Barbara Bush’s Legacy in Literacy Lives On
Thirty-five years ago today the former first lady launched her namesake foundation that has transformed adult literacy and lives.
Tasha Humphreys didn’t want to lie anymore on job applications about earning a high school diploma.
So when Humphreys and her newly blended family moved to Maine from Florida in the early 2000s, she had already decided to give one last-ditch effort at earning her GED. By then, the mother of five who dropped out of high school in ninth grade had attempted the certification twice. But with her youngest children entering the school system and a new start in a new state, she wasn’t ready to give up on her own education.
Those first two attempts were beyond frustrating.
Humphreys, who was born in Louisiana, describes her unstable upbringing that forced her to move a lot during her childhood and contributed to her educational issues. She tried to earn her GED the first time when she was 16.
“They put you in a room and give you some workbooks and say, ‘Go,’” Humphreys recalls. “There wasn’t really anybody who could help explain or answer questions.”
Shortly after her daughters were born, she tried again in Florida. Humphreys recalls attending evening GED classes at a local public school, where she describes a noisy and chaotic learning environment with juveniles whose attendance was court-ordered.
“It was so distracting because the kids were like, ‘Hey, do you have a cigarette?’ or they were throwing pencils or just chitchatting,” she says, adding that there was still no explanation for how to get things done in the program. So, again, she left.
But when Humphrey entered her third GED program when she was in her mid-20s, she discovered through her local town hall in Maine that something was different. There was a quiet setting and two teachers—one who taught math, the other English and writing. They were approachable. And they changed the trajectory of her life.
“They didn’t make me feel like I was asking a stupid question,” she recalls. “That was a big thing.”
The program was one of more than a thousand across the country funded by the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.
The ‘sheer force’ of Barbara Bush
Thirty-five years ago today, former First Lady Barbara Bush (1989-1993) launched her namesake literacy foundation with the goal of breaking the multigenerational cycle of low literacy by supporting parents with unmet literacy needs and encouraging them to learn alongside their children. At the time, it was widely reported that she believed literacy was “the most important issue we have.” Even before her years in the White House, she linked literacy to cascading American societal problems, including sustainable family wages, economic growth, and health outcomes.
The work of the foundation would go on to have an exponential impact on American society when, in 1991, the National Literacy Act (NLA) was signed into law by her husband, President George H.W. Bush. The groundbreaking legislation inspired by Barbara Bush’s passion for literacy was far reaching and would eventually pave the way for new nationwide education standards.
When Congress passed the NLA, it amended the Department of Education Organization Act to coordinate and establish literacy-related programs. It amended the Adult Education Act (AEA) to establish the National Institute for Literacy and the National Institute Board, which gave the entities the power to appropriate funds. And it established in the Department of Labor a structure to funnel grant money to businesses that demonstrated exemplary workplace literacy.
The bill also bolstered federal investment in literacy by providing grants for public housing authorities for literacy programs and training for educators. It expanded grant eligibility to community-based organizations and nonprofits and established a Family Literacy Public Broadcasting Program for the production and dissemination of family literacy programming. Moreover, the bill extended literacy support for commercial truck drivers, established an inexpensive book distribution program for children and students with special needs and provided funding for correctional education programs for inmates.
In marking the NLA’s 25th anniversary in 2016, Barbara Bush said this about literacy: “The National Literacy Act put into policy my belief that education is a civil right, no matter one’s age. The needs of adult learners are so often overlooked, yet adult education initiatives have enormous potential to improve the social and economic well-being of families, communities and our nation.”
“The National Literacy Act put into policy my belief that education is a civil right, no matter one’s age.” — former First Lady Barbara Bush
The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy was originally established as a grant-giving organization, Andrew Roberts, Barbara Bush Foundation interim president and CEO, tells East Wing Magazine. He explains how Barbara Bush would go out and spread awareness about literacy, raise money and deploy funds through grants to family literacy programs across the country.
Ultimately, the NLA created resource centers all over the United States, which are no longer funded at the federal level, Roberts says.
“The idea was not necessarily that she would fund those programs forever,” Roberts says. “But the idea was to get those programs what they needed to get up and rolling.”
The foundation gave out well over $110 million over the first 25 years in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to Roberts.
“That initial infusion of money from the federal government was huge,” Roberts says.
