National Coalition for Literacy

. . . by: establishing goals for co-enrollment; establishing shared accountabilities for serving adult education students; explicitly allowing career pathways, integrated education/training and dual and concurrent enrollment; and creating a new funding stream to support a career pathways leadership grant program.

—An NCL WIA Reauthorization Priority

Article by Amy Ellen Duke-Benfield

The Adult Education and Family Literacy Act (Title II, Workforce Investment Act, WIA) set broad economic and educational goals for adult education and English literacy programs. The law includes entry and success in postsecondary education, job training, and employment as core performance indicators and encourages integration of adult education with career development and employment and training services.

Many adult education students have economic goals for pursuing education; reaching these goals requires services and supports beyond those that the adult education system alone can provide. These students want and need to achieve an economically valuable credential as efficiently as possible, given the other pressing demands of work and family on their time.

Unfortunately, state longitudinal tracking of adult education student outcomes show that few adult education students are completing postsecondary education and training.  CLASP has developed recommendations that would help more students achieve these goals by better aligning the activities of the WIA Title I Adult program and the Title II program. The National Coalition for Literacy has adopted these recommendations as stated above.

Establishing goals for co-enrollment: We need to require states to promote closer connections between Titles I and II and to set targets that steadily increase the percentage of co-enrolled students over time, because they haven’t done so on their own. Very few adults are co-enrolled in WIA Title I Adult program, which offers employment and training services, and WIA Title II adult education services, and WIA Title I has been serving declining numbers of low skilled and limited English proficient adults.

During PY 2007, only 0.2 percent of exiters from the WIA Title I Adult program were co-enrolled in adult education. [i] There is no comparable information on the percentage of Title II students who are co-enrolled with Title I. This low level of co-enrollment could have a significant negative effect on program outcomes for adults in Title II, because WIA Title I could be providing career advising, job placement, job training, and support services to adults who are also receiving adult education and ESL instruction, allowing for comprehensive and integrated services.

Establishing goals for co-enrollment in Titles I and II will help adult education students gain access valuable services that have been shown to increase persistence among adult learners.  CLASP  envisions the Departments of Education and Labor negotiating these targets with individual states, and that a target as low as 3 or 4 percent would be a vast improvement over current rates.

Shared accountability: WIA Titles I and II also should be better aligned within a career pathways framework both to provide more intensive and integrated workforce development and adult education services that are linked to income, work and academic supports and to better connect these systems with employers and postsecondary education. Program alignment will make it easier for low-skilled youth and adults to gain the skills and marketable credentials they need to advance over time to successively higher levels of education and employment in industry or occupational sectors in demand in the regional economy.

Yet, the performance measures and the process for setting performance expectations in Title I have created disincentives for the workforce investment system to serve less-educated and disadvantaged individuals because these individuals are less likely than higher-educated or higher-skilled individuals to achieve strong labor market outcomes. Incompatible performance accountability systems between Titles I and II are widely acknowledged to be barriers to greater integration of services to help low-skilled learners achieve their career and postsecondary goals.

We call on Congress and the administration to develop a shared system of accountability for workforce education and training system programs that includes both outcome measures of career and postsecondary success and interim measures of participants’ progress toward these outcomes.

Rather than serving as a disincentive to serve “hard-to-serve” individuals, the proposed shared system of accountability would provide incentives for greater integration of efforts across federal programs to help low-income, low-skilled people and others with barriers to employment advance further in the labor market. The shared system of accountability would remove barriers to such integration caused by the current fragmented accountability provisions across programs. It would include the following components:

• A shared set of interim and outcome measures
• Consistent definitions of units of service such as training, integrated programs and bridge programs that can be used across federal programs
• Commonly agreed upon accurate and unbiased cost-allocation methods for services funded by multiple sources
• Consistent standards of data quality and data sharing to assure transparency and privacy and to provide a level of trust among agencies needed to implement a shared system of accountability

Promoting more innovation in adult education services: In recent years, some adult education programs have sought to more strongly link basic skills with workforce and postsecondary education and training. Several states, including Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Kentucky, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin, have been piloting ways to integrate basic skills instruction with postsecondary education and training in “workforce bridge” initiatives to enable more lower-skilled students to earn marketable postsecondary credentials more quickly. They have done so by connecting adult education programs with career pathways, integrating adult education with workforce and postsecondary coursework, and dually and/or concurrently enrolling students in adult education and postsecondary.

Because these activities are not explicitly mentioned as allowable activities in Title II, some states and localities have been wary to adopt such practices and others have only funded these types of activities with foundation or state discretionary dollars, rather than seeking to embed these approaches in traditional adult education programs.

Here is an example of an integrated education and training program called IBEST, from Washington state:

Recently, the Department of Education Office of Vocational and Adult Education issued information about how to implement integrated education and training programs, signaling stronger support for such approaches than had been sent in the past. Such guidance is not enough, though. Adding these activities to the statute would ensure they remain allowable, supported activities—regardless of the Administration in place—and better support the college and career aspirations of more adult education students.

Creating a new funding stream for career pathways state policy leadership grants: Such grants would be jointly administered by the Departments of Education and Labor to support systemic state policy change across adult education and postsecondary education and training programs. Often, these systems are not coordinated, resulting in a leaking pipeline that prevents low-skilled individuals from reaching family-sustaining employment. These grants would provide states with resources to make the necessary changes to align services and improve outcomes across workforce development, postsecondary education, and adult education/English as a Second Language in a career pathway framework.

Midwestern states have engaged in this type of policy work through the Joyce Foundation’s Shifting Gears initiative and are seeing successful transformation in their education and training systems to promote more low-skilled adults gaining marketable credentials leading to family-supporting jobs. While foundation support for career pathways initiatives has been essential to their development and success, a federal funding stream that would support such efforts, even if quite small, would signal strong support and show the federal government has some “skin in the game.”

Do you see these alignment issues as important? Tell us about your experiences on the ground caused by this lack of alignment.  How would better alignment help adult learners? Enter  your comments in the Comment box below.

Relevant documents:

• CLASP’s WIA Title II Reauthorization Recommendations for Career and Postsecondary Success
• CLASP’s Proposal to Create Career Pathways State Policy Leadership Grants Program
• CLASP’s Recommendations for Reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act Adult Program
• CLASP’s Recommendations on Performance Accountability in the Workforce Education and Training System
• Funding Career Pathways and Career Pathway Bridges: A Federal Policy Toolkit for States
• Shifting Gears: State Innovation to Advance Adult Workers and the Economy in the Midwest

[i] Social Policy Research Associates. 2007 WIASRD Data Book, December, 2008.