aspx
