Hard to believe... Detroit... 47% �functionally illiterate.�

[pqr]

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2011/05/04/report-nearly-half-of-detroiters-cant-read/

 

DETROIT (WWJ) – According to a new report, 47 percent of Detroiters are ”functionally illiterate.” The alarming new statistics were released by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund on Wednesday.

 

 

I am still not sure that I can believe this one.

Edited May 5, 2011 by pqr

[MHowell]

OMG, that makes me sick!

[DarlaS]

Alarming, yes. Hard to believe? Not if you live anywhere near it...

[Jennifer in MI]

Alarming, yes. Hard to believe? Not if you live anywhere near it...

 

:iagree: Unfortunately, I agree.

 

Dh is an Episcopal priest in downtown Detroit. The things he sees are just so sad. We have a number of parishoners who really cannot read.

 

Very sad.

[gingersmom]

I don't find it that shocking.

 

There was a handyman in my building in NYC (early 30's, with a family), who could not read. I had heard rumors that he could not read but did not believe it till he came to my apartment to do some work.

 

He made some excuse about why I had to read the directions to him and then he would do the work.

 

It was so incredibly sad.

[justamouse]

That is so, unbelievably sad.

[Stacy in NJ]

Here are pictures from the Detroit public school book depository. It was abandoned many years ago. Those piles and piles of rubbish are school text books some still inside their plastic wrapping. This is the publics tax dollars at work in the Detroit public school system.

 

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=detroit+school+book+depository&view=detail&id=67D26492FD7CA5371FF967D26492FD7CA5371FF9&first=1&FORM=IDFRIR&qpvt=detroit+school+book+depository

[lovemyboys]

Here are pictures from the Detroit public school book depository. It was abandoned many years ago. Those piles and piles of rubbish are school text books some still inside their plastic wrapping. This is the publics tax dollars at work in the Detroit public school system.

 

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=detroit+school+book+depository&view=detail&id=67D26492FD7CA5371FF967D26492FD7CA5371FF9&first=1&FORM=IDFRIR&qpvt=detroit+school+book+depository

 

I remember this. It's like those ghost cities in China....only in decay.

[Harriet Vane]

I live at the edge of Chicago's inner city. Yes, I believe the illiteracy statistic--I see the reality of it every day here. It's a sad fact that our inner cities are not much different from a third world country (I have visited the third world, and I have lived here for 14 years, so I know what I am talking about).

[Audrey]

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2011/05/04/report-nearly-half-of-detroiters-cant-read/

 

DETROIT (WWJ) – According to a new report, 47 percent of Detroiters are â€functionally illiterate.†The alarming new statistics were released by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund on Wednesday.

 

 

I am still not sure that I can believe this one.

 

 

Sorry. Not hard to believe at all.

 

I'm guessing you've never lived in Detroit?

[Murphy101]

Here are pictures from the Detroit public school book depository. It was abandoned many years ago. Those piles and piles of rubbish are school text books some still inside their plastic wrapping. This is the publics tax dollars at work in the Detroit public school system.

 

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=detroit+school+book+depository&view=detail&id=67D26492FD7CA5371FF967D26492FD7CA5371FF9&first=1&FORM=IDFRIR&qpvt=detroit+school+book+depository

 

What the!?

 

Geez. At the very least, think of the money they could have made recycling it all?!?!:glare:

[nmoira]

What the!?

 

Geez. At the very least, think of the money they could have made recycling it all?!?!:glare:

 

A couple of these made me cry. I grew up about an hour's drive from Detroit and got my undergraduate degree at the University of Windsor across the river (in urban planning/geography, so you can imagine how much we talked about Detroit). I still miss John K. King Books, the DIA, Greektown of old.

[joannqn]

A couple of these made me cry. I grew up about an hour's drive from Detroit and got my undergraduate degree at the University of Windsor across the river (in urban planning/geography, so you can imagine how much we talked about Detroit). I still miss John K. King Books, the DIA, Greektown of old.

