[NLA] In support of a separate AELS Act for the USA

[Thomas Sticht]

This is in reponse to Nancy Hansen.
Tom Sticht


On  Friday, May 17, 2002 9:37 AM Nancy said: Quote" It angers me that
there wasn't more foresight exercised into identifying what  the
problems would be as the WIA took over the funding of adult ed - it has 
NOT been all that long ago and problems are already beginning to crop
up.  I  never DID approve of the DoE throwing adult ed into the cold, if
that's what  happened.  Now we are going to become a Senator's AELS. 
Will adult ed then  become a program of the NE of the US only?  I mean,
the program, which I 
administer, isn't even *close* to Massachusetts!  Will my program
receive the 
same attention that AELS out there does?  Part of me feels that this may
be a 
fair resolution yet another gut-feeling is it isn't going to provide
funding 
to *all* but only to a few larger AELS entities."

Response: The AELS as I have defined it consists of all those programs
being funded in part by the state grant program of the WIA/AEFLA. South
Dakota gets funds at the present time [about $1 million in FY 99]
through this grant program and therefore is [and would be] a part of the
AELS of the USA as I am thinking about it. I have advocated for removing
the AEFLA from the WIA, renaming it the Kennedy Adult Education and
Literacy System of the United States of America Act to honor the Kennedy
family for its historical and contemporary role in gaining support for
adult education and lifelong learning. This would in no way affect the
formula by means of which funds are distributed in the state grants. If
your program in Sioux Falls is an LLA program, run entirely by
volunteers, and not serving the South Dakota state AELS students, you do
not receive AELS money now and you would not receive it under the new
Act unless you chose to work under the administrative arrangements of
the Act, including at the present time the requirement for some form of
assessment – generally most members of the AELS are using standardized
tests at the present time, but this could be changed in the future. 

Nancy Hansen said:  Quote:"Tom, if you had chosen to go one step further
than "visit the national  organizations' websites" and visited with the
people charged with the 
responsibilities of these organizations (such as Executive Director
Peter 
Waite of LLA who has always been available to visit with lil-ole me
about my 
concerns) you might have found out that the organizations are
volunteer-led 
in many, many cases.  The figures are going to be only as good as those 
reporting them - and I'm NOT a good example because even MY reporting is 
sporadic!  The "drop" from one reporting period to the next could be
impacted 
by ever changing leadership of programs. "Unquote 

Response: The web sites for either LVA or LLA do not provide any
qualifying remarks that would lead a reader to assume that the numbers
they report serving across the nation, including South Dakota, are not
fairly accurate. If they are not fairly accurate, as Nancy indicates
hers are not, I doubt that Peter Waite or any one else could offer
better numbers. As to the drop across time in enrollments for both LVA
or LLA, I did not even attempt to speculate as to why the numbers may
have dropped. But it seems highly unlikely that such systematic declines
would happen as a consequence of some random change in leadership in
local councils for both organizations over time. It is also consistent
with the large drop in enrollments for the AELS during the same time
that I have reported on in the last few months. To date, no one has
accounted for those drops, either.

Nancy says, Quote"Alright, the next issue Tom Sticht brought up:  ".it
is not clear how many of  the LVA/Laubach programs receive AELS funds
and whose students are therefore  included in the AELS total."  I have
said it before, but will repeat it one more time:  The volunteer 
programs, which teach the adult whose skills are at the 0-3 grade level
of  reading, are going to balk, hesitate or refuse to demand their
students at 
the enrollment date be standardized tested - if they have any blood in
their  veins at all!  I would suggest that this might be why you don't
see their  numbers elsewhere. Standardized Testing is the prerequisite
for federal  funding that stops cold many literacy providers from
accessing funding for  their learners - The consequence?  They don't
report their numbers as well."Unquote

Response: Nancy here makes some statements that I am quite certain are
not entirely correct. For instance, both LVA and LLA conduct workplace
literacy programs and there are no data of which I am aware indicating
that the adults in those programs read solely at the 0-3rd grade levels.
So while I would agree with Nancy that it is likely that many, and
perhaps most of the people served by LVA and LLA are at the lowest
levels of literacy, I doubt that they all are.  Also, it is very much
the case that some LVA and LLA programs are funded through their state’s
AELS which, in turn, is funded in part by the federal state grants
program of the WIA/AEFLA. Therefore at least some LVA and LLA affiliates
are doing some standardized testing to meet the WIA/AEFLA accountability
requirements. In fact, in New York City, the Literacy Assistance Center
collects thousands of pre and post test scores using the TABE in LVA of
NYC  programs each year. Finally, even if LVA and LLA programs did not
do standardized testing, and were not part of the AELS, this would not
necessarily keep them from reporting how many adults they served in a
given year to the national headquarters of LVA or LLA. This does not
require any standardized testing.

Nancy says: Quote"The question about the remaining 2,685,000 students? 
Aren't they the people  detailed in Tom's explanation about two
paragraphs later?  Prison, GED-prep 
students, English As a Second Language students (who aren't enrolled in 
either LLA or LVA programs), library literacy, Head Start, Family
Literacy 
and perhaps church-led programs. "Unquote

Response" No. In my comments I stated that there are many adults being
served in venues such as the ones you mention, but I also indicated that
I had no data for them. The 2.68 million I mentioned were the numbers of
adults that were served by and reported to the federal government in its
oversight of the AELS, with the LVA and LLA numbers removed, though I
note now that some of the AELS adult students may be served in the same
venues that I mentioned for which I had no data. But my point was that
there may be many other adults being provided literacy education in
these venues for whom I had no data and hence I am unable to estimate
the total number of adults being provided with literacy instruction in
the U.S. each year. But I do have the data to indicate that the AELS
programs, that is, those programs funded in part through the state grant
programs in the WIA/AEFLA, serve some 2.9 million students and hence the
AELS is the primary provider of adult education and literacy development
in the U.S. today. 

In the last decade of the 20th century the AELS/USA had close to 40
million enrollments of adults lifting themselves up in the world through
education.It is this state and federal partnership, this Adult Education
and Literacy System of the United States of America, that I am
celebrating this year for its 35 years of growth and development as the
nation's third publicly supported education system, alongside the K-12
and Higher Education systems. 

Adult Learners of the USA - Unite!
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