November 17, 2016
On
Oct. 31, the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education hosted its first
Advancing Equity Symposium to support the increased emphasis the Obama
Administration is giving to equity for all populations across the education
spectrum. The symposium featured a
keynote address by Secretary of Education John B. King, Jr., a discussion with
senior Department of Education officials on advancing equity through federally
funded initiatives, a variety of smaller sessions addressing issues and
concerns regarding equity, a discussion of “implicit bias” and “systemic
inequities,” and a panel of students on their experiences with equity.
A
number of central themes were presented; beginning with Secretary King’s
opening remarks emphasizing the need for enhancing equity of access, quality,
and results in order to help more Americans achieve their academic, career, and
civic goals. This, the secretary acknowledged,
is a formidable challenge because equity concerns affect many diverse groups of
students—first generation and low-income students; students of color; older
students facing the challenge of juggling jobs, families, and education; and
returning students intent on completing their education goals.
The
symposium also focused on how best to serve these various groups of students. Several speakers acknowledged that while much
has been done to promote equity in access, quality, and results, much more
remains to be done. Inequity persists in
many dimensions of education. Students
in poverty attend high-poverty schools at a much higher rate than their more
affluent peers. Less experienced and
less qualified teachers often are concentrated in schools and districts serving
low-income students. High-poverty
schools tend to offer less well-rounded curricula and fewer advanced
courses. It therefore is no surprise
that affluent students attend and graduate from college at significantly higher
rates than their lower-income peers.
Access is not enough. Access
without quality perpetuates the inequity that low-income students
encounter.
Matters
that affect low-income students overlap with those facing first generation
students; students with limited English language proficiency; students with
disabilities; older students; and other groups that struggle to achieve the
same access, quality, and results as their more-advantaged peers. The
disparities persist beyond schooling.
Employer-provided training tends to focus on college graduates, with
much less training provided to those employees with limited college experience
or only a high school diploma, or those who did not complete secondary
schooling. Adult education, while
available to a limited number of those needing assistance, does not have the
capacity to make up the large differences that exist.
Symposium
participants pointed to efforts that are being made to overcome the equity gap,
but as a whole, these efforts remain inadequate in both scope and quality. Both the need and the challenge are great. Achieving equity of access, quality, and
results are key goals to our success as a nation and to the success of all
Americans.
For
more information, click on this link to all the plenary sessions, Advancing Equity
Symposium Videos
and this link to OCTAE’s Advancing Equity Community of Practice, https://community.lincs.ed.gov/group/advancing-equity.
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According
to the National
Governors Association (NGA), preparing a
workforce with the skills necessary to make states more economically
competitive is a top priority for governors across the United States. This
priority is discussed in a new NGA report, State Strategies to
Scale Quality Work-Based Learning.
The report discusses ways to prepare the workforce with demand-driven skills to meet the needs of
businesses and make states more economically competitive. It may be of interest
to programs and entities responsible for the learning needs of individuals
already in the workforce and those looking to upgrade their skill levels.
According
to the report, industries across all states are struggling to find qualified
applicants for jobs at the same time that job-seekers are finding they do not
have the skills needed to enter the workforce or progress along a career
pathway. Thus, there is a growing mismatch between the needs of industry and
the skills of American workers that has resulted in a significant negative impact
on the economic competitiveness of a state.
Information was drawn from a
roundtable of experts in work-based learning convened by the National Governors
Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) in late 2015. It highlights the
experiences of the six states participating in an NGA Center policy academy
focused on scaling work-based learning programs in high-demand, middle-skills
science, technology, engineering, and math careers.
According to the NGA,
governors—working with their industry, education, and workforce partners—are
uniquely positioned to scale and sustain participation in high-quality,
work-based learning. They are able to achieve this by elevating high-quality,
work-based learning; implementing state-led pilots; building an infrastructure
to scale and sustain efforts; and providing incentives to host and support
work-based learning opportunities.
To learn more about
state strategies to scale up the quality of work-based learning, please access
the full brief.
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The
new Sustainability Toolkit was released recently by the U.S. Department of
Labor’s Employment and Training Administration as part of its technical
assistance for Trade Adjustment Assistance
Community College Career Training (TAACCCT) grantees. It provides a framework
that can be used by a wide range of grantees. The tool kit allows for
self-assessment in six areas that support the sustainability of programs and
innovations developed by grantees.
To
access the TAACCCT Sustainability Toolkit, please visit the TAACCCT Community
of Practice on Workforce GPS at https://taaccct.workforcegps.org/resources/2016/07/25/13/22/Resource_TAACCCTSustainabilityToolkit.
You
can also listen to the TAACCCT Sustainability Toolkit Launch Webinar on
Workforce GPS here, https://www.workforcegps.org/events/2016/07/18/11/38/TAACCCT_Sustainability_Toolkit_Launch_Webinar. It includes
examples of how TAACCCT grantees are actively engaged in sustainability
planning.
