[NLA] What caused the decline of the AELS?

[Thomas Sticht]

NLA list members: Just for the record I would like it known that I have
not been playing a "numbers game" or any other kind of "game" when I
have called attention to the drastic decline in the Adult Education and
Literacy System (AELS) of the United States in recent posts. 

To me it is intensly distressing to discover that the AELS, which I
define as the set of programs funded wholly or in part by the state
grants program of the AEFLA, the system that the National Coalition for
Literacy has been trying to get $1 billion a year for, and that had an
average growth of some 100,000 new enrollments per year for over thirty
years, should suddenly in 1998 start a drop which by the end of FY 2000
amounted to a 28 percent decline in enrollments. That's over 1.1 million
enrollments that have have been lost and gone unaccounted for in any
official record. 

And though Developmental Education in higher education colleges and
post-secondary vocational institutions are vitally important for
millions of adults, these are not ABE programs and enrollments in such
programs do not make-up for the precipitous loss of students from the
AELS. Finding out what happended to these million students and what can
be done to reverse this decline is not a game of any kind. It is an
extremely serious problem and unfortunately I fear that no one  in the
present administration is concerning themselves with it. 

How can a million+ people just disappear?
  
Tom Sticht
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