local policy

Retired Los Angeles Adult Education Teacher Says Shutting Down LAUSD Adult Education Would Harm K-12 Children

/ The Old Crank

The Los Angeles Times published an excellent op-ed piece today by John McCormick, a retired Los Angeles adult education teacher, on the folly of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s “worst-case scenario” budget plan, which puts LAUSD’s entire adult education system at serious risk of elimination. (For background on their proposal, read my post here; for an update, I recommend Marjorie Faulstich Orellana’s article in The Huffington Post, published last week.)

I want to highlight one particular point that McCormick makes in his article, and that is about the impact that shutting down adult education would have on parent/caregiver engagement:

Closing adult schools would also result in collateral damage to K-12 children. My students often attended the same schools at night that their children attended during the day. Because kids usually pick up English faster than their parents, if the parents don’t learn the language, they become marginalized in their own families. They cannot communicate with teachers, help with homework or even understand what their kids are saying. So instead of being able to help their kids assimilate, parents are more likely to remain isolated.

I’m often puzzled as to why parent engagement advocates aren’t up in arms when adult education cuts are threatened. In the paragraph above, McCormick does a great job explaining the connection between the two issues.

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)

New Wrinkle in Alexandria Adult Education Controversy

/ The Old Crank

(Updated Below)

Sharon McLoone reports for the Old Town Alexandria Patch that Alexandria Virginia City Public Schools Superintendent Morton Sherman announced last Friday evening that ACPS has placed an employee on administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation into “possible testing irregularities” in the ACPS Adult Education Program.

According to an ACPS statement, this incident provides evidence as to why restructuring ACPS Adult Education is so critical. “[N]ow is the right time to restructure this program with licensed, experienced staff to ensure proper management, reporting, and instruction is taking place for the sake of our students. ”

As McLoone notes in her story, Sherman and the School Board’s efforts to restructure the program have been the subject of considerable controversy.

In an odd coincidence, “Sherman and the School Board” was also the name of that really terrible band that played at your prom in 1966.

You can read the entire ACPS statement here.

Questions concerning assessment data collection are not unheard of in adult education. It would be interesting to know what warranted placing an employee on leave in this particular case.

UPDATE 4/6/12: Michael Lee Pope of Connection Newspapers has provided details on the specific issues cited by the Division of Technology, Career and Adult Education and Literacy Services in the memorandum they sent to ACPS. According to the article, the memorandum “documented an inordinate number of adult education students received the same score on a basic skills test. It also pointed out that a total of 95 students supposedly took a speaking and comprehension test on the same day.”

UPDATE 4/11/12: More details from Lisa Gartner of The Washington Examiner.

Is the Potential Elimination of Adult Education in Los Angeles Our Wisconsin Moment?

/ The Old Crank
latimes-march14

Photo of the front page of the March 14th edition of the Los Angeles Times, from the Save Adult Ed! Web site.

About a year ago, Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times described the effort by Governor Walker of Wisconsin to slash the collective bargaining rights of his state’s public employees as a potential “watershed for public-sector unions, perhaps signaling the beginning of a decline in their power — both at the bargaining table and in politics.”

The situation in Wisconsin galvanized the labor movement and resulted in a massive protest that engaged people from around the country. I’ve been thinking about those protests the last couple of months as I’ve been following the school budget situation in Los Angeles, where the school board has decided to completely shut down adult education unless new revenue or teacher pay cuts are accepted. Eliminating adult education in L.A. would cut off adult education services to well over 300,000 people.

There are a lot of differences between the crisis in L.A. what was happening in Wisconsin a year ago in many, many fundamental ways. For one thing, the effort to dismantle public sector unions in Wisconsin was connected to an organized, long-standing national political agenda, and to my knowledge there is no political party with a specific agenda to dismantle adult education. Secondly, adult education ever had the political clout or recognition that organized labor has. But I do think an argument can be made that the attempt to shut down adult education in L.A. is a similar “watershed” moment for the field, both because of the scale of the protests (500 people at the rally yesterday), and, possibly, the ramifications. If adult education services at this scale, and with such visible, active support, can simply be dropped—if the city and the school board, in other words, gets away with doing this—does this send a message to policymakers across the country that they can get away with it too? Granted, adult education has never been in a very secure position in most states; as noted by CLASP, several states have been cutting funding for adult education dramatically the last few years, and Arizona dropped state funding altogether in 2010.

But eliminating a program of this size is, I believe, unprecedented (by comparison, according to CLASP, Arizona’s 2010 cut dropped services for 40,000 people). For this reason, it feels like a dangerous line in the sand that the adult education field should not allow to be crossed, similar to the way in which labor leaders realized that the fight in Wisconsin last year had ramifications that went well beyond Wisconsin state borders.

Here is a video of the guy with the megaphone above. He was living under a bridge before he learned English: