ERIC ED418238: Passports to Paradise: The Struggle To Teach and To Learn on the Margins of Adult Education.

127 Pages·2.1 MB·English

by  ERIC

DOCUMENT RESUME
CE 076 132
ED 418 238
Sticht, Thomas G.; McDonald, Barbara A.; Erickson, Paul R.
AUTHOR
Passports to Paradise: The Struggle To Teach and To Learn on
TITLE
the Margins of Adult Education.
San Diego Consortium for Workforce Education and Lifelong
INSTITUTION
Learning, CA.
PUB DATE 1998-01-00
NOTE
125p.
Applied Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Inc., 2062 Valley
AVAILABLE FROM
View Blvd., El Cajon, CA 92019-2059 ($20).
Research (143)
Reports
PUB TYPE
MF01/PC05 Plus Postage.
EDRS PRICE
*Adult Basic Education; *Adult Literacy; Basic Skills;
DESCRIPTORS
Cultural Differences; Educational Improvement; Educational
Policy; English (Second Language); Inner City; *Literacy
Education; National Programs; Needs Assessment;
Participation; *Participatory Research; Program
Effectiveness; Social Bias; *Subcultures; Teacher
Researchers; *Urban Education
California (San Diego)
IDENTIFIERS
ABSTRACT
This report provides a 5-year perspective on the adult
literacy education (ALE) system in the inner city of San Diego, California.
"The Struggle To
Chapter 1 introduces the research. Chapters 2-5 in part 1,
Learn," contain the following: information about the difficulties of
determining how many adults might benefit from basic skill education;
introduction of the practice of having adult literacy students perform as
researchers to discover barriers to and ways to increase participation in
ALE; what happens after adults decide to go back to school; and how various
instructional factors affect learning and the transfer of learning to the
"The Struggle To Teach," include
home and community. Chapters 6-8 in part 2,
the following: reports by two teacher researchers on hardships of teaching
and learning and insights of 17 teachers about the educational system; a
teacher researcher's experiences in trying to change instruction in an
English as a second language class and how the dynamics of students' lives
and classroom turbulence affected her work; and challenges to teaching posed
by diversity in a classroom due to cultural factors and different language
"The Struggle To Be
and literacy skill levels. Chapters 9-11 in part 3,
Better," cover the following: activities federal policy makers and officials
have undertaken to try to improve the ALE system nationally; activities in
California to improve the ALE system; and rebuttals to news stories about the
low intellectual abilities of disadvantaged youth and adults.
(YLB)
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Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made
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Margins of Adult Education
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January
1998
San Diego- Consortium for Workforge
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,Education &lifelong Learning
PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL
Office of ducational Research and Improvement
EDUC6Nf1ONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION
HAS BEEN GRANTED BY
CENTER (ERIC)
wttott,rti
et'
his document has been reproduced as
received from the person or organization
t Ar1.141,7
originating it.
Minor changes have been made to
improve reproduction quality.
0
TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
Points of view or opinions stated in this
INFORMATION CENTER
document do not necessarily represent
official OERI position or policy.
BEST COPY
AVAILABLE
Passports to
Paradise
The Struggle to Teach
and To Learn on the
Margins of Adult
Education
Thomas G. Sticht
Barbara A. McDonald
Paul R. Erickson
January 1998
Diego Consortium for Workforce
CWELLSan
and Lifelong Learning, Inc.
Education
3
© 1998, Applied Behavioral & Cognitive Sciences, Inc.
For additional copies of this report send a check for $20.00 made out to the ABCS to:
The Applied Behavioral & Cognitive Sciences, Inc.
2062 Valley View Blvd. El Cajon, CA 92019-2059
tel/fax [phone]
Table of Contents
iv
Acknowledgments
v
Executive Summary
Marginally Literate Adults and Their Struggle
Chapter 1
1
for Educational Passports to Paradise
Part 1
The Struggle to Learn
How Many of San Diego's Adults
Chapter 2
9
Need Literacy Education?