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Looking
for free resources to aid in designing, managing, and expanding courses for
career training? SkillsCommons is an online
repository hosting thousands of free and openly licensed course and educational
program support materials being developed by nearly 700 colleges across the U.S.,
funded by the U.S. Department of Labor’s TAACCCT grant program.
More
than 6,500 resources are already available for download, featuring curricula
for both short and long-term courses leading to industry-certified credentials
in 16 high-demand fields, such as manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and
information technology. While there are multiple repositories of open
educational resources (OER), SkillsCommons is the world’s largest OER project
featuring job-driven workforce development materials, with more resources being
added continually. All teaching, learning, and supporting materials on
SkillsCommons are available under a Creative Commons license (CC BY) that
allows others to use and adapt the materials for free, including commercial use
of derivatives. To date, the site has already generated more than 150,000
downloads.
SkillsCommons
has implemented seven types of “makeover strategies” to illustrate
how innovative technologies can be applied to the site’s content to create
engaging, interactive educational materials tailored to the needs of students.
The strategies provide “before” and “after” views of content using different
designs and highlighting the advantages of the new derivative works. These
strategies include support for interactive content (including games, quizzes,
and mobile-friendly content), learning management systems, eBooks, and much
more.
SkillsCommons.org
is designed and managed by California State University (CSU) and its Multimedia
Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) program under a
cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Labor. Extensive user support
resources are available on the website, and the SkillsCommons CSU-MERLOT team
of leaders, librarians, educators, and developers are available to assist
anyone interested in using and adapting the OER on SkillsCommons.
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On Nov. 15, 2016, the Department of Education’s National Center for
Education Statistics released the latest installment of findings from the Survey of Adult Skills, part of the Program for the International Assessment of Adult
Competencies (PIAAC). This report, Highlights from the U.S.
PIAAC Survey of Incarcerated Adults: Their Skills, Work Experience, Education,
and Training, presents new data collected from a nationally representative
sample of incarcerated men and women, ages 18–74, in 98 state and federal
prisons in 2014. It describes the literacy and numeracy levels of these adults
by age, gender, and ethnicity and compares these findings to the general
household population, which was surveyed in 2012 and supplemented in 2014. The survey’s
background questionnaire, adapted for the incarcerated population, provides a
rich profile of background data, work experiences, and education and training
participation patterns while in prison.
Listed below are key findings in literacy and numeracy from the report:
- The average literacy score for the U.S. prison
population was lower than the average literacy score for the U.S. household
population, and a higher percentage of incarcerated adults (29 percent) were
low-skilled (scored below PIAAC’s Level 2) in literacy compared to adults in
the U.S. household population (19 percent).
- While the average literacy score for
incarcerated white adults was lower than the average score for white adults in
the U.S. household population, the average literacy scores for incarcerated black
and Hispanic adults were not measurably different from the average literacy
scores for black and Hispanic adults in the U.S. household population.
-
The average numeracy score for the U.S. prison
population was much lower than the average numeracy score for the U.S.
household population, putting a higher percentage of incarcerated adults (52
percent) in the low-skilled range compared to adults in the U.S. household
population (29 percent).
Echoing findings on skill levels and skill-use patterns in the household survey,
incarcerated adults’ skills showed the following interesting findings related
to adults’ prior and current work history:
- Around two-thirds (66 percent) of inmates
reported that they were working prior to their incarceration—about half (49
percent) were employed full-time, with another 16 percent working part-time.
- Adults who were employed prior to their
incarcerations had higher average numeracy scores.
- Incarcerated adults holding a prison job had
higher average literacy scores than their peers who did not have a prison
job. Yet many incarcerated workers
reported that their jobs did not require the use of literacy and numeracy
skills on a regular basis.
- Those with skills certifications scored higher
on literacy and numeracy than their peers without such certifications.
Previous research from the Rand Corporation
and the U.S.
Department of Education has shown the value of education and training in
prison and the value of industry-recognized credentials to reduce recidivism.
The U.S. PIAAC Survey of Incarcerated Adults sheds light on how incarcerated adults are participating—or not—as
follows:
- Fifty-eight percent of incarcerated adults
completed no further formal education beyond the level they had on their entry
to prison, and 21 percent obtained a high school credential during their
current period of incarceration.
- For incarcerated adults, more education
completed was associated with higher skills in both literacy and numeracy.
- Twenty-one percent of incarcerated adults were
studying for a formal degree or credential.
- The most desirable educational programs for
incarcerated adults who wanted to enroll in academic programs were those which
offered a certificate from college or trade school (29 percent). High school
completion (18 percent) and associate’s degree programs (18 percent) were the
next most popular.
- Seventy percent reported that they wanted to
enroll in an academic class or program, but twenty-five percent of these adults
were on a waiting list for academic classes or programs of study in 2014.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 600,000 individuals are released from
prison each year in the United States. From the Highlights from the U.S. PIAAC
Survey of Incarcerated Adults, more than half of incarcerated adults
had two years or less remaining on their sentences (54 percent), with about one
in five (19 percent) having fewer than six months left to serve.All related PIACC survey reports are available at http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/.
All related PIACC survey reports are available at http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/.
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