August 17, 2007

Fall From The National Literacy Summit of 2000 Continues Eight Years Later

Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education

In September of 2000 the National Literacy Summit 2000 steering committee
held a meeting in Washington, DC in a Congressional office building and
launched An Action Agenda for Literacy in a report entitled "From the
Margins to the Mainstream". The Action Agenda called for a "system of high
quality adult literacy, language, and lifelong learning services" offering
ease of ACCESS to QUALITY services for adult students and sufficient
RESOURCES to support increased access and quality services. This
accessible, high quality adult education and literacy system was set as the
national goal to be achieved by the year 2010. But now, eight years into the
Action Agenda, results for these aspects of the system are not encouraging:
enrollments have declined, quality is unclear, and federal funding for the
states has declined in inflation adjusted dollars.

ACCESS: In 1998 there were 4,020,550 enrollments in the Adult Education and
Literacy System. After the WIA/AEFLA (Workforce Investment Act/Adult
Education and Family Literacy Act) of 1998 was passed, introducing new
accountability requirements, enrollments fell to 2,891,895 in 2000, the
year of the Literacy Summit. Seven years later, in  2007, enrollments had
dropped to 2,405,095. This is a decline of over 40 percent from 1998  when
the WIA was enacted and a drop of 17 percent from 2000, the year of the
Literacy Summit which aimed to increase access to the AELS. This indicates
that there were1,615,455 fewer enrollments in 2007 than there were in 1998
and 486,800 fewer enrollments in 2007 than in 2000. The cause of this
decline of over 1.6 million enrollments has never been explained by federal
or state governments.

At the present time, it looks like the Action Agenda item of ACCESS is
failing with respect to increasing enrollments in the AELS, and there are
no data of which I am aware to suggest it is succeeding in programs outside
the AELS, such as local community based programs, library programs and so
forth. I do not know of any organization that is taking a comprehensive
look into the issue of ACCESS to adult literacy services throughout the
nation. The National Council of State Directors of Adult Education (NCSDAE)
have produced a report entitled American Competitiveness Initiative
(February 2006) calling for enrollments in the AELS to increase to
4,095,499 by 2010-2011. This would return the AELS enrollment back to its
level of a decade ago.

A report from a National Commission on Adult Literacy was released in June
of 2008 and called for all the government programs that provide adult basic
skills education or job training should enroll some 20,000,000 adults a year
by 2020. However, this has been acknowledged as an arbitrary number with no
particular rationale to support it, and the report does not specify how the
additional enrollments would be recruited nor in what kinds of programs they
would engage, e.g., the AELS or some sort of job technical training
programs, or whatever.

QUALITY: I have found no information to suggest that in the last eight years
there has been an improvement in the quality of services for adult students
in the programs of the AELS or any other programs such as those of
community-based programs, libraries, corrections, workplace, etc. Indeed, I
have found no definitive statement about just what "quality" means in the
AELS.

One factor related to educational quality that is frequently mentioned in
discussing the AELS is the large percentage of part-time and volunteer
personnel in relation to full-time personnel. Presumably, the more
full-time professional personnel in an educational system, the better the
quality of the system. Using this indicator of quality, in program year
2001-02 there were a total of 153,390 personnel in the AELS, and 21 percent
were full-time. The number of students per full-time personnel was 87 to 1.
By program year 2004-05, there were 144,169 personnel, but only 15 percent
were full-time, and the student to full-time personnel ratio was 116 to 1.

One outcome that the Action Agenda called for under the topic of Quality was
that students would be involved as primary stakeholders and full partners in
every aspect of program operation. But that this outcome has not been
achieved is suggested by the fact that VALUE (Voice of Adult Learners
United to Educate-www.valueusa.org), an organization for adult students,
considers that the present AELS does not well serve the needs of adult
learners and it is calling for developing an alternative model for adult
basic education to replace the present AELS.  In what VALUE is calling its
Social Change Initiative, a call is made for "drastic reform" of the
present AELS.

Another challenge to the quality of the AELS has been made by Glenn Young, a
former specialist in adult learning disabilities in the U.S. Department of
Education’s Office for Adult Education and Literacy. In an extensive
discussion in March of 2008 on the National Institute for Literacy’s
Learning Disabilities discussion list, Young asserts that the present AELS
is not providing quality services for adult learners and, as with the VALUE
organization, he calls for major reforms to the system.

RESOURCES:  In September 2000 the National Literacy Summit 2000 Action
Agenda included  Action Agenda Priority 1: Resources, Outcome B: Action 2:
"Persuade Congress to appropriate $1 billion annually to the adult
education, language, and literacy system."

Unfortunately, funding for the AELS has barely reached a little over half of
the $1 billion in the first 8 years following the Literacy Summit, and there
is little indication that the funding for fiscal year 2009 will exceed that
of 2008, around $554 million, or  a little over $220 per enrollee.

The NCSDAE American Competitiveness Initiative report calls for an AELS
budget of $2 billion in 2010-2011 with some 4 million enrollments. This
would result in about $500 per enrollment. Even with state funding added,
the report projects about $972 per enrollee as a national average, though
actual amounts would vary from state to state. The National Commission on
Adult Literacy report calls for 20,000,000 enrollees by 2020 with public
funding (e.g., state and federal) of some $20 billion (with some
unspecified amount of additional funding from some hoped for private
organizations). This is some $1000 per enrollee, which in inflation
adjusted dollars is less than what the combined state and federal funding
is today.

The present funding and that called for by both the NCSDAE and the National
Commission on Adult Literacy report contrasts with present funding per
student in the K-12 system of over $8000 and over $20,000 in higher
education. The federal Head Start program currently runs about $7000 per
enrollee and Early Head Start spends in excess of $10,000 per child. In a
related effort, though the Action Agenda called attention to the need for
adult literacy education of parents to improve the literacy of their
children, during the last eight years funding for the federal Even Start
family literacy program was cut drastically from some $250 million in
fiscal year 2002 to just over $66 million in 2008, a drop of almost 75
percent!

Clearly, in the light of all these failures to improve access, quality, and
resources as called for in the Action Agenda, the Adult Education and
Literacy System (AELS) would remain a marginalized education system even if
a federal budget of $2 billion for some 4 million enrollments could be
achieved by 2010-2011 as called for by the NCSDAE. Given the experience of
the last eight years, this seems mostly like a worthy aspirational but
highly unlikely goal to be achieved. And we are 80 percent of the way to
2010!

Thomas G. Sticht
International Consultant in Adult Education
2062 Valley View Blvd.
El Cajon, CA 92019-2059
Tel/fax: (619) 444-9133
Email: tsticht at aznet.net