By Kathryn Baron • Thoughts on Public Education • http://bit.ly/LuCymv
PART 1: Adult Ed falls to flexibility: Districts are sweeping the funds into K12
6/11/12 • The sun was still melting through the gray morning sky as teacher Don Curtis rode his bicycle into a warehouse yard belonging to Oakland Unified School District, opened a large garage door, and backed his classroom into the parking lot.
The mobile classroom parked at West Oakland Middle School.
“It has taken some getting used to driving this vehicle, trust me. The big thing is the back end; when you turn, the back end swings out quite a ways,” said Curtis. But after eight years, he’s had plenty of practice driving the district’s 35-foot-long RV retrofitted with 12 computer workstations and a large screen for projecting lessons.
The mobile classroom, run by the school district’s adult education program, fills several spaces on a busy street next to Oakland’s Urban Promise Academy Middle School. It’s also full on the inside, with nearly two dozen parents of Promise Academy students sitting snugly on chairs and stools in order to buddy up at the workstations, while Curtis teaches them the basics of computer literacy: setting up email, doing a simple web search, and navigating the parent information section of the district’s website.
On the sides and front of the RV, painted in multicolored letters, is a sign reading “Sharing English Together.” But that tag line is archaic. Despite the high-tech equipment inside, the RV is emblematic of a threatened species, a relic of Oakland’s once thriving adult education program.
Don Curtis teaches computer literacy and drives the classroom.>>
The district’s program no longer offers English as a Second Language. It has also cancelled basic skills classes for adults who left school very young, often to work, and, at the other end, has dropped a high school diploma program for students who are a few credits shy of completion. A popular certified nursing assistant program is down to two sessions instead of seven, and two of the three schools have been closed.
“It’s been a year since the two campuses have closed. But we’re still getting calls asking if people can get their high school diploma,” said Chris Nelson, director of Oakland’s adult education program and president of the California Council for Adult Education (CCAE). “It’s heartbreaking to have to cut these classes knowing how much the community needs them.”
Flexibility breeds contretemps
Until 2009, adult education was protected as a categorical program in California, meaning the money couldn’t be used for any other purpose. In February of that year, state legislators gave school districts permission to use funds from 39 categorical programs – including adult education – wherever they were most needed, and cut the budget for those programs by 20 percent.
What districts did with categorical flex. (Source: California Legislative Analyst)
Since then, local school boards have closed 32 adult education programs and cut at least half the funding for more than 40 others, according to a survey conducted a few months ago by the adult education administrators in Montebello Unified School District. Later this week, EdSource will be releasing a new report and survey of how this categorical flexibility, or “flex” as it’s described, threatens to dismantle the nation’s oldest adult education program.
<< Chris Nelson is director of Adult Ed in Oakland Unified School District and president of the California Council for Adult Education.
Oakland’s program was among the hardest hit, losing 90 percent of its funding. In the past three years, it’s dropped from $11.4 million to $1 million. During that same period, said Nelson, enrollment fell from 25,000 to 1,000 students, and all but a handful of the 300 teachers and staff members were laid off.
Adult education in California started in 1856, when the San Francisco Board of Education sponsored evening classes in elementary and vocational education in the basement of St. Mary’s Cathedral, according to the 2005 book Meeting the Challenge: A History of Adult Education in California, published by the state Department of Education.
Adult Ed cuts and closures. (Source: Montebello Unified School District, Adult Ed program)
Nelson is exasperated when he considers how far the program has come, only to now face being done in by a budget deficit. “Adult education has survived the Civil War, two world wars, and the Great Depression,” he said. “I believe that adult education can move forward; it should be able to.”
Get on the bus
Edgar Melchor first saw the mobile classroom when he brought his son to school. He has two children in the district and works at Whole Foods, the high-end grocery chain. Melchor said even though most of his work involves computers, his skills weren’t very good. He has a computer at home that his children use, but as far as he was concerned it was just a decoration – until he enrolled in Curtis’ class. The class runs four days a week, it’s free, and there’s childcare in the middle school for parents with younger kids.
“It helps me communicate better with [my children], because kids know a language we don’t know, the language of computers, and now I understand it,” said Melchor. “I help them every day with homework now.” And when he’s stumped, he emails Curtis.
“That’s part of the beauty of family literacy, that the kids see that their parents are taking these classes,” said Curtis. “I think it’s a huge impact for children to see their parents studying; it’s like trickle down, I would liken it to.”
The class has also given Melchor the confidence to apply for a better position at work, and he plans to enroll in a GED course. So it troubles him that the program has been cut so drastically. Every day he sees parents trying to sign up for the class, but they’re turned away because it’s already packed. “We should do something, we should come up with some funds to support this,” said Melchor. “You can see that we don’t need that much. We are here in a trailer; I don’t think we need that much to learn.”
