education

Charter Schools and Adult Education: Thoughts on Pending Florida Legislation

/ The Old Crank

According to this report in the Cape Coral/Fort Myers News Press, legislation is about to be introduced in the Florida legislature by Sen. David Simmons, (R-Maitland), and Rep. Janet Adkins, (R-Fernandina Beach), that will, according to the report, “allow charters or non-profit groups to offer adult education classes.”

I’m pretty sure that Florida law does not currently prohibit nonprofits from offering adult education classes, and if you read further, it appears that this is not actually what this proposed legislation would do.

The issue caught my attention because there are several charter schools in Washington, D.C. that provide adult education classes as part of their mission. The D.C. charter law is unique (as far as I know) in that it explicitly includes adult education as a suitable function for D.C. charter school funding. I think that there are other states where the law is silent on the issue.

While I haven’t actually read the proposed Florida bill, it does not appear to be modeled after the D.C. law. Instead, this proposal appears to be designed to provide charters and nonprofits with access to state adult education funds that currently flow exclusively to the K-12 system in Florida. In other words, nonprofits can obviously offer adult education services now — they just can’t currently access state adult education money to do it. The bill is being promoted by a large nonprofit organization, the Volunteer USA Foundation, a non-profit group with strong connections to the Bush family.

The charter school law in the District of Columbia, on the other hand, allows charter schools that serve adult students with the opportunity to access city education funds that otherwise is used for K-12 education. In other words, it created a new funding source for adult education, leaving existing state funds for adult education alone. (The “state” adult ed money in D.C. does not go to D.C.’s K-12 system, by the way, but flows pretty much exclusively to nonprofit organizations through a competitive grant process.) Again, I may be wrong, but it appears that the Florida legislation is designed simply to move adult education money from the K-12 system into private nonprofits and charter schools. It may result in new adult education entities but if so it will be at the expense of services currently being provided by the school system.

I think this distinction is worth mentioning as this issue is often raised in discussions of whether charter school legislation might open up new funding streams for adult education. It did in the District. That doesn’t appear to be what is envisioned in Florida.

P.S. Someone with some extra money lying around should fund someone to do a  comprehensive look at current adult education charter school models, (most are in D.C., but I understand that are a smattering being proposed in other jurisdictions), and look at state charter school legislative language across the country that might theoretically accomodate the growth of adult charter schools.

Pressure Points When Adult Education Funding is Cut

/ The Old Crank / 1 Comment

(Updated Below)

Oakland North is a news site operated by the U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. On Monday of this week, their lead story was a lengthy, very well-reported piece by Mariel Waloff on the Oakland Unified School District’s (OUSD) decision to cut 90% from its Adult and Career Education program.

Since 2009, after the passage of the California Budget Act (CBA), school districts have been allowed to take money from one funding category and move it into another. This allowed OUSD to use the funding originally intended for adult education in the district to fill the gaps in its K-12 budget. This has been happening all over California for the last few years, and, as a result (and a sadly predictable one), adult education has been decimated in many parts of the state. The scope of the cuts has been so great that it could be argued that the CBA is the worst piece of legislation for adult education in the entire U.S. over the last several years.

The article does a nice job illustrating where the pressure points and areas of conflict are for adult education during periods when state and local governments cut funding:

1. When adult education is pitted against K-12, adult education loses.

As Waloff notes, “[a]lthough the demand for adult education [in Oakland] was high at the time, K-12 was ruled to be a higher priority.”

Even with a significant political push from the adult education community, it seems to me that it’s always going to be a losing proposition to be on any side other than K-12 when a budget issue has been framed as a choice between K-12 and anything else.

Waloff writes that demand for adult education was high, but we don’t know from the article whether those people demanding services organized any kind of advocacy effort to persuade the board to preserve the funding. But even if they did, it’s not easy for the adult education community to reverse these kinds of decisions on its own.

I wonder if an advocacy effort by members of the entire community, on the other hand, who refuse to pit one sector of educational services against the other, and who demand that all educational services be preserved, might be more effective. (Again, no idea if this was tried here.) Such a group could also argue, if cuts are necessary, that they be more equally distributed. Waloff suggests that the Adult and Career Education Program staff were sort of resigned to the proposition that K-12 education is a greater funding priority, but, really, why is that the case? Is everything in the K-12 budget really more of a priority than 90% of the adult education budget? And doesn’t adult education have any impact on the success of the kids in K-12? (Many of the students in the adult education system there have children in the K-12 school system.) If the the adult education program was positioned as part of a seamless set of equally valuable services essential to the health of the community, where each of the services are interdependent on each other, maybe it would not be so easy for the school board to cut 90% of its budget.

