Adult Education's Day (or More?) in the Sun

Back from a few days in Burlington, Vermont, with its 70-degree March weather, and surprisingly good restaurant scene (like this one).

A sure sign of spring's renewal and hope, yesterday: adult education prominently featured in the Boston Globe!  In essence, to respond to the reality that adults go back to get a GED, then find it's not enough to get them a family-supporting job or to succeed in community college, the state is planning to "retool" the system to strengthen the focus on college- and career-readiness:

The effort would lead to increased instructional intensity, more academic and career advising, and a curriculum geared toward college and career readiness, including courses in specialized areas of interest, education officials said.

For me, some takeaways, lots of questions.  First, this move should be seen as part of the overall K-12 conversation about bolstering college and career pathways, and making a more seamless educational system.  Second, while adult education has undergone funding cuts since the recession struck in 2008, a renewed focus on the field might act as a barrier to later cuts. 

That said, it's unclear how the field will be "retooled" from above--despite the positive comments from people in the article, teachers, counselors, and directors will all have to be on-board with, and well-trained, in the new sauce.  And I worry that too strong a focus on merely career preparation--while undoubtedly important to so many GED and ESOL-skills seekers--neglects preparation for the rest of life: to be a citizen, to be a parent, to go to college for broad, not narrow skills. 

Look forward to following this one.

File This Under:

Wonky but Revealing: Cutting Class, a report from MassBudget on the problems--visible and hidden--with the public education funding formula here in the great state of Massachusetts.


The Executive Summary gets the main points, but there are many nuggets throughout the whole text.  Key takeaways: There are some structural and some situational issues with the "foundation budget" for school systems--what  schools spend on their system, minimum, which differs from district to district depending on number of low-income students, distribution of elementary vs. middle vs. high school students, and so forth.

Structural: the formula was set based on 1993 figures, which weren't adjusted once it was signed into law in 1994, thus always lowballing district needs.

Situational: health care costs and special-ed costs are higher than what you might expect.  Many reasons for both, mostly understandable.  The result: districts pull money that could be used for regular ed teachers and other services to fund their legal obligations to special-ed and employee benefits.

Circumlocutionary: By "the great state of Massachusetts," I actually mean, "the Bay State," "the citizens of the great state I governed," or "home," depending on which version you prefer from what Romney used in his victory parity speech tonight.  By my count he did mention the state's name twice, but it was listening to him get around having to say "great" and "Massachusetts" in the same sound-bite-bound sentence was almost as painful as, well, as listening to him speak in general.

By "home," he expanded by way of saying, "It's nice to be home for the first time in two months."  Hmmm.  Hasn't been in Massachusetts in a while?  As my mother might say, that's sort of how he governed.

Policy Takeaway for the Week: It's likely the only major legislation to get through the Massachusetts Statehouse before summer is the budget, and a bill to contain health-care costs.

First reaction: man, that's slow.  Why doesn't anything ever get accomplished in politics?

Second reaction: considering how much health care eats up the state budget, a health-care bill is an education bill, a transportation bill, a community-development bill.  In theory--the devil will be in the details, of course.

What's the Problem?

For Arts of Communication class, Kennedy School of Government.  Assignment: Deliver a speech stating a problem and proposing solutions.  NB: Constrained by a four-minute max, there's a lot I couldn't get to.  And the story's true--but the name Maria Gomez isn't.

A year and a half ago, Maria Gomez, a woman in her mid-thirties who had immigrated from Peru about a year before, stepped to the microphone in the event room in a small human-services agency in Roxbury.  She stood upright, her black hair pulled back over a pressed white blouse.  She was one of a group of adults graduating from a 5-month, twelve hour a week, English as a Second Language class.  She looked out at the crowd, and said, “When I went to the doctor’s for an appointment with my children, before, I had problems.  Now when I go to the doctor’s, I say, I don’t need a translator.”  In a place more accustomed to the artful speeches of Nanci Pelosi or David Brooks, it might seem curious to highlight the testimonial of a low-income immigrant parent.  Around here, it’s easy to overlook the adults in our community who lack basic skills.  Rather than overlook these folks, though, let’s give them a closer look.  The Roxbury program Maria graduated from was one I started and ran for two years; my adult education experience has taken me into consulting and teacher-training.  So today, I’d like to describe the problem of immigrant literacy—and recommend some solutions.

