State Policy

California Continues Disinvestment in Adult Literacy

/ The Old Crank

As expected, California’s latest revenue expectations were short of what was needed to prevent automatic state spending cuts to to libraries, universities and schools for 2012, including $15 million in library funding.

Last Saturday, the Napa Valley Register reported that The Literacy Center of Napa City-County Library would be losing all of its state funding (about about $48,000). While this will not result in the closing of the center, it does represent a total withdrawal of state support for library-based community adult education in the county.

The Literacy Center coordinator Lisa Smartt, who has worked in literacy for 30 years, said she and her colleagues have watched in disbelief as funding for their special literacy programs has continued to shrink.

“We’ve been shaking our heads,” Smartt said. “We never thought we would see this.”

The State Library has been the main source of funding for the library’s Literacy Center since 1985. The bulk of the funding paid for the workbooks and other materials used by the center.

The Literacy Center, located inside the Napa City-County Library, offers free one-on-one tutoring for adult learners who need help with their basic reading, English as a second language, GED preparation or math skills. These learners include native speakers, students learning English as a second language, the learning-disabled and others who “just fell through the cracks,” Smartt said.

“In these difficult economic times, more people have been using the Literacy Center to improve their job skills,” Kreimeier said, adding that the center receives numerous referrals from Workforce Napa.

For the Literacy Center to remain open, Smartt will have to find more creative ways to secure funding.

Fundraising is a challenge for the Literacy Center because, as a government agency, it can’t compete with Napa’s nonprofits for local grants. This limits the center to seeking support from private donors as well as state and federal grant programs — which often have a wide pool of applicants.

To maintain a robust program, the Literacy Center requires about $60,000 per year. This does not include the salaries of its three staff members, which are supported by the county, Smartt said. Currently, the center is operating on less than $30,000 per year.

Smartt is trying to look at the positive side of the budget cuts. The “blessing” in all of this, she said, is “we get to reinvent ourselves.”

The Literacy Center will be shifting its focus to one-on-one literacy services at the library — specifically GED preparation and employability tutoring. Almost all of the general outreach programs will be eliminated, including Families for Literacy, Homework Assistance, and the jails program where literacy tutors worked one-on-one with inmates.

I appreciate the positive thinking that one must maintain when faced with the elimination of a major funding source. But it’s also clear from the last paragraph that cutting services—including family literacy services and services to inmates—is part of that reinvention.

According to the paper, Smartt believes that “any country that wants to remain competitive should make literacy a top priority.” The question is whether policymakers in California and elsewhere actually believe this—and if not, why not?

New Cuts to Adult Literacy Programs in California Appear Likely

/ The Old Crank / 1 Comment

The Sacramento Bee reports this morning that it is likely that California’s revenue expectations will fall far short of what was hoped for when the budget was passed back in in June. The Legislative Analyst’s Office is expecting $3.7 billion less than expected, and according to the budget scheme Governor Brown and the California legislature came up with last spring, this would result in automatic cuts to to libraries, universities and schools. (The governor and the California legislature inserted $2.5 billion in new cuts that automatically trigger if the Governor’s Department of Finance determines California will fall short of their revenue projections.)

These cuts will include $15 million in library funding, which would hit California’s large network of volunteer-driven adult literacy programs pretty hard. The Bee quotes Michael Dillon, a lobbyist for the California Library Foundation, who says the cuts “would significantly impact readers and people trying to get sufficient reading skills.”

In addition, it appears to me that the potential for further cuts to adult education operated by school districts is also a strong possibility. That is because further K-12 reductions are also possible, although the Bee reports that it is unclear how deep into school budgets the state will cut, if at all.

If it does, I would expect further cuts to adult education will result, as school districts respond by continuing to shift dollars away from adult education to shore up K-12 budgets. The California Budget Act (CBA) allows school districts to this, and it has been happening all over California for the last few years. I wrote about one such example here.

The new revenue forecast will be out this week.

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.