Literacy Texas

Interagency Literacy Council Literacy Texas Testimony

Literacy Texas is the statewide literacy leadership coalition for Texas.  Founded in 2001, the mission of our organization is to unify Texas’ literacy community-based and faith-based organizations.  Literacy Texas provides these programs resources to build their capacity to serve more learners through training, sharing of best practices, funding opportunities, networking and advocacy on their behalf. We proactively seek out state and national best practices and models and then we share these resources with our service delivery members. Literacy Texas’ strength is in stakeholder leadership and relationships that engage local and state government agencies, businesses, civic leadership, education, health and human services agencies, and the workforce.

Literacy Texas is unique – no other organization is devoted to supporting the hundreds of literacy programs across the state that are not primarily funded through the state and federal adult education system.  Literacy Texas works with programs that range from large in size – serving as many as 9,000 students (LIFT – Literacy Instruction For Texas) a year to small programs that serve 20 or less.  Led by a board driven strategic plan, we have a unique perspective because we interact with literacy community-based organizations from all counties in the state.

The literacy CBOs we represent are grassroots organizations with an entrepreneurial spirit who want to help those in their community achieve their dream of reading to their children, getting a living wage job or furthering their education.  CBOs do this with limited resources, but with a huge amount of passion.  Our hope is the CBOs get recognized as true partners in all our objectives to reach, teach and retain more adult learners and to have the resources required to build the capacity for millions of unserved adult learners.

Adults and out-of-school youth depend upon their teachers to provide high-quality instruction. The majority of literacy programs in Texas, however, operate with very limited training budgets. Literacy Texas and our funders believe the literacy community-based organizations deserve well-trained volunteer tutors and teachers and program administrators for the success of their programs and their learners.

Texas Learns and TCALL have been a great supporter of Literacy Texas and we appreciate everything that Joanie Rethlake and the agency have done to fund conference reimbursements and training for literacy CBOs.  The Interagency Literacy Council has given Literacy Texas the opportunity to learn more about and collaborate more closely with the Texas Education Agency, Texas Workforce Commission and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.  We appreciate this opportunity and have been sharing what we have learned with the 300 teachers and tutors on the Literacy Texas’ listserv. 

We have come a long way – but much more needs to be done. Literacy Texas continues to passionately advocate for state funded research to count the CBOs and their learners.
Until all our data is counted – there is not an accurate picture of the needs and services for Texas adult learners.  Although we have had dialogue with several state agencies to fund this research, we are still seeking a resolution to this endeavor.  We estimate that CBOs are serving approximately 100,000 learners a year without federal or state funding.  One of the largest CBOs in the state, Literacy Advance of Houston, is not being counted in the current state database because they do not receive public funding.  Until we have better data, we don’t have the numbers to substantiate our impact and demonstrate the tremendous asset these organizations are in reducing the number of low literacy learners in our state.  Literacy Texas has also advocated for learners from CBOs to be added to the TEAMS state database. A year ago this looked impossible, but we are now encouraged that this might happen thanks to Jenny Jacobs with TEA.

Every week calls and emails are received by Literacy Texas from people who say they’ve lost their job and they can’t fill out an application, or they have a degree but can’t spell and they want to know where they can get help to improve their skills.  These examples validate that workers are not fully prepared for today’s workplace needs.

We wish all literacy community-based organizations could be a part of a coalition like the established Houston READ Commission, the Literacy Coalition of Central Texas or the Tarrant Literacy Coalition who have had years of great leadership to make their provider organizations strong.  Unfortunately most communities do not have this type of support. Literacy Texas is there to help the other hundreds of programs in the state to grow and become better established.

Literacy Texas believes in the research* that says—Raising literacy and numeracy for people at the bottom of the skills distribution is more important to economic growth than producing more highly skilled graduates. The TWIC research validates that adult literacy is a silent epidemic and not going to go away.  Thanks to the Council for giving us all the opportunity to work better together to get better results.

 

 

 

* 2005 C.D. Howe Institute Commentary, “Public Investment in skills: Are Canadian Governments Doing Enough?” by Serge Coulombe and Jean-Francois Tremblay.