 

 

Wow. Those remind me of scenes from the show Life After People. It's hard to believe things are that bad; we just don't see it much here.

[Annie Laurie]

A couple of these made me cry. I grew up about an hour's drive from Detroit and got my undergraduate degree at the University of Windsor across the river (in urban planning/geography, so you can imagine how much we talked about Detroit). I still miss John K. King Books, the DIA, Greektown of old.

 

I had the same response when I saw that. I grew up about an hour from Detroit too. Detroit has never been a healthy city, at least not for as long as I can remember, and I'm in my mid 30s. I was honestly amazed when I moved from that area to TX at 19 and saw downtown Dallas- which is nothing special, but so much different from Detroit. I thought all major cities were like Detroit, but it's like a different world.

[Ibbygirl]

A couple of these made me cry. I grew up about an hour's drive from Detroit and got my undergraduate degree at the University of Windsor across the river (in urban planning/geography, so you can imagine how much we talked about Detroit). I still miss John K. King Books, the DIA, Greektown of old.

 

Those images are heart rending. :crying:

[Rosie_0801]

I didn't know this could happen in a city.

 

:confused:

Rosie

[Ibbygirl]

I didn't know this could happen in a city.

 

:confused:

Rosie

 

Detroit was "Motor City", but then all the auto factories closed up and moved overseas. :( I don't know if that's the cause of all of that decay, but I'm sure it's a sizable part of it. :(

[In The Great White North]

Detroit was "Motor City", but then all the auto factories closed up and moved overseas. :( I don't know if that's the cause of all of that decay, but I'm sure it's a sizable part of it. :(

 

Detroit's decay started long before that, probably with years leading up to the riots in the 1960's. It was considered totally unsafe in the early 70's. It's schools were already a disaster (remember bussing?)

[Ibbygirl]

Detroit's decay started long before that, probably with years leading up to the riots in the 1960's. It was considered totally unsafe in the early 70's. It's schools were already a disaster (remember bussing?)

 

Wow! That is so sad. From the looks of the former grandeur of some of those buildings, I think it must have been amazing in it's heyday. What a shame.

 

Thank you for adding more insight to my post, I've never been to Detroit, and the auto factories closing and leaving was the extent of my knowledge.

[AvasMom]

Wow. I want to go looting in the libraries and the biology classroom! I can't believe they didn't just give the books away or sell them! But with a 47% illiteracy rate, who would take them?

[angela in ohio]

I would assume some of them can read, just not English. It would be intersting if they broke it down into subcategories for that.

 

Detroit - and Michigan - have been mismanaged for so long (both of my parents grew up in Detroit - Hamtramck, Highland Park, Warren, etc. - and most of my family still lives there - now in the suburbs, though ;)) We were in a recession before the current economic downturn.

 

Detroit is just a larger version of many other Midwest cities. There are the suburbs where everybody with any means moved to, there is the very inner city, where there is revitalization (casinos, ball parks in Detroit) and then there is the part in between, where the struggling live.

 

Like many other cities, churches are working to keep the inner city folks alive (2wordstory.com for example.) Those big churches have been abandoned, but there are still churches downtown feeding the homeless and the hungry.

 

The abandoned schools/supplies are a result of rapid population decline. They closed a few dozen schools one year, then another few dozen the next. That's a lot to deal with. All resources, time, energy are going to the ones that are still open. Dh is in grad school with many Detroit teachers and administrators. It's a sad situation, but things are finally being done.

[Onceuponatime]

A couple of these made me cry. I grew up about an hour's drive from Detroit and got my undergraduate degree at the University of Windsor across the river (in urban planning/geography, so you can imagine how much we talked about Detroit). I still miss John K. King Books, the DIA, Greektown of old.

 

 

Wow. I just can't imagine the abandoned libraries, schools, and police stations! It is like some kind of end of the world scenario.

