Clevelander Delores Landers dropped out of high school when she was 16, after she got pregnant.
Despite that, she built a life for herself and her two kids, with only the most basic of math skills. That began to change when she started coming to the Cleveland adult education-focused nonprofit Seeds of Literacy, roughly two years ago.
"So, here's my story. When I came here, I didn't know how to subtract. I didn't know how to divide. I didn't know how to do multiplications. I learned math here," Landers said.
Despite struggling with math as a kid, Sanders, who is 64, says the only advice she got from her teachers was, "keep up." She said her mother didn't understand why she was struggling.
"I suffered a lot of beatings because I couldn't do my math," she said. "Every time I got my report card for math, it was always an F."
Her math skills have improved dramatically since coming to Seeds of Literacy.
"It's been a lot of times that the tutors, you know, would bring tears to my eyes, but they were tears of joy," Landers said.
Seeds of Literacy has hundreds of stories like Landers’, stories of adults who have struggled their entire lives with English and math skills after being left behind by the education system.
And Landers isn't alone. 28% of U.S. adults in 2023 scored at or below the lowest level of literacy, struggling with even the basics of English, on the national Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. People scoring at that level could have trouble comprehending details on a job posting or utility bill according to the National Literacy Trust. And the number of adults scoring that low on the assessment has risen in recent years, up from about 19% in 2017. An even higher percentage, 34%, tested at the lowest level for math in 2023.
Bonnie Entler, president and CEO of Seeds of Literacy, said the nonprofit is one of several in the Cleveland area providing free education to adults, to help them obtain GEDs and build English and math skills.
"Here in the city of Cleveland we have a fairly high illiteracy rate or low literacy levels," Entler said. "We are at about 66% and we have neighborhoods that vary all different, from the highest 90% plus, all the way down."
While the study that estimated that literacy rate in Cleveland has been challenged recently, Entler said the fact of the matter remains: too many people in Cleveland, and across the country, are struggling with even basic comprehension of English and math. And it causes serious problems for them, from being locked out of access to higher-paying jobs and higher education to the inability to participate more fully in public life.
Why so many are struggling
63-year-old Clevelander Denise Sanders says she didn’t receive the attention she needed in the classroom when she was growing up. She said it's had lifelong negative effects.
"Low self-esteem. I didn't care no more, because I knew didn't nobody care," she explained. "You know, especially at school, some of the teachers, they didn't care. Me being a Black American, it shows how some teachers would do us, you know?"
Sanders was diagnosed with a learning disability as a kid, but, the U.S. didn’t have laws on the books until the mid-1970s guaranteeing supports for students with disabilities; that sea change came too late for Sanders. And even now, the Learning Disabilities Association of America says students are still suffering in the classroom; despite one in five children having "learning and attention issues," few get direct support or accommodations, while a significant number of children with learning disabilities go undiagnosed.
While Sanders was still able to graduate from high school, when she got to Seeds of Literacy more than a decade ago, she was only reading at a third-grade level.
Cleveland in particular has a high number of people living in poverty; studies suggest a strong correlation between poverty and the number of people struggling with low levels of literacy.
Tina Weaver, 57, who's been coming to Seeds of Literacy for roughly five years, said many of the students dealt with challenging external factors at home when they were children, that compounded their challenges in the classroom.
"You've got to understand that these children are coming from broken homes, a lot of them, the people that you see here now, trying to get their education now," she said. "Seeds of Literacy helps people in our adult life, even though we still feel inadequate or embarrassed that we didn't (learn) or we're not at the place where we believe we should be."
Clevelander Carol Baraga, 64, said her parents allowed her to drop out of high school to join the workforce after she reached algebra in school and was so thoroughly frustrated by being unable to grasp it and her teachers' response to her struggles.
"I'm raising my hand. I'm raising my hand," she recalled. "They say 'it's in the book, it's in the book.' But I need help, I know it's in the book."
Baraga noted people with low levels of literacy are not "stupid." She said her father taught her bookkeeping and she's worked many jobs throughout her life, including at the city water department and at Goodwill Industries. She also made sure both her kids graduated from high school. She said she hopes to eventually get her GED degree.
"I want to prove this to myself that I'm not stupid, that I can do this," she said. "Because my brother and my kids, certain questions I'd ask them, they'd say, 'you went to school, you should have stayed in school. You don't know that? You're kind of stupid.' I never like that. I hated that."
Statewide, the average graduation rate across all public schools after four years is 87.9%. At Cleveland Municipal School District, the graduation rate has dipped since the pandemic, to 75.3% in the 2023-2024 school year. Just 35.3% of CMSD third-graders scored "proficient" in reading and 32% scored "proficient" in math on CMSD's last state assessment.
