[NLA] Perennial Issues For Adult Literacy Education

[Thomas Sticht]

Research Note                          October 5, 2002

Perennial Issues for the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELs)
of the United States

Tom Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

A U. S. Department of Education report for Program Year 1999-2000 states
that there were 3500 to 4000 programs that year funded in part by the
State Grants from Title 2 The Adult Education and Family Literacy Act of
the Workforce Investment Act of 1998. These programs make up what I call
the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) of the United States. In PY
1999-2000 this publicly funded education system served close to 2.9
million adults.

Since the signing of the Adult Education Act of 1966, which formed the
AELS, there have been a half dozen issues, besides the search for more
funding, that have consistently been raised as in need of research and
action. These include:

1. Determining the Scale of Need: How many adults in the nation (or
state/local region) are in need of the services of the AELS or other
literacy providers? Or, as is sometimes stated in a military metaphor,
what is the size of the "target population" for adult literacy education
providers?
[Present status: State Grants under the Adult Education and Family
Literacy Act of 1998 are apportioned based on the number of adults 16
years or older who are out of school and do not have a high school
diploma. Presently this amounts to some 44 million adults. The National
Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) identified around 20 percent of adults in
Literacy Level 1, the lowest level, giving about 33 million adults ages 16
to 65 with very low literacy. But the NALS data have been declared invalid
by the former director of the NALS at the National Center for Education
Statistics and he suggests they should be reduced by about half for
maximum validity. Self-perceptions of reading problems by the NALS
participants resulted in about 7 percent, or around 10 to 14 million
adults who said they read not well or not at all.]

2. Participation/Recruitment: What percentage of the target population is
being served and how can more adults be recruited to participate in
programs?
[Present status: From 1998 to 2000 enrolments in the Adult Education and
Literacy System of the United States, defined as those programs funded in
part by the State Grant funds from the AEFLA, fell from 4 million to 2.9
million. Perhaps the million or so adults who were lost from the AELS are
being served elsewhere, but there are no statistics known to me on how
many adults are being served nation wide in adult literacy programs among
the total array of providers.]

3. Retention: How can adults be motivated or otherwise supported to stay
in programs long enough to learn a lot more than they usually do?
[For decades now it has been difficult to get adults to stay in programs
on average for up to 100 hours of instruction. The National Evaluation of
Adult Education Programs of 1995 cited an overall median of 58 hours of
instruction. ESOL students stayed almost twice as long, on average around
113 hours. Contemporary national data on how retention is defined in the
various states and territories, what the retention numbers are, and how
they may be chainging due to the implementation of the National Reporting
System or other factors are not known to me]

4. Teaching/Facilitating Learning: How to best find out what adults
want/need to learn, and how to best teach/help them learn what they
want/need to learn?
[Present status: In 1998 Victoria Purcel-Gates and associates at NCSALL
studied 271 programs and found that most (73%) were traditional
teacher-talk, student-listen classes using  academic materials not related
to student’s lives outside the classroom. Beder & Medina in their 2001
study of 20 classrooms found that most (16) were in the traditional skills
oriented, teacher led traditional classroom category. The National
Evaluation of Adult Education Programs of 1995 reported that 46 percent of
students received instruction in traditional classrooms with a teacher,
one percent received instruction with only a  tutor, 15 percent had both a
classroom and learning lab, and 4 percent used only a learning lab, often
with computer based instruction, 34 percent used other combinations of
instruction. Many community based, volunteer programs use one-on-one
tutoring to the largest extent, as in ProLiteracy Worldwide affiliates.
Whether any one or a combination of these methods of teaching is superior
to the other(s) is not known to me.]

5. Assessment: How can adult’s knowledge and skills be assessed to better
place them in appropriate programs, to determine what special methods or
accommodations they might need, and/or to determine whether they are
progressing well in their learning?
[Present status: National data on placement assessments and accommodations
assessment are not known to me. Those programs in the Adult Education and
Literacy System of the United States must report learning gains using pre
and post testing or performance assessments on the National Reporting
System. For years numerous pre and post testing studies using standardized
tests have tended to show about 5,10 or 15 months of gain in reading in
any number of programs in the Job Corps, the military, corrections,  in
the classrooms of the AELS, and in tutoring programs like those of
ProLiteracy America. Examining many studies shows little to no correlation
of gains with hours of instruction across the studies.]

6. Outcomes: What happens to adults who have participated in programs
after they leave the program?
[Present status: The National Reporting System presents data for states
and territories in the AELS on percentages of adults who move from the
classroom into employment, or into postsecondary education, and who get
high school diplomas or GEDs. Similar data have been obtained in the past
from AELS programs and they always show a certain percentage of adults in
each category. So far, these data have not seemed to have had much of a
bearing on any aspect of recruitment, placement, programming,,
instruction, assessment or any thing else. This may change in the future
if the information is made part of a high stakes assessment system with
rewards and punishments for outcomes.]

The constant need for more money, and these six issues, seem to me to have
occupied the adult education field every since the original signing of the
Adult Education Act early in fiscal year 1967. Today, 35 years later at
the end of fiscal year 2002, these same issues seem to me to still capture
the major policy, research, and practice interests of those working in the
AELS. Through activities such as staff development, including teachers as
researchers, reports, conferences, and now internet list discussions, the
field tries to educate itself about these six issues and what, if any, new
knowledge may have been obtained to address these issues. Whether these
staff development or other activities have actually improved any aspects
of the six issues is not known by me.

I’m wondering if any adult educators working in the field have any sense
of how our understanding and approaches to these issues may have changed
over the years and whether this change has been for the better, for worse,
or have things stayed pretty much the same.



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