Retired Los Angeles Adult Education Teacher Says Shutting Down LAUSD Adult Education Would Harm K-12 Children

/ The Old Crank

The Los Angeles Times published an excellent op-ed piece today by John McCormick, a retired Los Angeles adult education teacher, on the folly of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s “worst-case scenario” budget plan, which puts LAUSD’s entire adult education system at serious risk of elimination. (For background on their proposal, read my post here; for an update, I recommend Marjorie Faulstich Orellana’s article in The Huffington Post, published last week.)

I want to highlight one particular point that McCormick makes in his article, and that is about the impact that shutting down adult education would have on parent/caregiver engagement:

Closing adult schools would also result in collateral damage to K-12 children. My students often attended the same schools at night that their children attended during the day. Because kids usually pick up English faster than their parents, if the parents don’t learn the language, they become marginalized in their own families. They cannot communicate with teachers, help with homework or even understand what their kids are saying. So instead of being able to help their kids assimilate, parents are more likely to remain isolated.

I’m often puzzled as to why parent engagement advocates aren’t up in arms when adult education cuts are threatened. In the paragraph above, McCormick does a great job explaining the connection between the two issues.

Arizona Budget Compromise Drops Proposed Restoration of Adult Education Funding

/ The Old Crank

The budget agreement that was hammered out late last week between Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and Republican state legislative leaders appears to drop Governor Brewer’s initial recommendation that state funding for adult education be restored to a “minimum” level that would enable the state to access federal Workforce Investment Act funds. “She’s drastically revised down her (education) spending initiative,” according to Luige del Puerto of the Arizona Capitol Times.

The budget proposal released by Governor Brewer in January proposed a minimal investment of $4.6 million dollars for adult education. That document noted:

Without additional funding, the State will lose eligibility for federal Workforce Investment Act dollars targeting adult education and will lose capacity to serve Arizonaʹs under‐ educated adults and support economic recovery in the state. The Executive Recommendation of $4.6 million is the minimum required to draw down $11.8 million in federal Workforce Investment Act dollars and maintain adult education services statewide.

However, according to this document, released by the Arizona Children’s Action Alliance on Friday, the Governor agreed to drop this request in the compromise agreement.

Fittingly, Nonprofit Free Speech Curtailed by Congress Before Anyone Had a Chance to Say Anything About It

/ The Old Crank

A leftover nonprofit/1st amendment issue raised by the FY 2012 omnibus appropriations bill passed by Congress last December got some attention this week in the form of a strong opinion piece by Mark Rosenman, director of Caring to Change, and Gary D. Bass, executive director of the Bauman Foundation and affiliated professor at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute. Their article was published in both The Chronicle for Philanthropy and the Foundation Center’s “Philantopic” blog.

The issue concerns some language that was inserted into the bill that, in the author’s opinion, curtails the free-speech rights of certain non-profit organizations. Rosenman and Bass see this is part of a long history of efforts (primarily by right-wing political groups) to prevent nonprofits that receive federal dollars from informing policymakers and the public about issues they care about.

The authors do a nice job of describing the language that was inserted, (although you have to get almost halfway through the article to get to it), and I agree that nonprofit organizations should be concerned:

With the new law, groups that receive money under the appropriations measure cannot use federal grants for “any activity to advocate or promote” any “proposed, pending, or future” tax increase (at any level of government) or any “future requirement or restriction” on a “legal consumer product” (e.g., tobacco and alcohol products, junk foods and beverages, and guns).

None of those key terms is defined. Suppose a group received federal aid to fight cancer by decreasing tobacco use and wanted to educate the public about the health dangers of cigarette sales, especially to minors. Presumably, that wouldn’t be allowed under the law. Or say another nonprofit won a grant to curb obesity. It might want to suggest a surcharge on sodas and other sugary foods as a way to deter consumption, but it probably couldn’t promote that idea.

The new law also forbids nonprofits from using federal money to influence some regulatory and executive-branch actions. That means a charity that receives federal money to provide care and support to families with disabled children, for example, would no longer be allowed to use any of its government money to comment on proposed state regulations that govern residential treatment or in-home services.

The point I want to add to this is about the process. What a lot of people who don’t follow Congress very closely may not realize—and may be surprised by—is that policy language like this often finds its way into appropriations bills. Before I started paying attention to how the appropriations process worked, I just assumed that appropriations bills solely concerned… appropriations. That is, I thought they just described spending amounts, and didn’t include much else. But Congress often inserts policy language into these bills that can have far-reaching consequences.

Rosenman and Bass complain that “charity leaders didn’t find out about [the language] in time to take action to prevent their passage,” which is quite possible, because the omnibus bill was rushed into passage after Congress failed to get FY12 appropriations bills out under the normal process. This raises the question: is it a good idea for Congress to be able to insert legislative language like this into bills during an expedited process where there is little time for advocacy or debate? But overall the authors are more critical of the substance of the language that was inserted into the bill than by the process by which it got in there.

In any case, it’s a good lesson for advocates on the importance of paying attention to the appropriations process, and that it’s especially important to be alert when spending bills come together quickly, like this one did.

Curious Comment About Rise in Student Loan Defaults

/ The Old Crank

In a recent essay for Voices In Society, Anthony Carnevale, Director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, makes an offhand remark about student loan defaults that caught my attention:

Sure, college is expensive—stories of students racking up tens of thousands of dollars in student-loan debt are common. Federal student-loan default rates jumped from 7 percent in 2008 to 8.8 percent in 2009, so it’s clear that not everyone is handling that debt responsibly. (my emphasis)

Maybe some of those borrowers were irresponsible, but that 7 percent default rate jump occurred just after the worst recession in decades—one that was characterized by double digit unemployment in many states. I wonder how many borrowers during this period suddenly found themselves in a position, through no fault of their own, where it became impossible to continue to make their payments.

Something else was going on around this time, too:

“I hear a lot of talk that these are just rogue actors,” Mr. Harkin began one question to Gregory D. Kutz, who led the undercover investigation for the Government Accountability Office. “Would you say that misleading and deceptive practices are the exception, or are these more widespread?”

Mr. Kutz responded that while investigators found “good practices” at a handful of colleges, none of the 15 colleges it visited were “completely clean.” At each of them, recruiters and admissions officers made deceptive or otherwise questionable statements to investigators posing as applicants.