advocacy

What It Takes

/ The Old Crank / 2 Comments

(Updated Below)

A small contingent of adult learners attending the National Adult Learner Leadership Institute here in Washington paid a visit this afternoon to the U.S. Department of Education to meet with the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and the Assistant Secretary for Vocational and Adult Education, Brenda Dann Messier. I was fortunate enough to be able to tag along.

Looking over my notes from the discussion, I am struck by how often the discussion turned to (1) what I’d call non-academic issues that nonetheless make adult education a challenge for many adults (especially low-income adults): busy work schedules, raising children, transportation, etc.; and (2) the impact that prior trauma and/or existing disabilities can have on learning, and the need for more resources that are appropriate for these learners.

This isn’t surprising, really—and these issues are well-known by people in the field—but it occurred to me that from a public policy perspective, our efforts to think about and address these issues are a bit underdeveloped. Adult education policy leans a bit more in the direction of what I think of as academic issues (teacher quality, professional development, standards, assessment, etc.) and less on the non-academic issues that can have as much of an impact on adult learner success as anything else. The best instruction in the world can’t do much for a mother who can’t come to class because she can’t find a childcare provider. This is why adult education advocacy can’t begin and end with the number in the line-item for adult education—a cut to housing services or childcare in the state or local budget can have every bit as much of a destructive impact on adult education enrollment and success as a cut to adult education itself.

As for special needs: again, it’s not that adult education policymakers (or programs) ignore these populations, but outside of what are commonly thought of as learning disabilities (such as dyslexia), it’s fair to say that few adult education programs or teachers specialize in serving those with physical/sensory/cognitive disabilities or mental health issues, and I don’t think there is much policy-oriented research available on how best to meet their needs. (This is yet another case where I’d really love to be wrong, so please correct me if I am—but I’ve been in many, many big-picture adult education policy meetings in my life and rarely—if at all—are mental health or disability issues discussed. But these issues come up often, one way or another, when you discuss policy with adult learners.)

Not surprisingly, many of the best programs in adult education do provide or arrange for other support services, including counseling, child care, health and mental health services (including drug and alcohol treatment), service coordination (case management), homelessness and housing services, and other social services. But again I’d say that programs offering a full range of wrap-around services are still pretty rare.

A lot of things have to be in place in order for some adult learners to succeed. If we agree that it makes good public policy sense to provide all adults with limited skills and/or lacking academic credentials with the opportunity to be successful adult learners, we need to look more carefully at what it takes—not only inside the classroom but outside of it—and advocate for policies that support those conditions.

UPDATE 5/10/13: Right after I wrote this post, I learned that World Education is offering an online course this summer for teachers interested in learning more about how chronic stress, trauma, and other adverse life experiences can affect learning. More information here.

UPDATE 5/23/13: The Department of Education has published a blog post about the visit with Secretary Duncan. The post includes a great video of one of the meeting participants, Shamika Hall, talking about her experience going back to school as an adult:

 

It’s Possible America Doesn’t Actually Know What It Wants

/ The Old Crank

By now I’ve seen a dozen or more polls like this one that show popular support for federal education spending exceeding support for other popular and well-known federal programs, including Social Security and Medicare. Often, as in this case, it’s number one, ahead of everything else.

But I wonder if the poll questions lead to results that overstate the actual popular support for federal education programs.

For example, how often are those who are polled told that federal education spending typically accounts for only about 10% of education funding in their school district, (and possibly less). Would they feel as strongly about protecting this funding knowing that it represents a relatively small amount of their school’s overall budget?

If they were given the names/purposes of specific federal education programs, would those poll as well, especially if people had no direct experience with those programs?

And obviously, it would be interesting to see the responses to these questions broken out by age group. I probably felt a lot less strongly about Medicare than I did about education when I was in my twenties. (In fact, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have told you what Medicare was when I was in my twenties.)

Also discouraging: this same Pew Research Center poll that shows broad support for education also has “aid to needy” coming in dead last, by a pretty significant margin. Low-income children receive 70% of federal education money.

In other words, I wonder whether the positive poll numbers in support of education generally might mislead advocates into thinking there is greater support for specific federal education programs than there actually is—particularly those programs that low-income families depend on. (Of course, there may be some polling out there that I haven’t seen that does attempt to drill down a bit more on this issue.)

It Doesn’t Matter What the Huffington Post Thinks

/ The Old Crank

That’s the first thing I thought when I read this long list of sequestration effects. Yes, they’re terrible, and most are just really nonsensical from a public policy point of view. (And if you don’t have time for the whole list, just read this one.)

But what’s more significant, I think, is this: Congress has been on a two-week recess. Have they heard about any of these effects when they were back home? It’s oversimplifying to suggest that that an outcry back home would have been enough to pressure Congress into immediately doing something about this upon their return—but if they’re not hearing about the negative effects from constituents back home, that would seem to significantly diminish any chance that it will be repealed or replaced anytime soon.

New Study Suggests Literacy Programs in Ghana Lead to Lower Rates of Infant Mortality

/ The Old Crank

Although it supports the (apparently) widely agreed notion among those in the global development community that adult literacy programs are not effective, a new study does point to an “unintended success” of such programs: decreasing child mortality.

So says Niels-Hugo Blunch, associate professor of economics at Washington and Lee University, in his recently published a paper, “Staying Alive: Adult Literacy Programs and Child Mortality in Rural Ghana.”

Blunch says that evaluations of adult literacy programs in developing countries tends to skip over beneficial outcomes that would cast them in a more successful light. From Washington and Lee’s news release:

Blunch explained that although the adult literacy program is formally about literacy and numeracy, it is really a multiplex program that integrates other modules such as health and social issues, income generation/occupational skills and civic awareness. Approximately 28 different topics are covered across those three modules.

Under the health module, women learn about family planning, teenage pregnancy, environmental hygiene, immunization, HIV/AIDS, safe motherhood and child care, drug abuse, traditional medicine and safe drinking water.

Blunch is hoping that publication of his paper will get the attention of the global development community, including the World Bank, and result in increased attention and funding for these programs, especially in rural areas.

I also thought this was interesting:

Classes in rural Ghana are held two to three times a week for a total of about six hours per week and, in most cases, there are 20 to 30 participants per instructor. It takes about 21 months to complete the course. Yet, according to Blunch, a significant reason for the skepticism and resulting reduction in funding of these programs is the poor outcomes in Latin America and South America, where classes frequently lasted only six to eight months, were shorter, and often also not with the additional health, income generating activities and civic awareness components.

I don’t have any direct experience with adult literacy programs outside of the U.S., so I can’t speak with any kind of expertise about them, but in general, with adult literacy, it shouldn’t be a surprise that programs that are longer, with a greater intensity of instruction and an integrated learning approach would lead to better outcomes than the programs he is describing in Latin and South America.

Blunch’s paper also included a cost-benefit analysis (again, this is according to Washington and Lee’s news release—I don’t have a link to the paper itself) of program participation that showed “substantial positive net benefits in monetary terms, including the future earnings of children whose deaths have been averted, even when disregarding women learning about income-generating activities, as well as the many other positive potential outcomes of program participation.”

From the perspective of domestic adult literacy policy and advocacy, I think it’s equally important to conduct this kind of research, and to point out these “indirect” outcomes to policymakers—and in monetary terms. (I know, of course, that there has been research like this, but there needs to be more of it, and it needs to be better publicized.) Anyone who has been around an adult education program here in the U.S. has seen the positive impact that simply enrolling and participating in a program can have on the individuals who have enrolled—in terms of their health and overall well-being, the example they set for their children, etc. We sell our programs short here in the U.S. as well.