Adult Literacy

Comment-palooza

/ The Old Crank

2015 NRS Education Function Levels UpdateLast month the Department of Education proposed several modifications to the learning objectives associated with the educational functioning levels in the National Reporting System (NRS), the accountability system for adult education programs that received federal funds through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. The changes are intended to “reflect the adult educational demands of the 21st Century.”

Here is a link to the proposed changes: Revised Educational Functioning Level Descriptors.

By law, the Department must provide the general public and Federal agencies with an opportunity to comment. If you are so inclined, head on over to regulation.gov and press the “Comment Now!” button. Comments are due by March 16th.

And hey, remember that terrible budget for adult education programs we told you about last week? Turns out there is an opportunity to comment on it:

In the coming weeks, Secretary Duncan will testify before Congress on the President’s budget proposal, but before he goes, he wants to hear from you. In the form below, tell us what the budget means for you, so he can share that message when he testifies before Congress.

Generally speaking, the President’s budget has good things in it for education, so I think they are probably expecting words of support for the increases to the education budget that they are proposing. But I don’t see any reason why one couldn’t use this opportunity to voice concerns about those programs that did not receive an increase. Head over to “Tell Us How the Budget Affects You” to comment. Again, if you are so inclined.

Finally, while it’s too late to submit comments to the  White House Task Force on New Americans, you might be interested in reading some of the comments that were submitted. A few groups have shared their comments with me privately, so I can’t share them here, but the National Skills Coalition did publish their comments, and they’re worth a look.

Does PIAAC Make Accurate Assumptions About Future Skill Needs?

/ The Old Crank

ETS released a new report used the PIAAC data to compare U.S. millennials with millennials in other wealthy countries. Coverage of the study in The Atlantic included an interesting overall critique of PIAAC from Tom Loveless of The Brookings Institution:

…Loveless, an education scholar with The Brookings Institution, said that while the PIAAC results aren’t surprising, the maker of the assessment “is unabashed about its ambitions in this regard … [it] believes it’s measuring skills that matter in the 21st century. Put me in the ‘I’m skeptical of that claim’ group.”

…[He] says that, empirically speaking, the PIAAC results don’t match up with existing data about the U.S. economy’s performance. But a bigger qualm Loveless has is the assumptions that the adult-competencies assessment makes about the skills workers will need going forward. “Let’s say I was alive in 1915 and I gave a test that predicted the job skills and future economic productivity of nations,” he said. “I just don’t see how anyone in 1915 could have foreseen the skills that would have been important for the rest of the 20th century, and I doubt that anyone’s doing that now for the 21st century.”

No One Could Have Predicted…

/ The Old Crank / 2 Comments

More discouraging news, this time from WRVO in New York:

New York replaced the GED because the test’s price tag was set to double this year. The new test gives students the same credentials – the equivalent of a high school diploma. Statewide pass rates are down by four percent after the switch, compared to 2012. The number of test-takers also fell by half.

First of all, that is a classic example of a buried lead, in paragraph form. I view a 4% pass rate drop as actually pretty good news, considering that they’ve switched to a completely different exam. The real news is that the number of test-takers has fallen by half. That is not an “also”—that is the story.

And to what do we attribute this dramatic decrease in the number of test-takers? In states that stuck with the GED, the drop off is attributed by critics to the higher cost and difficulty of the revised GED. In New York, they have a different problem:

Bruce Carmel, director at the Bronx Youth Center and a co-chair at the New York City Coalition for Adult Literacy, says there was a lot of misinformation about the new test.“You heard some people saying, ‘Oh, there’s no more GED,” he says. “So when people heard there was no more GED test, a lot of people thought it was over and you couldn’t get your high school equivalency diploma anymore.”

Sometimes it seems like if we had tried to come up with a plan to intentionally discourage adults from earning their high school equivalency we could not have done a better job. I know this is not in fact what anyone intended (including the test publishers), and I don’t want to the discount the heroic work that the adult education community has done to transition to these new exams. We’d be in even worse shape without their efforts. (And I wish the media would pay as much attention to that as they do to the poor numbers.) Nor is this a criticism of the decision in New York to replace the GED. But the dramatic drop we are experiencing around the country in the number of people seeking a high school equivalency diploma as a result of these changes should not have been unexpected. Some honest, no-finger-pointing reflection on how we ended up in such a situation might help us take steps to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. And while eventually this all may eventually shake out for the better, let’s not forget about the folks who gave up on high school equivalency during this transition, and what the future likely holds for them.

Michael Bloomberg: “Education Isn’t Going to Help Uneducated Adults”

/ The Old Crank

Let’s hope this is not representative of the level of discourse one can expect at the Aspen Institute:

Moderator Jennifer Bradley, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Institute, then asked what the U.S. can do to get people out of poverty. Bloomberg responded that conventional wisdom points to education, but education isn’t going to help uneducated adults. Bradley later asked how government can offer basic fairness to the children “who have been failed.” (my emphasis)

Bloomberg claimed that 95 percent of murders fall into a specific category: male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25. Cities need to get guns out of this group’s hands and keep them alive, he said.

As noted by Paul Campos, here, according to actual crime statistics, the real percentage appears to be 22.8.

Maybe this is an isolated case, but I worry that attitudes and ignorance like this, when espoused by elites, can have a significant adverse impact on efforts to improve adult educational opportunities for minority out-of-school youth and young adults. Curious what others think.