[NLA] What caused the decline of the AELS?

[Art LaChance]

Tom,

I for one would be interested in knowing your gut feeling about some
possible causal factors for the decline of the adult student numbers.
You're in position to see this on a global scale and can make some loose
analysis.  I'm not looking for hard-core data here, maybe an intitutive
response.

Thanks,

art




Thomas Sticht 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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