Ask this guy:
By his own admission, [Snowden] was not a stellar student. In order to get the credits necessary to obtain a high school diploma, he attended a community college in Maryland, studying computing, but never completed the coursework. (He later obtained his GED.)
The Committee for Education Funding, a coalition of (mostly) national educational groups, released their annual response to the President’s 2014 budget proposal released on May 29th. (It was delayed due to the fact that the President’s budget was delayed.) This book is delivered to every member of Congress.
The section on the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA), which I wrote (hence the self-promotion) on behalf of the National Coalition for Literacy, is on page 133 at this link (or you can just click here for the AEFLA section alone). It’s really more of a revision/edit of last year’s section. This year we also included a short anecdote, contributed by another NCL member, to start things off, which hopefully provides readers with a sense of what this funding actually means to people.
Anyway, I wanted to mention it here because I figured that some of you may find a quick summary of adult literacy funding under AEFLA (i.e. Title II of WIA) to be useful in your own advocacy efforts.
It also gives me a chance to recommend the CEF book, which really serves as much more than just a response to the President’s budget—it includes a history of education funding over the last ten years for nearly every federal education program, and includes lots of charts and graphs making the case for the federal investment in education.
A couple of weeks ago, in a post about a meeting between a group of adult learners and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, I mentioned being struck by how often the discussion turned to the non-academic barriers that can make adult education a challenge for many people.
Yesterday the National Journal published a story about the Jeremiah Program in Minneapolis, which provides low-income single mothers enrolled in college with subsidized housing in residential communities with on-site child care, in the belief that a lack of secure housing and child care are the biggest barriers preventing these young women from finishing college. (A pilot program in Austin, Texas is also underway, and there are plans to open a new campus in Fargo, North Dakota, next year)
To qualify for the program, these women have to be enrolled in college, but it’s not difficult to envision how this model could be adapted for adult learners seeking to improve their literacy and/or earn a high-school credential.
Jeremiah’s return on investment numbers also demonstrate, once again, the wisdom of investing in parents (especially mothers) in order to improve school readiness and reduce child poverty:
An independent study from Wilder Research of St. Paul found that every dollar invested in Jeremiah Program families can return up to $7 to society at large, both by reducing the family’s dependence on public assistance and by increasing the economic prospects of both mother and child. Sixty percent of the program’s 2011 graduates were unemployed when they entered the program, and the rest were earning an average of $9.46 per hour. Upon graduation, the women started earning an average wage of $19.35 per hour. Graduates leave with better parenting skills, and their children get the benefit of high-quality early-childhood care.
Gloria Perez, Jeremiah’s president and CEO, told the National Journal that “everybody seems to acknowledge, across all political lines, that the mother tends to be the primary educator of the child and role model for the child,” but unlike the calls to invest in pre-K education, you don’t hear as much about scaling up programs that invest in parents. And yet the return on investment numbers here are just as powerful as those used to support the case for investing in pre-K.
The National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) just released a report called report that has some pretty interesting statistics on the drop-out rates of students with learning disabilities, or SLDs. According to NCLD, nationwide, the current dropout rate for SLDs is 19%. But 22 states have dropout rates higher than the national average, led by South Carolina, where a startling 49% of their SLDs drop out of school before earning a diploma.
I haven’t looked into this a while, but for years I’ve been surprised/concerned that there isn’t a firm, widely agreed-upon estimate of the percentage of enrolled adult education students with learning disabilities. (If anyone can point me to this, please do.) But if the dropout numbers for SLDs are this high, it stands to reason that many of these folks find their way into adult education classrooms.
Via Education Week
Literacy & Policy 