[NLA] What caused the decline of the AELS?

[tom zurinskas]

Let me get this straight.  California accounted for
87% of the decrease in  the Adult Education and
Literacy System (AELS) enrollments for the entire
country from 1998 to 2001.   AELS enrollments were
down 68% there.  Also, the number of  full time/part
time/volunteer workers there dropped (25%,10%,74%,
respectively).  Yet during that time federal funds
increased from $38.8 to $47.5 million (22% increase). 
If that were in salaries alone, it would be a 69%
increase in salaries for the remaining paid workers. 
So shouldn’t “competency based adult education”
results show improvement for the few remaining
students, yet there is underachievement?  What’s up.

tz


--- Thomas Sticht <tsticht at aznet.net> wrote:
> 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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