adult literacy

Responding to Budget Cuts in Adult Education

/ The Old Crank

Last week, the Council for the Advancement of Adult Literacy (CAAL) released In A Time of Scarce Resources: Near Term Priorities in Adult Education, a 34-page summary and analysis of responses submitted by more than two dozen “adult education leaders” about “priority areas in adult education at a time when resources are scarce.” (Not that they are plentiful most of time.) According to CAAL, “the main purpose of the paper is to motivate adult education planners, service providers, and policymakers to recognize the need to focus on highest priority next steps to take in this period of extreme funding constraints.”

Those surveyed, according to CAAL “stress[ed] that we can achieve a great deal, despite stagnant funding, if we set priorities and are all traveling in the same direction toward a comprehensive shared vision for the future.”

But is this true? You can obviously prioritize and work more efficiently to make do with what you have in almost any circumstance, (which is where a report like this one is useful), but I think we let policymakers off the hook when we say that “we can achieve a great deal” when budgets are drastically reduced, as they have been in many states in recent years. People in this field work so hard to figure out how to move forward with scarce resources—in doing so, my fear is that scarce resources are all we are ever going to get.

House and Senate Adult Literacy Resolution Roundup

/ The Old Crank

Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) is introducing a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives to recognize the second full week in September as National Adult Education and Family Literacy Week. (As a D.C. resident, I was pleased to see that Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton is a co-sponsor of the resolution.)

If you would like to ask your member of Congress to sign on as a co-sponsor as well, the National Coalition for Literacy (NCL) has all the information you need in order to make that ask. The deadline is tomorrow, July 31st.

In addition, Senators Patty Murray (D-WA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) have introduced a similar resolution in the Senate, and are also looking for co-sponsors among their Senate colleagues. For this one, the deadline is Wednesday, August 1st. For some reason, I can’t find this information on the NCL web site, but here is an e-mail NCL sent out last week with some helpful instructions on how to contact your Senator about it:

Senate Alert: Invite Senators to Cosponsor Resolution Dedicating National AEFL Week 2012!

Recently, Senators Patty Murray (D-WA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) introduced a senate resolution dedicating the week of September 10, 2012 as National Adult Education & Family Literacy Week! Already Jim Webb (D-VA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have signed on as cosponsors to this measure. Would you like your U.S. Senator to support adult education and family literacy by cosponsoring this resolution?

If so, then please call his or her office today, requesting your U.S. Senator sign on as a co-sponsor.  Deadline to co-sponsor: Wednesday, August 1st

Instructions:

  1. Call your U.S. Senator’s office. Ask to speak to the legislative staff who covers adult education. Find the phone number here: http://bit.ly/Senate-AEFLWeek12
  2. Ask, “Will you please ask Senator __________________ to cosponsor a Senate Resolution recognizing the week of September 10 as National Adult Education & Family Literacy Week? The deadline to officially sign on as a cosponsor is August 1.”
  3. To cosponsor, legislative staff should call Jordan Smith on Senator Murray’s staff or Peter Oppenheimer on Senator Alexander’s staff. Offer to send the staffer acopy of the draft resolution.
  4. Talk about why it is important for the Senator to show his/her support as well as the success of local programs and impact of adult education in local communities. While NCL shares the “national picture” with Congress, only you have the local and personal story.
  5. Follow up as appropriate.

Also worth noting: Congressman Hansen Clarke (R) and Tim Scott (D), both of Michigan, introduced a House resolution at the very end of last month “[e]xpressing the sense of the House of Representatives that bolstering literacy among African-American and Hispanic men is an urgent national priority.”

The resolution, if approved, would, among other things, “affirm the goal of reducing adult illiteracy by 50 percent in these target populations and by 25 percent throughout the United States” over the next ten years; encourage local, State, and Federal agencies—as well as the private sector—to engage in “literacy promotion initiatives;” and encourage Federal agencies and private firms to support community-based organization programs and the use of trained volunteers to work with the target populations. (my emphasis).

Congressman Clarke also wrote a piece for the Huffington Post on Friday advocating for increasing resources for adult literacy programs—but without mentioning any specific support for legislation that would actually increase federal funding for adult literacy. Here are his recommendations:

First, rather than reducing school hours and facilities due to budget cuts, we must keep our schools open later and reopen libraries to serve students who are struggling to read. Second, we should boost funding for community-based organizations like Reading Works and ProLiteracy Detroit that provide adult literacy training. Such programs are understaffed and oversubscribed, with 74 percent of organizations nationally maintaining waiting lists. Third, we should reform our prisons to give inmates the tools they need to become successful members of the workforce. We can start to do this by providing more resources to teach literacy in prisons and by rewarding inmates who read more.

