TV Literacy : $1.8-Million Program Aimed at Improving Reading Skills Unveiled

A century ago, if you couldn’t read or even write your own name, you could still get a job as long as you had strong muscles. But for the up to 1.5 million adults living in Los Angeles County today who can barely read a sixth-grade-level textbook, being illiterate could soon spell permanent unemployment.

Officials in Los Angeles on Thursday announced their proposed solution: They want to tap into the entertainment capital’s expertise by producing 160 half-hour videotapes aimed at improving reading skills and encouraging dropouts to go back to the classroom. The tapes will be shown on television to generations of Angelenos raised on the tube.

‘Build New Hope and Opportunity’

“We believe that this new program will be the basis upon which we build new hope and opportunity, giving people a chance to learn to read, to become literate and thus become participating citizens of our society,” said Mayor Tom Bradley in joining city commissioners at a press conference to announce the $1.8-million program.

Named “Opportunity USA, The Discovery Series,” the program’s launching comes at a time when economists have predicted a crisis in Los Angeles if the city fails to bridge the growing gap between an undereducated, blue-collar work force and an increasingly technological job market. City officials said they hope to tap private firms for the entire cost of the program.

Based on a 1988 pilot program that taught English and American history to immigrants seeking amnesty, the “Discovery Series” will teach reading, writing and other basic skills at three different levels.

The first section will try to bring those who cannot read or write at all up to at least a second-grade level, said Emily Chappell, executive producer of the series and executive director of the city’s Bicentennial Commission on the Constitution, which developed the program.

The second level will attempt to raise those with second- and third-grade skills to a sixth-grade level, while the third will push viewers toward a ninth-grade educational level and possibly a high school diploma, Chappell said. She added that the segments will be broadcast concurrently on local television, with supplementary learning guides made available through newspapers. Tapes will also be distributed through libraries, social service agencies and churches.

‘A New Delivery’

“I’m trying to bring a new delivery to the (educational) system,” said Chappell, adding that educators from USC, UCLA and the Los Angeles Unified School District are helping design the series, which she hopes will reach at least 500,000 people.

“If you look at the classroom today and the classroom of 100 years ago it’s almost the same. You have one teacher in front of 35 students. But people are different today,” Chappell said.

Indeed, in today’s society even an 11th-grade education may not be enough to get a person hired. By 1990, the AFL-CIO says, a person functioning below the literacy level of a high school senior will be virtually unemployable except for the most-limited of service jobs.

Aimed particularly at welfare recipients, high school dropouts and the underemployed, Chappell said the “Discovery Series” will be an adult version of “Sesame Street,” featuring some celebrities in its segments and providing instruction in an entertaining way. Its format--in which history will be taught by “beaming” viewers back in time to witness events in America’s past--will act on the premise that the same medium that can bring people to tears can also teach them to read.

Chappell said program coordinators plan to meet with various companies within the next month to seek funding and hope by next March to have the shows on the air.