[Sebastian (a lady)]

Here are pictures from the Detroit public school book depository. It was abandoned many years ago. Those piles and piles of rubbish are school text books some still inside their plastic wrapping. This is the publics tax dollars at work in the Detroit public school system.

 

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=detroit+school+book+depository&view=detail&id=67D26492FD7CA5371FF967D26492FD7CA5371FF9&first=1&FORM=IDFRIR&qpvt=detroit+school+book+depository

 

I remember when these pictures were published. I think this is related to the issue of buying giant sets of integrated curriculum instead of being able to buy just the portions that the school population needs.

 

In other words, many publishers sell an integrated reading, writing, spelling curriculum. But it comes as a package and doesn't necessarily work well for all students or only in parts.

 

But then, I'm not much of a fan of basal readers anyway.

[Sebastian (a lady)]

Wow. I want to go looting in the libraries and the biology classroom! I can't believe they didn't just give the books away or sell them! But with a 47% illiteracy rate, who would take them?

 

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."

— Mark Twain

 

 

When I contrast the account in The Autobiography of Frederick Douglas of his efforts in learning to read (including tricking neighborhood boys into teaching him), which could have earned him a beating, with the devaluing of education and the written word that I see around me today, it makes me despair.

 

My own son announced to me last night that he'd caught "The Disease"; he now loved books. He'd spent most of the evening in a corner of his brother's scout meeting reading The Sword in the Tree. He got up early this morning to finish it.

 

This is what the students in Detroit and many other cities are being deprived of. Some through negligence, some through the selfishness of systems that prioritize other things above actually teaching basic skills, and some because they just don't care enough to learn to read.

[Sebastian (a lady)]

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2011/05/04/report-nearly-half-of-detroiters-cant-read/

 

DETROIT (WWJ) – According to a new report, 47 percent of Detroiters are â€functionally illiterate.†The alarming new statistics were released by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund on Wednesday.

 

 

I am still not sure that I can believe this one.

 

Then there is Ballou High School in DC, which has almost no books in their library. I am pretty sure that I have more books for children and young adults than they do.

 

This might not matter if there were a gleaming public library down the street. But I don't think that is the situation.

[Mimm]

That's heartbreaking. I've heard of people talking about the shame of adult illiteracy. What does it mean to be "functionally illiterate"? Is that no reading ability at all or that they can make out words but their reading isn't to a level where it's useful in every day life?

[mommaduck]

Wow. I want to go looting in the libraries and the biology classroom! I can't believe they didn't just give the books away or sell them! But with a 47% illiteracy rate, who would take them?

 

The Well Trained Looters...yep, what a waste!

[K-FL]

So awful!! Hollywood just needs to go there to film the next Post-Apocalyptic movie.

 

I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the 47% statistic too. How many are American born? How many of each ethnic demographic? etc.

[lisamarie]

Not hard to believe at all. The Detroit public school system is in the process of "selling" off a bunch of their schools to private corps who will turn them into charter schools and hopefully turn them around. Even in my area of MI, the illiteracy rate is not so hot in the city schools. The test scores are downright frightening. But with the city schools, there is a HUGE turnover rate every year. In our last house, the local elementary school had a 50% turnover rate every year. It was that transient. My BIL graduated from the high school we would have used and only 60% of the kids who started there as Freshmen made it to graduation. A 40% drop out rate is staggering IMO.

[Mrs Mungo]

That's heartbreaking. I've heard of people talking about the shame of adult illiteracy. What does it mean to be "functionally illiterate"? Is that no reading ability at all or that they can make out words but their reading isn't to a level where it's useful in every day life?

 

Usually it means you can read, but only at a very basic level. They cannot read or write well enough to function in the predominant society without help.

[Stacy in NJ]

large(ish) US city. So, no. It's not about immigrants who can't read English. It's about an urban population that's been decimated do to social/political failures.

