Adult Education's Flexibility; A Resource to All

It is curious to me to see that so many references are made in these discussions about flexibility of delivery, individualized or differentiated instruction to acheive standardized objectives, and using varied means to meet the great variety of needs of the learners of California.  While standards and standardized testing are inevitably part of the landscape, there seems to be a renewed interest in meeting the students where they are.  What is curious is that there is a strong and successful delivery system that has done this for decades that is virtually excluded from the Master Plan to date.  Adult education has always taken instruction as close to the student as possible: community centers, local elementary schools, senior residences, churches and libraries, the private workplace and the home's television and computer.  Adult education has always incorporated comptency-based insturction: what do you need to do, how do you learn it, how do you demonstrate you've learned it.  Adult education has always had the flexibility to quickly gauge what a learner needs: new computer applications, new challenges for parents, long-term care planning for seniors, vocation-specific English as a Second Language.  Open enrollment and curricular flexibility have made us, proudly, the 7-11 of education: stop and pick some up when YOU need it.  What others claim as academic rigor has often seemed uto be rigor mortis to many of our students who come back to us from other systems.  When there is a system already in place that values and implements the strategies that work best for many of our least served populations, why has it been so woefully excluded in the Master Plan?  In this seamless educational system of the perfecting future, who will speak for the working poor, the senior, single parent, the adult immigrant?  Will this great hope of plan be inclusive or exclusive?