Intergenerational Workforce Literacy Development

2/6/2013

Intergenerational Workforce Literacy Development:

Toward a Multiple Life Cycles Education Policy

Tom Sticht International Consultant in Adult Education

The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998 includes as Title 2: The Adult Education and Family Literacy Act AEFLA). This implies that adult education is concerned with both the improvement of adults as members of the workforce and as members of families. Yet, the National Reporting System, which is the accountability system for the AEFLA, includes measures only of the learning and education outcomes for the individual learner (educational gain; high school completion, entered postsecondary education or training) and workforce outcomes in its performance measures (entered employment; retained employment). Despite the fact that the AEFLS expressly refers to family literacy, the NRS reports nothing about the influence of adult education on the literacy of the family.

Given the importance of the education of adults on the educational achievements of their children, the failure to obtain outcome measures of the effects of adult education on the adult’s children is a serious omission in the accountability system of the Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS) supported by the AEFLA and state funds.

Over thirty years ago, in a 1979 speech to the American Association of Publishers meeting in Palm Beach, Florida, I called attention to The Cycles of Marginal Literacy and Marginal Living resulting from the lack of strong literacy skills among millions of adults. The next year, in 1980 I made a presentation to the National Academy of Education meeting inToronto, Ontario, Canada which I subsequently published in 1983 with the title Literacy and Human Resources Development at Work: Investing in the Education of Adults to Improve the Educability of Children.

In the latter report, I indicated how adult literacy educators could work with employers to provide basic skills education contextualized within and integrated with job skills training to cost-effectively improve the literacy skills of the workforce while also providing an intergenerational improvement in the literacy and educational achievement of the adult’s children.

A few years later, in 1991, I co-authored a report of research conducted in partnership with Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW) in Washington, DC in which we tested the hypothesis that adult literacy education could have intergenerational effects. We found that providing workforce education integrated with basic skills training for mothers on welfare did indeed lead to intergenerational effects on the women’s children. This was true for both cognitive behaviors, such as reading more to their children, and non-cognitive behaviors such as greater motivation to do their homework on the part of the women’s children. These intergenerational effects of adult workplace literacy were again found in the mid-1990’s in six programs in the Chicago area.

Today, there are additional calls for recognizing the value of the intergenerational effects of parent education. We have had family literacy programs for over two decades in which parents and their children are enrolled in education programs together. More recently, the Aspen Institute has initiated the Ascend Family Economic Security Program which, like family literacy programs, takes what it calls a “two-generation” approach to helping move parents, especially women, and their children beyond poverty through education and family supports.

In a 2010 article published in Education Canada, a magazine of the Canadian Education Association, I called for changing education policy away from a focus on the lifespan of one individual and focusing instead upon the effects of education on multiple life cycles. I illustrated in that article that many of the cognitive and non-cognitive benefits of early childhood education result from the changes the programs make in the parents of the children. This lead to an article in 2011 for the American Educator, a magazine of the American Federation of Teachers, entitled Getting It Right From the Start: The Case for Early Parenthood Education.

And this brings me back to the need to focus more attention upon the family literacy component in the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998. This act carries the potential to bridge education across generations to improve the productivity of adults both at work and in the home. By accomplishing the latter, the AEFLA may also contribute to reducing inequalities in education and economic standing that are presently the concern of numerous organizations and governments at the State and Federal level.

In my free workshop for 2013, entitled Intergenerational Workforce Literacy Development, I review additional evidence for and educational program practices which are moving us more and more toward a multiple life cycles education policy. Spring workshops include Fairfield, CA in April and Dearborn, MI in May. 

tsticht@aznet.net