[NLA] Adult Education in a Time of Deficits

[Thomas Sticht]

Both the Washington Post and the San Diego Union Tribune ran articles
today (Nov. 29, 2001)indicating that the Office of Managment and Budget
forecasts deficit budgets for the remainder of President Bush's term.
The Union-Tribune discusses possible cuts in budgets and quotes the
Director of OMB as saying that the federal government presently has too
many job training programs. That suggests that potential cuts in adult
education and training programs may be being contemplated. In turn, this
suggests the need for adult education advocates to argue for support in
terms of the  economic efficiency of adult education. A couple of years
ago I wrote a paper focused on getting greater returns for education
dollars by investing in adult education. The paper is briefly noted
below. The full paper is available at www.nald.ca under full text
documents.  


Adult Basic Education: 
Strategies to Increase Returns on Investment (ROI)

Thomas G. Sticht 
Applied Behavioral & Cognitive Sciences Inc. 
July 1999 

It is axiomatic that government spending should produce the very most
for the monies spent. In this paper I argue that there are opportunities
to get what I call "double duty dollars" from the billions of dollars
that are being spent by governments on education and workforce
development. This can be done by following two investment strategies for
adult basic education: invest in programs that increase the
intergenerational transfer of cognitive skills and that teach using a
functional context education approach to instructional design. 

Investment Strategy #1 
Promote the Intergenerational Transfer of Cognitive Skills

Evidence from dozens of studies over the last quarter century indicates
that preschool or in-school compensatory interventions for children may
not lead to improved cognitive skills when the children complete
secondary education and enter adulthood. Other evidence indicates that
the most important, long term, educational intervention "program" for a
child are well educated, financially comfortable parents (or major
caregivers). Better educated parents produce better educated children.
Further, there is now evidence that investments in the education of one
welfare parent may influence the school achievement of one, two or even
more of the parent's children. This suggests that in programs of
compensatory education, such as Head Start or Even Start, a major
emphasis should be upon parent's education and job training, including
the commitment of the largest share of funds to the education and
training of the children's parents. Evidence suggest this may lead to
better educated, more immediately employable parents who can better take
care of their children and contribute to the development of more
educable children. 

Investment Strategy #2
Functional Context Education

We can teach basic skills of reading, writing, speaking, listening,
arithmetic and thinking following a functional context approach. There
is now convincing evidence that the basic academic skills of reading,
writing, and mathematics can be taught within the context of teaching
job skills. Workplace literacy programs in the military and in many
businesses and industries have conclusively demonstrated that the
teaching of job skills and basic skills can be integrated and both can
be learned at the same time. However, activities such as youth and adult
job training programs and literacy programs for welfare parents
generally produce separate funding for basic academic skills education
and job training programs based on the outmoded idea that one must first
acquire the "basics" before one can benefit from job training. But by
integrating academic and jobs skills training, we can reduce the amount
of time needed to both educate and train youth and adults in a job
field, they can more quickly enter into employment and more rapidly
return the investment in their training through tax revenues. 

For those in welfare basic skills  programs, this is also a way to get
"double duty dollars." We can teach those on welfare job skills by
integrating these content areas with basic skills instruction rather
than thinking that one has to first get the basic skills and then use
them to learn job. Making such learning sequential adds to education and
training time and costs, and keeps adults out of the productive
workforce longer. Greater returns to education and training dollars can
be obtained by changing existing programs to require the integration of
basic skills and job training.