Adult Education Groups Protest Potential Cuts

A recent immigrant from Turkey, Seyide Kuran, can hardly speak a sentence in English, but this month she submitted a handwritten letter to the editor. “I am a student in the Adult Literacy Program at Brooklyn College,” she wrote. “Out program needs your help.”The letter was written at the behest of her English literacy teacher at Brooklyn College, she said, who wanted her students to express to newspapers their opposition to President Bush’s proposal to cut by almost two-thirds the federal financing of adult education.“It was just an assignment people had to do,” Ms. Kuran’s son, Erkan Kuran, said in a telephone interview, translating for his mother.Adult-education administrators at CUNY said adult-literacy students were not required to write letters to protest the budget cuts. Rather, they said, letters like Ms. Kuran’s point to the outrage among students over the White House’s 2006 proposed budget cuts in grants to states for adult education.“It was not an assignment. We discussed the cuts in class. Students are understandably upset,” the director of the adult-literacy program at Brooklyn College, Anita Caref, said.Ms. Caref and other CUNY officials said the university would have to turn away thousands of adult students if Congress approves the White House cuts. In his budget, Mr. Bush proposed cutting the total adult-education state grants by $370 million, to $200 million. A protest against the cuts at Union Square Park is planned tomorrow, which will bring together students, instructors, and adult-education organizers from various city groups.One protest organizer, Ira Yankwitt, director of the New York City Regional Adult Education Network, accused the Bush administration of slashing the literacy program money to “pay for the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.”“This is a radical effort to roll back any vestiges of the New Deal or the war on poverty,” Mr. Yankwitt said.The Bush administration said the cuts were made to a program that has failed to demonstrate success. A supplementary document to the 2006 budget proposal explaining the reasons behind the cuts states: “The program does not have strong accountabilities mechanism to ensure that States and localities support effective programs that will achieve measurable results.”The document points to a negative report by the White House Office of Management and Budget, which used a three-year-old formula for grading all federal programs and agencies, called the Program Assessment Rating Tool, to determine that the adult-education grants lacked accountability.Proponents of the literacy grants said the OMB’s rating tool used inappropriate criteria to grade the programs, a formula designed to measure the effectiveness of employment programs. Measures for job-training programs “do not apply to an education program like adult education,” a report from the National Council of State Directors of Adult Education stated.The report, issued in reaction to the OMB analysis, argues that the OMB unfairly penalized adult-education programs for not reporting target employment goals. CUNY officials said they had never heard of the rating tool before the Bush administration cited it in its budget report.Adult-education activists also pointed out that most states have passed the Department of Education’s own performance review, called the National Reporting System. It uses figures submitted by the state education departments, such as the numbers of students who move to higher levels, pass the GED, or find jobs.“The purpose of the adult-education program is for adults to become literate and to become employed and self-sufficient, and consequently the program assessment rating tool had to measure the success of the program in terms of both literacy and employment,” a spokeswoman for OMB, Sarah Hawkins, said yesterday. Advocates for adult-education grants said the effects of the cuts could be drastic.At CUNY, they foresaw a possible reduction of enrollment in free adult-literacy programs at 13 campuses by 3,300, to fewer than 7,000 students, as well as displacement of dozens of fulltime and part-time instructors.CUNY receives most of its public funds for its free literacy programs from the federal government through the Workforce Investment Act of 1998. The adult-literacy program at La Guardia Community College, for instance, receives $500,000 a year from the federal government and another $150,000 in city tax-levy funds, according to the director of the college’s English-language center, Mae Dick. Her program serves about 600 students at a time, she said.La Guardia, like other CUNY campuses, offers a number of other fee based programs for students who wish to improve their English skills. The ESL courses at LaGuardia cost from $200 to $1,000, Ms. Dick said, and have much shorter waiting lists.

Adult Education Groups Protest Potential Cuts

Adult Education Groups Protest Potential Cuts

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