Creating lifelong learners
GED teacher Carolyn Chin >>
The district’s GED program is held in what’s known as a permanent portable classroom. It doesn’t travel, but on a spring morning it was shuddering as work crews pounded away at a nearby construction site. The noise didn’t seem to distract any of Carolyn Chin’s two dozen students as they practiced mathematical word problems.
Chin is fervent about her work. Last summer, when it wasn’t clear whether she’d have a job in the fall, she held the class anyway, arranging to use her regular classroom. “My students wanted to maintain their momentum, so I wanted to make that happen for them,” she explained modestly. Her students are so loyal, they can’t seem to stop coming, even when they’ve completed the class.
Florence Edwards already passed the GED exam, took the certified nursing assistant class, works full time, and has enrolled in a nursing program at Merritt College for the fall semester. None of that has kept the recently naturalized immigrant from Ghana from showing up regularly in Chin’s class. “I always come here on my break time, I come here to refresh my mind,” said Edwards.
<< Florence Edwards earned a GED and nursing assistant certificate and is pursuing a degree in nursing.
Roberto Perez can’t stop smiling as he talks about graduating from the GED class later this month. “I couldn’t believe it,” he gushed. “When I first came here, I came to try, but I never think I’m going to make it and it was a big surprise when I got my scores and it said I passed; and I jumping and I still can’t believe it!”
Roberto Perez in Carolyn Chin's GED class. >>
Perez is a cook in an Italian restaurant in San Francisco and will study to become a chef next September at City College of San Francisco. But his future was uncertain at the end of the last academic year when all the teachers were laid off shortly after he started in Chin’s class. His nightmare was that the district would stop offering GED courses. “Now I’m going to say keep this open, the GED, because I think everybody deserves a second chance,” said Perez.
A lot of people in Oakland need second chances. About 30 percent of the adult population are considered functionally illiterate and 21 percent don’t have high school diplomas – higher in some neighborhoods. None of this is lost on the school district, but its primary mission is K-12 education and those schools have been cut so much that there was little question about appropriating the flex funds.
“These are tough decisions in terms of which programs need to be reduced, schools to close, so that we can actually function, deliver a quality program for all of the students and also be fiscally solvent,” explained Deputy Superintendent Maria Santos, who oversees adult education in Oakland Unified School District.
She acknowledged that those decisions aren’t made in a political vacuum. “I think some of the critical considerations that come to mind are what we’re held accountable for,” said Santos. That means ensuring that students improve their scores on statewide achievement tests, that they meet academic standards and increase their graduation rates.
<< As Deputy Superintendent of Instruction, Maria Santos oversees Adult Ed in Oakland Unified.
The district is hoping to offset some of the cuts to adult education by developing partnerships with local community organizations and community colleges, funding ESL classes through a different categorical account, and making sure that alternative programs like continuation schools are utilized to their fullest.
Santos was calm, even impassive while discussing the situation, as though she’d heard and said it all many times before. But at the end of the conversation, she stood up, rapped her knuckles on the conference table in her office, and conceded, “These are tough decisions; there are no good decisions when it comes to money.”
PART 2: Need to “hunker down” and fight
This is the second of a two-part series on adult education in California. Posted on 6/13/12 | http://bit.ly/L5Spvl
Adult education in California is nearly as old as the state itself. Today, the program that has helped millions of people learn English, earn a GED, and receive job training for 156 years is facing extinction. A new report released today by EdSource concludes that these schools, which provide second chances for the state’s most needy adults, “are as much at-risk as many of the people they serve.”
The report, aptly titled At Risk: Adult Schools in California, (following) surveyed the state’s 30 largest school districts and found that 23 had made significant cuts to their adult education programs. In many cases, they lost at least half their funding. One of them, Anaheim Union High School District, shuttered its 73-year-old adult school.
“The important thing to remember is that these adult school programs are serving a population that really falls through the cracks,” said Louis Freedberg, Executive Director of EdSource. “This is a population that needs basic education in basic skills, that needs help with English as a Second Language, and for whom there is really no other place to go to get these basic services.”
Adult ed cuts in 30 largest districts. (Source: EdSource)
These draconian cuts have taken place in just the past three years. Until 2009, adult education funding was protected as a categorical program, meaning districts could not use the money for any other purpose. But that February, faced with a massive budget shortfall, the Legislature and Gov. Brown removed 39 programs – including adult ed – from this restriction and gave school districts flexibility to use the funds wherever they were most needed.
A survey of several hundred school districts conducted by the adult education program in Montebello Unified School District found that about 40 have closed or are planning to shut their adult education programs, and estimated that, statewide, districts have redirected about 60 percent of the $773 million in adult education funds to the K-12 system. At the same time, enrollment dropped from 1.2 million students to about 700,000.
“We were actually growing before the cuts started,” said Pam Garramone, principal of Sonoma Valley Adult School, which closes at the end of this month. Garramone said there were six adult school agencies in Sonoma County before flex started; now there’s only one, Petaluma, and it doesn’t have the capacity to accommodate the 10,000 people who have been shut out.
Farewell message on Sonoma Valley Adult School site.
Garramone said her district has always been very supportive of adult education, but was placed in an untenable position. “Our budget situation was just so drastic that every single thing that was on the list to be cut was painful for them, and they’re looking at even more cuts next year, so the decision to finally close adult education they just felt had to be made,” she said. “And I really don’t blame them; I didn’t necessarily agree with it, but I certainly don’t blame them for the decision.”
She blames the Legislature. Adult education should never have been flexed, said Garramone. Even though categorical flex is supposed to end on June 30, 2015, few people expect to see the money again. Indeed, Gov. Brown’s proposal for a weighted student funding formula would make categorical flexibility permanent.
Paul Hay, the superintendent of San Jose’s Metropolitan Education District (MetroED), told EdSource if weighted student funding is approved, “adult education is dead, gone, over, and will never come back in the state.”
MetroED’s enrollment plunged from 10,000 to 2,000 after it closed more than 50 programs, two major campuses, and all its community outreach centers except for a program for disabled adults.
Societal impact
The adult education program in Oakland Unified School District was among the hardest hit without being closed. It has been cut by more than 90 percent since the start of flex, losing $11 million of a $12 million budget which necessitated shutting two campuses and canceling English as a second language courses as well as its high school credit recovery program. The GED classes are still thriving, however, and graduated 95 students last year.
“When we were cut our numbers were at the highest they’ve been, this would have been our best year ever,” said Chris Nelson, director of the district’s adult education programs and president of the California Council for Adult Education. “It’s ironic now that the economy is so bad because it’s during times of high unemployment that people seek education programs.”
Donita McKay standing outside the Oakland adult ed computer literacy RV. >>
Donita McKay is studying for her GED and taking a computer literacy course through Oakland’s adult education school. McKay is 49 years old, a single mom with four children, and a ninth-grade drop out. She said being back in school has opened her mind and given her a different outlook on life.
“Education is important because when you don’t have it you’re so limited,” said McKay. “I always tell my children, get your education, because I didn’t really get all mine, so and you see where I’m at. They hear that from my mouth everyday.”
Sitting at small workstation in an RV retrofitted as mobile computer classroom, McKay said she’s considering becoming a teacher one day, “because I always like to give back and give what I learned, because it reminds me I used to be like that.”
Oakland has all the challenges of any big city. English is not the first language for about 40 percent of the population and in some neighborhoods the high school dropout rate is a staggering 60 to 70 percent, said Mayor Jean Quan, who spent twelve years on the local school board.
<< Oakland Mayor Jean Quan
“What I really worry about is California creating a permanent underclass,” said Quan. “This is one of the ways out; this is one of the second chances that people have, and if people don’t have at least a high school degree it’s very hard to even get a good paying blue-collar job.”
Not dead yet
Gordon Jackson is head of the Adult Education Division of the California Department of Education. He said the mission of adult education is to advance the “economic, workforce development and societal goals by preparing adult learners for college, career and civic responsibility.”
It’s a critical goal, but one that doesn’t have critical support. Although adult education programs are run by both K-12 school districts and community colleges, it’s not the core mission of either. So, it’s taken some time for advocates to organize, but they’ve started considering alternatives on a number of fronts.
Several proposals are being floated said EdSource’s Freedberg. One idea is to combine resources and establish regional centers. Another, put forth by the state’s Little Hoover Commission, recommends turning over responsibility for adult education to community college; even thought they
Gordon Jackson, Director of Adult Education Division, CA Dept. of Education. (Source: CDE).>>
are facing their own massive budget cuts. And a third plan, already underway, is to lobby the Legislature to remove adult education from categorical flex and from the governor’s weighted student funding formula.
“There are times when I would like to sit next to somebody at Starbucks and moan and groan and say I cannot believe that there are adults in this world of ours at the legislative level and other places who don’t really understand what it means to demolish an infrastructure, what it means to do this to California’s future,” said Jackson. “I can bemoan that and have a really intense pity party for a while, until I need to focus on what needs to happen.”
EdSource - At Risk: Adult Schools in CaliforniaTo learn more:
California Adult Education Administrators Association
California Council for Adult Education
ENDING California’s Public Adult Education Through Policy: Will you let it happen? California Federation of Teachers, April 13, 2012.
Linking Adults to Opportunity: Transformation of the California Department of Education Adult Education Program. CDE’s Strategic Plan. Nov. 2011.
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