In todays Buffalo News the front page story is about Illiteracy..
It is shocking that in this day and age there are so many people right here in our city who can not read.
With an abundance of services available why do we such an overwhelming amount of people who can not read or write?
About 1 in every 4 children in Buffalo live in EXTREME poverty..That scares me
I have seen alot of things in Buffalo I imagined only happened in 3rd world countries and I just can not understand it.
With a wealth of social service programs WHY are these services not reaching the people who need them most? WHY is there a 10 year old boy who can not read? Who do we blame?
I live not far from the East Delavan library.. I live in an area that is lower income and as written in the News today the East Delavan library is always abuzz with activity..There are always area residents trying to learn about computers,attending workshops etc.. And for the record the library NEEDS MORE COMPUTERS..WHY did we close down libraries..refresh my memory?
I see a cycle that can not continue..I see millions of dollars being dolled out for programs to help and I see a 2 hour wait for residents to use a computer to work on their resume or learn how to use a computer..WHY?
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You don't need a computer to write a resume and there is more than one library. Take a bus to the main branch and use a computer there or any other library.
More excuses for why people refuse to help themselves.
You're right there are plenty of services and money for these people.
Paid for from the earnings of those who actually have helped themselves to be better.
It is a choice they make not to take advantage of the opportunities before them. They suffer their choice.
LHardy:
I for one am happy when I see people trying to better themselves.THOSE ARE THE PEOPLE WE NEED TO ENCOURAGE!
Buses cost money..most people in the neighborhood walk to the library.
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People need to take some personal responsibility for their actions and positions in life.
What things have failed and created this situation:
1) Society has failed.
A) We no longer say that it is wrong for children to be having children. The stigma of teen age pregnancy is gone.
B) We no have taken away the stigma for receiving social services. Families (generations) receive social services like this is their job. The people that the system was originally set up for and need them, get the benefits and get off as soon as possible. They don't stay on for generations.
2) Governments have failed. (Nothing new here)
A) Any program that the govt does that competes with the private sector fails. The politicians answer is not to find out what is wrong, evaluate, fix, and move forward, it is to throw more money after it.
B) That is why there are so many students that can't perform basic skills when they graduate, yet we continue to spend so much money to educate them. Throwing bad money after bad doesn't fix anything.
3) The parents have failed, since many of them in poverty can't help their children since they didn't learn the material when they were in school.
4) The students fail themselves one they reach a certain age. They make choices that affect them the rest of their lives.
Once again, the biggest failure is the lack of personal responsibility. If one does not have any skills, they won't go anywhere in life, except down to the social services office each month to collect benefits given to them when taken form us.
Well said!Originally Posted by govtchecker
Poverty be damned! Lets talk about the Bills and a New Stadium....let's build the Circus Maximus!
"The horror........The horror..........."
THIS SHOULD BE POSTED AT EVERY SOCIAL SERVICES OFFICE!!!!
PERHAPS.. it should be illegal for children to have children. I know it sounds ridiculous, but drastic measures must be taken and the line must be drawn somewhere to stop the proliferation of children who are raised by those mothers who are babies themselves and have no social, responsible skills to cope in life independently withput help or financial aid from society!
I believe that informed discussion is essential in finding answers. This article in Bflo News is indeed both shocking & depressing.
As the city relentlessly shrinks, 1000 babies are born to women with a HS diploma . . & many of those "women" are unmarried teens, who have no relationship with an also-teen father . . and have few family supports.
That is "brain drain" in the starkest terms. "The educated leave town, replaced by the likely-to-be-uneducated. Not a formula to revive a struggling city.
Clearly city leaders, especially in minority communities, must strees that both dropping out of HS & teen pregnancy are forms of "deliquency". Bill cosby took lots of heat for confronting such issues. However confronting them is critical to the success of all those "disatvantaged" children & Bflo.
SPECIAL REPORT: CHILDREN OF POVERTY
Illiterate children: Poor beyond words
Future success clouded by lack of opportunity now
By Charity Vogel NEWS STAFF REPORTER, Updated: 02/10/08 6:53 AM
Andre Vernor is only 10, but he’s got a big dream.
He wants to open up a barber shop of his own someday.
The only problem is, if that’s going to happen, Andre needs to learn how to read and write and handle money.
And right now, he’s struggling with that. His dad used to teach Andre how to count out change: nickels, dimes, dollars. But his dad is in jail.
