Due to popular demand,* regular posting to this site is returning. Still very interested in hearing from anyone interested in becoming a regular contributor or an occasional guest post. In the meantime, I’ll be back posting on a somewhat regular basis.
*employing an extremely generous definition of “demand.”
No time these days to maintain this site on anything close to a regular schedule, but I thought I’d break my long silence to log this quote reported in the Celina Record, (in Texas), about the influence of adult education in children’s educational success, a favorite topic of this blog:
[Jill Roza, the district’s director of adult education services] was the assistant principal at Celina Intermediate School. She said that she had frequently encountered parents “who didn’t feel comfortable coming into the school system if they didn’t speak English,” which made it difficult to “get them the information they needed for their children to be successful” in school. “Many did not have a firm foundation in their own language,” she recalled, “and so I wanted to do something that would create that harmony between the community and the school and would make them feel much more comfortable coming into a school setting.”
Roza added: “Watching them come into class with their supplies, they are so excited and they want to learn because they know that it’s benefitting their children. Many of them will say,’I want to help my child with their work.’”
Today is International Literacy Day, an annual observance for focusing attention on the importance of literacy around the world. There are events in schools and communities around the globe today to mark the occasion.
The theme of International Literacy Day 2015 is “Literacy and Sustainable Societies.” UNESCO notes that “[l]iteracy skills are the prerequisite for the learning of a broader set of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values required for creating sustainable societies,” while at the same time, “progress in areas of sustainable development, such as health and agriculture, serves as an enabling factor in the promotion of literacy and literate environments.”
International Literacy Day celebrations are generally more prominent outside of the Unites States, although many U.S. adult literacy programs mark the day with events or announcements. This UNESCO page has links to some of the more prominent ILD 2014 events.
For those of you who are fans of infographics, here is the official UNESCO ILD 2015 infographic (click on it to see the entire thing):
Big news today in the world of correctional education, with the Wall Street Journal, Politico, and others reporting that the Obama administration is about to announce an “experimental” program to expand incarcerated adults’ access to Pell grants. (Congress made federal and state prisoners ineligible for federal financial aid back in the mid-1990s.) According to these sources, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is scheduled to make “an important announcement related to federal aid” during a visit to a Maryland prison on Friday.
While the attention this week is on incarcerated adults, the administration’s Pell “experimentation” may eventually extend into other areas. Speculation yesterday about the administration announcing a plan to restore access to Pell for prisoners was prompted by a speech Duncan gave earlier in the day — while mainly focused on higher education outcomes, there was a brief aside towards the end about how the administration was looking to “experiment” with expanded Pell access. But that part of the speech, excerpted below, was not only about expanding Pell access to incarcerated adults:
We want to do even more, developing experimental sites that will make Pell grants available to programs that award credentials based on demonstrated competency, to incarcerated adults seeking an independent, productive life after they get out of jail, and to adult learners who enroll in short-term certificate programs that provide meaningful job-ready training. (my emphasis)
So stay tuned. The news this week may be the first of several Pell announcements with significant implications for adult learners.
Literacy & Policy 