New Paper on Predictors of Post-Secondary Success

/ The Old Crank

The College and Career Readiness and Success Center at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) has just published a new brief that reviews various predictors of post-secondary success, according to research. The paper includes predictors of postsecondary success for adult education students. For what it’s worth, here are those predictors:

  1. Earning a GED.
  2. Achieving a CASAS score above 265.
  3. For those enrolled in an I-BEST model program (a very limited subset of the adult education population), the authors say that  enrollment with the intent of pursuing a vocational career—as opposed to simply for “academic purposes”—is also a potential predictor.

Not exactly earth-shattering news. And that last one… I haven’t reviewed the source, (note: laziness = excellent predictor of poor blog post quality), but I would think any highly structured program like I-BEST would look better in terms of outcomes than the general population of adult students enrolled, unless it was a total disaster of a program.

It seems likely to me that much more research is needed on this subject.

I’ve pulled out the relevant text from the report below:

For adult education, two indicators for success have been identified: obtaining a GED and receiving a Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment Systems (CASAS) composite score above 256 (Wachen, Jenkins, & Van Noy, 2010). The CASAS assessment was designed to measure adult mathematics, reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills in order to identify career pathways that are best suited to students’ abilities.

…

Other potential factors that relate to postsecondary success are limited to the area of adult education and are largely dependent on data provided by workforce innovation agencies. Findings from research conducted on the Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST) model suggest that adult students who enroll in postsecondary programs with the intentions of pursuing a vocational career fare better in achieving their career-oriented goals when compared to other adult students enrolling in postsecondary programs strictly for academic purposes (Wachen et al., 2010).

(Updated Below)

Last week, the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) co-hosted an event at CAP that basically served as the coming out party for a special U.S.-focused OECD report on the findings of the international Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). As I’ve noted in previous posts, the findings  for the U.S. are not encouraging. Here’s a chart from that report showing the relatively poor state of U.S. literacy skills:

OECD Literacy Chart

After the OECD’s main presentation, Assistant Secretary for Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE) Brenda Dann-Messier outlined some specific actions that her office is taking in response to the report. You can view the entire event (including her complete speech) in the video at the end of this post, but I wanted to highlight the action steps, which were as follows:

(1) Her office will be developing a new national plan, to be released at the end of April, aimed at improving “the foundational skills” of low skilled adults.

(2) The plan will be informed in part by a series of five regional “engagement sessions” around the country, beginning with a session here in D.C. on Wednesday. (These “engagement sessions” may sound familiar.) OVAE will be working with the Department of Commerce to ensure that representatives from the workforce development, human resources, business, and labor communities “are actively engaged in these regional sessions.” OVAE also plans to gather “additional input” in each region from adult learners and teachers in local adult education and workforce training programs.

(3) Just like on Jeopardy, there’s a take-home edition: OVAE has put together a toolkit for people who want to host their own engagement sessions or roundtables. Feedback from these sessions will be collected and considered during the planning process. (OVAE also plans to provide opportunities for individuals to submit comments as well.)

(4) OVAE has produced a new set of state fact sheets that profile the low-skilled adult population in each state. (There’s a national profile, too.) This announcement was a bit puzzling to me, as the Assistant Secretary emphasized (correctly) that these profiles are not based on PIAAC but on schooling and educational attainment data from the American Community Survey (ACS). As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think the PIAAC data really drives home the importance of not conflating skills with educational attainment.

(5) The final action step was a puzzler as well, if only due to lack of detail. The Assistant Secretary announced a new “awareness campaign” with an organization called Connect2Compete, in order to, in her words, “create access for the approximately three million low-skilled adults” identified in PIACC “who want to participate in  adult education but can’t due to lack of space or other constraints.”

Through the “Everyone On” campaign, millions of low-income american families can acquire low-cost high-speed internet access and low-cost, high-end devices, such as tablets and laptops. We’re particular exited about the opportunity to work together to not only qualify our students for affordable access and devices, but also to help adult learners connect with everyday services, engage in their communities, apply for jobs, and access high-quality online learning opportunities 24/7, 365 days a year.

