Final Round of TAACCCT Grants Will Reportedly De-emphasize Use of Funds for Remediation

/ The Old Crank

The U.S. Department of Labor today announced the final round of Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training grants.

This round will include some significant changes to the program, including, reportedly, a de-emphasis on remediation. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the President and Vice President are headed to Pennsylvania today to speak about revised criteria later today at the Community College of Allegheny County.

According to the Post-Gazette, applicants for this round “will need to show a direct correlation between their funding requests and job placement” and that “some programs that have been funded in the past, such as remedial education courses, could have a harder time winning approval.” (my emphasis)

From a White House source who was not willing to be named, for some reason:

“Some of the community colleges have used the money in past rounds to do some of the things we’re talking about but others have used it for remediation,” one top White House official said. Under the new criteria they will have to use it to “actually make the endpoint of someone being able to get a job and a career,” he said. (my emphasis)

1970 issue of Harvard Educational Review a Fascinating Look Back on Adult Literacy in the U.S.

/ The Old Crank

Harvard Educational Review, Summer 1970I stumbled on something this morning I thought readers of this blog may find of interest: a special issue of the Harvard Educational Review from the Summer of 1970 devoted to “Illiteracy in America.” Articles by Paulo Freire, Neil Postman (!), Frank Laubach and others. Interesting to read what some of the big thinkers in the field were writing and thinking about in those days.

Unfortunately not free unless you are a subscriber, but I know some of you are in library or university settings and might have access.

Manufacturing Job Growth: Nothing to Get Excited About

/ The Old Crank

A month or two ago I was talking to some people who work in the community college/workforce development field, and they were rather insistent that U.S. manufacturing jobs were roaring back. I still don’t know what they are talking about. As Jared Bernstein notes in this post about today’s jobs report, manufacturing accounts for about 9% of total employment in this country, and less than 4% of our job growth over the past year. While obviously some new jobs are being created at some companies in some parts of the country, it’s actually the only industry in this slowly recovering economy that, on the whole, appears not to be growing.

A Fundamental Difference

/ The Old Crank / 2 Comments

(Updated Below)

A fundamental difference between the publicly funded adult education system in this country (to the extent that a true “system” exists) and K-12 is that the adult education system doesn’t even come close to providing the funds needed to serve all of those who would like to be served (currently estimated to be around 3 million people), let alone the total number of people who in fact may need such services, which could be as high as 36 million people, according to the latest guess estimate front the PIAAC survey. Government-funded adult education serves only about 1.7 million and that number has dropped by almost a million over the last decade.

In other words, we don’t even attempt to fully fund an adult education system in this country. I know that many K-12 school systems are cash-strapped, and thus would undoubtedly argue that they are not in fact, “fully funded,” but at least it’s generally understood that there has to be a baseline amount of funding available to provide a seat for every school-age child. Not the case in adult education. A similar problem has existed in pre-K, although now there are calls for “universal” pre-K that also seem to be premised on the assumption that every child of pre-school age should have access to services. There has never been no call for “universal adult education” (although perhaps there should be).

Thus in adult education it’s trickier to balance the need for innovation and new ideas (which adult education certainly does need) with the reality that we’ve yet to fully fund the basic infrastructure that we need in order for new models and innovations to take root and grow. Imagine a K-12 system where we only had enough schools and teachers to educate two-fifths of our school-age kids. Would our first priority be to design new models, or would it be on building more schools and hiring more teachers? I think unquestionably it would be the latter.

I’m willing to concede that we need to be more strategic and innovative in order to create more learning opportunities for low-skilled adults, but it’s also important not to kid ourselves: the reason we are serving far fewer students than a decade ago is not because we don’t have enough models, but because we’re not investing enough in the basic infrastructure (classroom, computers, teachers, etc.) to serve them.

Lately I’ve been working on the premise that the development of new innovations (especially with regard to technology) could actually spur more investment in the basic infrastructure pieces, but, at the same time, it’s also hard to imagine anyone taking primarily responsibility for funding the basic infrastructure outside of the public sector. I think it’s important to talk about how/whether new innovation in this field actually gets the public sector spending we need moving in the right direction.

UPDATE 3/13/14: I mentioned above that to date there has been no call for “universal adult education,” but there is something close to that beginning to take shape as more states explore the possibility of providing free community college education to all students. This article in Stateline from yesterday refers to these efforts collectively as the “college-for-all movement.”