NLA Challenge: Four Questions Which We Need to Answer

[Harriet Vardiman Smith]

David:

On 1/07 you wrote:

"These four questions need to be answered -- with one voice from the field.
...We will need to agree on what _high quality_ means and what the costs
are not only for instruction but also the support services..."

In my former life, I was in early childhood education. It has struck me
many times how very similar are the challenges and issues faced by those
advocating for adult literacy education and for early childhood education.
Both serve marginalized populations, outside the realm of K-12 levels of
public awareness and funding (with the exception of Head Start, which has
never been funded at levels sufficient to reach all those eligible). 

Early childhood *has* had the advantage of a unified voice from the field,
in the form of the national professional organization, the National
Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). Before beginning
to address issues of the links between quality, compensation, and cost of
programs, NAEYC developed the widely-esteemed and adopted "Developmentally
Appropriate Practice" (DAP) guidelines and a nationwide accreditation
process based on DAP for all early childhood programs, now considered
definitive in public, private/nonprofit, and for-profit early childhood
programs. Even Head Start programs and commercial child care programs such
as KinderCare consider DAP the standard for best practices, and can and do
seek NAEYC accreditation. This was a case of the field "agree[ing] on what
high quality means", and DAP is stated in a way that is both definitive in
terms of skills/practices and flexible in terms of curriculum. When I first
attended a conference presentation on Equipped for the Future, I thought,
"It's Developmentally Appropriate Practice for Adult Learners!"  However,
DAP *was* developed by a professional organization of educators, not
through a government-funded project, which is probably not insignificant in
terms of its being viewed as valid by practitioners. 

When I read or hear about efforts to professionalize and improve
compensation in the field of adult education and to develop a credential
for adult education paraprofessionals here in Texas as well as other
states, I think of the Child Development Associate degree, administered by
by the Council for Early Childhood Professional Recognition. The CDA was
pioneered and standardized beginning in the early 1970's by The Child
Development Associate National Credentialing Program, a movement to improve
the quality of child care, funded by the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth and Families. The program
is designed to assess and credential early care and education professionals
based on performance. (Website:
<http://www.cdacouncil.org/about/history.htm>) So here is an example of a
project that *was* federally-funded, but has achieved a high level of
acceptance in the field and ever-increasing currency in the early childhood
employment marketplace.

The good news is, there may be precedent here for advocacy which could be
useful to the field of adult literacy/ESL education. If you look at federal
funding levels for child care and early childhood intervention/education
programs, they are not where they need to be, but have come a long way in
recent years. Levels of compensation and benefits for early childhood
professionals and paraprofessionals have seen some improvement, but have an
even longer way to go. Issues of affordability hinge on what parents can
pay for early childhood education/child care in this case (and how much
government will subsidize), not so much on government funding and an
assumption of little/no cost to students, as in adult literacy education.

I have excerpted below part of an NAEYC position statement which touches on
the very same issue as your four questions: 

NAEYC Position Statement (Revised 1995)
Quality, Compensation, and Affordability
from the NAEYC website at
<http://www.naeyc.org/public_affairs/pubaff_index.htm.>

"Since its founding in 1926, NAEYC has worked to improve the quality of
early childhood programs for
young children and their families. In recent years these efforts have
included the adoption of the following:
criteria for high-quality early childhood programs and implementation of an
accreditation system to
recognize programs that meet these standards of excellence (NAEYC 1991),
guidelines for
developmentally appropriate practice (Bredekamp 1987), guidelines for
appropriate curriculum and
assessment (NAEYC & NAECS/SDE 1991), compensation guidelines for early
childhood professionals
(NAEYC 1993), and guidelines for professional preparation and certification
(NAEYC 1985, 1991,
1993, 1995; ATE, DEC/CEC, & NAEYC 1994; Willer 1994).

"In 1987 NAEYC adopted a position statement on quality, compensation, and
affordability in early
childhood programs. This position statement emphasized that the provision
of high-quality early childhood
programs depends upon three basic needs being met: high-quality programming
for children, equitable
compensation for staff, and affordable services for families or other
consumers. NAEYC's revised position
statement reaffirms the importance of each of these three components --
quality, compensation, and
affordability. Since the statement's initial adoption in 1987, considerable
literature has accumulated on the
topic, but insufficient progress has been made in ensuring that all
families with young children have access
to high-quality programs with well-qualified, competent, and equitably
compensated staff and at an
affordable price."

Certainly some interesting and informative parallels...

Harriet Vardiman Smith
Materials/Research Coordinator
Texas Adult Literacy Clearinghouse
800-441-READ
409-862-6519
website:  http://www.cdlr.tamu.edu/tcall/