Adult Literacy

Two WIA Bills to Be Introduced in the House on This Week

/ The Old Crank

I was pleased to have the opportunity to join my fellow National Coalition for Literacy (NCL) board members up on the Hill this morning for meetings with Congressional staff. I was particularly pleased we had a chance to meet with staff members of the House Committee on Education and Workforce responsible for Workforce Investment Act (WIA) reauthorization. As luck would have it, we were among the first to learn that two WIA bills are going to be introduced in the House tomorrow: one from Rep. Virginia Foxx to that they said was designed to remove duplication and consolidate federal workforce programs under WIA; and one from Rep. Joe Heck concerned with tying job training more closely with the needs of the local business community.

They don’t expect markup on either of these anytime soon. So it’s not huge news—and these two bills will not have much concerning adult literacy in them—but it’s nice to hear that there is any kind of movement on WIA in the House. (Title II of WIA is the primary piece of federal legislation concerning adult literacy, and thus advocates feel that any movement on WIA is a good sign for us.) NCL is also asking House members to consider holding a hearing on adult literacy sometime next year, and we got some positive feedback on that today as well.

Charter Schools and Adult Education: Thoughts on Pending Florida Legislation

/ The Old Crank

According to this report in the Cape Coral/Fort Myers News Press, legislation is about to be introduced in the Florida legislature by Sen. David Simmons, (R-Maitland), and Rep. Janet Adkins, (R-Fernandina Beach), that will, according to the report, “allow charters or non-profit groups to offer adult education classes.”

I’m pretty sure that Florida law does not currently prohibit nonprofits from offering adult education classes, and if you read further, it appears that this is not actually what this proposed legislation would do.

The issue caught my attention because there are several charter schools in Washington, D.C. that provide adult education classes as part of their mission. The D.C. charter law is unique (as far as I know) in that it explicitly includes adult education as a suitable function for D.C. charter school funding. I think that there are other states where the law is silent on the issue.

While I haven’t actually read the proposed Florida bill, it does not appear to be modeled after the D.C. law. Instead, this proposal appears to be designed to provide charters and nonprofits with access to state adult education funds that currently flow exclusively to the K-12 system in Florida. In other words, nonprofits can obviously offer adult education services now — they just can’t currently access state adult education money to do it. The bill is being promoted by a large nonprofit organization, the Volunteer USA Foundation, a non-profit group with strong connections to the Bush family.

The charter school law in the District of Columbia, on the other hand, allows charter schools that serve adult students with the opportunity to access city education funds that otherwise is used for K-12 education. In other words, it created a new funding source for adult education, leaving existing state funds for adult education alone. (The “state” adult ed money in D.C. does not go to D.C.’s K-12 system, by the way, but flows pretty much exclusively to nonprofit organizations through a competitive grant process.) Again, I may be wrong, but it appears that the Florida legislation is designed simply to move adult education money from the K-12 system into private nonprofits and charter schools. It may result in new adult education entities but if so it will be at the expense of services currently being provided by the school system.

I think this distinction is worth mentioning as this issue is often raised in discussions of whether charter school legislation might open up new funding streams for adult education. It did in the District. That doesn’t appear to be what is envisioned in Florida.

P.S. Someone with some extra money lying around should fund someone to do a  comprehensive look at current adult education charter school models, (most are in D.C., but I understand that are a smattering being proposed in other jurisdictions), and look at state charter school legislative language across the country that might theoretically accomodate the growth of adult charter schools.

Pressure Points When Adult Education Funding is Cut

/ The Old Crank / 1 Comment

(Updated Below)

Oakland North is a news site operated by the U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. On Monday of this week, their lead story was a lengthy, very well-reported piece by Mariel Waloff on the Oakland Unified School District’s (OUSD) decision to cut 90% from its Adult and Career Education program.

Since 2009, after the passage of the California Budget Act (CBA), school districts have been allowed to take money from one funding category and move it into another. This allowed OUSD to use the funding originally intended for adult education in the district to fill the gaps in its K-12 budget. This has been happening all over California for the last few years, and, as a result (and a sadly predictable one), adult education has been decimated in many parts of the state. The scope of the cuts has been so great that it could be argued that the CBA is the worst piece of legislation for adult education in the entire U.S. over the last several years.

