My recent post sharing Maren Elfert and Jude Walker’s paper The Rise and Fall of Adult Literacy in Canada elicited a number of responses including one from Scott Murray.
Scott, as many of you know, was the driving force behind Canada’s leadership in the International Adult Literacy Survey and subsequent surveys including the most recent PIAAC. Since leaving the federal government, Scott’s firm DataAngel has continued to work on large scale surveys and evaluations in the area of adult education and training.
Scott has taken issue with Maren and Jude’s paper and prepared a response which he asked me to share with you.
Murray – Pluck not the mote from thy neighbour’s eye Feb 21
Scott makes a number of points about the value of strong literacy skills, of targeting people in the workplace and about contributions made by essential skills projects.
However, I have issues with his response. Overall, I think Scott is not responding specifically to the Elfert/Walker piece but rather is presenting his assessment of literacy programs, which he seems to feel are “incapable of delivery the goods expected by public funders.” Throughout his paper, the tone is negative and at times sarcastic…“Ultimately, the vaunted literacy infrastructure failed to provide any evidence of meaningful returns on investment, relying instead on shrill protestations of “We are doing God’s work!”.” I don’t know what prompted him to use this tone.
I believe Scott mis-interpreted Maren and Jude’s definition of the literacy infrastructure. They write about the provincial/territorial and national literacy groups while Scott’s response focuses on the delivery of literacy programs. Maren and Jude don’t actually address literacy delivery.
The description of the federal government’s role (page 3) is limited focusing on the more recent efforts around Essential Skills. It does not account for the type of activities that the National Literacy Secretariat encouraged from 1989 to at least 2006, that is, developing learning materials, improving co-ordination and information sharing, improving access to literacy programs and outreach, increasing public awareness of literacy issues, and research. These activities show the breadth of what the federal government can do.
Several statements in the response do not seem to relate to anything in Maren and Jude’s paper. For instance, on page 4 Scott states “The ideas that an untrained instructor can ascertain their learners needs without assessing them, or can know that they did the job they promised the learners and funders they would do, is a fantasy.” I could find no reference to practitioners, trained or untrained, in the original paper.
I would argue against the statement made on page 6 that “To make matters worse, many of the literacy training providers went to great lengths to resist sharing the benefits of publicly funded developments with others.” The existence of NALD/COPIAN, AlphaPlus, the Centre for Literacy Summer Institutes speak to the ways in which the literacy organizations did share.
Finally I totally disagree with the statement on page 8 “The final straw came when analysis revealed that the provincial and territorial literacy organizations were spending virtually all of their federal funding on overhead rather in helping low skilled adults gain skill.”
Provincial and territorial organizations were getting operational funding from the federal government, the point of which was to fund overhead. None of these organizations was in the business of directly teaching literacy to learners. The federal government decided that it no longer wanted to provide operational funding. It may have thought the money should have been spent of delivery; however that was not what the organizations were being funded to do. I know of no direct plea to have these provincial/territorial organizations cooperate across jurisdictions although there were efforts to do this with the national organizations.
Although I’ve taken issue with the tone and quite a few of the points made, I agreed to share Scott’s paper with you. It is important for us to understand different points of view if we are ever to create a robust adult literacy, education and training policy and program regime in this country.
I look forward to reading your comments on both papers – respectful dialogue is always welcome here.
