Education – General

Retired Los Angeles Adult Education Teacher Says Shutting Down LAUSD Adult Education Would Harm K-12 Children

/ The Old Crank

The Los Angeles Times published an excellent op-ed piece today by John McCormick, a retired Los Angeles adult education teacher, on the folly of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s “worst-case scenario” budget plan, which puts LAUSD’s entire adult education system at serious risk of elimination. (For background on their proposal, read my post here; for an update, I recommend Marjorie Faulstich Orellana’s article in The Huffington Post, published last week.)

I want to highlight one particular point that McCormick makes in his article, and that is about the impact that shutting down adult education would have on parent/caregiver engagement:

Closing adult schools would also result in collateral damage to K-12 children. My students often attended the same schools at night that their children attended during the day. Because kids usually pick up English faster than their parents, if the parents don’t learn the language, they become marginalized in their own families. They cannot communicate with teachers, help with homework or even understand what their kids are saying. So instead of being able to help their kids assimilate, parents are more likely to remain isolated.

I’m often puzzled as to why parent engagement advocates aren’t up in arms when adult education cuts are threatened. In the paragraph above, McCormick does a great job explaining the connection between the two issues.

Curious Comment About Rise in Student Loan Defaults

/ The Old Crank

In a recent essay for Voices In Society, Anthony Carnevale, Director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, makes an offhand remark about student loan defaults that caught my attention:

Sure, college is expensive—stories of students racking up tens of thousands of dollars in student-loan debt are common. Federal student-loan default rates jumped from 7 percent in 2008 to 8.8 percent in 2009, so it’s clear that not everyone is handling that debt responsibly. (my emphasis)

Maybe some of those borrowers were irresponsible, but that 7 percent default rate jump occurred just after the worst recession in decades—one that was characterized by double digit unemployment in many states. I wonder how many borrowers during this period suddenly found themselves in a position, through no fault of their own, where it became impossible to continue to make their payments.

Something else was going on around this time, too:

“I hear a lot of talk that these are just rogue actors,” Mr. Harkin began one question to Gregory D. Kutz, who led the undercover investigation for the Government Accountability Office. “Would you say that misleading and deceptive practices are the exception, or are these more widespread?”

Mr. Kutz responded that while investigators found “good practices” at a handful of colleges, none of the 15 colleges it visited were “completely clean.” At each of them, recruiters and admissions officers made deceptive or otherwise questionable statements to investigators posing as applicants.

One of Four New D.C. Charter Schools to Open in 2013 Will Serve Adults

/ The Old Crank

According to The Washington Post, four new charter schools have received tentative approval from the D.C. Public Charter School Board to open for the 2013-14 school year. One of them, the Community College Preparatory Academy, will offer “an educational second chance” to unemployed and under-skilled adults. According to the Post, the school will hold classes at the Backus Campus of the University of the District of Columbia Community College, the Shadd School and the P.R. Harris Educational Center.

h/t @PostSchools

Half of the Students Seeking an Associates Degree Require “Remedial Training”

/ The Old Crank

From an article in the National Journal published last Friday:

To achieve the high-tech manufacturing base that Obama envisions, it will be necessary to train hundreds of thousands of workers for skilled jobs that will require technical training and some college-level coursework. That’s a heavy lift in the current climate, in which about half of the students seeking an associates degree require remedial training that they should have gotten in high school, according to Complete College America. (my emphasis)

The article then goes on to argue that there is a lack of coordination between the White House and Congress on career and technical education legislation, citing the career and technical education “blueprint” released by the White House last week and the dueling Workforce Investment Act (WIA) bills in the House as examples. But the specific problem highlighted in the passage above is never mentioned again. According to the article, the WIA legislation would “rejigger job-training programs and help colleges tailor their curriculum to workforce needs,” but no mention is made of whether this or any of the other legislative proposals would address the problem that half the people who want to go to college can’t read or write or perform basic math well enough to be successful at the postsecondary level to begin with (which is what the somewhat cryptic phrase “requires remedial training” means). Nor does the author explore the degree to which those students’ basic skills fall short.

Which was not the point of the article, I realize. I just thought it was interesting that the author made this weirdly-phrased reference to the issue—and then dropped it.