This resource sharing effort will help us expand the infrastructure for adult learning in our country so that many more low-skilled adults can access high quality learning anytime, rather than exclusively relying on the WIA infrastructure which has the capacity to serve less than 2 million low-skilled adults per year. (my emphasis)

It’s hard to know what to say about this until further details are revealed. The reference to not “exclusively relying” on WIA (aka the Workforce Investment Act) is curious. It’s also worth noting, for now, that eligibility for many of Connect2Compete’s programs are tied to having children who are eligible for the federal school lunch program. Many adults in need of adult education services, of course, are without children. I’m also curious about how much of this effort is simply increasing awareness of Connect2Compete’s services, or whether there are some specific new resources for adult learners that will be developed. Hopefully, whatever this is, it will leverage and expand the existing efforts to provide online learning opportunities for adults, like this one.

One thing this announcement definitely didn’t include: more funding. That, of course, it is beyond the power of the administration to provide new funds without Congressional approval (although sometimes they can fund new programs by shifting money around or finding savings somewhere). However, that does not mean the administration is prevented from proposing that Congress provide new funding for adult education, which is exactly what the President did for pre-K education in his budget last year. In fact, major new pre-K legislation, based in large part on the President’s request, was rolled out great fanfare on Capitol Hill the very day after the OECD report on adult skills was unveiled at CAP. The House version of the Pre-K bill includes an authorization of $27 billion dollars for pre-K. (Federal support for adult education is well under a billion dollars annually.) This doesn’t mean that Congress will actually ever pass these bills, let alone appropriate those kinds of dollars for pre-K, but the proposal is, at least, on the table.

Make no mistake: the reason adult learners suffer from a “lack of space or other constraints,” is because nothing even remotely close to sufficient funding is being invested in these things. The question for those concerned about adult skills is whether, in the absence of even a modest proposal to increase funding for adult education, the administration is seriously committed to addressing the problem.

Update 11/19/13: I made a small edit above clarifying the ability of the administration to fund new programs. While it’s true that the executive branch can’t appropriate entirely new funding, the administration sometimes had discretion within program categories to allocate or re-allocate funds in order to pay for new programs.

U.S. Department of Education Response to OECD’s Call to Action

/ The Old Crank

New OECD and NDD Reports Out Today

/ The Old Crank / 1 Comment

timetoreskillVery light posting recently, which I attribute to an unusual (and troubling) imbalance in the work-to-pondering ratio over the last week or so. I thought I’d break the silence with news of two new reports released today that might be of interest to those who follow adult education policy.

First up: Time for the U.S. to Reskill? What the Survey of Adult Skills Says, an OECD report on the policy implications of the recent PIAAC Survey for the U.S., including “key lessons about the strategic objectives and directions which should form a frame for policy development in the US, including policy on adult learning and schooling.”

NDD-reportIn addition, NDD United‘s report, Faces of Austerity: How Budget Cuts Have Made Us sicker, Poorer, and Less Secure was also released today. This is the first really comprehensive report on how Americans have been affected by federal budget cuts over the last several years. NDD stands for “non-defense discretionary, which is the part of the federal budget that includes the bulk of the funding for things like education, job training, health and science programs and research, and national parks. Adult education funding is an example of an NDD program, while not discussed at great length in the report, it is mentioned several times in the workforce section.

It’s a sad coincidence that an important new report calling attention to the need for greater investment in skills is released the same day as another report detailing the ways in which the country has been dramatically dis-investing in programs that address this very problem.

Those interested in the NDD report might also want to take a look at Sam Stein’s piece on NDD United’s efforts in the Huffington Post.

“Adult literacy an economic issue for San Antonio”

/ The Old Crank

An editorial in the San Antonio Express-News last week claims that there is just one “formal” adult literacy program for the entire city of San Antonio—stunning, if true—and calls on the local community to come together to address the need for adult literacy services the same way it has come together to support early childhood education and homelessness:

The city of San Antonio has shown great initiative in addressing early childhood education. The creation of Haven for Hope was a bold attempt to provide one-stop services for the homeless population.

There is no reason the community can’t rally around improving adult literacy, as well. It is in the best interest of our families, economy, present and future.