UPDATE, 3/18/12: The San Diego News-Tribune published a guest opinion piece by Dom Gagliardi, principal of the Escondido Adult School, that reiterates this point. Writing about the budget mechanism implemented in California in 2009 that allows districts to divert funds from adult education to support its K-12 programs, Gagliardi writes, “When forced to prioritize instructional services for youth or adults, the choice is obvious and painful.” (my emphasis)

2. When GED services are pitted against other adult education services (ESL, Adult Basic Education — especially ABE for those with very limited literacy), GED tends to win.

For now, [Adult and Career Education Program Administrator Chris] Nelson is trying to make the best of the resources the adult education program has. “We”re really trying to focus in on the students who are with us,” he said. “We’re making sure they get the instruction that they need and that they are passing the GED. That’s the most important thing (my emphasis). Then we help them transition to the next step.”

Adult and Career Education staffers are in fact expanding the GED program (my emphasis), which administrators have found to be almost as useful as a high school diploma, as well as more cost effective and simpler for adults to go through than the previous adult high school program. McClymonds High School remains the only certified GED testing site in Oakland, but the program will soon be offering GED classes at the OUSD building in East Lake as well as at sites in Fruitvale and East Oakland.

3. When institutional adult education is cut, there is tremendous pressure on community-based nonprofits to take on the students that the institutional services have dropped.

I’m using the word institutional here to describe adult education programs based in school systems or community colleges. When funding is cut to these programs, community-based nonprofit orgnaizations are often called upon to expand their services. As Waloff writes:

In a city with a large immigrant and refugee population, many people who once benefited from the district’s ESL program now must go elsewhere for help. To fill in the gaps, non-profit organizations throughout the city have been increasing and even creating programming for English language learners.

So what it sounds like is happening here is that the institutional system is for the most part focusing on the GED students, leaving everyone else to be taken care of by the nonprofit CBO sector.

Unfortunately, expanding nonprofit CBO services coming off a recession isn’t likely to be easy. I wish the article had gone into a little more detail on the financial pressures that this is placing on the CBOs in the area. Bear in mind that some of these CBO’s may not qualify for (or have difficulty competing for) the other state and federal funding streams that support adult education (I’ve found this varies a lot from state to state).

This in turn increases the pressure on those students who are being cut loose from institutional programs, who may have to choose between attending clases in less than optimal conditions, or simply give up and decide to forgo classes due to tranportation issues or other barriers.

Some students… attend classes offered at non-profits like the English Center or Lao Family Community Development, a social services organization for immigrants and refugees currently offers two ESL classes of 40 students each, but only has two teachers.

“It’s better than nothing,” said Markham, who directed some parents to Lao Family Community Development’s program after the OUSD cut its adult classes, but she worries that it is very difficult to learn a new language with such a high student-teacher ratio.

And ultimately, Nelson pointed out, some people can’t make it to any of these other sites for financial reasons or because of a lack of transportation. “I believe that many of them are just not attending, because they have nowhere to go,” Nelson said.

Budget cuts create these pressure points. I’m interested to learn more about advocacy efforts that try to avoid pitting education advocates — even subsets of adult education advocates — into increasingly isolated camps.

The Skills Mismatch: What Employers Say vs. What They Do

/ The Old Crank

Speaking of Jared Bernstein, (who I quoted in my previous post), yesterday he weighed in on the skills mismatch debate. In short, he thinks employers are full of it:

[T]he consensus among economists tends to be that there’s a large skills mismatch between employers’ demands and the skills of the workforce.  I don’t buy it.  The data from the BLS on occupational skill demands now and in the future actually matches up pretty cleanly with the supply of skill, at least at the level of educational attainment.  Yes, employers constantly say they can’t find skilled workers, but that’s kind of the point… they constantly say it. If it were true, you’d see it in a more quickly rising compensation premium to workers with higher levels of education.  And you don’t really see that type of acceleration.  (Note: the emphasis on “acceleration” is important here—the fact that college workers are paid more than high workers isn’t the issue—unmet skill demands imply an increasingly rising premium, and the college premium has actually decelerated in recent years, as this slide from EPI reveals–it shows the regression-adjusted college premium as flat since the latter 90s for women and rising more slowly for men.)

He does think that increasing higher levels of educational attainment is good for the economy in general — in that smarter people are better workers in whatever job they are doing — but that’s not the same argument the skills mismatch folks are making.

Are Education Investments Enough?