Maria is not alone.  2 million immigrants enter the US annually; half of them either have low literacy or don’t speak English.  There are many consequences: let me focus on two: our economy—and our next generation.  First, all the research shows, if we’re going to maintain America’s global competitiveness, our workers must get better skills.  To this, some would say, why focus on helping immigrants make a big leap in their skills?  Why not focus on workers who already speak English and have some skills, helping them make the small steps to move up in the economy?  The answer brings me to our second consequence: the next generation.  More and more, our K-12 students are the children of immigrants.  And a parent with low literacy is less likely to pay attention to their kids’ homework or pick up the phone and call their teacher.  The struggle for adult literacy is a struggle for the economy and for our children.  And Maria is a great example of what’s possible: after my class, she kept studying English, got her citizenship, and started a Home Health Aide training program. 

Maria's an example of someone with low skills who found a solution.  The bigger problem is, we’re not serving enough people like Maria, and we’re not serving them well enough.  That’s a two-fold problem: capacity and quality.  First, capacity: Right here in Cambridge, go down Mass Ave about a mile to the Community Learning Center.  Their waitlist is 434 people long.  Statewide, a study in the 90s verified there were 15,000 people on waitlists for ESL.  That means months or years waiting for a seat.  Second, quality.  According to a national evaluation, a third of all adult ESL students leave class within the first two months.  Why does somebody drop out?  He doesn’t feel like he’s making much progress.  Or programs hold classes during the day—and that’s when his job is.

Let me move to solutions.  The adult literacy field needs something like what the Celtics have needed for two years: to get bigger, and get better.  First, the bigger part.  Proposing more funding for anything is a tough sell these days.  But an investment in education is a down payment for our economy and our kids.  That argument may not carry the day everywhere, but it sure does in some places.  Indeed, right here, in his recent State of the Commonwealth speech, Governor Patrick proposed building workers’ skills, in part through increased funding for community colleges—which happen to be a key bridge to higher skills for many immigrants.  That wisdom for investing in the future should be extended to adult ESL.  But an alternative to government support are public-private partnerships.  In Chinatown, the Asian American Civic Association goes into Tufts Medical Center, and offers three levels of ESL for hospital employees.  It’s good for everyone, and Tufts picks up the tab. 

           

           Some will ask: why make a system bigger when it hasn’t proven its effectiveness at current scale?  To address that serious concern brings me to my second solution: Should adult-education get bigger, it must get much, much better.  That third of students who drop out?  We need to get them to where Maria got.  The best solutions will probably come from the dedicated teachers who understand how to work with adults.  But here are a few of my ideas: locate ESL programs in K-12 schools, and provide daycare.  Increase professional development for teachers to provide an engaging curriculum that students like and learn from.  And make sure students are in the right classroom in the first place.  Increase assessment when students start class—what does Maria already know?  What does she struggle with?—and get students in a class with others at similar levels, so they aren’t lost, or bored.  Those are a few ideas: there are many more. 

           As future policymakers, I ask you: when the conversation turns to education, please think of it beyond just K-12.  Think of adults, too.  As citizens, I ask you: when we talk about immigration, let’s move beyond culture or who doesn’t belong.  Let’s move the conversation to the skills everyone needs.  Let’s move the conversation to how to help more people get those skills, and help themselves, their children, and our entire economy.  Thank you. 

Politico Pith: Choice Thoughts from the State Secretary of Education

Not gonna say it was quite like seeing Lady Gaga walk into our library basement, but it was pretty cool.  Just a few (paraphrased) nuggets able to persist through my stats-addled brain-fog:

We hold school time constant and let learning vary.  We need to flip those: everybody to mastery, no matter how long it takes.

One of my big problems with NCLB was that it overidentified underperforming schools but didn't give states the money to help those schools.   

Teacher evaluation has to be based in part on student achievement.  It's a common sense connection parents know.  Last year she had a poor teacher and hated math.  This year she loves her teacher and math's her favorite subject.

If you want to guarantee great turnout at a school committee meeting out in the suburbs, don't propose revamping the reading curriculum--propose changing the school day by 20 minutes.

We just voted to do the first state takeover of a school system, in Lawrence.  I was at a school in a different city yesterday, and I was sitting there talking to those people, thinking, We should take over this district, too.

Starting Line Item

Announcement from the Obama Administration today that Head Start funding will be subject to competition.  Shuttering centers if they don't show academic progress, directing funds to successful programs.

The changes will require all lower-performing Head Start programs to compete for funds instead of receiving the money automatically. The new benchmarks to determine eligibility will mean some programs that fail to show children are making academic program will lose funding. Grants will be reviewed every five years.

In general, I support the President's move toward competitive bidding, especially in energy and transportation, usually havens of earmark lard, cough cough.  Besides creating some motivation for lackluster centers to work better--and it's not at all clear to me that Head Start's mixed outcomes have to do with lack of staff motivation rather than inability to attract and support great staff--I'm  not sure how this helps increase the supply of high-quality childcare for kids from tough backgrounds.

Some centers will get better, and maybe get more money, but short-run it implies shuttering more centers.  And justifying one's own existence based on potentially hard-to-measure academic outcomes could certainly be a recipe for book-cooking.  It looks like sanctions rather than support.  I'd love to be proven wrong.

Finally, thank-you-thank-you Business Week for this graf:

Before making his remarks, Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius toured a classroom at the Yeadon Head Start Center. He played with 16 3-to-5-year-olds gathered around smaller circular tables. One group worked on putting together a puzzle, another played with blocks.

Now if that isn't a metaphor for working with Congress, what is?

How Much, or How?

Ooh boy, Nicholas Kristof writing about all the things I care about! 

He gets right to the point about how little public funding goes to children under age 5.  And to how early investments in children actually have documented cost-benefit pay-offs.

Kristof's also refreshingly frank in taking on Head Start questions.  He admits what we've long known, that some gains (e.g. IQ) for kids who go through HS wear off quickly.  But he points out that "the former Head Start participants are significantly less likely than siblings to repeat grades, to be diagnosed with a learning disability, or to suffer the kind of poor health associated with poverty."  Those are really important measures, especially when you consider how repeating grades sets kids up to drop out.

His closing point is: we can't afford not to fund early childhood.  But it's not just a question of how much funding early-childhood gets.  It's a question of how programs are run.

Problem is, quality of day-care varies a lot.  And overall, the picture isn't pretty--some programs are excellent, others terrible, most in-between.  That variation happens even within a government-funded program like Head Start, not to mention in the ever-growing area of private day-care.  Are play areas safe?  Are teachers well-trained?  Are adult-child interactions engaging?  These are not side questions, they are the main questions.

Dumping a whole lot of money into early-childhood without ways of ensuring programs are actually well-run won't do much for the disadvantaged kids Kristof cares about.  Kids from tough backgrounds need great programs, not just more programs.

The Weakened Links

Trying to fund linkages is impossible, because it we'd have to deal with too many funding streams--federal, state, and local.

That's what staff members from a foundation that fights poverty in a large U.S. city told me when I asked them if they provide funding to help programs link together with other ones--not just drive funding to single organizations. 


Research shows that helping poor people through interventions works best if one intervention leads to another.  Nonprofits are notorious for protecting their turf and avoiding collaboration.  We're never gonna solve tough problems unless we solve them together.  And we're never gonna work together unless we can line up our dollars.

By the way, this was a major foundation with a lot of pull.  If they step back from linkage-funding with their hands in the air, that says something.

Eight Is the Loneliest Number

Every once in a while, a statistic just comes out of nowhere and knocks me down.  The share of GED recipients who actually complete college once they've started (now, there's a conversation for another day).  The Red Sox' abysmal September record (now, there's a conversation for ... oh wait, there might not be another day).

Yesterday's stunner?  A number (from the 90s) showing that only 8 percent of public investment in education is spent on children birth-to-5.   

Everything we know says that kids cognitive, emotional, linguistic development has a huge, lifelong impact.  Why don't we fund 0-5 better?

Now, I understand: the public K-12 system is a 500-billion-dollar gorilla taking up much, much more than 8 percent.  A lot of birth-to-five life happens at home.  The private-public balance for daycare is more on the private end than in K-12.  The "Head Start didn't work" perception is out there--even if it's not entirely true.  But it's still shocking how little our society invests in arguably the most important five years of life.


For society at large, I think it comes to down to this: perception of crisis.  Major foundations like Gates, Broad, and Walton zealously fund all stripes of K-12 school reform.  These initiatives are problematic in many ways, but I think they've caught fire among donors because of the obvious crisis of American high schools.  Open the paper and you read about this-or-that failing school.  Turn on the news and you get a steady diet of "kids these days'" troubles with drugs and gangs.  Employers are finding that young adults can't do the job.  Colleges are finding freshman can't do the classwork.

But there's very much a 0-5 "crisis," as well.  Toddlers with health problems, kids who haven't seen letters or heard enough talking at home, and on and on.  But this crisis is much more silent.  It has to do with complicated genetic-environment interactions beyond the grasp or interest of policymakers.  Further, three-year-olds who are falling behind aren't marauding the streets in gangs ... they're just not getting right kind of attention or discipline from Mom or Dad.  And even if kindergarten teachers can already see the negative outcomes, these outcomes aren't blaring over the news or failing in droves out of Stats 101 at Your Local State College.

So we don't intuitively grasp early-childhood issues the way we do with older kids.  Even if we did, where would the political will be to act?  Kids don't vote.  Parents of poor, at-risk kids don't either.

Just yesterday, I heard a former advocacy worker say: You have to kiss serious politico butt to get lawmakers to give money to early childhood.  I don't want to be mired in pessimism, but how do we change this?

NFP, HCZ, QED?

I was born into luck.