The article does a nice job illustrating where the pressure points and areas of conflict are for adult education during periods when state and local governments cut funding:

1. When adult education is pitted against K-12, adult education loses.

As Waloff notes, “[a]lthough the demand for adult education [in Oakland] was high at the time, K-12 was ruled to be a higher priority.”

Even with a significant political push from the adult education community, it seems to me that it’s always going to be a losing proposition to be on any side other than K-12 when a budget issue has been framed as a choice between K-12 and anything else.

Waloff writes that demand for adult education was high, but we don’t know from the article whether those people demanding services organized any kind of advocacy effort to persuade the board to preserve the funding. But even if they did, it’s not easy for the adult education community to reverse these kinds of decisions on its own.

I wonder if an advocacy effort by members of the entire community, on the other hand, who refuse to pit one sector of educational services against the other, and who demand that all educational services be preserved, might be more effective. (Again, no idea if this was tried here.) Such a group could also argue, if cuts are necessary, that they be more equally distributed. Waloff suggests that the Adult and Career Education Program staff were sort of resigned to the proposition that K-12 education is a greater funding priority, but, really, why is that the case? Is everything in the K-12 budget really more of a priority than 90% of the adult education budget? And doesn’t adult education have any impact on the success of the kids in K-12? (Many of the students in the adult education system there have children in the K-12 school system.) If the the adult education program was positioned as part of a seamless set of equally valuable services essential to the health of the community, where each of the services are interdependent on each other, maybe it would not be so easy for the school board to cut 90% of its budget.

UPDATE, 3/18/12: The San Diego News-Tribune published a guest opinion piece by Dom Gagliardi, principal of the Escondido Adult School, that reiterates this point. Writing about the budget mechanism implemented in California in 2009 that allows districts to divert funds from adult education to support its K-12 programs, Gagliardi writes, “When forced to prioritize instructional services for youth or adults, the choice is obvious and painful.” (my emphasis)

2. When GED services are pitted against other adult education services (ESL, Adult Basic Education — especially ABE for those with very limited literacy), GED tends to win.

For now, [Adult and Career Education Program Administrator Chris] Nelson is trying to make the best of the resources the adult education program has. “We”re really trying to focus in on the students who are with us,” he said. “We’re making sure they get the instruction that they need and that they are passing the GED. That’s the most important thing (my emphasis). Then we help them transition to the next step.”

Adult and Career Education staffers are in fact expanding the GED program (my emphasis), which administrators have found to be almost as useful as a high school diploma, as well as more cost effective and simpler for adults to go through than the previous adult high school program. McClymonds High School remains the only certified GED testing site in Oakland, but the program will soon be offering GED classes at the OUSD building in East Lake as well as at sites in Fruitvale and East Oakland.

3. When institutional adult education is cut, there is tremendous pressure on community-based nonprofits to take on the students that the institutional services have dropped.

I’m using the word institutional here to describe adult education programs based in school systems or community colleges. When funding is cut to these programs, community-based nonprofit orgnaizations are often called upon to expand their services. As Waloff writes:

In a city with a large immigrant and refugee population, many people who once benefited from the district’s ESL program now must go elsewhere for help. To fill in the gaps, non-profit organizations throughout the city have been increasing and even creating programming for English language learners.

So what it sounds like is happening here is that the institutional system is for the most part focusing on the GED students, leaving everyone else to be taken care of by the nonprofit CBO sector.

Unfortunately, expanding nonprofit CBO services coming off a recession isn’t likely to be easy. I wish the article had gone into a little more detail on the financial pressures that this is placing on the CBOs in the area. Bear in mind that some of these CBO’s may not qualify for (or have difficulty competing for) the other state and federal funding streams that support adult education (I’ve found this varies a lot from state to state).

This in turn increases the pressure on those students who are being cut loose from institutional programs, who may have to choose between attending clases in less than optimal conditions, or simply give up and decide to forgo classes due to tranportation issues or other barriers.

Some students… attend classes offered at non-profits like the English Center or Lao Family Community Development, a social services organization for immigrants and refugees currently offers two ESL classes of 40 students each, but only has two teachers.

“It’s better than nothing,” said Markham, who directed some parents to Lao Family Community Development’s program after the OUSD cut its adult classes, but she worries that it is very difficult to learn a new language with such a high student-teacher ratio.

