[NLA] NLA policy and advocacy discussions (long)

[Gail Spangenberg]

Colleagues,

I agree with Tom about the need for a blue-ribbon commission to come 
up with a new master plan for the field.  It is an excellent idea now 
and it was 2-3 years ago when the climate was friendlier and
when I got some funding help from Ford and Carnegie to see if I could 
get a plan and funding together for such a commission.

The plan itself actually got fairly well developed.  But, in the end, 
the problem was lack of adequate funding.  For months, I had 
commitments of $1 million from two sources, but just as the effort 
was about to be launched, half of the funding evaporated, triggering 
loss of the other half.  Not wanting to lose all the ground that had 
been tilled, I decided to found CAAL and open a path, at least for a 
time, to pursuing a few of the topics a commission would have looked 
at.   The community college project, built around a blue-ribbon task 
force, is one such topic.  Other topics/projects are in review by 
potential funders or on the drawing boards now  -- and money is a 
more urgent constraint with each passing day in the current political 
and economic climate.

Just the same, if Tom could use his considerable powers of persuasion 
with Hewlett or one of the other foundations in California or 
elsewhere that know and have supported his work over the years, a 
commission just might be possible and perhaps he could succeed where 
I was unable to.  I'd be all for that.  It could indeed do the field 
a lot of good.

Gail Spangenberg
President
Council for Advancement of Adult Literacy
1221 Avenue of the Americas - 50th Floor
New York, NY 10020
212-512-2362, fax 212-512-2610


>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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-- 
Gail Spangenberg
President
Council for Advancement of Adult Literacy
1221 Avenue of the Americas - 50th Floor
New York, NY 10020
212-512-2362, fax 212-512-2610
_______________________________________________
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