Author: The Old Crank

First Look: President’s Proposed FY 2016 Budget

/ The Old Crank / 1 Comment

(Updated Below)

I don’t know when or if I’ll have the time to give the President’s Fiscal Year 2016 Budget Proposal a through read, let alone any kind of thorough evaluation. But here is my quick-take look at what it proposes for adult education.

The most important source of federal funds for adult education programs, by far, is the Adult Basic and Literacy Education State Grant program under Title II of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), which was level funded at $569 million. This is the money that states use to provide grants to local adult education programs. If you are a program that gets part of your funding through WIOA, this is the pot where that money comes from. On the other hand, the President once again proposes an increase for something called Adult Education National Leadership Activities. This year, he calls for a $6 million dollar increase  to this line item ($13.7 million to $19.7 million) in order to “support States in their efforts to improve adult education standards and assessments and to carry out data collection activities during the first year of full implementation of the reauthorized Adult Education programs.” This represents about a 44% increase over the FY 2015 spending for this line item. It also represents a substantial increase over the amount that is authorized by WIOA, which caps National Leadership Activities at $15 million.

Congress rarely bites on any suggestion to increase National Leadership Activities funding. Interestingly—and frustratingly—the administration kept the combined total of state grants and National Leadership Activities funding under the total combined amount authorized by WIOA for FY 2016. In other words, even though they went over the authorized limit for National Leadership Activities funding, they come in $33.6 million below AEFLA’s authorized level of $622.3 million for these two line items combined. So they could have increased the state grant line item without going over the total authorized amount for adult education under WIOA. Interestingly, it appears the administration was careful to keep the combined total of state grants and National Leadership Activities funding in line with the total amount authorized by WIOA (in other words, even though they went over the authorized limit for National Leadership Activities funding, they “balanced” this by not increasing the state grant line item). Perhaps Congress will be more inclined to approve the President’s proposal, since on balance it does match is less than WIOA’s total authorized level. Or maybe this will signal to them that adult education is not a priority.

But a big challenge with proposals like this is that the state grant program has a larger and broader constituency than National Leadership Activities. National Leadership funds tend to stay at the U.S. Department of Education—or, as is often the case, with contractors they employ. As a general rule, Congress is more inclined to protect or support increases to federal funding that goes out to the states and districts they represent than funding that appears to enlarge the budgets of federal agencies, especially if they are unclear on what the benefit of this funding will have for their constituents back home.

One other point: adult eduction policy folks are sometimes so focused on WIOA (or it’s predecessor, the Workforce Investment Act) that they tend to ignore or downplay other federal programs that are sources of funds for adult education programs, especially community based programs (CBOs). The Community Development Block Grant program, educational research funding, and funding for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) are just a few examples. We also sometimes forget to thoroughly analyze the potential for new programs proposed by the President to be a source of funding. If I have time maybe I’ll try to take a closer look at some of these programs in a future post—but in the meantime, don’t be shy about using the comments section to flag any funding issues or new programs that the adult education community should be paying attention to.

Congress never adopts a president’s budget in its entirely. Sometimes, as has been the case recently, it largely ignores it. This year it’s going to be particularly challenging for the administration to get any increases passed. Most of the administration’s new program proposals or proposed increases to existing programs are the product of the fact that they didn’t hold themselves bound to the expected cap on FY 2016 required by sequestration, which kicks in again for FY 2016 unless Congress and the President come up with another deal to get rid of it. That doesn’t mean, in my opinion, that the document is pointless. As a policy document, it’s a useful catalog of the President’s priorities,* and it can give advocates for certain programs or initiatives something to rally behind. It remains to be seen whether adult education advocates will get behind a proposal to flatline funding for adult education programs in FY 2016, after a modest increase last year that was still well short of recapturing funding lost due to sequestration.

*A great example is the President’s free community college proposal. While the funding for this is unlikely to be approved by Congress in 2016, the idea has taken hold and will likely be part of the education/workforce policy discussion for some time.

UPDATE 2/9/15: As is often the case with a “first impression” post that I write late at night, I made a bit of a goof, which I corrected above. I misremembered the authorized amount for adult education in FY 2016 under WIOA, and was too tired to remember to double-check. The mistake doesn’t take anything away from the most important and main point of my post—which was that the President is proposing to level-fund adult education state grants—but an ancillary point I made, which is that it appeared that the administration might have been trying to stick to the overall authorization level by offsetting the increase to National Leadership funding by flat-funding the state grants, was wrong.

But not wrong in a good way! It means the President’s proposal is actually worse than I thought, because in fact they did not even try to meet the authorized level for adult education under the WIOA legislation that the President himself signed less than six months ago. They could have provided the increase for National Leadership and increased the state grants by another $33.6 million without going over the authorized level. This is extremely troubling. Significant increases were proposed for many other education programs: Title I, Head Start, TRIO, CTE, and others. Has the administration lost confidence in the adult education program? What does this signal to Congress?

One silver lining: going under the authorized amount provides adult education supporters a clear path for advocacy. As we discussed in a post back when WIOA was introduced, having authorized levels can be a handy tool, because it can be cited as evidence of Congress’s judgement as to the minimum funding a program needs. Putting aside that Congress’s authorized levels for adult education in WIOA were way too low to begin with, at least there is a figure ($622.3 million) that advocates can point to as justification to appropriators as to why adult education needs more funding in FY 2016 than the President has proposed.

How Concerned Should We Be About the 2014 GED Numbers?