A family friend who owned a Ferry Street barbershop, and let Andre work a few hours a week sweeping up hair and chatting with customers, was killed in a shooting on the West Side.
But still, he keeps trying. “I don’t like reading, but if I have to, I do,” says Andre, a fourth-grader with a cherubic smile and a bent for mischief. “I can’t wait to cut hair. I want to be paying my mom’s bills when I’m older.”
Whether Andre Vernor ever learns enough to open a barber shop may seem trivial.
It’s not. It matters — to his future, and to that of the city he lives in.
Today, nearly two-thirds of adults in Buffalo function at the two lowest levels of literacy, research shows.
That means they may be able to find the expiration date on a driver’s license, or use a TV schedule, but they can’t function at the minimum level of literacy that employers in Western New York now require for any job higher than entry level.
Among children, the numbers are equally disturbing.
Half of all children entering the city’s prekindergarten classrooms are not ready for school, data show, because they have limited language abilities and can’t identify basic shapes or letters.
Many of these children don’t even know their own names.
By fourth grade, 60 percent of city schoolchildren have fallen behind in reading ability — a percentage that only increases as they get older.
That’s why the literacy skills that Andre Vernor is gaining now matter.
Literacy among Buffalo’s children — 43 percent of whom live in poverty, according to census estimates — will affect the future of the region for at least a generation, according to experts here and around the country.
“If Buffalo can’t do something to help those parents get out of poverty and help these children succeed,” said Sharon Darling, director of the National Center for Family Literacy in Kentucky, “it’s going to eat away at the quality of your whole community.”
Fighting illiteracy in Buffalo is proving to be a tough, uphill struggle.
Those involved say the problem here is deeply entrenched.
“There’s this intergenera- tional cycle of illiteracy in Buffalo,” said Helene Kramer, executive director of Good Schools for All, a community partnership for quality education that has set a goal of 100 percent literacy in the city. “It’s a huge problem.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s unsolvable, observers said.
And that, they said, should be a priority for Buffalo — if the city wants to change the face of poverty here.
“Illiteracy is really about poverty,” Darling said. “You can’t separate the two — they’re woven together so tightly.”
A closed book
In poorer sections of the city, it’s not unusual for people to know someone — a relative, a friend, a child — who can’t read or write. Rather, it is commonplace.
“I know a lot of people who can’t read,” said Margaret Clark, 47, a resident of the city’s Langfield projects. She was illiterate herself for many years after dropping out of high school when she got pregnant at 16.
State tests show that the 60 percent of all fourth-graders who can’t read with proficiency increases to 67 percent by eighth grade.
It’s a problem seen all over the city — especially in poorer areas — by those who work with children.
“I’ve got 10-year-olds that can’t tell me their home phone numbers or where they live,” said Chris Payne, director of the Babcock Clubhouse of the Boys & Girls Club on Babcock Street on the East Side. “My 5-to 7- year-olds, they’re just not where they should be. They can’t read. They can’t comprehend.”
Among ninth-graders, 39 percent of all those entering city high schools won’t graduate.
That leads to more problems when high school dropouts start having babies of their own.
Clark raised her four children before taking the first step out of an illiteracy so severe she used to have to ask clerks in the grocery store to read food labels for her. What motivated her was a growing family of nine grandchildren who needed help with their homework. Now, after two years of tutoring, she can read and considers herself literate.
“I felt bad,” Clark said of her years of illiteracy. “Kids would look at me like, you’re a grown person and you can’t read. I came from nothing — to where I am now.”
One of the highest risk factors for illiteracy among Buffalo’s children is being born to a woman who doesn’t have a high school diploma, experts said.
Right now in the city, that’s 1,000 babies each year.
Parents overwhelmed
Why does a child in a poor household struggle to become literate?
There are several factors that come into play.
Many poor children in Buffalo are growing up in single-parent homes, and the parent — or grandparent — they live with is too overburdened or otherwise absent to spend time talking to and teaching the child.
Laquita Harris, Andre Vernor’s mom, tries her best to see that her son learns, but she’s stretched thin between work and school.
“I just want to tell my kids, they want to have a different type of life,” she said. “Not being without nothing. I want them to be responsible, to work and have a job.”
It’s also a matter of resources. Children in Buffalo’s poorest homes don’t have books, magazines, counting toys, or other items that build literacy skills.
