Emily Ellison, Executive Director, Says Farewell to Literacy Action!

Emily Ellison, Executive Director, with LAI GED Graduate

The written word has been a thread connecting essentially every aspect of my life, from my early adoration of my father, to my decision to become a writer in my early 20s, to the rich and intimate relationships I have with my husband, daughter, and many friends.  When I was a child, my father read to me each evening, sharing with me his passions for poetry, for history, biographies, religion, adventure, and far-off lands.  He never read children’s books to me (I don’t think we even had any in the house), but he read to me from whatever book he was reading, or from the newspaper, and sometimes even from one of the large maroon-colored American People’s Encyclopedias that lined the shelves in our den.  Those moments with my father were the most defining ones of my childhood and as I grew older and he read less frequently to me, I grabbed any book that was available and read from it by the beam of a flashlight under the bedcovers at night long after I was supposed to be asleep. 

This love of words followed me to college and to a brief tenure as a newspaper reporter and then to years as a novelist, posing questions and thoughts on the page that I couldn’t seem to be able to ask and say in person.  When our daughter was born in my mid-thirties, I finally began reading the canon of children’s literature that I had missed as a child.  Some of our most cherished mother-daughter times were reading aloud together as Dad and I had done so many years earlier, or filling up her red wagon with books and pulling them home along a broken sidewalk from the library every week.

It was impossible to imagine NOT being able to read, not living in a home with books in every room.  So when in 2006 the executive director’s position opened up at Literacy Action, an agency that was founded in the late 60s to teach adults to read, I jumped at the opportunity. 

When I think back to my assumptions in 2006, those initial thoughts about literacy seem so naïve.  Some of the first things I asked the staff when I arrived at Literacy Action were: “How do you measure success?”  “How long does it take to teach someone to read?”  “How long will it be before they can get their GED?” 

It was out of my range of experience to understand that a 45-year-old man born and raised in the United States could enter a literacy class not knowing the sounds of the alphabet.  I had no idea that a grandmother would be unable to read to her grandchildren.  That someone could have gotten to the 11^th grade in high school and yet enter our programs at a 3^rd grade reading level.  That someone in 21^st Century America could not fill out a job application or read a train schedule or understand a drug label.  That countless adults could not locate the United States on a world map and didn’t have the math skills needed to balance a checking account.

I also did not realize how extreme were the poverty levels of most of the clients that Literacy Action served or that their lack of literacy skills went back generations. I didn’t know that so many of our students dropped out of school not because they were stupid or lazy or uninterested, but because they had learning issues that were never diagnosed or addressed.  I didn’t understand that people with dyslexia will almost never learn to read with the whole language curriculums that had been used in their schools.  As Maya Angelou wrote, truly I was “ignorant of my own ignorance.”

Tomorrow is my last day serving as the executive leader at Literacy Action.  I will be returning to the Atlanta Girls’ School, an independent college-preparatory school that I helped found in the late 1990s.  Although I will no longer be employed at Literacy Action, I will never lose my passion for advocating for adult learners and for the under-financed programs that serve them day after day.  Over the last few years, I’ve been privileged to learn so many things from our students and staff.  They’ve taught me so much about courage and perseverance.  They’ve opened my eyes to what my friend and LAI trustee Chris Miller calls America’s “dirty little secret” regarding the numbers of functionally illiterate adults in this country.  How did we get to this point, where instead of having one of the highest literacy rates in the world, the U.S. has 93 million adults with limited reading, writing, and math skills, where one in seven American adults lack the basic skills to apply for college or technical training?  How has this not become a priority for elected officials and corporate leaders? 

Maybe they’re as clueless as I was about the impact of low literacy rates on ALL of us, not only the families of undereducated adults.  There is crime, for example.  Those in the adult literacy field know that the numbers of prison beds that will be budgeted for in the next two decades are based on the current reading scores of third-grade children.  They know that 70% of prisoners score in the lowest literacy levels on the National Adult Literacy Survey and that less than 50% of those incarcerated have a high school diploma or GED certificate.

My colleagues in the field have taught me that children coming from low-literate homes start pre-school at least three years behind children coming from homes where the adults can read, that they stay behind for the rest of their tenure in school, and have an exponentially greater chance of dropping out of school than their peers. They know that there is a proven correlation between illiteracy and poverty and that low-income, undereducated adults are unable to read to their children, help them with homework, and rarely become involved in their children’s schools. For those of us who have spent so much time volunteering in our children’s classrooms and spending a great portion of our lives making certain that they are being well educated, it’s easy to be judgmental about someone who doesn’t seem to be as active in that process as we.  But let’s think about it.  How many of us would want to sit down with our child’s teacher if we couldn’t read the progress report they wanted to discuss with us?  If we knew it was likely our secret of being unable to read would be discovered?

There’s so much shame involved when someone can’t read.  There’s a lifetime of low self-esteem that works itself out in often inappropriate and unhealthy ways.  But the majority of our clients at Literacy Action are brave beyond measure.  They’re determined to stop the cycle of illiteracy that has kept them and their families trapped in public housing and dead-end jobs.  They WANT to be self sufficient.  They’re desperate to make sure that the paths their children and grandchildren take are far different from the ones they’ve followed.

It is estimated that more than 800,000 adults in Metro Atlanta do not have the reading skills to fill out an online job application, to help their children with homework, to end this intergenerational cycle on their own.  They need our help.  And agencies such as Literacy Action need the support of businesses, politicians, community leaders, and educators.  This is an enormous ship to turn around, and it won’t be turned quickly if we don’t decide as a community, as a nation, that we’re going to be a society that reads.   

Great things are ahead for Literacy Action and the adult literacy effort in Georgia if we all come together to make sure that every child in the state has a parent who can read to her, that every student comes from a home where the adults can help him be successful in school, where we have a workforce that has the math skills, critical thinking skills, and technology skills to ensure that we remain leaders in the global economy. 

After nearly five years working in the adult literacy field, my love of reading has shifted.  There’s never a day goes by when I pick up a book or a newspaper or a memo that I take it for granted that I can read while so many of my fellow citizens cannot.  I now know that the person ahead of me in line at the tax office who asks the clerk to help fill out forms for him because he “left his glasses at home,” is probably someone who is functionally illiterate.  I now know that it’s likely that every one in five persons who I walk past on the street downtown or see on the subway or in the store is likely to have a reading issue.  The true joy of being able to read will only return when Atlanta is a fully literate city.  Please join Literacy Action and other literacy programs as they work tirelessly to help make that happen.

-Written by Emily Ellison