re not learning the core curriculum (qtd. in Curtis 9). In the field of education there is immense pressure to keep absences and tardies at a minimum. A school district's average daily attendance correlates directly to how much money they get from the state. This fact forces schools to keep numerous children in school at all costs without really being concerned with how they perform. Thus, if teachers graded as they should, failure rates would be much higher due to the high illiteracy among students. This relates to literacy based on the fact that even if students cannot read, they are being pacified in school just to appease the state and are not being taught but rather tolerated ( Curtis 12). Some teachers earnestly thought that the system had failed to educate as its mission states. The conviction of most veteran teachers was that pupils could not read because they had not been forced to read. According to the previous law children could only be held back twice. There were pros and cons for the law, however, the results were that students who could not read were being placed onward regardless if they could read or not. This formula festered and supplied many illiterate people to society (Curtis 14). As Bill Honig Ph.D. states as his theory "If you don't have an organized program to teach skills directly, you're going to have a gap in you're [sic] reading program. It's like trying to play baseball without being taught the skill of hitting'" (qtd. in Levine 65). Aspirations that by the millennium all United States citizens would own the intelligence and abilities to be competitive in a world economy are quickly being squashed. 26,000 people were surveyed into five levels with five being the most literate and one representing the most illiterate. Some 44 million Americans fall into the lowest two levels. The study shows that the vast majority of American adults do not have the literacy skills necessary to integrat...
