adult education

(Very) Long Awaited “Making Skills Everyone’s Business” Report Is Finally Released

/ The Old Crank

making-skills-coverThe Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) at the U.S. Department of Education has released a new report, Making Skills Everyone’s Business: A Call to Transform Adult Learning in the United States. The report, originally slated to be released in April of 2014, offers seven strategies, “grounded in evidence and informed by effective and emerging practices,” that hold promise for “improving the conditions that create and perpetuate poor literacy, numeracy, and problem solving.”

OCTAE has also produced a recorded video announcement about the report from Acting Assistant Secretary Johan E. Uvin.

GED Attainment Higher for Adults Who Participate in an Adult Education Program

/ The Old Crank

Impact of ABS Program ParticipationThis report was released in December but I just caught notice of it this week. The third in a series of research briefs that utilize data from the Longitudinal Study of Adult Learning (LSAL)*, which compared adult literacy development among adults who participated in adult education programs and those who did not over a lengthy period of time, this analysis of the data found that the rate of GED attainment was higher among individuals who participated in programs (35%) than those who did not (25%). This may seem like an unsurprising finding, but unsurprising or not, it’s important to be able to point to evidence that participating in a program makes a difference. You can download the entire brief here.

*LSAL randomly sampled about 1,000 high school dropouts and followed them for nearly a decade from 1998–2007. LSAL followed both participants and nonparticipants in Adult Basic Skills (ABS) programs, assessing their literacy skills and skill uses over long periods of time, along with changes in their social, educational, and economic status, offering a rich picture of adult literacy development.

Comment-palooza

/ The Old Crank

2015 NRS Education Function Levels UpdateLast month the Department of Education proposed several modifications to the learning objectives associated with the educational functioning levels in the National Reporting System (NRS), the accountability system for adult education programs that received federal funds through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. The changes are intended to “reflect the adult educational demands of the 21st Century.”

Here is a link to the proposed changes: Revised Educational Functioning Level Descriptors.

By law, the Department must provide the general public and Federal agencies with an opportunity to comment. If you are so inclined, head on over to regulation.gov and press the “Comment Now!” button. Comments are due by March 16th.

And hey, remember that terrible budget for adult education programs we told you about last week? Turns out there is an opportunity to comment on it:

In the coming weeks, Secretary Duncan will testify before Congress on the President’s budget proposal, but before he goes, he wants to hear from you. In the form below, tell us what the budget means for you, so he can share that message when he testifies before Congress.

Generally speaking, the President’s budget has good things in it for education, so I think they are probably expecting words of support for the increases to the education budget that they are proposing. But I don’t see any reason why one couldn’t use this opportunity to voice concerns about those programs that did not receive an increase. Head over to “Tell Us How the Budget Affects You” to comment. Again, if you are so inclined.

Finally, while it’s too late to submit comments to the  White House Task Force on New Americans, you might be interested in reading some of the comments that were submitted. A few groups have shared their comments with me privately, so I can’t share them here, but the National Skills Coalition did publish their comments, and they’re worth a look.

No One Could Have Predicted…

/ The Old Crank / 2 Comments

More discouraging news, this time from WRVO in New York:

New York replaced the GED because the test’s price tag was set to double this year. The new test gives students the same credentials – the equivalent of a high school diploma. Statewide pass rates are down by four percent after the switch, compared to 2012. The number of test-takers also fell by half.

First of all, that is a classic example of a buried lead, in paragraph form. I view a 4% pass rate drop as actually pretty good news, considering that they’ve switched to a completely different exam. The real news is that the number of test-takers has fallen by half. That is not an “also”—that is the story.

And to what do we attribute this dramatic decrease in the number of test-takers? In states that stuck with the GED, the drop off is attributed by critics to the higher cost and difficulty of the revised GED. In New York, they have a different problem:

Bruce Carmel, director at the Bronx Youth Center and a co-chair at the New York City Coalition for Adult Literacy, says there was a lot of misinformation about the new test.“You heard some people saying, ‘Oh, there’s no more GED,” he says. “So when people heard there was no more GED test, a lot of people thought it was over and you couldn’t get your high school equivalency diploma anymore.”

Sometimes it seems like if we had tried to come up with a plan to intentionally discourage adults from earning their high school equivalency we could not have done a better job. I know this is not in fact what anyone intended (including the test publishers), and I don’t want to the discount the heroic work that the adult education community has done to transition to these new exams. We’d be in even worse shape without their efforts. (And I wish the media would pay as much attention to that as they do to the poor numbers.) Nor is this a criticism of the decision in New York to replace the GED. But the dramatic drop we are experiencing around the country in the number of people seeking a high school equivalency diploma as a result of these changes should not have been unexpected. Some honest, no-finger-pointing reflection on how we ended up in such a situation might help us take steps to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. And while eventually this all may eventually shake out for the better, let’s not forget about the folks who gave up on high school equivalency during this transition, and what the future likely holds for them.