In the city today, 22 percent of children are growing up in “extreme poverty,” a form of poverty so deep it means living on less than half the federal poverty standard — or about $10,000 a year for a family of four.
That leaves little money for a new book. Often in these homes, TV becomes the baby sitter. But kids don’t learn literacy skills from watching TV, experts said.
“Children in low-income families watch a lot of TV. They tend not to hear words being spoken to them,” Kramer said. “These kids aren’t coming into school with any oral vocabularies. We now know that at least half of kids come in already at risk.”
Groundbreaking research on childhood literacy found that what matters most is how many words the child hears spoken, in the first formative years, by adults. Huge discrepancies exist between low-income and middle-class families in this respect, researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley demonstrated in their land- mark 1995 book “Meaningful Differences.”
Children in families headed by parents who were professionals heard 11 million words spoken to them over one year’s time, the research found. Kids in working-class families heard 6 million. Kids in welfare households heard just 3 million.
By age 3, researchers found, a typical child growing up in a professional home can speak and comprehend better than the parents in a welfare home.
Reading to a better life
The parents of Buffalo’s poor children want more for their kids. Some say they see literacy as one ticket to a better life.
Like Charlene Wilson, 40. She has lived in South Buffalo her whole life, most of it on the same street. She works part-time as a cook and bartender at a neighborhood tavern.
Wilson said she wants her 12-year-old daughter, Megan, to achieve more than she has in life. Have a good marriage and a good job, maybe even go to college.
“I’m hoping she gets some kind of a scholarship for college,” Wilson said, “because I’m not going to be able to help her.”
Megan, a slim girl with straight auburn hair, likes to spend time playing with her cat, Angel, and hanging out with her friends. She’s average in school. In her spare time, she’s reading a book called “The Uglies,” but she’d much rather watch TV.
“I like TV better,” Megan said. “It’s more fun.”
Opportunities for broader learning haven’t panned out for Megan so far.
Three times, she has been invited to participate in an overseas trip as a “Student Ambassador” for the United States, through the People to People program. And every time her mom has said no, because of the $3,000 cost of the trip.
“She would’ve visited five countries,” Wilson said, “but I just can’t afford to send her.”
The travel would have built more literacy skills in Megan — especially in a world where literacy is no longer defined as just being able to read well.
Today, literacy means a broader skill set: everything from being able to tell time, to understanding a schedule, to operating a computer, to being able to compare the prices of two items.
“Unless somebody really takes the time to reach an arm in and pull you out of that cycle of illiteracy, you’re going to be marked for life,” said Tracy Diina, director of Literacy Volunteers of Buffalo and Erie County. “You have these kids who could be geniuses underneath. It’s like a net is placed over them.”
Not ready to work
At a conference on literacy in Buffalo last fall, employers from around Western New York said that literacy is a major problem for them when it comes to hiring people.
According to the most recent research undertaken in the city, by the National Adult Literacy Survey, in the 1990s, 61 percent of adults in Buffalo function at the two most basic levels of literacy. Follow-up research in 2002 on the state level showed that the problem had not improved, although numbers specific to Buffalo have not been released yet.
Employers said that in 2008, any job higher than entry-level work requires more literacy skill than those adults have.
That’s why people like John Jones will likely be out of work for quite a while.
Jones grew up on Peckham Street on the East Side. Only three of the eight children in his family grew up knowing how to read.
He dropped out of public school at 16 — he thinks he might have reached 10th grade, but isn’t sure — and worked as a laborer for a while.
He’s been on social services disability income for 10 years because of his illiteracy, some health problems, and the fact that he has struggled with addictions.
Jones, who lives off Michigan Avenue, said he probably won’t ever hold a good job. He has smaller goals: to get a driver’s permit; to be able to navigate buses and street signs in order to take his two young daughters to an indoor playground.
The one bright spot in his life right now is watching his daughters surpass him.
“When I was 7, I wasn’t able to read anything. I was like a toy without a battery,” said Jones. “My 7-year-old can write good. She even writes me letters.”
Starting early
The “Read to Succeed Buffalo” partnership has begun in recent months an intensive effort to figure out what will work to turn around the city’s illiteracy crisis.
The idea is to come up with effective models that can then be replicated all over the city, said Kramer, who heads Good Schools for All, a program of the Community Foundation of Greater Buffalo. The foundation, officials there said, is investing more in the literacy project than in any other undertaking in its 88-year history.