 

So awful!! Hollywood just needs to go there to film the next Post-Apocalyptic movie.

 

I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the 47% statistic too. How many are American born? How many of each ethnic demographic? etc.

[FaithManor]

Michigander here and you should know this is no surprise at all for DH and I. We live well north of the northern burbs of Detroit, but dh does drive to Troy and Warren on a regular basis, plus we do airport runs, and other errands into the city. I'm afraid to say that one can hardly veer north of the Opera House/Symphony Hall and the Art Museum/Wayne State University corridor on Woodward Ave. more than a couple of blocks and be in neighborhoods that look like ghettos....every other house rotting and falling down, boarded up, burned out, drug hideout...it's is just so awful. I want to weep when I think about the children zoned for schools like Hamtramck.

 

But, Detroit is not alone. Buena Vista school district on the southeast side of Saginaw is a failing school district. Only 59% of incoming freshman will graduate and most of that will be due to grade inflation and credit just for showing up...the illiteracy rate amongst the graduates is staggering.

 

Flint is no better. The schools are hurting even more in the funding department has they've lost 4000 residents in one year. The way we fund schools is ridiculous anyway, and when people are fleeing your state as fast as they can, well...that stupid per head funding thing just comes back to bite an already dismal situation right in the rump.

 

Our own local, rural school districts - and believe me when I say they are not impressive but their graduation rates are high and the literacy rate is not abysmal - are cutting approximately 35 teachers per district. The average kindergarten classroom will have 37-42 k'ers and no teacher or student aides. Dd's new boyfriend, a special ed teacher for children with moderate to severe learning disabilities, will have 22 5th/6th grade age students next year and no other adult! He has such a lovely attitude about it and he's quite an organizer, plus he is excellent with classroom discipline so he will probably survive and his kids will learn something. But, sheesh.....let's just throw the kids in the deep end hope they pop up and start swimming!

 

Faith

[Brilliant]

This Time article says the median house price in Detroit went from $60k in August 2005 to $8k in August 2009. :blink:

[AvasMom]

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."

— Mark Twain

 

 

When I contrast the account in The Autobiography of Frederick Douglas of his efforts in learning to read (including tricking neighborhood boys into teaching him), which could have earned him a beating, with the devaluing of education and the written word that I see around me today, it makes me despair.

 

My own son announced to me last night that he'd caught "The Disease"; he now loved books. He'd spent most of the evening in a corner of his brother's scout meeting reading The Sword in the Tree. He got up early this morning to finish it.

 

This is what the students in Detroit and many other cities are being deprived of. Some through negligence, some through the selfishness of systems that prioritize other things above actually teaching basic skills, and some because they just don't care enough to learn to read.

 

My ds LOVES that book! It was one that encouraged him to read and improve his reading skills. I just nodded in agreement with the rest of your post. It's tragic. We've had such great memories that we've made when reading classic literature out loud. It's so sad that so many kids won't ever know what they are missing. Either they aren't exposed to these books at all or they grow up thinking they are "boring." So many similarities to nutritional deficiency when kids never know what pure, whole foods taste like or they think they are "gross" because all they know is fat laden, processed junk. So sad. :(

[CatMomof3]

I must be an ostrich with my head in the sand. I did not know it was that bad.

[TeacherZee]

Then there is Ballou High School in DC, which has almost no books in their library. I am pretty sure that I have more books for children and young adults than they do.

 

This might not matter if there were a gleaming public library down the street. But I don't think that is the situation.

You can help Ballou get books for their library.

[LidiyaDawn]

A couple of these made me cry. I grew up about an hour's drive from Detroit and got my undergraduate degree at the University of Windsor across the river (in urban planning/geography, so you can imagine how much we talked about Detroit). I still miss John K. King Books, the DIA, Greektown of old.

 

Holy cow. I only know of Detroit by name (like any other major US city) and I *think* they have a sports team called Tigers? Anyway, wow. It looks like something out of a movie! That's a normal part of the city???