Overcoming Barriers to Participate
Chapter 3
19
in Adult Literacy Education
Getting to School and Completing
30
Chapter 4
a Semester is Tough
ESL Students May Learn Some
Chapter 5
41
But Transfer Little
The Struggle to Teach
Part 2
Teachers and Students Share Thoughts
Chapter 6
51
on the Hardships of Teaching and Learning
One Teacher's Experience in the
Chapter 7
63
Open Entry/Open Exit Classroom
73
Chapter 8 Grappling With Diversity
Part 3
The Struggle to Be Better
84
Chapter 9
Striving at the National Level to Make
the Adult Literacy Education System Better
The Struggle to Improve Adult
94
Chapter 10
Literacy Education in California
104
Chapter 11 Adult Literacy Education: The Marginalized
Education System We Should Care More About
Acknowledgments
The San Diego Consortium for Workforce Education and Lifelong Learning (CWELL) and its Action
Research Center (ARC) resulted in large part from recommendations of the California Workforce Literacy
Task Force in 1990. The Executive Director of that Task Force was Donald Woodside, Consultant to State
Senator Ralph Dills. Don participated in CWELL conferences, he advised on legislative and other matters
throughout the project and he reviewed and commented on this report. For all his words of wisdom and acts
of encouragement we thank Don very much.
At the San Diego Community College, the person most responsible for bringing the idea of the CWELL
and Action Research Center to the attention of college officials was William Armstrong, Director of
Institutional Research and Planning. Throughout the five years of the CWELL project Bill has offered
advice, helped in getting through the details of working in the college district, participated in several
research projects with CWELL ARC staff, and he has reviewed and offered advice on this report. Bill's work
on behalf of the CWELL Action Research Center and its projects is deeply appreciated.
We are indebted to Mr. Augustine Gallego, Chancellor of the San Diego Community College District, Mr.
Rodgers T. Smith, President of the Division of Continuing Education in the San Diego Community
College District; Dean Jim Smith and Associate Dean Fran Lee of the Educational Cultural Center; Dean
Marc Cuellar, of the Cesar Chavez Center; and Associate Dean Eileen Benswi of the Centre City Skills
Center. Special thanks are offered to Dean Barbara Penn, Associate Dean William Grimes, and other
administrators, faculty and staff of the Mid City Center for their support of the CWELL ARC located in the
Mid City Continuing Education Center. We are grateful to these outstanding leaders and their staffs for their
support of and contributions to the work of the San Diego CWELL ARC.
We are very appreciative of the department chairs, resource persons, and the many teachers in the San Diego
Community College District, Division of Continuing Education. They have shared generously their
thoughts and hopes for adult literacy education in San Diego. We are especially grateful to the teachers who
served as CWELL ARC Teacher Researchers. The works of six of these Teacher Researchers, Lynn Francis
Bundy, Rosa Teresa Limon, Lovanne Ma lo, Wes Popham, Judy Quinton, and Marina Zamora Vera are
featured in the present report.
Special recognition and appreciation goes to the hundreds of adult students who contributed to the work of
the CWELL ARC either as Adult Student Researchers, members of focus groups, journal writers, survey
respondents or in the many casual conversations held with CWELL ARC staff over the five years of the
CWELL project. The voices of many of these students are heard in the present report as they recount the
struggle to learn that they and thousands of other adult students have made seeking educational passports to
Paradise.
The researchers of the CWELL Action Research Center (ARC) have included Dr. Thomas Sticht, CWELL
Project Coordinator and Senior Technical Advisor, Dr. Barbara McDonald, Director of the CWELL ARC,
Paul Erickson and Carolyn Huie Hofstetter, both of whom worked as graduate research assistants from the
San Diego State University. Staff members included Laura Fernandez and Gloria Martinez. The authors
would like to thank each of these associates for their dedication and many insightful contributions to the
work of the CWELL ARC.
The San Diego Consortium for Workforce Education and Lifelong Learning (CWELL) has been supported
in part by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund,
and the National Institute for Literacy. We are grateful to these organizations for their generous support.
The San Diego Consortium for Workforce Education and Lifelong Learning (CWELL) is comprised of the
Applied Behavioral & Cognitive Sciences, Inc.; the San Diego State University, College of Education,
Department of Educational Technology; and the San Diego Community College District, Division of
Continuing Education. Any errors of omission or commission in the report are the responsibility of the
authors. The ideas and opinions expressed in this report are those of the authors and they do not necessarily
reflect the official positions, opinions or policies of members of the San Diego CWELL, the William and
Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, or the National Institute for Literacy.
6
vi
Executive Summary
"Just another beautiful day in Paradise!" That's the refrain you hear almost daily in San
Diego from radio talk show hosts, clerks in stores and passersby on the sidewalks. Each
year thousands of people from hundreds of countries and various states within the U.S.
migrate to San Diego. But when they arrive, they do not find themselves in Paradise.
Instead they find themselves living in an inner city community characterized by higher than
average crime rates, more unemployment, lower incomes, higher teenage pregnancy rates
and lower high school graduation rates than the city that surrounds them. Tens of
thousands of these adults find themselves socially and economically marginalized because
they lack important passports to Paradise. The foreign born may lack the ability to speak
English well enough to get a job and support a family. Thousands of marginalized native
speakers of English lack good basic edudational skills in reading, writing, and mathematics
or a high school diploma, or both.
In search of educational passports to Paradise, thousands of the newly arrived migrants,
from abroad and from other states, and the undereducated native adults of San Diego seek
help from the adult literacy education programs provided by the San Diego Community
College District, Division of Continuing Education.
This report provides a five-year perspective on this adult literacy education system located
in the inner city of San Diego, California. As used here, adult literacy education includes
instruction in English as a second language (ESL), adult basic education (ABE), which
includes literacy and mathematics education below the 9th grade level, and adult secondary
education (ASE) at the high school or General Educational Development (GED) level.
Overview of the Report
This report includes 11 chapters. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the research and an
overview of the remaining 10 chapters in the report. The report is divided into three parts,
the contents of each part are briefly described below.
Part 1, The Struggle to Learn
This includes Chapters 2 through 5. Chapter 2 provides
.
information about the difficulties of determining just how many adults in the San Diego
area might benefit from additional education in the basic skills of English, reading and
mathematics. Chapter 3 introduces the practice of having adult literacy students perform as
researchers to discover barriers to participation in adult literacy education and what might
be done to increase participation in adult literacy education. Chapter 4 continues the
discussion of the struggle to learn by considering what happens after adults decide to go
back to school. The final chapter in Part 1, Chapter 5, deals with the issue of how various
instructional factors such as class size, erratic attendance, and turbulence affect learning and
the transfer of what is learned in class to the home and community beyond the walls of the
school.
Part 2, The Struggle to Teach. In Part 2, Chapters 6, 7, and 8 focus on the voices of
teachers and their reflections on the struggle to teach in a marginalized education system.
Chapter 6 includes reports by two CWELL ARC teacher researchers on the hardships of
both teaching and learning and it presents insights that 17 teachers have about the
educational system in which they work. Chapter 7 presents a case study of one teacher's
experiences as a CWELL ARC Teacher Researcher in trying to change instruction in an
ESL class and how the dynamics of students' lives and classroom turbulence affected her
7
v
work. Chapter 8 looks at the challenges to teaching posed by great diversity within a given
classroom due to cultural factors and different levels of language and literacy skills.
Part 3, The Struggle to Be Better.Three chapters deal with activities to try to make the adult
literacy education system more effective. Chapter 9 reviews some of the activities that
federal policy makers and officials have undertaken over the years to try to improve the
adult literacy education system nationally. Chapter 10 focuses on activities in California
over the last two decades to improve the adult literacy education system. Finally, in Chapter
11 rebuttals are offered to news stories in the New York Times, Washington Post,
Washington Times and the San Diego Union about the low intellectual abilities of
disadvantaged youth and adults.
Major Findings and Recommendations
Adults' Self-Perceptions of Educational Needs Differ From Needs
Identified in National and International Adult Literacy Surveys
On the whole, San Diegans score well on international literacy comparisons with other
nations. They rank 4th after Sweden, Germany and Netherlands, while the U. S. as a
whole ranks 8th out of ten comparisons (Chapter 2). But some 60 percent (750,000) of
adults in the San Diego region are below national literacy standards set by the National
Governor's Association and could have difficulty competing for higher wage jobs in the
region. Over a third (about 690,000) of San Diego area adults think they could get a better
job if they could read or do mathematics better. About one in six San Diego area adults said
that they sometimes get help from others in reading at work. The differences between test
scores and self-perceptions of work-related skills may be one of the reasons why more
adults do not seek adult literacy education. They do not perceive their need for it.
Recommendations. Adults need some way to confidentially and accurately gauge their
literacy and mathematics skills to determine their personal needs for increased skills and
their needs for skills to increase their competitiveness in the local, national and global
economies.They need non-threatening, informational and counseling sources that can
make them aware of resources
available to them to help them increase their skills.
Employers could take the lead in providing these types of informational resources to
employees, but other community organizations, e.g., hospitals, grocery stores, etc. could
also provide this type of information in window displays, on grocery bags, etc.
The national television networks could devote a number of broadcasting hours per year to
adult knowledge and literacy self-assessments that could let adults (and K-12 students for
that matter) determine their personal skill levels and what they might do to improve their
skills if they think they need to. Statewide telephone surveys like the one used by the
CWELL ARC in the San Diego area (Chapter 2) could provide a relatively inexpensive way
to measure the knowledge levels of adults, their self-perceptions of their need for adult
literacy education, and their actual participation rates in adult literacy education.
Turbulent Lives Lead to Turbulent Classrooms With Low Participation,
Low Attendance, High Dropout Rates and Low Achievement
Fewer than ten percent of the adults in the San Diego area who think they could benefit
from education in reading and mathematics actually attend classes (Chapter 2). Barriers to
attendance due to hectic life circumstances, work schedules, poor child care, lack of
transportation and lack of social support from relatives, friends, and employers stop many
adults from attending education (Chapter 3). Of those who do attend, two-thirds leave
a semester of school, half attend fewer than 30 percent of the
completing
before
vi
available hours of instruction, and there are large numbers of adds and drops producing
over 200 percent turbulence during a semester (Chapter 4). Most adult students are
functioning as lower literates (i.e., with reading skills below the 7th grade level) both when
they enter and when they leave adult literacy programs (Chapter 8), yet most feel they have
improved their literacy skills (Chapter 5).
Recommendations. Adult literacy Student Researchers recommended that the media become
more involved in encouraging adults to go to school (Chapter 3). This might be done in
conjunction with television or radio shows that offer game-like methods of self-assessing
one's skills and information about skills, their competitive advantages, and how to locate
educational opportunities. Adult Student Researchers also thought that greater social
encouragement by family, friends, community organizations (i.e., churches, social clubs,
etc.) and employers would be useful in increasing adults' participation in continuing
education.
A Need to Reexamine Policies and Educational Approaches in the Adult Literacy Education
System.The effects of turbulence due to numerous adds and drops call for a reexamination
of the general policy called "open entry/open exit," in which adults can enroll in or drop out
of classes at any time (Chapter 10). Other states are exploring other approaches to
managing student enrollments and their efforts should be monitored.
One positive effect of the State Department of Education's activities to implement
competency-based adult education (CBAE) in California is that there are now data for over
a decade to track how well the adult literacy education system that receives federal funding
is doing. The data show that retention rates and learning gains have held constant over the
last decade, while reports of goal attainment by adult students have shown a 66 percent
drop (Chapter 10).
The precipitous drop in goal attainment and the fact that retention rates and learning gains
have not improved over the last decade calls for an evaluation of numerous State
Department of Education activities costing millions of dollars that have been and are being
carried out to improve the adult literacy education system. We need to know if these
activities have the potential to improve the adult literacy education system and are in need of
increased resources, or if the activities are inadequate to improve the system and new
approaches are needed.
The Adult Literacy Education System Is Marginalized
and Needs to be Mainstreamed to Achieve National Education Goals
The adult literacy education system in California is a marginalized system by virtue of (1)
the low levels of funding it receives per full time equivalent student (FIE) (about one-half
what the community college gets per Fib, one-fourth what the California State University
gets, and about one-8th what the University of California system gets), (2) the use of 80-
90 percent part-time teachers, (3) malevolent, incorrect cultural beliefs about human
intellectual abilities and when they can be developed, and (4) the almost total absence of
attention to the adult literacy education system by the media, the state Legislature,
Governor, and Superintendent of Instruction which amounts to a dereliction of caring
(Chapter 11). This is an educational system that few outside the system know about or care
about. It begs for attention by the media and the elected officials who are supposed to
provide oversight on behalf of the general citizenry.
Recommendations. The media should act as citizen caregivers and provide the degree of
investigative oversight to the adult literacy education system that it gives to the K-12 and
higher education systems. The Legislature, Governor, and Superintendent of Public
vii
9
Instruction need to care more about this statewide system that spends almost half a billion
dollars a year of taxpayers' money.
Returns to Investment in Adult Literacy Education. Too often the adult literacy education
system is considered as a remedial system and it is thought that moneys are better spent on
prevention, which generally translates into institutional programs for preschool or early
childhood education. This is a misperception because adult literacy education is both a
developmental education program to increase adults' educational skills throughout their life
spans and a prevention program to prevent learning problems and school failures among
children. Data show that investments in the education of adults can improve the educability
of children and produce other multiplier effects that bring large returns on investments
(Chapter 11). Because it contributes to our efforts to accomplish all eight of the national
education goals while increasing an individual adult's personal competitiveness and the
productivity of the workforce now, instead of a generation from now through K-12
reforms, the adult literacy education system should change from being marginalized to
being mainstreamed
.
A Need for Human Resources Research and Development
California has millions of undereducated adults with a huge range of education and training
needs, yet there is almost no investment by California's state or local governments,
businesses or private charitable foundations in research and development that could lead to
improvements in California's adult literacy education and workforce education training
systems. This is unconscionable given all the information presented in this report that
shows the importance of adult literacy education to both the improvement of K-12
education, the improvement of workforce competitiveness, and the general improvement of
the quality of human life.
It is also unconscionable that California's great teacher training institutions, most notably
the California State University system, provide little, and most campuses no, preparation of
teachers for undereducated, marginalized adults.
Recommendations. This lack of research, development, and teacher training to improve the
education of undereducated, marginalized adults are the same findings reported almost
a
decade ago by the California Workforce Literacy Task Force. Based on its findings that
Task Force recommended:
"That the Legislature establish a network of field stations for action research and evaluation on
adult education in association with campuses of the California State University and Community
College system, oriented to
... the development of improved methods of education and training for
non-college bound youth and adults; further that the Legislature require the California State
University and Community College systems to establish a formal program to educate and train a
cadre of adult educators that can work with the spectrum of education, language, and learning needs
of California's undereducated youth and adults."
The establishment of the CWELL Action Research Center in the San Diego Community
College District, Division of Continuing Education,and a new graduate education program
at the San Diego State University for Workforce Education and Lifelong Learning
Specialists (WELLS) demonstrates that the recommendations of the California Workforce
Literacy Task Force can be implemented. We need now to care enough for the adult literacy
education system to provide the planning, resources, research and teacher training to create
an adult literacy education system for California that moves from the margins to the
mainstream of our educational systems and provides a model of adult education for the
nation and the world in the next century.
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