education

Diversion of the Day: Run DMC on Reading Rainbow

/ The Old Crank

Here is a video of Run DMC promoting literacy on an episode of Reading Rainbow, back in the 1980s. I’m posting it here because, as a matter of literacy policy, we need to remind policymakers that reading is a very fresh way to learn.

Reading Rainbow was a great show. The host, Levar Burton, also served as executive producer of the series, which ran for an amazing 21 seasons and won a boatload of Emmys and a Peabody Award. Burton was—and still is—a great literacy champion. He may have introduced more kids to books than anyone alive today. I learned recently that he’s just finishing up work on a new multimedia/tablet version of the show.

h/t onetwoonetwo.com, @kurt930

Older, Long-Term Unemployed May Lose Education Advantage

/ The Old Crank

Overall, the unemployment rate for workers with a college degree is about half the rate of those who hold just a high school diploma, but that gap appears to narrow for older, long-term unemployed workers. From an article by Arthur Delaney in The Huffington Post yesterday:

[A]dvanced degrees can lose their talismanic power. Once they become unemployed, college-educated workers are just as likely as high school grads to wind up unemployed for an extended period of time. During the year ending last June, 12.4 percent of jobless workers with high school diplomas had been out of work 99 weeks or longer, according to a Congressional Research Service report. Among unemployed Americans with a bachelor’s degree, 11.3 percent had been jobless 99 weeks or longer — a statistically insignificant difference. (my emphasis)

Delaney speculates that one of the reasons for this statistical narrowing is that workers with just a high school education are more likely to leave the labor force, which then reduces the proportion of those workers who count as officially unemployed. Another possibility, he writes, is that that “since a majority of new jobs created during the economic recovery are lower-paying and lower-skilled, they are easier for less-educated workers to learn, while higher-educated workers are simultaneously being more selective about the jobs they’re willing to work.”

Adult Charter School Proposed for Nashville County

/ The Old Crank

The Tennessean reports today that Goodwill Industries of Middle Tennessee is pursuing a  charter for an adult charter school, taking advantage of the opportunity created by recent changes to the state’s charter school law. Here are the details (note the critical caveat in the last sentence):

A Goodwill vice president said Tuesday she pursued a charter after being approached by a former employee in Nashville Mayor Karl Dean’s office to help some of the county’s 60,000 adults without a high school diploma.

Excel Academy, proposed by Goodwill Industries of Middle Tennessee, hopes to serve adult dropouts.

“The barrier to getting a job is that they don’t have a high school diploma,” said Goodwill of Middle Tennessee Vice President Betty Johnson. “There is a huge unmet need.”

Goodwill will give $100,000 in startup money for the program, fashioned after one in Indiana that has a waiting list of more than 2,000 adults. However, school district officials say it’s unclear whether state K-12 funding will cover adults who dropped out years earlier. (my emphasis)

Excellent Article on History of Adult Education in California—and Why It’s All Falling Apart Now

/ The Old Crank

Over the weekend, the San Diego News-Tribune published an outstanding guest opinion piece by Dom Gagliardi, principal of the Escondido Adult School, and a past president of both the California Council for Adult Education and the National Commission on Adult Basic Education.

Gagliardi’s article is a great primer on the proud, 156-year history of school-based adult education in California—a system of “adult schools” that is all but collapsing in the wake of massive state budget deficits over the last several years—and a law that has encouraged many school districts to cut adult education from their budgets.

Gagliardi notes that at its peak in 2005, nearly 1.4 million Californians were enrolled in adult education, mostly through this system. But since 2010, 32 adult schools have closed temporarily and 44 have had their budgets cut by more than 50%, all because of a budget mechanism implemented in 2009 known as “categorical flexibility,” which allows districts to divert funds from programs like adult education to support its K-12 programs. As Gagliardi writes:

The increasing economic pressure on school districts to balance their budgets has put them in the untenable and unfortunate position of pitting one program against another. When forced to prioritize instructional services for youth or adults, the choice is obvious and painful. (my emphasis)

That last point can’t be emphasized enough (see point number one here).

According to Gagliardi, there is at least one school district in California that has remained steadfast in continuing to provide adult education despite these pressures—and not surprisingly, it’s his own. Although the district has cut their budget by about 20%, the Escondido Adult School, which serves approximately 10,000 students per year, has survived, at least in part via increased class fees to offset the decreases in state and local funding.

Gagliardi concludes, “[i]t is increasingly evident that giving local school districts the ability to use funding previously earmarked for adult education to support K-12 programs must end before the entire adult education system is decimated. (my emphasis) Once the infrastructure of the state’s adult education program is gone, it will be difficult if not impossible to resurrect.”

That law is supposed to expire in 2015; it’s encouraging to read a call to end this practice now, before it’s too late.

Be sure to go read the whole article if you are at all interested in what is going on there. Again, it’s a great primer on the history of adult education in the state, a good summary of what is going wrong there now, and a call to act before there is nothing left to save.