A Call to End the GED in New York

/ The Old Crank / 1 Comment

Thomas Hilliard, a Senior Fellow in Workforce Development Policy at the Center for an Urban Future, thinks the revamped GED, scheduled to launch in January, 2014, “could be a disaster for New York.” In a commentary published by the Times Union on July 17th, Hilliard notes that the state of New York as yet to come up with a plan to address the increased cost of the test or provide for an alternative:

The GED Testing Service, which has long administered the GED, announced plans to revamp the test to ensure that anyone who passed it would be ready for college-level coursework. This is understandable given the premium on college credentials in today’s economy. But as it set out to create a new test, the GED’s stewards decided to enter into a partnership with Pearson LLC, the world’s largest educational publisher. Pearson took over leadership of the GED Testing Service, and in May 2012 announced plans to raise the price of the GED to $120, effectively doubling its cost to New York state.

The increase is particularly troublesome because New York state bars the charging of a fee to take the GED and pays the full costs of testing out of the state budget—roughly $2.7 million last year. Unless the state doubles its expenditure—an unlikely prospect—the number of test slots for people to take the GED could fall by half, from 45,000 to 22,500.

As a result, New York could easily lose thousands of GED holders a year, a damaging blow to the state’s economic competitiveness and the job prospects of low-income youth and adults.

Hilliard concludes his piece by calling on New York State policymakers to drop the GED altogether: “It’s time for the state to end its partnership with the GED and give New Yorkers an alternative high school equivalency exam—preferably one that is less expensive but every bit as accepted by employers and colleges as the GED.” While acknowledging that the state has begun exploring alternative tests, he implores them to step up their efforts, noting that “time is running out” to establish an alternative by the end of 2013.

In related news, New York City’s unemployment rate climbed to 10 percent in June.

New Community College Completion Study Emphasizes Student Perspectives – Will Adult Education Policymakers Join the Trend?

/ The Old Crank

Education Week’s College Bound Blog reported today on a new report published by Public Agenda, WestEd and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Success Initiative that looks at barriers to college completion, called Completion by Design Student Voices on the Higher Education Pathway. The researchers gathered the bulk of their data for this report via focus groups with community college students themselves. The students’ responses are worth reading (in particular, from an adult education perspective, it was interesting to read that “most students believed that the student success and developmental education courses intended to bring them up to speed were not offered in a way that helped them succeed”), but it was also interesting to me to learn that, apparently, soliciting student views on the issue in the first place is unusual—and that doing so might be an emerging trend:

Policymakers are realizing that listening to students may be part of the answer to improving educational attainment. Other initiatives have focused on high school student voices and attitudes of students about paying for the cost of college.

Could this trend one day work its way into a prominent place in adult education research? In 2009, in testimony provided to what was then called the House Committee on Education and Labor’s Higher Education, Lifelong Learning, and Competitiveness Subcommittee, Mary Finsterbusch, Executive Director of VALUE, a national nonprofit organization governed and operated by current and former adult literacy students, argued that the perspectives of adult literacy and basic education students are often overlooked:

One of VALUE’s core beliefs is that most successful for-profit companies rely on consumer input and feedback to improve their products and services; the adult literacy system should do this too. Adult learners should be part of the planning, delivery, and supervision of adult education services and research at every level. As recipients of adult education services, adult learners have a unique, important, and all-too-often overlooked perspective regarding what does and does not work.

The consumer, the adult learner, isn’t asked for input or feedback about adult literacy policies and programs in any systematic way. Low-literate adults are sometimes viewed as ignorant – at best, people to be pitied and taken care of; at worst, people to be looked down on and dismissed.

On May 29th I was invited to attend a briefing on a new National Research Council (NRC) report,  Improving Adult Literacy Instruction: Options for Practice. This report essentially distills and summarizes the latest research (or, in some cases, the lack of sufficient research) that informs (or should inform) adult literacy teaching practices. There were several hundreds attendees at the briefing asking questions and providing feedback; by my count, there was just one person there who self-identified as an adult learner—Marty Finsterbusch.