What officials say
Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb in a brief interview this week said "a lot more work" needs to be done to improve the quality of education at CMSD, to help better prepare students for the future. Bibb appoints the school district's board, and also "concurs" on the vote to hire the district's CEO.
"We have a lot more work to do, especially across CMSD, to make sure our young children get the right head start they need around literacy and the science of reading," Bibb said. "That's why I'm excited about the new curriculum we've deployed across CMSD under (CEO) Dr. Morgan's leadership. And this is an area where I think there's broad bipartisan support. The governor has invested significant money in the 'science of reading' statewide. We want to continue to invest in nonprofits like the Seeds of Literacy so that if young adults don't have those skills, they can still get them to be competitive in the workforce."
Morgan noted that the district adopted a universal curriculum for reading in 2024, and will adopt a universal curriculum for math in the near future. School officials have argued a lack of a consistent curriculum across buildings in the past made it hard for students moving from building to building to have continuity in learning.
"It's unfortunate through the years, and not only just in our city, but just nationwide, without the appropriate measures, without the high quality curricula in place, there are some kids and now adults that do slip through the cracks and we want to do everything we can to make sure that that doesn't happen for our kids and we're going to try hard to make sure it doesn't."
But what about for adults who have already been through the system? Michele Pomerantz, the mayor's chief of education, said the school system was in a significant period of upheaval from the late 1970s into the 1990s. Court-ordered desegregation and busing meant a rapid reorganization of where students went to school, disrupting education for many but also leading to white flight from the city.
"Desegregation caused generations of upheaval and decline and people leaving the school system," she said.
She also said schools have waffled for years on the best way to teach students how to read, with many states like Ohio only aligning recently on requiring districts to adopt curricula backed by the "science of reading," a phonics-heavy approach based off how young brains learn to read.
David Quolke, the former president of the Cleveland Teachers Union from 2008 to 2020, worked in the district as an instructor for the visually impaired between 1984 and 2008. He said there was a lot of frustration directed at the school district, political leaders and judges for the way desegregation was implemented, causing chaos in the system. Teachers also left the district and many were laid off due to budget issues, leading to massive class sizes, he said.
"I believe our graduation rate was like 33%. I mean, it was abysmal," Quolke said of the school system in the 1980s.
Quolke said the school district was unable to get levies passed for years. Meanwhile, Ohio's school-funding system was declared unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court in 1997, with the Ohio's state government not providing a true fix until recently, with Ohio's "fair school funding" formula.
Bob Paponetti, president of The Literacy Cooperative, a Cleveland nonprofit focused on improving literacy, said the root of the problem of adults lacking literacy skills starts early.
"If you continue to kind of go upstream, so to speak, you can see there's a measure called the kindergarten readiness assessment. And if you look at that, especially for some of the more urban areas, you have, in some cases, 80% of children starting kindergarten behind," he explained.
Why Seeds of Literacy's model is working
Seeds of Literacy CEO Bonnie Entler said the nonprofit is seeing increasing demand for its services, year after year. Its model allows students to come as they are, whenever they’re able, for as long as they like, with three sessions - in the morning, afternoon and evening. There’s a virtual classroom and assistance with learning how to use computers.
Entler said while her organization has a relatively small staff of 25, it relies on a veritable army of volunteer tutors - about 350 total – to serve about 1,700 students a year.
“We know our students didn't succeed in that traditional classroom, so we don't want to put them back into that same environment," Entler said. "So, our students really have that one-to one support that they really need and really are working on whatever is of interest to them.”
Flexibility is key, Entler said. Many students are struggling with barriers like transportation, heavy work schedules and caring for kids and grandkids, so they can't come to every class.
Seeds of Literacy student Denise Sanders has been coming on-and-off for more than a decade, with breaks to care for her sick mother and help with grandkids.
Overall, Sanders appreciates the support she’s found, including from one former tutor who was a writer.
"He saw something in me about writing. He says I have that gift. And I'm like, well, where is that? Because with my reading and writing, I was like, 'how am I going to do that?' But I'm determined," she said.
After years of hard work, Sanders is now reading at a sixth-grade level, and she hopes to go far beyond that. Her end goal? To eventually attend college to study writing.
"I try to set an example, a positive example, that it's never too late to make a difference in your life," Sanders said. "She (her daughter) got her GED. My grandson, he got his GED, you know. So I feel that I made a kind of an input in that."
She hopes to be an inspiration to others, which she said wouldn't have been possible without her time at Seeds of Literacy.