“We have begun,” Kramer said. “One hundred percent literacy means we help everyone. We are working with that goal — helping everyone.”
One new idea being put into action involves reaching out to children at the very earliest stages of life, in day care settings, including home day cares, to introduce books and early learning methods.
Another project involves the creation of a “literacy hot zone” in the 14215 ZIP code, which includes a swath of northeast Buffalo off the Kensington Expressway that stretches into the Cleveland Hill area of Cheektowaga.
In that zone, literacy programs are being intensified in order to see if a deepened effort can turn around the literacy levels in a few targeted neighborhoods, Kramer said.
The East Delavan Library has become a focal point of some of those outreach efforts.
There, library manager Jamie Smith said the new efforts are being received well so far. Workshops on financial and computer literacy have drawn big crowds. Children’s programming is also popular.
But it’s going to take a lot to turn around a problem of such magnitude, Smith said.
Every day, she says, people come into the library for help with basic tasks, like looking up a phone number in the phone book, or reading a printed form.
She helps them. But she’s only one person.
“We’re a community in need,” said Smith. “I see people every day that are functionally illiterate.
“That’s hard.”
cvogel@buffnews.com
You haven't seriously looked for a job recently, have you, Levi? Many employers won't even consider a resume typed on a typewriter.
More to the point, who the heck still has a typewriter around?
The City of Buffalo has brought this on themselves. They THRIVE on the needy! They THRIVE on being needed! They THRIVE on being in control!
The City has done NOTHING in the last 40 years to compete in bringing in educated upper and middle class residents. All they want to do is build more “low-income” housing and subsidize more “low-income” programs to put the residents in greater need.
In the meantime its “suburban competitors” created markets with upper and middle-class housing and substantially increased its tax-base. Little “Andre Vernor” has no chance. He lives with parents in a city that will give him no opportunity whatsoever!
That being said, throwing more money and subsidize into failing programs is not the answer. Taking away subsidies and putting restrictions on people that are receiving them is!
If someone you don’t even know walked up to you in the mall and said, “Give me $50! My cell-phone bill is past-due”! What would you say???? Well, what makes it right for the Government to TAKE MY MONEY and give it to them for the same cell-phone bill??????
If you can't read or write - why would you know how to operate a computer?
A lot of people are ashamed that they cannot read or write. I spoke to an older gentleman once who had this problem. He said he a whole system to get thru life not being able to read. He finally learn to read, but it took him a lot of courage to make that happen.
A lot of illiterate people never learn to read because their home life is a mess and there are a lot of external problems that they face. So reading (school) becomes the last thing on their minds. Years pass and their problem becomes worse.
So it not simply a choice, its a problem that balloons into a crippling secret.
Apologies:
I meant to say the following:
As the city relentlessly shrinks, 1000 babies are born to women withOUT a HS diploma . . & many of those "women" are unmarried teens, who have no relationship with an also-teen father . . and have few family supports.
True; there are not many typewriters around today, but they and word processors still can be found.
No I haven't had to look for a job recently though I do look at resumes on a frequent basis. I still see many that where produced on a typewriter and have never disqualified an applicant based on that criteria. That would be a foolish move for a company. Unless of course it was computer related position.
I never saw an instance where a computer generated resume was needed for a janitor, roofer, garbageman, stock boy and so on.
Point being. If a person truly wants to better their position they will find a way. Not make excuses as to why they can't.
I haven't met a single successful person in business that said, "I can't," when it came to improving their position. Not once.
Not all jobs require this. If you can't read or write with the amount of money we pour into education it is ones own fault unless medically unable to do so.
Yes it is a choice. Simple or not there are still choices to be made by the individual.
I know many elderly people who can not read or write who are gamefully employed and are living very comfortable lives.
These are just more excuses for people who make bad choices.
So, from this discussion it would seem that people with Down Syndrome are better equipped to look for and be employed by many of our corporations today, than those who just refuse to learn?
Last edited by LHardy; February 10th, 2008 at 12:13 PM.
But the bus is only $1.50 a ride, or $3.50 all day. You can't afford $3.50 to type up a resume or find a job? Come on.
And don't most of the folks on food stamps, HEAP, TANF, etc automatically get qualified for free/reduced bus ridership at our expense? I think so, because I always see a ton of able bodied people using those cards on the train/bus every day.
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