[NLA] NLA policy and advocacy discussions (long)

[Thomas Sticht]

Recent discussions about CBOs and other adult literacy education
providers, David’s postings about the focus of the NLA list on policy and
advocacy and his comments about the need for more valid assessments for
accountability, Jon Randall’s postings about the policy and other advocacy
initiatives of the National Literacy Coalition, reports by the Council for
Advancement of Adult Literacy (CAAL) about state versus federal roles in
adult literacy education, the role of adult schools, community colleges
and other providers of adult literacy education, led me to revisit some of
the perennial issues that I discussed last October that have engaged the
adult education and literacy provider field in the United States for many
decades.
Tom Sticht


1. Determining the Scale of Need: How many adults in the nation (or
state/local region) are in need of the services of literacy providers? Or,
as is sometimes stated in a military metaphor, what is the size of the
"target population" for adult literacy education providers?

I used to think that State Grants under the Adult Education and Family
Literacy Act of 1998 were 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. But Jon’s
recent postings about the Census 2000 data seems to put the apportionment
on population shifts. This raises the question for me of just how are the
State Grant funds distributed?

To my knowledge, the State Grants are not distributed based on the data of
the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) of 1992 which  placed 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. I don’t know if the
NALS data are used anywhere for distributing funds, perhaps someone can
tell us.

But at any rate, 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.
Even then it isn’t clear what is being measured.  And the federal
government is doing it all again this year to see if the problem has been
reduced I guess. 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. I don’t know if this
type of self-perception data are being collected in the new NAALS. I also
don’t know what difference it would make if the new NAALS declares 75
percent of adults as functionally illiterate. Who cares?

So how should the scale of need be determined? On what basis should State
Grant funds be apportioned?

2. Participation/Recruitment: What percentage of the "target" population
is being served and how can more adults be recruited to participate in
programs?

Given the lack of information about the "scale of need" which defines the
"target population" in some way, it is not easy to know what percentage of
the "target" population is being served. From 1998 to 2000 enrolments in
the 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 State Grants programs 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. If
library, community college, business and industry, military programs,
store front, etc. programs are included as members of the Adult Education
and Literacy System of the United States, then how can we find out how
many adults are served in the AELS each year? And how do we "market" the
system to adult learners, policymakers, and others? What do we advocate
for – money to stamp out illiteracy (I have seen this in some local ads
for adult literacy education – still).

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. But how can adults with 3rd grade reading skills achieve high
school skills in 100 or even 600 hundred hours of in-class or in-tutoring
attendance? In takes normal, typical children seven years to go from 3rd
to 10th grade level reading – by definition. How much attention should we
be giving to increasing attendance? Should more attention be focused on
providing adults with "just-in-time" brief periods of education when they
feel the need?

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?

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 America affiliates.

We keep on saying that we need to improve the quality of teaching and
promote better learning but we say this in general terms and not in
specific terms, like that program over there needs to improve its teaching
and learning. Trying to improve things everywhere, like a lot of research
tries to do, seems to me to too often to not improve anything anywhere.
How do we know things aren’t just fine in teaching and learning? And if
they are not, what should be done to make them better? Any consensus here?

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?

National data on placement assessments and accommodations assessment are
not known to me. Those programs in the State Grants programs 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 State Grants, 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.

Maybe the measures of learning that are in general use in programs are not
"valid" as David has suggested. But what does this mean? Valid for what?
Measuring to see if what is taught is being learned? Would that be a
"valid" measure of learning? Does it also have to predict future behavior
outside the classroom (i.e., transfer), such as ability to perform
literacy tasks in the physician’s waiting room, filling in those terrible
forms?

6. Outcomes: What happens to adults who have participated in programs
after they leave the program?

Jon said recently that the OMB is planning to look at employment outcomes
to judge the merits of adult literacy programs. The National Reporting
System presents data for states and territories in the State Grants
programs on percentages of adults who move from the classroom into
employment, or into post-secondary 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, such as the OMB may be planning. Does it
matter? To whom and why?

Like I said last October, 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, 36 years later in fiscal year 2003, these same issues seem to still
capture the major policy, research, and practice interests of those
working in the field.

David has focused the NLA list on policy and advocacy issues, and these
are some that I have seen repeatedly. There are repeated calls for more
partnerships, co-ordination, coalitions, less fragmentation, greater
inclusion, more adult learner involvement, more research, more and better
staff development, better teacher training, better assessments, and so on
and on. But has anything got better? How can we tell? What should the
field be advocating for? The CAAL wants better/more community college
participation, others want better/more CBO participation, State Grants are
taking an inflation adjusted drop, while the field wants more money for
Jon’s two-part adult education and literacy system. But no one has said
how we can or should go about advocating for every part of this highly
fragmented "system." Should we just argue that adult literacy is good for
democracy and so give the field a lot more money?

I have recommended in the past that the field needs a solid, blue-ribbon
commission to come up with a master plan for the field. But I don’t see
that happening in the near future. But perhaps later on
.





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