adult education

Michael Bloomberg: “Education Isn’t Going to Help Uneducated Adults”

/ The Old Crank

Let’s hope this is not representative of the level of discourse one can expect at the Aspen Institute:

Moderator Jennifer Bradley, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Institute, then asked what the U.S. can do to get people out of poverty. Bloomberg responded that conventional wisdom points to education, but education isn’t going to help uneducated adults. Bradley later asked how government can offer basic fairness to the children “who have been failed.” (my emphasis)

Bloomberg claimed that 95 percent of murders fall into a specific category: male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25. Cities need to get guns out of this group’s hands and keep them alive, he said.

As noted by Paul Campos, here, according to actual crime statistics, the real percentage appears to be 22.8.

Maybe this is an isolated case, but I worry that attitudes and ignorance like this, when espoused by elites, can have a significant adverse impact on efforts to improve adult educational opportunities for minority out-of-school youth and young adults. Curious what others think.

This Shouldn’t Be So Hard to Figure Out

/ The Old Crank / 1 Comment

Is it reasonable to still be making up our minds as to whether the new “tougher” GED makes good policy sense? This sentence from a recent Dow Jones Business News article on the dramatic drop in the number of GED test-takers got my attention:

Economists and policy makers are torn over whether a tougher test is good or bad.

You know who is likely not torn about it? The kid who can’t get a minimum wage job because he doesn’t have a diploma, and who can’t put the time in to pass the new, more difficult GED. Pretty sure they are going to go with “bad.” Randy Trask, the president of the GED Testing Service, says in the same article that the GED “was becoming irrelevant” before the changes, but for people without a high school diploma, it was and remains very relevant. I realize a high school diploma is not enough for most of the jobs that pay a decent wage, and that we want to encourage people to get into career pathway programs and integrated training and into college etc., but I’ll never understand why it would ever make sense as a matter of public policy to make high-school equivalency any harder than it needs to be.

“Some test takers may have the simple need to work at Starbucks, they don’t need to analyze a Shakespeare play,” said Larry Condelli of the Workforce and Lifelong Learning program at the not-for-profit American Institutes for Research. “Then again, if you give them a lesser education for a specific purpose, are you really helping them?”

This is not an unreasonable question. But at this point, it might be time to take the debate outside of the usual policy circles and ask actual test-takers and potential test takers what they think. If our adult education system was truly learner-centered, not only in terms of instruction, but policy as well—that is, if we had a system in which adult learners had a major voice in policy discussions and decisions—this would be a much easier question to answer. Lacking that, a survey of the target population might help us figure it out.

At the end of the day, this should not be a hard one to call. If, on balance, the new test ends up being more of a barrier to the people it’s designed to serve than an opportunity, it should and probably will be considered a failure. Arguing for more career pathways or integrated models or whether adult education works at all actually obfuscates what should be a fairly simple question, which is whether the test has or hasn’t created an unfair and unreasonable barrier to adults and out-of-school youth seeking high school equivalency. (It’s useful to remember, by the way, that many people who take the GED—maybe the majority—aren’t enrolled in or have any contact with the adult education system at all.)

Adult-learning instructor Marcia Leister has felt the impact of the new GED test at her technical college in Bellingham, Wash., a state where currently only the GED is offered. Of about 120 students she taught last year, about 10 people took the test, about a quarter of the number in a typical year, and only one person passed it, she said.

“My students are extremely frustrated by the new test,” she said. “They are losing hope.”

I think sometimes policy people (me included, when I’m wearing that hat) forget what it actually looks like on the ground in this business, and end up missing the obvious. We can disagree about a lot of things in adult education policy, but I don’t think any of us want to be in the losing hope business.

First Look: President’s Proposed FY 2016 Budget

/ The Old Crank / 1 Comment

(Updated Below)

I don’t know when or if I’ll have the time to give the President’s Fiscal Year 2016 Budget Proposal a through read, let alone any kind of thorough evaluation. But here is my quick-take look at what it proposes for adult education.

The most important source of federal funds for adult education programs, by far, is the Adult Basic and Literacy Education State Grant program under Title II of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), which was level funded at $569 million. This is the money that states use to provide grants to local adult education programs. If you are a program that gets part of your funding through WIOA, this is the pot where that money comes from. On the other hand, the President once again proposes an increase for something called Adult Education National Leadership Activities. This year, he calls for a $6 million dollar increase  to this line item ($13.7 million to $19.7 million) in order to “support States in their efforts to improve adult education standards and assessments and to carry out data collection activities during the first year of full implementation of the reauthorized Adult Education programs.” This represents about a 44% increase over the FY 2015 spending for this line item. It also represents a substantial increase over the amount that is authorized by WIOA, which caps National Leadership Activities at $15 million.

Congress rarely bites on any suggestion to increase National Leadership Activities funding. Interestingly—and frustratingly—the administration kept the combined total of state grants and National Leadership Activities funding under the total combined amount authorized by WIOA for FY 2016. In other words, even though they went over the authorized limit for National Leadership Activities funding, they come in $33.6 million below AEFLA’s authorized level of $622.3 million for these two line items combined. So they could have increased the state grant line item without going over the total authorized amount for adult education under WIOA. Interestingly, it appears the administration was careful to keep the combined total of state grants and National Leadership Activities funding in line with the total amount authorized by WIOA (in other words, even though they went over the authorized limit for National Leadership Activities funding, they “balanced” this by not increasing the state grant line item). Perhaps Congress will be more inclined to approve the President’s proposal, since on balance it does match is less than WIOA’s total authorized level. Or maybe this will signal to them that adult education is not a priority.

But a big challenge with proposals like this is that the state grant program has a larger and broader constituency than National Leadership Activities. National Leadership funds tend to stay at the U.S. Department of Education—or, as is often the case, with contractors they employ. As a general rule, Congress is more inclined to protect or support increases to federal funding that goes out to the states and districts they represent than funding that appears to enlarge the budgets of federal agencies, especially if they are unclear on what the benefit of this funding will have for their constituents back home.

One other point: adult eduction policy folks are sometimes so focused on WIOA (or it’s predecessor, the Workforce Investment Act) that they tend to ignore or downplay other federal programs that are sources of funds for adult education programs, especially community based programs (CBOs). The Community Development Block Grant program, educational research funding, and funding for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) are just a few examples. We also sometimes forget to thoroughly analyze the potential for new programs proposed by the President to be a source of funding. If I have time maybe I’ll try to take a closer look at some of these programs in a future post—but in the meantime, don’t be shy about using the comments section to flag any funding issues or new programs that the adult education community should be paying attention to.

Congress never adopts a president’s budget in its entirely. Sometimes, as has been the case recently, it largely ignores it. This year it’s going to be particularly challenging for the administration to get any increases passed. Most of the administration’s new program proposals or proposed increases to existing programs are the product of the fact that they didn’t hold themselves bound to the expected cap on FY 2016 required by sequestration, which kicks in again for FY 2016 unless Congress and the President come up with another deal to get rid of it. That doesn’t mean, in my opinion, that the document is pointless. As a policy document, it’s a useful catalog of the President’s priorities,* and it can give advocates for certain programs or initiatives something to rally behind. It remains to be seen whether adult education advocates will get behind a proposal to flatline funding for adult education programs in FY 2016, after a modest increase last year that was still well short of recapturing funding lost due to sequestration.

*A great example is the President’s free community college proposal. While the funding for this is unlikely to be approved by Congress in 2016, the idea has taken hold and will likely be part of the education/workforce policy discussion for some time.

UPDATE 2/9/15: As is often the case with a “first impression” post that I write late at night, I made a bit of a goof, which I corrected above. I misremembered the authorized amount for adult education in FY 2016 under WIOA, and was too tired to remember to double-check. The mistake doesn’t take anything away from the most important and main point of my post—which was that the President is proposing to level-fund adult education state grants—but an ancillary point I made, which is that it appeared that the administration might have been trying to stick to the overall authorization level by offsetting the increase to National Leadership funding by flat-funding the state grants, was wrong.

But not wrong in a good way! It means the President’s proposal is actually worse than I thought, because in fact they did not even try to meet the authorized level for adult education under the WIOA legislation that the President himself signed less than six months ago. They could have provided the increase for National Leadership and increased the state grants by another $33.6 million without going over the authorized level. This is extremely troubling. Significant increases were proposed for many other education programs: Title I, Head Start, TRIO, CTE, and others. Has the administration lost confidence in the adult education program? What does this signal to Congress?

One silver lining: going under the authorized amount provides adult education supporters a clear path for advocacy. As we discussed in a post back when WIOA was introduced, having authorized levels can be a handy tool, because it can be cited as evidence of Congress’s judgement as to the minimum funding a program needs. Putting aside that Congress’s authorized levels for adult education in WIOA were way too low to begin with, at least there is a figure ($622.3 million) that advocates can point to as justification to appropriators as to why adult education needs more funding in FY 2016 than the President has proposed.

How Concerned Should We Be About the 2014 GED Numbers?

/ The Old Crank

From an Inside Higher Education article published today on the reportedly dramatic drop in GED test takers and passers in 2014, after a new, more expensive, computer-only test was put into place:

Lennox McLendon, executive director of the [National Adult Education Professional Development Consortium], said he plans to ask about each state’s testing and pass rates, and whether there are differences between the three high school equivalency tests. So far, he’s not concerned by the lower number of test-takers and passers this year.

“That’s just the way the cycle goes,” McLendon said. “It’ll pick back up and a year from now, and we’ll be going full speed again.”

I hope this turns out to be the case. Here are Rhode Island’s reported pass numbers:

2013: 2,363
2014: 225

That is about a 95% drop.

It’s always nerve-wracking to highlight any numbers that suggest something in adult education is not working—it’s one of the unfortunate by-products of working in a field that is constantly fighting for its life—but from my vantage point there is no evidence to suggest that our teachers, administrators, or state directors are directly at fault for these numbers*, and thus it would be wise, I think, to examine these numbers carefully, rapidly assess exactly what might be going wrong, and determine whether the situation really will simply resolve itself without some kind of intervention. Otherwise, if the numbers don’t bounce back, the whole system is likely going to be blamed anyway—I wouldn’t count on everyone outside the field agreeing to simply pin the blame on the new test.

In my opinion, this is potentially a very dangerous moment for our field. If those numbers don’t go up in 2015 and 2016, it leaves the field open to claims of ineffectiveness. There is also danger in reflexively placing blame on the GED Testing Service. It might make some folks feel better, but we need to work with them to get this right, and I don’t see how completely alienating them helps. (Even if you are highly critical of the transfer of the GED to the Pearson/ACE for-profit, that’s what we are going to have to live with for the foreseeable future.) I’m curious as to what others think. Am I overly concerned?

*Here is what I mean by directly. It could be, for example, (not saying it is) that one of the problems has something to do with teachers not being sufficiently trained to teach the new test. But my guess is that if that’s true, that would prove to have more to do with the clumsy roll out of the new test and/or the general lack of funding for the field, which results in limited professional development opportunities.