[AAACE-NLA] Curriculum Policy Proposals

[tsticht at znet.com]

Aaace-nla Colleagues:

David Rosen has recently discussed his interests in national content
standards, curriculum aligned with the standards and assessments that map
onto the standards and curriculum. This is consistent with the current
zeitgeist concerning accountability at the federal level. In this regard, I
think it is important to review past activities of the federal and state
governments to product the sort of standards/curriculum/assessment systems
that David has spoken about. The primary efforts in this as far as I know
are the Adult Performance Level (APL) project, the California Adult Student
Assessment System (CASAS-later changed from California to Comprehensive to
market the system products more widely, and supported by the federal
government’s dissemination efforts), and the Equipped for the Future
project. To my knowledge, there is no research indicating that these
attempts at national standards/curriculum/assessment systems improved adult
education and literacy development anywhere. In fact, for the CASAS, some
data suggest just the opposite, in California in the decade from 1986
through 1996 gain scores for ESL and ABE stayed the same, retention rates
stayed the same, and the percentage of adults reporting they met their
goals dropped from around 15 to 5 percent.

The national APL project just sort of faded away after the federal funding
dried up. CASAS is widely used as an assessment today, and has content
standards (competencies) and curriculum materials aligned with the
assessment system. EFF tried to get national input from learners at the
outset but was plagued by a poor and biased response rate. Out of 6,000
programs contacted, only 1,500 letters from learners were received from 149
programs. This is about a 3 percent response rate from programs (149/6000)
and a very small sample of the some 4 million students in the federally
supported ABE program at the time. Further, it was reported that of the 149
programs, some sent two or three letters from students and some sent dozens,
adding to the bias factor. Aside from the questionable representation of
adult learners in the EFF project, there has never been an evaluation to
see if programs that adopt the EFF approach have improved in any way or if
they are more effective than any other program that does not use EFF.

Presently, the National Reporting System of the federal government that is
used by all 50 states provides three first order (broad) domains of content
standards: ABE, ASE, and ESL (ESOL/ELL), they define six second order,
sub-domains for each of these three first order domains, for which programs
can find and map curriculum materials from publishers, or constructed in
their own programs with or without the help of students, and finally, the
NRS provides an assessment system with a variety of available tests that
provide levels of assessment in mapped onto the second order domains for
each of the three first order domains of content standards. This broadly
conceived national content standards/curriculum/assessment system also has
yet to demonstrate in some acceptable manner (presumably some
scientifically acceptable manner to meet present federal concerns for
scientific, evidence-based programming) that it has lead to genuine
improvements in the AELS.

Given these past and present experiences with national efforts to produce
content/curriculum/assessment aligned standards for the Adult Education and
Literacy System (AELS) of the United States as a means of improving the
AELS, I think it might be useful to conduct a more thorough review of these
past and ongoing federal and perhaps some state efforts along these lines to
identify why they have not been demonstrated to actually improve the AELS in
terms of student learning, retention, or goal achievement. Ideally, this
would be done before any major new projects along this line are initiated.
But perhaps that is asking for too much.

Tom Sticht