[AAACE-NLA] [aaace-nla] Heckman and Adult Education

[tsticht@znet.com]

Kenny Tamarkin said, "Any discussion of which is more effective, Early
Childhood Education or Adult Education, misses the point. We need both. If
our current administration had its way, we would have neither."

But I don't think this addresses the issue: Heckman is saying that Early
Childhood Education is more cost-beneficial than adult education and/or job
training for solving important education or other problems in the nation. So
the first question is: what important education/other problem(s) is/are
Early Childhood Education programs supposed to be solving and which ones
are Adult Education/job training supposed to be solving?

Now, suppose we can identify these education/other (e.g, crime, poverty,
etc) problems that need to be solved, we can ask, can we solve them better
with Early Childhood Education or with Adult Education/job training. For
instance, take preparation for primary education. Is it better to do this
through taking childen from their parents and teaching them something in a
preschool, or is it better to teach adults good parenting and other skills
so they can prepare all their children themselves for primary school (and
continuing up the K-12 system, too).

Right now the major movement in this country is toward ever more preschool
education. Universal preschool is being proposed in California and is
already in place or in progress in some states. Further, we already have a
large federal program of Head Start which some thought was too late, and so
now we have Early Head Start.

So is it more cost-beneficial to focus on children in institutional settings
and then send them home to the same family and community contexts that may
be disfunctional, or is it better to work with the parents and other adults
in the community to raise the social benefits available to all children in
the community.

These either/or questions get more important in times of huge budget
deficits. Unfortunately, despite 15 years of two national research centers
(NCAL; NCSALL) for adult literacy and learning, we have little research to
address these important questions of return on investments to adult
literacy education (or anything else, for that matter).

I have tried to bring these two educational efforts together through a Life
Cycles policy. But it is next to impossible to get any serious discussion
of this type of policy need or set of issues. So the policy void is filled
by economists like Heckman who take existing reports and do secondary
analyses and make their recommendations. The Adult Education field has no
investment in research and analyses to counter the data of economists and
other policy oriented groups.

The adult literacy education field needs to do something about this soon or
face dissolution.

Tom Sticht




























Kenny Tamarkin
Executive Director
Massachusetts Coalition for Adult Education