[NLA] Gut response for Art

[Art LaChance]

Thank you very much Tom.
Verrrry interesting stuff here.

Question.  If the numbers' drop is as you suggest could be partially attributed to the loss of CBO programs and if nationally we lost 500 CBO
programs each carrying an average of 244+ students annually, that could account for both the decrease in the numbers of students and especially
the associated drop in volunteers.  This would indicate to me that we lost the participation of small local community programs, but that they may
have continued to serve students. ??  Could this be an assumption accepted at the legislative level and therefore basis for ignoring the numbers
issue?  Especially if some other states indicated a rise in students served?

Art




Thomas Sticht wrote:

> Art has asked for my gut response, intuitive feelings about why there has
> been a large, unexplained drop in the number of enrollments in the AELS
> since 1998. So here are my thoughts.
> Over a year ago I brought up this issue with folks in the federal
> government in Washington DC and got four hypotheses, most of which have
> been brought up here on the NLA list in this ongoing strand of discussion,
> and earlier last year in posts I made to the NLA list.
> The four hypotheses include
> (1). High employment rates have caused drops in enrollments.
> (2). Work-first changes in welfare laws have caused drops in enrollments.
> (3) Better record keeping in the NRS has reduced the numbers of duplicated
> counts of enrollees and hence produced an apparent drop in enrollments.(4) Accountability requirements of the WIA/AEFLA as implemented via the
> NRS in place at the time resulted in large numbers of CBO programs
> withdrawing from the AELS, taking their students with them, and that
> produced drops in the enrollments.
> Hypothesis 1. Checking on the first hypothesis, I reported in a report in
> 1998 on the correlation between employment rates and rates of enrollments
> in the AELS as best I could determine the relationship from available data
> on employment rates in the Dept. of labor and enrollment data from the
> Dept. of Education over a couple of decades. The relationship was
> practically zero. A paper I produced, Beyond 2000, is available at
> www.nald.ca under full text documents searched by S for my last name and
> reports these data. So I am not too convinced that the higher employment
> rates have made much of an impact in enrollments in the AELS in the last
> few years, though there could be some mild effects here.
> Hypothesis 2. Changes in welfare laws could have had some impact on
> enrollments, but it is difficult to say how much of a change.
> Interestingly, and contrary to what some people think, welfare recipients
> have never made up the lion’s share of AELS enrollments. In a 1998 report
> from the ED/OVAE/DAEL showing data for enrollments for five years for FY92
> to FY 96 out of over 15 million enrollments, only some 2.2 million, about
> 14 percent, were on welfare. In five years 2.2 million is about 440,000
> per year and the recent PY 1999-2000 report indicated that some 282,303
> adults were on public assistance.  So while drops in AELS enrollments due
> to changes in welfare laws are no doubt there, they are perhaps in the
> neighborhood of drops of some 160,000 of the per year enrollments in past
> years and so I don’t think they would count for the bulk of the recent
> drops.
> Hypothesis 3. The idea that NRS procedures have reduced multiple counts of
> students is a fairly popular hypothesis about why drops in AELS have
> occurred since the WIA/AEFLA accountability requirements have been in
> place, and we have seen this in some recent posts on the NLA list. I
> suppose that some of the drop in enrollments can be attributed to better
> record keeping. But I am not too convinced that this would account for
> much of the drop because, looking at the past history of the AELS, it grew
> at about 100,000 per year for some 30 years and it does not seem to me to
> be reasonable to attribute these sizeable annual increases to errors of
> double or triple counting of people.  I doubt the NR is that much of an
> improvement over keeping track of simple counts of people. And therefore,
> better record keeping, while do doubt reducing false counts to some
> extent, would not seem to me to make a big contribution to the decline in
> enrollments since 1998.
> Hypothesis 4. The idea that resonates a lot with me is that the
> accountability requirements of the WIA/AEFLA as implemented via the NRS
> resulted in large numbers of CBO programs withdrawing from the AELS,
> taking their students with them, and that produced drops in the
> enrollments. To check this out as best I could, I reasoned that if double
> counting was a major problem, then this should primarily affect drops in
> reported enrollments and would not necessarily lead to drops in personnel.
> So I checked out the drops in personnel in the U. S. and, as I reported,
> found that though there were some drops in both part-time and full-time
> personnel, the total drop in volunteers was more than the combined part
> and full time drops. This suggested to me that it was withdrawal of CBOs
> who use lots of volunteers from the AELS that accounted for the largest
> share of the decline in enrollments. I looked at states like California
> and found that it accounted for some 87 percent of the AELS decline and it
> had lost about 10 percent of part timers, 25 percent of full timers, but
> an astonishing 73 percent of its volunteer personnel from 1998 to 2000. In
> Texas, from 1997 to 2000 enrollments fell from 228,723 to 106, 516 and
> personnel in the Texas system fell by 63 percent, with part timers falling
> about 40 percent, full timers 65 percent and volunteers a whopping 98
> percent from 2509 in 1997 to just 46 in 2000.  All these changes in states
> like California and Texas are mind boggling and have received little
> discussion at a national level. But the large drops in volunteers suggests
> to me that a large share, and perhaps the largest share of the drops in
> the AELS enrollments are due to CBOs pulling out of the system and taking
> their students with them. This is also suggested by the fact that the 1998
> OVAE/DAEL report said that "Approximately 4,000 grant recipients provided
> adult education services." In the PY1999-2000 report it says that some
> 3500 to 4000 programs provided services. Could be a drop of some 500
> programs-no?
> Not all states have shown drops in enrollments since 1998, and not all
> showed drops in personnel. But the impact of large states like California
> and Texas cannot be dismissed as major contributors to the overall state
> of the AELS in the recent PY 1999-2000 report to the Congress. And as I
> have said, none of these data about the collapse of the AELS are discussed
> in that report or in any other official documents that I have seen.
> Tom Sticht
>
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