/ The Old Crank

Yesterday, Jared Bernstein highlighted a new paper on income mobility by Katherine Bradbury, from the Boston Federal Reserve, which bolsters the argument that the rate of family income mobility—the ability of families to move up and down the income scale—has been gradually diminishing for the last several decades, while income inequality has grown over the same period. This is important, Bernstein explains, because there are some who argue that the increase in income inequality in this country is offset by greater mobility—in other words, they argue that while the gap between rich and poor is widening, at least more people are able to move up and down the income scale more quickly.

Bradbury’s paper has a great chart showing that this does not appear to be the case—that in fact, there appears to be a decline in the rate of mobility across the last several decades.

Bernstein believes the two are causally related. That, in his words, “higher inequality is itself driving a chain of events that leads to lower rates of income mobility.” He continues:

There are various links to this chain—and this is just a hypothesis at this point (but I’ll bet I’m right). The relationship between income concentration and political power is one important link. The austerity measures we are now contemplating, the regressive changes to the tax code, the sharp cuts in discretionary spending (a part of the budget that pays for, among other things, various investments in human capital targeted at less advantaged populations)—the general and pervasive view that we a) can’t afford the investments and social insurance we need, and b) can’t raise taxes to pay for them—is not an objective fact based on analysis. It’s a political call based on power.

Last night, Fareed Zakaria hosted a special on CNN called “Restoring the American Dream: Fixing Education.” On CNN’s web site, Zakaria writes:

I’ve been thinking about Occupy Wall Street, which is now occupying a number of other cities in America. What is it really about? The protesters don’t like bank bailouts; they feel the 99% have been hard done-by and they’re protesting what they see as unprecedented inequality.

His conclusion is that the lack of social mobility is what underlies it all:

I think underlying their sense of frustration is despair over a very un-American state of affairs: A loss of social mobility. Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their own status. They didn’t mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility – the sense that anyone can make it.

Zakaria also has stats. He notes this week’s TIME magazine cover story on social mobility, in which the author points out that if you were born in 1970 in the bottom one-fifth of the socio-economic spectrum, you had only a 17% chance of making it into the upper two-fifths.

From what I can tell, the terms “social mobility” and “inequality” used by Zakaria here are roughly equivalent to—or at least very closely tied to—the concepts of income inequality and income mobility discussed in Bradbury’s paper. In other words, he thinks (and I think he’s probably right about this) that people are frustrated because they see rich people getting richer while their own opportunities to get ahead are diminishing. (Although I’m not sure if this goes far enough—people seem angry about not just diminishing opportunity to get ahead, but about falling further behind.)

Zakaria’s answer, like others in the media, is education:

There are a number of reasons why we find ourselves in this predicament – but the most important of them is how much we have lagged behind on education. No other factor is as closely linked to upward mobility. Education is the engine of mobility (my emphasis).

Reading this after reading Bernstein’s article, I wonder if our education system really is the primary reason why we “find ourselves in this predicament.” After all, many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are college-educated, as are many of the long-term unemployed. While I would imagine that most protesters would agree that equal opportunity for education is consistent with their message, what people appear to be most directly angry about is that despite having educated themselves and worked hard and done all the things they are supposed to do, economic opportunity is actually narrowing—and in some cases, drastically. (I also think many are focused more on immediate actions and less in long-term investments—but that is another discussion.)

Everyone agrees that investments in education make sense, but what is the degree to which these investments will actually impact family income inequality absent any other reforms or changes in our economic system? Is education still the primary engine of mobility that Zakaria claims it is? Do people believe that it is? Perhaps this is discussed during the program (which I have not seen), but in his introduction, Zakaria does not get into the issue of income concentration and political power that Bernstein raises.

In education we talk a lot about return on investment. You can’t get two sentences into a conversation with a pre-K education advocate, for example, before hearing about how x number of dollars invested in the system will result in y amounts of economic output. But the income inequality and mobility problem suggests to me that right now there may be a different, more relevant way to ask about return on investment in education: to what extent will our investments in education result in greater income equality and/or greater rates of mobility? If those investments are not going to do it on their own, what else needs to happen? In particular, I’m hoping that when people call for reform and increased investments in education as a direct response to these protests, they can address these questions.

I think these are especially relevant questions for those of us in the adult education field. Clearly, a lot of adults who need help with basic skills are hoping that improving those skills will lead them to greater economic opportunity. One thing for sure: we tell them that all the time. But for adult learning to lead to greater economic opportunity, there has to be a reasonably equitable economic playing field for them to enter once they upgrade those skills. What if students decide that this is no longer the case—that whatever effort they put into improving their skills, they will end up right back where they started? There is a line in Bradbury’s paper that suggests this is not an unreasonable position: she writes that “families’ later-year incomes increasingly depended on their starting place. (my emphasis)”