And ultimately, Nelson pointed out, some people can’t make it to any of these other sites for financial reasons or because of a lack of transportation. “I believe that many of them are just not attending, because they have nowhere to go,” Nelson said.

Budget cuts create these pressure points. I’m interested to learn more about advocacy efforts that try to avoid pitting education advocates — even subsets of adult education advocates — into increasingly isolated camps.

Concerns About the Redesign of the GED

/ The Old Crank

Catherine Gewertz wrote a lengthy piece in this week’s Education Week about the planned redesign of the GED. The piece does a good job explaining, from the perspective of the GED Testing Service, and others, why extensive changes are being planned. Meanwhile, over at the D.C. LEARNs blog, Ben Merrion does a nice job summarizing the potential positives and the potential concerns over these changes for adult education programs to consider.

Judging by the comments made on Gewertz’s piece, a lot of people have concerns about the redesign, some of which she addressed in a blog entry Tuesday — mainly the concern about the for-profit arrangement created to oversee the redesign. Gewertz wrote in her original article that the redesign effort was a “joint venture of the American Council on Education, or ACE, which created the GED, and the education publishing giant Pearson.” What was not clear from that statement is that ACE and Pearson are transitioning the GED testing service from a nonprofit to a for-profit business.

When I read the original article, a couple of additional comments/questions came to my mind:

First, the article notes that the redesign will require “overhauling professional development for GED teachers, reworking curricula, and adding strong counseling supports to help students pass and plan their next steps.” The article does not, however, discuss the financial challenges that this could pose for GED instructional programs, especially at a time when many programs are experiencing severe cuts in state and private funding. Federal funding for adult education has remained basically flat for a over a decade. There are plenty of programs that would like to add a strong counseling component right now, for example, but don’t have the resources to do it.

Secondly, I was also surprised that the original article did not discuss the concerns that have been raised about the potential additional cost of taking the new GED.

Gewertz writes in her follow-up blog post:

I also asked if the company anticipated a change in the price of the new GED in 2014, either for those who take the tests, or for states, which lease it from the GED Testing Service. [GED Testing Service Executive Vice President, Nicole] Chestang said that it was too early to know whether the price would change, but said the company recognized the importance of keeping “costs lean and the test accessible.”

It looks to me, though, that a lot of folks have been operating over the last several months under the assumption that increased test fees are inevitable, and they attribute it to the merger with Pearson and/or to the shift to computer-based testing:

Prices are expected to increase to as much as $125 by 2014, when a new, more challenging version of the GED test is scheduled to debut.

— Changes to GED testing spur worry (The Virginian Pilot)

According to the Technical College System of Georgia, testing rates are increasing because of an increase in costs from the national test administrator, a public-private combination of the ACE and Pearson.

— Cost of GED testing to rise (The Haralson Gateway-Beacon, Georgia)

As part of a planned overhaul, the testing service could increase the test fee from $65 to as much as $200 when the test eventually moves online.

— GED test price increase worries, angers some (WSMV – News Channel 4, Tennessee)

Last question: In her original piece, Gewertz wrote that “[Nicholas S.] Mader and others who study the GED worry that making it easily available to 16- to-18-year-olds induces dropouts by offering a quicker, easier alternative. The GED Testing Service recognizes that risk, said spokesman CT Turner.”

Does anyone know if there any evidence that this is true? I do think that it’s possible that some kids struggling in school (and their parents) might think that obtaining a GED is a better option than staying in school, but that’s different from saying that they view it as a shortcut. At D.C. LEARNs, we used to get calls from parents asking about this. From what I can remember, it was always because they were looking for a way out of a horrible school situation — violence, bullying, lack of attention to a learning challenge from teachers and administrators, etc. Parents sometimes wanted to get heir kids out of an enviroment that they thought was harmful. In other words, consideration of the option to drop out and study for the GED was in response to a difficult situation at school, not an effort to find an “easier alternative” to graduation. (Our policy was to always urge kids to stay in school, in case you were wondering.)

I also think most kids have some vague awareness that getting a GED may not have the same value as getting a high school diploma. But again, some may view it as a better option than staying in school.

Maybe my experience is unusual, but it sure would be useful to know whether there is data to support Mader’s contention. (I haven’t read all of the papers cited in this article so maybe it’s in one of those, but if so, it’s odd that it’s not cited in the context of this paragraph.)