[NLA] Welfare and the AELS

[AndresMuro@aol.com]

In a message dated Tue, 25 Jun 2002 8:22:54 AM Eastern Standard Time, "Debbie Yoho" <dwyoho at earthlink.net> writes:

Debbie: If I understood what you where estimating, the opposite is true. After welfare reform, the academic level of AELS participants should be higher. This is because AELS is being asked to prepare students for the workforce and they have to cream to show results. This is leaving people in great need for educational services (those that David Joots was referring to as "casual students") behind for someone else to serve. What has happened is that many of the people with lower academic skills are out of the system. They may be enrolling in other alternative literacy programs as suggested previously by Hal. 

This is essentially a disaster, as I see it. Since the AELS system needs to show results, they need to get people with high academic skills. So they leave everyone behind that they would not show results in a short period, As David Joots  suggested. Programs essentially select people that show good potential. Who shows good potential?

People that don't have daycare problems, health problems, $$$$ problems or any other problems that may interfere with short term success. How does AELS get these people? They recruit, of course. Essentially, AELS begins to compete with colleges and Universtites for slighltly underprepared, but potentially successful students, many of them minorities. Instead of encouraging the poor to go to college, we are encouraging them to go to AELS, for short term training. Of course, a lot of people are tempted by the promise of slighly higher than minimum wage jobs. In Texas, entities that try to prepare people for low wage training, recruit form public schools and refer people to AELS. In the meanwhile, those that desperately need literacy skills are left behind. The AELS system should be designed to prepare those at the bottom. Colleges and Universities should be targeting High school graduates and drop outs who need some help with the basics. Instead, AELS gets those that need some help with the basics and target them for low wage jobs. Colleges and Universities can, then, only focus on the elite. 

Talk about creating an underclass of minoritites and design a system to ensure that they will not succeed, this is it. The interesting thing is that this is not my paranoid articulation of an imaginary system. There is tons of literature arguing that this has been created, and we are happily contributing to this. When you put the pieces together it fits like a puzzle. 

Essentially, if we have a model and when we compare it to reality it fits, then we must assume that it has been created for this purpose. Even if this was not the intention, the evidence shows, clearly, that this is the outcome. If our politicians are truly not intending to create an underclass, then they must change the system that promotes it. Otherwise, the are actually supporting it, together with everyone who is aware of this fact and still works for such a system. Aaaaaaaaarrrgggg!!!

Andres



Andres   

>
>From Tom Sticht:
>"By
>these data, changes in welfare laws in the decade of the 1990s  did not
>have much of an effect on enrollments in the AELS/USA as of the beginning
>of the new century."
>
>Here's an example where pure numerical data could be misleading. While
>there can be no argument with Tom's facts that welfare reform has had
>little effect on enrollment figures, many in the trenches believe it has
>had an effect on WHICH welfare clients enroll.  Tom, do you have any
>figures about welfare enrollment by academic entry level?  I would
>hypothesize that the entry level "starting point" is now much lower.  
>
>Deborah W. Yoho
>Co-moderator, NIFL-Health  and
>Executive Director
>Greater Columbia Literacy Council
>921 Woodrow Street, Columbia, SC  29205
>803-765-2555   Fax  803-779-8417   dwyoho at earthlink.net
>
>
>
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