“That initial infusion of money from the federal government was huge,” Roberts says.
Nowadays, large pieces of the NLA are no longer funded, according to Roberts. However, the wider-ranging impact was that the bill came at the time when there was nothing like it for literacy.
The National Institute of Literacy, for example, no longer exists. Although, Roberts says, it was the first-of-its kind educational standard in the United States. Modern educational standards like the Common Core curriculum may not have come into existence without the NLA, he says.
“And even though elements of it no longer exist, in almost all cases there’s a successor that does keep some of that work moving,” Roberts says. “If you talk to literacy experts all over our field, everyone still refers back to that bill, even elements of it that are no longer in use.”
One program that the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy still uses today, says Roberts, is the National Reporting System, the de facto reporting system for the federally funded Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). According to Roberts, tucked into WIOA is a modernized version of the NLA that includes literacy support and is currently going through the process of being improved and renewed.
“I think everyone believes that Barbara Bush almost single-handedly pushed that bill [NLA] through,” Roberts says, noting there are stories and photographs that show the former first lady and then Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander (1991-1993) in his office working the phones for the NLA, which was, notably, sponsored by Rep. Tom Sawyer, a Democrat from Ohio. “It was her sheer force of will that led that legislation.”
“I think everyone believes that Barbara Bush almost single-handedly pushed that bill [NLA] through,” Roberts says.
‘I had to fight for what I wanted’
If it wasn’t for Barbara Bush, Angelica Ibarra might not be sitting behind her desk at her Florida-based nonprofit Achieve Plant City describing to East Wing Magazine how the organization helps people who are a lot like her. Ibarra, who was born in Mexico, lived a migrant life growing up. She and her family came to the United States decades ago and worked from farm-to-farm, following the harvest from one state to another. She dropped out of school in seventh grade. Says Ibarra, “There’s nothing that really belongs to you because you leave to follow the crops.”
By the time Ibarra was 26, she had two children and was still living the same migrant life. “I was desperately trying to look for a way out of that cycle,” she says.
With less than five years of schooling, Ibarra recalls not having the skills to write a full paragraph when she enrolled in a GED program in Florida. It took her six months to earn her GED, and she credits a supportive teacher who helped her through the program long before the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy was established. Ibarra admits it wasn’t easy.
“I hated it,” she says, reflecting back on a memory of writing a timed essay. She had 45 minutes to complete it. When the teacher came back to collect the essay, Ibarra’s paper was blank. “It was frustrating because you sit there and you feel stupid. Why can’t I come up with at least one sentence?” she recalls.
Ibarra kept at it, though, and earned her GED. She went on to community college, where she again struggled because the skills she had gained through the GED program were so basic. A particularly painful memory is of an English professor who gave her a zero on a paper and wrote, “You owe me points.”
“That’s how bad my essay was,” Ibarra says. “I learned I had to fight for what I wanted.”
She didn’t give up. Four and a half years later, she earned a bachelor’s degree, which led her to where she is sitting today. But it was in a job working at a nonprofit in Florida for which she was hired to start a family literacy program that she first became acquainted with the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. Ibarra was tasked with securing funding from the Florida Family Literacy Initiative, but she came to the job without grant writing experience or management experience and almost gave up when a woman at the organization leveled with her.
“‘You don’t have the grant writing skills, but do you have the heart?’” Ibarra recalls the woman asking.
That question was enough for her to move forward. At the time, Jeb Bush, son of Barbara and George H.W. Bush was governor and the governor’s family literacy grant was the first funding the organization received. That nonprofit went on to serve hundreds of families. Years later when the program faced closure because the building in which it was located was sold, Ibarra contacted her funders, including the Barbara Bush Foundation and received another life-changing piece of advice.
“‘Angelica, why don’t you become captain of your destiny?’” Ibarra recalls being asked, adding that the foundation leadership suggested moving the location of the program and for Ibarra to continue running it. “That’s all I needed to hear. If the Barbara Bush Foundation will support that, then absolutely.”
In 2014, Ibarra realized her dream of establishing a family literacy program in the community where she grew up as a migrant. Achieve Plant City provides a range of literacy services including adult English classes, preschool and intergenerational learning activities, elementary school tutoring and parenting workshops. Today, that program serves roughly 30 families— about 100 people—per year, many of whom are immigrants facing the same struggles Ibarra did.