I had healthy, well-educated parents, married, and stable parents.  Dad had a good job, Mom was a dedicated and ardent community activist.  My mom wouldn't have even thought of drinking when she was pregnant with me.  They had the means to support having one more kid--my little sister--two years later.  I grew up near parks, not power plants.  There was no lead paint within sight or touch.  From the earliest moments, I was loved, read to, and played with--not just by my folks but by aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers. 

Am I thankful?  You bet!  To try to make such positive fetal health behaviors, early parenting, and stable life pathways more prevalent for mothers who didn't have the background of my own, enter the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP).  I've been reading about it a lot recently. 

For someone like me who's very interested in the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) and programs like it, the NFP raises some big questions.

First, the NFP in a nutshell: It was a plan developed in the 70's by a developmental psychologist to make the conditions I benefited from more widespread for kids born to poor, teenage mothers in Elmira, N.Y., and later Memphis and Denver.  The backbone of the program?  Sending nurses into the homes, from early pregnancy to a couple years after birth, to talk, teach, model, counsel, what it took to be a good mother.

The results?  Less abuse and neglect, less use of public assistance by the families, and more involvement from fathers.  Many effects still showed up in kids when they were fifteen years old.  RAND found major cost-savings for the kids whose mothers were most at-risk and felt most helpless.  A flurry of similar programs emerged, and political leaders were quick to find and implement in their own cities and states. 

Teaching parenting is important.  Programs like the Harlem Children’s Zone have taken that cue, and added to it: good early parenting should lead to good pre-school, to good K-12 education, to good social-service supports.  

But there's an issue with this cradle-to-college "conveyor belt" now being replicated nationwide through the Promise Neighborhoods.  The very psychologist who developed NFP, David Olds, found that benefits to his parental supports were only for the at-risk mothers.  Secure families who got the supports didn't need them, and were a cost loss from an investment angle.  Olds's warning: making services universal may cover some families that don’t actually benefit, diluting resources that at-risk families most need.  

By keeping kids on the “conveyor belt” perpetually even if some of them could prosper by graduating out of it—cradle-to-college may threaten to “dilute” services at each level of its continuum.  Most of the families in these program's zones would probably be called "at-risk."  But maybe not all of them.  With scarce resources to fund the kind of childhood I got, that's a reality worth examining.  

Why Are We Funding This Stuff??

"Why Are We Learning This Stuff??"

When I was in K-12 education, a colleague of mine who taught biology posted that on his wall.  Beneath it he stapled up articles on "science in the news."  Whatever you needed to do to sell 15-year-olds on the wonders of mitochondria, right?

In my own adult-ESOL teaching, I've done a similar thing, less explicitly.  After a few weeks, our students start setting goals.  "Ha!" you might say, "'Goal-setting.'  Three syllables.  Can't be that hard, right?"  Well, it was three syllables like "debt ceiling" or "health reform" were three syllables.

Actually, it was really hard (I know, because many of my fledgling lessons in this area flopped).  What is a goal?  What is a realistic goal?  An academic, professional, or personal goal?  How do you make it specific?  Not too vague ("help my family"--whatever that means) ... but not near-term either (brush my hair tomorrow).

Once students had worked through several lessons, they wrote their own goals.  Different types of goals went on different-colored sticky notes.  These were affixed to a poster.  Every day I saw it.  Every day the students looked at.  Why are we learning this stuff??  That was why.

But if you're a funder, an agency head, an elected official, you have a different question: Why are we funding this stuff??  Sure, ESOL matters to the everyday happiness and prosperity of students, but how does it fit in a bigger policy framework?

• 28 percent of Boston's population is made up of foreign-born individuals
• In the last two decades, Boston's immigrant population has increased more than 50%
• Forty-five (45!) percent of children 0-17 in the city are children of immigrants
• One out of two adult immigrants in Boston struggles with English or lacks a diploma
• In the early years, how parents interact with their children, read to their children, manage their children's behavior has a big impact on whether those kids are passable or great students years later
• In the school-age years, parental engagement is HUGELY important to student learning
• Adult ESOL classes can help parents in two areas: First, how to enhance their young children's literacy.  Second, how to speak English they can use to stay in touch with teachers, principals, tutors, and coaches.
• There's demand.  Parents are tremendously eager to help their children.  They'll engage with most who want to help them do this.  Those parents who aren't working (and it's a lot these days) often crave classes to improve their literacy skills.  The waitlist in Boston for ESOL class stretches into the thousands.  

In other words, for many parents, especially immigrant parents, I think you can draw a line from the education they receive in their new country to the educational outcomes of their children.  Are there a thousand other factors?  Yes.  Are there a million exceptions?  Yes.  But that's why we need to fund ESOL programs--especially in family literacy.  And sooner rather than later.