ADULT EDUCATION IN AMERICA

Adult Education in America



Adult Education in America

Introduction

Today in America the rewards for what one knows and can do are large and growing. Literacy and numeracy skills have become a currency both here in the United States and in many developed countries around the world. Those in our society with below average skills cannot hope to earn above average wages in a global economy. Neither can they hope to participate fully in an evolving society where individuals are required to take on additional responsibility for more aspects of their lives in the face of increasing types and amounts of information. Policy makers and others are coming to recognize that, in modern societies, human capital, or what one knows and can do, may be the most important form of capital.

The book is Adult Education in America

In the book Adult Education is basically a survey which was conducted to provide comprehensive information about federally funded adult education programs and the skills of participants enrolled in those programs. The study had two primary goals. The first was to gather and disseminate information about the programs that constitute the adult education system in the United States. The second was to assess and report on literacy and numeracy skills of a nationally representative sample of adults who participated in those programs. Such information is particularly timely given that the major federal statute authorizing adult education activities—the Workforce Investment Act—expired at the end of fiscal year 2004 and has yet to be reauthorized by Congress. For the more than two million adults who currently participate in federally supported adult education programs, acquiring literacy and numeracy skills matters, perhaps now more than ever, and adult education programs have a vital role to play in improving their educational opportunities and outcomes.

Summary of Chapter 3

We have divided this chapter in to different headings, which indicate what this chapter explains. The following are given below:

Literacy and Numeracy Skills

Differences in performance were found between adult learners and the general adult population on all three proficiency scales.

Gender, Age and Skills

Larger gender differences were observed in terms of labor market outcomes including participation rates and salaries, even for adults within the same educational level. This was particularly clear for the AEPS population where there were larger proportions of older adults performing at Level 1, with the opposite true for Levels 2 and 3. Within levels, the ALL population showed a more uniform distribution of learners by age groups.

Race/Ethnicity, Place of Birth and Skills

The average performance of Hispanic adult learners in the AEPS was 19 to 26 points less than the average performance of the general population of Hispanic adults in the ALL population. Native-born adults represented 83 percent of the ALL population with only 16 percent scoring at Level 1 on the document literacy scale. In both populations, performance differences between adults in the top and bottom percentiles were wider for nonnative learners in all three scales.

Educational Attainment and Skills

A positive relationship existed between educational attainment and performance for both groups ...