[AAACE-NLA] What is a Multiple Life Cycles Education Policy?

[tsticht at znet.com]

March 30, 2010


What Is a Multiple Life Cycles Educational Policy?
Lifelong, Lifewide, Intergenerational


Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education


Today in most industrialized nations education is formulated under two types
of policy, lifelong learning and lifewide learning. This note briefly
defines these policies and introduces a third policy, Multiple Life Cycles
education policy.


Lifelong learning: A policy of education recognizing that education and
learning occurs from birth and across one’s lifetime. This policy has
formed the basis for providing taxpayer supported early childhood,
preschool education and adult English as a Second Language (ESL), adult
basic education (ABE) , and adult secondary education (ASE) along with the
more traditional educational systems of primary, secondary, and
post-secondary, higher education at the college and university levels.


Lifewide learning: A policy of education recognizing that education and
learning may take place in a variety of contexts: homes, playgrounds,
schools, businesses, workplaces, communities, churches, bars, cafes, etc.
For the most part, this policy has been applied to the education of
out-of-school adults, in terms of informal learning at home, on the job, or
in the civic activities of the community. Recently, this policy has been
expressed in movements to better understand childhood learning outside the
formal school and classroom and its relationship to student academic
achievement in the schools (ETS Policy Notes, 2010).


Multiple Life Cycles Education Policy: A  newer, more comprehensive policy
of education explicitly recognizing that the educational achievements and
lifestyles of one generation may be transferred intergenerationally and
affect the lifelong and lifewide  learning potential and educational
accomplishments of the next generation .


The 2010 report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 
on reading skills of 4th and 8th grade school children reveals that very
little gain, six or fewer points, in average scores has occurred since 1992
to 2009. This lack of much improvement for close to thirty years has
occurred despite the expenditure of trillions (thousands of billions!) of
dollars spent on preschool, kindergarten, and 1st grade through 12th grade
education during this time.


During this same time, one salient finding of the NAEP surveys has been
found: children’s reading achievement scores are widely different depending
upon their parent’s education and/or socio-economic levels. In the 2010 NAEP
report, socioeconomic status is estimated by whether or not the children in
the 4th or 8th grade are eligible for free or reduced price meals in
school. In these cases, there is over 25 points separating the achievement
of those students eligible for free meals and those not eligible for free
meals. This has been true since 2003.


Another 2010 report, this one from the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD), confirms the intergenerational
transmission of educational achievement and economic status as factors in
social mobility.  According to the OECD report: quote:” Intergenerational
social mobility refers to the relationship between the socioeconomic status
of parents and the status their children will attain as adults. Put
differently, mobility reflects the extent to which individuals move up (or
down) the social ladder compared with their parents.”(p.182) The report
examines a variety of social mobility indicators, e.g. wages, and concludes
that quote: “Policies that facilitate access to education of individuals
from disadvantaged family backgrounds promote intergenerational wage
mobility, and are also likely to be good for economic growth.”(p.196)


There is considerable evidence that successful early childhood programs gain
much of their benefits from the educational effects they have on the parents
of the children in the programs, suggesting the need for a  greater emphasis
on adult education in early childhood programs. Generally, this educational
achievement is not assessed and counted as adult education and so its
contribution to the children’s learning is not formally recognized and
acknowledged.


Attending to education based on a Multiple Life Cycles Education Policy
draws attention to the need for more extensive and intensive instructional
and assessment systems for providing and measuring the outcomes of
parenting education for adolescents and young adults in the schools and in
ESL, ABE, and ASE programs and their effects on the children of the adults.


References (use Google to locate these reports online):


ETS Policy Notes (2010, Winter). Addressing Achievement Gaps: After the Bell
Rings: Learning Outside of the Classroom and its Relationship to Student
Academic Achievement. Princeton, New Jersey: Educational Testing Service.


OECD (2010) Economic Policy Reforms: Going for Growth PART II Chapter 5 A
Family Affair: Intergenerational Social Mobility across OECD Countries.