Adult Literacy

Adult Education Apparently Not Dead Yet in Los Angeles, But Will Be Cut Significantly

/ The Old Crank

Today’s Los Angeles Times reports that members of United Teachers Los Angeles have approved a one-year labor contract that will preserve more than 4,000 jobs in return for agreeing to a shortened school year and reduced pay.

According to The Times, “the agreement means that adult school enrollment will shrink by about a third, but will no longer face total elimination.”

The Times’ story is consistent with an earlier report published by The Los Angeles Daily News that the union had tentatively agreed to a deal that would “save the jobs of 4,700 educators and restore some Adult Education, preschool and English-learner programs that had been threatened with elimination.”

By the way, reducing adult education enrollment by a third, while obviously better than complete program elimination, would be significant—reducing the number served by 100,000 or more.

For those who have not been following this story, you can check links with the tag “LAUSD” for more details.

Senate FY13 Labor HHS Bill Would Partially Restore Pell Grant Eligibility for “Ability to Benefit” Students

/ The Old Crank

The Senate Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education (Labor-HHS-ED) Fiscal Year 2013 appropriations bill, (S. 3295), which was approved Thursday, contained a little piece of good news for adult education in the form of an amendment included in the bill by Senator Murray (D-Wash) that would restore Title IV federal student aid eligibility (most importantly, Pell grant eligibility) for “ability-to-benefit” (ATB) students. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of Fiscal Year 2012, (that is, the FY 2012 Federal budget bill), passed back in December 2011, barred individuals without a high school diploma or equivalent from qualifying for this financial aid. In the past, these students could qualify by completing an “ability to benefit” test or by successfully completing six credits towards a certificate or degree.

This eligibility is scheduled to end for all students enrolling in college after July 1st.

Senator Murray’s amendment would not restore Title IV financial aid eligibility for all students, only those enrolled in very rigidly defined career pathways programs. The language in the bill basically mirror previous ATB eligibility requirements but then applies it only to those students enrolled in an “eligible career pathway program.” (See page 133 of the bill.)

In essence, Murray’s amendment protects financial aid eligibility for students enrolled in established programs such as Minnesota’s FastTRAC, Wisconsin’s RISE parternship, and Washington State’s I-BEST program. These programs—especially I-BEST—are the most oft-cited adult education models on Capital Hill. (If there is one thing that Congressional staffers and others policymakers with little knowledge of adult education may have heard of, it would likely be I-BEST.) In addition to the states where these programs are established, groups such as CLASP and Jobs for the Future are highly invested in these models, and those organizations are among the most visible adult education advocates on the Hill. When Congress ended financial aid for ATB students in December, they zeroed in on these models as the basis of their argument to restore financial aid eligibility for ATB students. Politically, it was also in all probability the only realistic strategy of getting any of that eligibility back, since the cost of restoring ATB financial aid eligibility for just those students enrolled in these established programs is probably going to be less than a tenth of the cost of providing full financial aid for ATB students under the old definition. In an excellent fact sheet prepared by CLASP on the subject, they estimated that about 90,000 college students qualified for Pell Grants under the old ATB provision; the number of students who would regain eligibility under Murray’s amendment would be a fraction of that number.

Here is the language in the bill that defines eligible career pathway programs (I’ve bolded what I think are the highlights):

(2) ELIGIBLE CAREER PATHWAY PROGRAM.—In this subsection, the term ‘‘eligible career pathway program’’ means a program that—

(A) concurrently enrolls participants in connected adult education and eligible postsecondary programs;

(B) provides counseling and supportive services to identify and attain academic and career goals;

(C) provides structured course sequences that—
(i) are articulated and contextualized; and
(ii) allow students to advance to higher levels of education and employment;

(D) provides opportunities for acceleration to attain recognized postsecondary credentials, including degrees, industry relevant certifications, and certificates of completion of apprenticeship programs;

(E) is organized to meet the needs of adults;

(F) is aligned with the education and skill needs of the regional economy; and

(G) has been developed and implemented in collaboration with partners in business, workforce development, and economic development.

If passed into law, even this partial restoration seems to me to be a significant win for the adult education community in that it preserves financial aid eligibility for students enrolled in models that have taken the adult education field forward in a promising direction. But it would also narrowly define the “benefit” that a student without a high-school diploma or the equivalent is deemed to be able to gain from a college education, at least for financial aid purposes. Such students would now be deemed to benefit from the education they are receiving only if they are enrolled in a very narrowly defined career pathways program—one that is tied to the skill needs of local employers (see paragraphs F and G, above), not necessarily the needs or interests of the student.

Report Identifies Benefits of Literacy Instruction for the Unemployed

/ The Old Crank

According to The Irish Times, a study in Ireland has found that unemployed people with literacy and numeracy problems who receive targeted training are almost three times more likely to move out of unemployment within a year than other unemployed people receiving the same training.

The Times reports that previously there has been no research on the experiences of unemployed people in Ireland with literacy and/or numeracy problems.

Question of the Day: Low Literacy and Medicine Bottles

/ The Old Crank

During the last week of May, WBEZ’s radio series Front & Center began airing a series about low literacy in the Great Lakes region. In an article on their Web site that accompanies the series, they run through a bulleted list of facts on the impact of low literacy. One of those bullets was: “Medication errors due to misread or misunderstood prescription labels cause up to 7,000 deaths each year.”

The inability to follow prescription instructions is a frequently used example to illustrate the challenges of low literacy. I’ve used it myself in material I’ve prepared for D.C. LEARNs and ProLiteracy. And it makes at least some logical sense. If prescription information is written at a level that is too difficult for people with low literacy to read, it’s not a stretch to assume that those people are more likely to make a mistake (and there is anecdotal evidence supporting this). But I wonder whether there is any hard data that actually shows how many people are directly harmed by people with low literacy misreading prescription labels.

The source for Front & Center‘s factoid above was derived from a 2005 American Medical Association publication that accompanied a White House Conference on Aging mini-conference on on health literacy and health disparities. Here is what that publication actually said:

All medications have the potential of causing harm as well as benefit, the incidence of adverse medication events increases with the number of medications. Medication errors are the most common medical mistakes – some as a result of misread or misunderstood prescription labels – causing up to 7,000 deaths each year and costing the health care system nearly $73 billion annually. Improving communications on medications can improve care, reduce errors, and save lives. (my emphasis)

The key word above is “some.” In other words, medication errors cause up to 7,ooo deaths annually, and the authors of this report think that some of those 7,000 are due to misread or misunderstood prescription labels. But even among that subset of the 7,000, it’s not stated how many misread or misunderstood prescription labels can be attributed to low literacy. Just because a label is misread or misunderstood, that doesn’t mean that low literacy was the cause. I have relatively high literacy and I misread things all the time.

I have passing familiarity with the literature on health literacy. I know there are studies on the relationship between low literacy and poor health, educational attainment and mortality rates, on the difficulties that people with low literacy have in understanding health information, or navigating the health care system, etc. What I’m specifically interested in is whether there is better data on the number of medication errors—and more importantly, the harm caused by those errors—that can clearly be attributed to low literacy adults misreading labels. Can anyone point me to a good source?