[BlessedMom]

Unbelievably sad!

[AngelBee]

Wow. Those remind me of scenes from the show Life After People. It's hard to believe things are that bad; we just don't see it much here.

:iagree::(

[AngelBee]

Detroit is just a larger version of many other Midwest cities. There are the suburbs where everybody with any means moved to, there is the very inner city, where there is revitalization (casinos, ball parks in Detroit) and then there is the part in between, where the struggling live.

 

 

:iagree:I am in MN and that is very much a description of Minneapolis. Parts of Minneapolis house millionaires. Other parts are extreme poverty. :(

[stripe]

I would assume some of them can read, just not English. It would be intersting if they broke it down into subcategories for that.

 

I'm not sure I'd call someone who could only read, say, Chinese, "functionally illiterate." I think I'd call them a non-English speaker. (I also wouldn't include infants and young children.)

 

According to this, those born outside the US are < 10 % of Detroit metro area residents and non-English speakers are < 10%. That doesn't include those who speak some English, though. African Americans make up > 80% of Detroit metro area. So it is not an immigration issue. (And there are many educated immigrants, anyhow.)

 

Remember when the Detroit schools hired volunteers to teach elementary school students to read? How can this be a good sign?

[AngelBee]

I must be an ostrich with my head in the sand. I did not know it was that bad.

I did not either. :(

[ElizabethB]

Sadly, the illiteracy rates are not hard for me to believe. This is the fruit of balanced literacy and sight words. They can read 300 - 1000 sight words but have trouble sounding out words they have not seen before.

 

They are that high in areas were there is not the money for tutoring and/or literate parents or grandparents to step in and teach a bit of phonics. With a bit of phonics added, many children are OK. (Not that I am advocating this as a teaching method, mind you!!)

 

Just back from vacation, I'll add more later. Here is my "Why Johnny Doesn't Like to Read" that explains to some degree they what and why of "functional illiteracy" caused by sight words:

 

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/aliterate.html

 

Also, the damage done with sight words can be very hard to overcome, it takes a lot of work and nonsense words to overcome guessing habits. My class of students in a homeless rescue mission in LA actually did better overall than my inner city Little Rock class of students because they had been in and out of school so much they never learned sight words--it is easier to teach it right the first time than to have to untrain bad habits and learn new ones.

[Mejane]

No need to single out Detroit! Do a search on literacy in the US; there have been some major studies in recent years, and it appears that illiteracy ranges from 23 to 46(or so)% of the entire country.

There are several ways to define literacy so the numbers vary. All in all, it's a country wide problem.....

 

I was gonna say...

[AngelBee]

I'm not sure I'd call someone who could only read, say, Chinese, "functionally illiterate." I think I'd call them a non-English speaker. (I also wouldn't include infants and young children.)

 

According to this, those born outside the US are < 10 % of Detroit metro area residents and non-English speakers are < 10%. That doesn't include those who speak some English, though. African Americans make up > 80% of Detroit metro area. So it is not an immigration issue. (And there are many educated immigrants, anyhow.)

 

Remember when the Detroit schools hired volunteers to teach elementary school students to read? How can this be a good sign?

This is devistating to me. :(

 

What kind of legacy will the children of Detroit be able to give their children if things don't change?

 

How done sone change something so bad? :(

[lisamarie]

This Time article says the median house price in Detroit went from $60k in August 2005 to $8k in August 2009. :blink:

 

Not just Detroit. I used to live in the "inner city" in my area and bought my house for $107K. Sold it at $105K in 2007 just as the market was turning. Now many of the houses in that area are going for $20K. I was shocked when my brother told me--he was considering buying a house for income property.

[Farrar]

It's pretty disturbing, but this story from a couple of years ago is now pretty much what I always think of when I think of Detroit. It's about a dead body that just sat in an abandoned warehouse for months and many homeless people and vagrants knew it was there, but no one did anything. That has just stuck with me as the ultimate sign that it was a city in complete decay.