/ The Old Crank

From an Inside Higher Education article published today on the reportedly dramatic drop in GED test takers and passers in 2014, after a new, more expensive, computer-only test was put into place:

Lennox McLendon, executive director of the [National Adult Education Professional Development Consortium], said he plans to ask about each state’s testing and pass rates, and whether there are differences between the three high school equivalency tests. So far, he’s not concerned by the lower number of test-takers and passers this year.

“That’s just the way the cycle goes,” McLendon said. “It’ll pick back up and a year from now, and we’ll be going full speed again.”

I hope this turns out to be the case. Here are Rhode Island’s reported pass numbers:

2013: 2,363
2014: 225

That is about a 95% drop.

It’s always nerve-wracking to highlight any numbers that suggest something in adult education is not working—it’s one of the unfortunate by-products of working in a field that is constantly fighting for its life—but from my vantage point there is no evidence to suggest that our teachers, administrators, or state directors are directly at fault for these numbers*, and thus it would be wise, I think, to examine these numbers carefully, rapidly assess exactly what might be going wrong, and determine whether the situation really will simply resolve itself without some kind of intervention. Otherwise, if the numbers don’t bounce back, the whole system is likely going to be blamed anyway—I wouldn’t count on everyone outside the field agreeing to simply pin the blame on the new test.

In my opinion, this is potentially a very dangerous moment for our field. If those numbers don’t go up in 2015 and 2016, it leaves the field open to claims of ineffectiveness. There is also danger in reflexively placing blame on the GED Testing Service. It might make some folks feel better, but we need to work with them to get this right, and I don’t see how completely alienating them helps. (Even if you are highly critical of the transfer of the GED to the Pearson/ACE for-profit, that’s what we are going to have to live with for the foreseeable future.) I’m curious as to what others think. Am I overly concerned?

*Here is what I mean by directly. It could be, for example, (not saying it is) that one of the problems has something to do with teachers not being sufficiently trained to teach the new test. But my guess is that if that’s true, that would prove to have more to do with the clumsy roll out of the new test and/or the general lack of funding for the field, which results in limited professional development opportunities.

An ESEA FYI

/ The Old Crank

Earlier this week, a group of civil rights groups and education advocates released a set of shared principles for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), and I would draw your attention principle number two, just as an FYI:

States and districts [should] ensure that all Title I schools encourage and promote meaningful engagement and input of all parents/guardians – regardless of their participation or influence in school board elections – including those who are not proficient in English, or who have disabilities or limited education/literacy – in their children’s education and in school activities and decision-making. Schools communicate and provide information and data in ways that are accessible to all parents (e.g., written, oral, translated). (my emphasis)

An ESEA reauthorization bill is expected to be unveiled in the Senate this week.

Rebranding Family Literacy

/ The Old Crank

Two articles in the National Journal last week provide further hope that the rebranding/refashioning of family literacy, a once powerful and influential approach to adult education that fell out of fashion for some reason over the last decade or so, is gaining traction.

The first piece, by Fawn Johnson, examines the “two-generation” approach to literacy practiced by the Briya Public Charter School here in Washington, D.C., a program that provides a preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds while their parents are offered English-language instruction, basic computer skills, and parenting classes—as well as skills that will help them nurture their child’s developing literacy skills. What’s interesting, though not mentioned specifically in the piece, is that Briya’s roots are as a federally funded Even Start program, a federal initiative that not so long ago provided upwards of 150,000 families (that’s from memory—I can’t locate the exact figures at the moment) with such services in programs across the country. This “two-gen” approach certainly had fallen out of favor among federal policymakers by the end of the last decade, as Even Start funding was cut several times by Congress, continually proposed for elimination by President Obama in his budgets, and finally eliminated for good in 2012.

Thankfully, Mary’s Center, which started the program, developed strategies that made their program less dependent on federal funds, beginning with going after charter school funding back in 2006 and forming the Even Start/ESF Public Charter School, which later evolved into Briya. While it’s good news that Briya survived and even grew despite the cut, many (most?) Even Start programs have shut their doors. If the family-focused approach is indeed back in fashion, it’s important to understand that we let a lot of other programs like Briya wither and die over the last several years. Maybe its time to work together to revive federal support for such initiatives.

The second article, by Alana Semuels of The Atlantic, examines the two-generation model championed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, focusing on a program in Mechanicsville, Georgia where they are piloting this approach. Here again, as Semuels’ points out, the general concept is not new (the paper cited twice in the article is actually from 1995), and this model appears to focus less on education services for the parents as much on other services and assistance. But the basic idea appears similar to the Briya approach.

The term “family literacy” started to go out of fashion around the same time that Even Start was under attack (the National Center for Family Literacy actually changed their name to the National Center for Families Learning a few years ago). Sadly, the phrases “family literacy” and “Even Start” don’t appear once in either article. But I doubt there are many substantial differences between the approach they are taking at Briya today and the approach they took when it was an Even Start program.

Whatever it’s called, and however much of the approach is actually “new,” the embrace (or re-embrace)  of family-focused, dual adult/child literacy approaches by policy and media influencers is long overdue. It’s especially heartening to read a quote like this one from Anne Mosle, the executive director of Ascend, at the Aspen Institute, in the Johnson piece: “For all the strides we’ve made in investing in early education, we can’t put all of the weight on the back of the child.”

If you scroll back through this blog you’ll find no shortage of posts lamenting what appeared to me to be a frustrating lack of understanding—most notably, in the pre-K movement of recent years—of the critical role of parents in childhood literacy development (I even wrote an op-ed about it, many, many years ago), and this renewed interest in linking the two again may present some interesting new opportunities to advance the adult education cause in the coming years. (Although there is still a lot of work to do to connect the dots—neither article conveys any sense that an adult education system actually exists, let alone the role it has played and continues to play in these efforts.)