“None of what we do now would have been possible without the Barbara Bush Foundation saying, ‘Here’s the seed money,’” Ibarra says.
Literacy as an economic driver
As time would tell, Barbara Bush’s instincts about literacy in the United States would bear out scientifically.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, more than half of U.S. adults from ages 16 to 74 lack proficiency in literacy. That means 54% of Americans—130 million people—are reading below the adult equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
Not long before Barbara Bush passed away in 2018, Roberts says former first lady approached the board with a sobering commentary: The foundation had been giving away all this money, but literacy numbers hadn’t changed as dramatically as the foundation had hoped. Bush asked, what could be done to make a bigger impact?
The former first lady’s question would be honored when sitting First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, an educator herself, in late 2021 paid tribute to Barbara Bush as the keynote speaker of the foundation’s National Summit on Adult Literacy. At the event, the foundation announced that it had received a $1.6 million grant from the Dollar General Literacy Foundation to support implementation of the first-ever National Action Plan for Adult Literacy.
And, earlier in 2020, a study by Gallup on behalf of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy found that improving adult literacy could generate $2.2 trillion in annual income for the country, 10% of the gross domestic product.
Though the statistics from the Department of Education have yet to be updated, they are still staggering, says Roberts. The latest literacy figures, from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), are to be released in December. Roberts anticipates the numbers will tell an even more dire story.
“The numbers, unfortunately, are broadly going the wrong way,” Roberts says. “There are a lot of reasons for that. The pandemic is certainly playing a role in that.”
Indeed, the pending report will be the first measurement of how COVID impacted adult education in America.
“It’s an issue of high importance,” says Roberts. “We’d love to put ourselves out of business, [so] that we don’t need us anymore. But, unfortunately, we still do.”
With Bush daughter Doro Bush Koch serving as the organization's honorary chair, the foundation is pressing forward with a new strategic plan, according to Roberts. Over the past decade, the foundation has leaned into adult literacy in addition to its work with family literacy. With post-pandemic numbers expected to show a downward trend in literacy, Roberts says the foundation will introduce new programming that emphasizes the importance of reading at home along with expanding existing services.
An unexpected benefit of the pandemic, Roberts says, was that it allowed people to get more comfortable with digital tools. He believes there are new ways to deploy programs that will allow the foundation to reach new people where they are.
What still surprises Roberts, though, is that literacy can be pigeon-holed to certain segments of society. Many believe that literacy issues are primarily an English-as-a-second-language problem or an inner-city issue, he says. In fact, Roberts says, it cuts across all demographics.
“It’s much wider spread than people recognize,” Roberts says.
Resilience in the pursuit of literacy
Now settled in New Hampshire, Tasha Humphreys looks back on her struggles with literacy with a deep sense of satisfaction. When she received her GED, she was told she scored the highest out of her group of test takers. The program held a graduation ceremony and Humphreys was asked to deliver a speech to her peers.
From there, she applied for a grant to enroll in a nursing assistant certification program. And that was just the beginning. Today Humphreys is a double-board-certified nurse practitioner (a family and psychiatric nurse practitioner). She recently launched her own practice in the field of addiction treatment. In her day-to-day work, she advocates for her patients with the added message that it is never too late to learn to read and to get an education.
“I’m the first [person] to find those resources for them,” she says, adding that she wants to be the same type of mentor that she was provided through the literacy program.
“I use my story as that role model that I didn’t have growing up,” Humphreys says.
When her patients sit down with her and see her degrees hanging on the wall behind her, she gives them a sense of hope.
“I always tell them I’m an old street kid from way back, and I can relate to you and understand the difficulties and the struggles,” she says. “Somebody telling them that it is possible—that’s huge for somebody.”
When she thinks about the Barbara Bush Foundation and all the literacy programs peppered across the United States it supported, Humphreys understands the difference it has made in people’s lives. It changes whole outcomes for people coming from poverty, putting them in a position to succeed and then give back. In Humphreys’ case, a generational cycle of poverty ended.
“Look at how this simple program changed my life,” Humphreys says. “I’m just a Southern girl who came all the way up north and this program in this little town changed my whole world. It changed my legacy.”
More information about supporting the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy can be found here.