 

The things I've read about the potential future of Detroit are sort of interesting. It's not the only dying industrial city in the country and there are moves to help revert the land to nature in the suburbs of some of these cities.

[twoforjoy]

Detroit is just a larger version of many other Midwest cities. There are the suburbs where everybody with any means moved to, there is the very inner city, where there is revitalization (casinos, ball parks in Detroit) and then there is the part in between, where the struggling live.

 

This. I live in Detroit. My husband and I work at a university in the cultural center, and we live right in the middle of the city. Our neighborhood is actually quite nice.

 

The schools, though, are a different story. Every single family I know--literally every single one--who has the resources to either homeschool their child or send them to private school does. A few people use some of the better charter schools in the city, but by and large anybody who is both concerned about their child's education and has the time, money, and/or transportation to manage an alternative to the public schools does so.

 

It's really a shame for the public schools, because that means they're left with the very poorest students (whose parents might want them in a better school, but can't manage an alternative) and the students whose parents just don't care at all about their education. Honestly, at this point, I don't think the problem is the teachers--I know some DPS teachers, and they are great people who really care about their students--or even the administration, but just what happens when you pull almost every motivated students with a family who cares about education out of a school district. You could put the best teachers in the world in some of these classrooms, and I'm not sure it would change things at all.

 

I have friends who work in the Detroit high schools who tell me their students have friends die on a weekly basis. It's unbelievably. It's also not surprising that academics isn't the first concern of most of these students.

 

The students I get out of DPS are among the best students they have--ones who actually managed to finish high school and go on to college--and many of them still can't construct a grammatically correct sentence. As sad as it is, just not 1) getting killed, 2) getting arrested, 3) getting pregnant, or 4) dropping out was a significant success.

 

But the point is just that it's not necessarily bad teachers or a bad administration or a bad curriculum. It's just a bad situation, where many of these students are living in poverty, often in very difficult family situations. As the students with parents who care continue to get pulled out of DPS for private schools, charters, and homeschooling, then things get even worse, and even more kids get pulled out, until you're really left with the most needy, struggling students with the most uninterested (if not outright hostile) parents in the public schools. Even a fantastic teacher with a great instructional plan would have trouble doing much more than classroom management in that sort of situation. And no concerned parent is going to put their child into that situation. I don't know a single person who works within DPS as an educator who will send their own children there.

 

The drop-out rate for Detroit public schools is extremely high. I want to say the last stats I saw had it around 70%.

 

The abandoned schools/supplies are a result of rapid population decline. They closed a few dozen schools one year, then another few dozen the next. That's a lot to deal with. All resources, time, energy are going to the ones that are still open. Dh is in grad school with many Detroit teachers and administrators. It's a sad situation, but things are finally being done.

 

One of the problems in the city is that it's got an infrastructure build for a population much, much larger than the current one.

Edited May 5, 2011 by twoforjoy

[angela in ohio]

Honestly, at this point, I don't think the problem is the teachers--I know some DPS teachers, and they are great people who really care about their students--or even the administration, but just what happens when you pull almost every motivated students with a family who cares about education out of a school district. You could put the best teachers in the world in some of these classrooms, and I'm not sure it would change things at all.

 

Exactly. Study after study has proven that student performance is only really closely tied to parents' education and parents' SES. The schools can't be blamed much. There is only so much even caring, loving, involved teachers can do with this situation. Turning around the situations these children live in, which means helping their parents up, is the only way to combat the problems in the schools really.

[Rivka]

That's heartbreaking. I've heard of people talking about the shame of adult illiteracy. What does it mean to be "functionally illiterate"? Is that no reading ability at all or that they can make out words but their reading isn't to a level where it's useful in every day life?

 

They can usually read some, but not well enough to understand things like a newspaper article, prescription drug instructions, or a job application.