[NLA] C-PAL: Have Faith Not Funds

[Thomas Sticht]

Research Note                         27 November 2002

The Community Partnerships for Adult Learning (C-PAL) Project: Have Faith,
Not Funds

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

The U. S. Department of Education’s Office of Vocational and Adult
Education has created the Community Partnerships for Adult Learning
(C-PAL) web site as a part of its strategy to help improve adult
education. The essential goal of the C-PAL is to encourage every
community’s stakeholders—businesses, labor unions, public school systems,
libraries, faith-based organizations, literacy service providers,
volunteer groups and other nonprofits, social service and workforce
development agencies and colleges — to understand the urgent need to
improve access to and the quality of adult education, and to pursue this
goal together.

However, after listing a number of indicators of this "urgent need," e.g.,
low literacy for some 64 million adults, 37 million high school dropouts,
growing income gap between adults with high school education or GED and
those with post-secondary education, growing need for ESOL, and programs
that are not reaching millions of adults who are in need of adult
education services, the web site for the C-PAL tosses the ball to the
field when it poses a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) and then answers it:

FAQ: Quote ": Is there funding available through this initiative for
communities that want to form or enhance local partnerships?" End Quote

The answer: NO! Quote: "This initiative is about meeting the needs of
adult learners at the local level through partnerships. It’s about
creating strong infrastructures that ensure stable support for adult
education regardless of external funding. Communities that are able to
build a funding base from a variety of sources have the greatest chance of
serving adults for years to come. Information on how to leverage resources
is included in the Building Community Partnerships section of the web
site. The Community Partnerships initiative itself does not have any
funding available to support state or local community-building efforts. "
End Quote

Note that this initiative calls for communities to "build a funding base
from a variety of sources" suggesting thereby that the U. S. Education
Department, Office of Adult and Vocational Education (OVAE) does not
recognize the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) of the United
States, which it has federal oversight for through the State Grants
program of the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act of 1998, as the
third branch of publicly funded education in the nation. Apparently
USED/OVAE considers the AELS as some sort of local community activity
demanding a variety of funding sources instead of a stable,  tax-based
source of public funding as in the K-12 and Higher Education systems.

In the C-PAL project, you are expected to do extensive partnership
building using your own community funding sources – if you can find them.
Through the C-PAL project, the USED/OVAE will cheer your efforts on and
link you to information on the web that will inspire and inform you to do
good on your own. So if you take on the extra activities involved in
building Community Partnerships for Adult Learning you better make your
work faith-based,  because you won’t get any  fund-based help from the
C-PAL project or the USED/OVAE.

Comment

This lack of funding for the C-Pal project is consistent with the Bush
administration’s failure to ask for any more funding for the AELS (state
grants) over the preceding year in the last two years. To me, this makes a
mockery of the USED/OVAE stated concern for the "urgent need" for
additional education for  64 million adults.

Though the Bush family, including Barbara Bush, Laura Bush and the men
folk,  all are on record as saying that parents are a child’s first
teacher, and the present administration is on record as calling for the
most qualified teachers we can find for educating children, it apparently
does not matter much if 64 million adults, many of whom are expected to be
 their children’s first teachers, are poorly literate and poorly qualified
to carry out their duties as their children’s first teachers. Apparently
we only need good teachers in the schools, not at home.

With federal funding for the AELS at an obscene level of less than $215 an
enrollment, compared to over $6000 per Head Start enrollment,  it is
difficult for me to believe that the present administration actually
considers the educational needs of 64 million adults "urgent," or for that
matter, as even marginally important.  And as for parents being their
children’s first teachers, that’s fine as rhetoric, but for the Bush
administration, there is apparently little need to come up with the
funding to make it a reality for tens of millions of adults with an
"urgent need" for education.




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