Shifting Corporate Attitudes

/ The Old Crank

One of the problems with the minimum wage debate (whether to raise it, by how much, what will the effects be on hiring, etc.) is that it pushes this much more fundamental issue into the background. I don’t personally understand why it’s not a given that it’s immoral to pay your employees so little that they can’t afford to eat, and why this is not a major topic of public discussion.

But I also think we have to deal with the fact that that’s apparently where we are.

Cappelli’s argument is focused on wages, but it seems to me that the shift he describes is reflected in corporate attitudes towards employee education and training as well. Corporations increasingly don’t see this as their problem. Likewise, Cappelli contends that corporations’ former sense of obligation to pay employees a decent wage had both strategic and altruistic motivations, and I think that was probably true about training as well. But whatever altruistic motivation there was behind some corporate training investments in the old days has all but disappeared. Corporate leadership today more typically looks at training exclusively in terms of return on investment back to the corporation.

You can be morally outraged by all this—or not—but either way, it does have an impact on policy. What is the role of government in an environment where corporations see less of a moral obligation to their employees—not just in terms of wages, but in terms of supporting the education and training needs of our workforce?

Found: A Sequester Cut to Adult Education

/ The Old Crank

For a variety of reasons, which I won’t go into here, it’s been difficult to identify adult education program cuts that are clearly the direct result of sequestration. But they have been happening:

WALTHAM — The City Council on Monday night argued back and forth over funds for an adult literacy program that saw its federal funding cut last year, ultimately sending the request back to committee and asking the School Department to try to come up with the money.

The Power Program, a nonprofit adult literacy organization, has been in existence for 27 years, but had its funding cut last year after there were across-the-board educational cuts on the federal level. (my emphasis)

via Wicked Local Waltham.

Monday Morning Reads

/ The Old Crank

A couple of articles from last week that are worth checking out if you missed them:

Why No Literacy Programs for 30 Million in U.S.?
This Remapping Debate piece by David Noriega reviews the current system of adult basic education in the U.S. and asks various experts (plus me) why there hasn’t been a more aggressive, coordinated investment in adult literacy services from either the federal government or states. Noriega asked members of Congress about federal action to address the issue and the responses aren’t encouraging:

Remapping Debate reached out to 13 members of the House and Senate of both parties, all with high-ranking positions on the relevant committees and subcommittees and many with past action on adult literacy on their records. Besides one who cited a scheduling conflict, only three responded, and of these only one—Rep. John F. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts—gave more than an emailed statement.

Tierney, who sponsored the Democratic House bill that would have nearly doubled funding, said the waiting list for adult education programs in his state has remained at close to 20,000 since he came into office in 1997. “The resources clearly are not sufficient,” Tierney said. He added that, while securing those funds is difficult in a House bent on cutting billions in food stamps, this doesn’t mean the money ins’t there. “We understand we have to make some hard decisions on prioritization, but there are plenty of places within our budget—if you include the military as well as the domestic budget—where we can move resources to the places they have to be. And this is a place where it’s obviously appropriate to do that.”

Rep. Phil Roe, Republican of Tennessee and chairman of the Health Education Labor and Pensions subcommittee of the Education and Workforce committee, emailed a statement detailing the intentions of the Republican bill that passed the House. In the statement, Roe characterized the bill as intended to improve adult literacy by cutting down on inefficiencies in the current system rather than by devoting more resources to the problem.

The office of Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and chairman of the senate’s Health Education Labor and Pensions committee, emailed a brief statement summarizing the bipartisan bill that passed his committee but did not respond to follow-up questions about whether more funding is needed.

Imagine if that question had been about early childhood education.

…

‘We Cannot Forget People Who Did Not Graduate From High School’
Fawn Johnson, who, among other things, covers the immigration beat for National Journal, wrote this article for The Atlantic on GED classes at La Guardia Community College in New York. The article extolls the results of La Guardia’s “contextualized” approach, as compared to regular GED prep, while glossing over the important fact that the students in the “contextualized curriculum” classes spend more time in class. Without diminishing the benefits of the instructional approach, it’s not really surprising to see better pass rates from students who are able to spend more time in class, whatever the curriculum.

I mention this because it goes back a point I was trying to make with Daniel for his article, which is that I think too much emphasis is sometimes placed on methods and models when the biggest problem is simply a lack of will to get things done. There are plenty of adults who have succeeded without the benefit of whatever is considered the best program model at any given moment. For many people, access to any instruction of some reasonably decent level of quality, in a supportive environment, with the opportunity to really focus a sufficient amount of time on the task at hand, is probably going to be pretty effective. But to create a system across the country that would provide these things for anyone who needs it—particularly low-income adults—is going to require a substantial investment. Not just an investment in instructional resources and teachers, but in the other kinds of supports (child care, housing, jobs with reasonable wages and more paid time off, etc.) that as a country we don’t seem willing to make right now.

Why I Write

/ The Old Crank / 2 Comments

There are a couple of reasons why I started this blog. For example, I wanted to demonstrate that it was possible to write about the policy-oriented topics I was interested in (mainly adult literacy, but not just that) with some modest degree of intelligence and depth, but in a non-wonky way—and to put the issue of adult literacy and adult basic skills in context for those who might be more wonkish, but who may not know much about the issue or how it fits (or might better fit) with other more prominent policy concerns.

Another thing I try to do—on occasion—is to be deliberately provocative, with the goal of spurring people to action—or at least to get a response. (It’s also related to goal number one above—trying to make things less boring.) In those instances I try to be fair, but I’ll sacrifice nuance for drama—although, to be honest, I hold back a lot more than I’d like, because professionally I’m just not in a secure enough position to risk completely alienating everyone I need to work with. (I’m starting—finally—to think about how to expand this site and add more voices here—from people who may not be under such constraints—but that’s a discussion for another day.)

One other challenge with this is that I can only write about information that is more-or-less public knowledge. Sometimes, because of my actual paying work, I know about things that are not public knowledge, and I’m occasionally at meetings or having conversations with people that are off the record. Not very often (I am about as non-insidery as you can possibly be and still get away with calling yourself a policy person in D.C. with a straight face), but it does happen. And sometimes things people say in public are the product of a lot of internal advocacy and back-and-forth that you never hear about, and a lot of the nuanced conversation that goes on behind the scenes is lost.

Having said all that, public pronouncements and actual actions are important. In the end it’s all you can really hold public officials accountable for. So when I call attention to the fact that adult literacy doesn’t show up as a priority in public pronouncements made by prominent public officials, I think that’s a valid thing to do, because no matter what I might be hearing behind closed doors, adult literacy advocates are going to have a lot more leverage with the President or Congress or the Department of Education when those officials actually start talking about this issue with regularity.

I’ll close by saying this: with a budget deal now in place (assuming it clears the Senate—not, apparently, a foregone conclusion), and with new data out on the need to address adult skills in the U.S., the next few months are probably as good a time as any in recent years for adult education advocates to be pressing the administration for increasing the U.S. investment in adult skills in the FY 2015 budget. The fact that the President didn’t mention it in his speech on inequality and the economy the other day was disappointing—I think it fits right into that discussion—but it’s not the case that this issue never comes up behind closed doors. If lots and lots of people noted they were disappointed not to hear anything about it in that speech last week—and hope to hear about it in his next major speech—it might get some attention.