Adult Ed in the comprehensive plan

I have been reflecting over the weekend on the dialogue at the WLAC community meeting on the "Master Plan" sponsored by Sen. Murray. One of the points Sen. Murray made, in response to adult education concerns about recommendation 8 (which calls for either reciprocity between K-12 adult ed and community college non-credit program credentialing, or 'common requirements' for credentials) was that we should recognize that currently in adult education we have the equivalent of "emergency credentials" in K-12, in that new teachers are usually issued preliminary credentials based on limited coursework, which are then cleared by taking additional post-graduate courses after starting to teach. Many of us couldn't hear this at first, because it is the standard credentialing path, not an emergency exemption to credentialing requirements to fill hard-to-staff (read, "inner-city") schools.

However, I realized that Sen. Murray was correct in his assessment and it made me realize how much we in adult education have internalized, or at least accommodated ourselves to the "second-class-citizen" status of adult education. As H Rap Brown once said, there's no such thing as a second class citizen; citizenship is like pregnancy -- you either are or you're not.

Adult education has for too long been conceptualized as "night school," a part-time program staffed primarily by 'moonlighters.' We in adult ed all know that this is no longer the case. In LAUSD, for example, the majority of student hours are now in the daytime, not the evening. There are 5 times as many teachers who work exclusively in adult education as those who work extra assignments after a day teaching K-12 courses. Yet these realities are not reflected in either our image or in the (lack of) importance given to adult education in the comprehensive state plan.

It is actually time to do a major re-conceptualization of adult education. It is true, as many of my colleagues have said in this dialogue, that we are already doing many of the things called for in the plan, and doing them well. But it is also true that we do it with inadequate resources and within counter-productive constraints. We need to think about adult education as a full partner in both the teaching profession and the provision of educational services. That means we need to provide adult educators a fully-credentialed entry path to adult education, with a corresponding full-time employment, full benefits and a career path and ladder in the classroom, staff development and all the responsibilities that go with them. Our students deserve nothing less.

Right now, many people enter adult education as part-timers with no benefits and with no mechanism for achieving permanent through evaluation of their teaching and completion of a clear set of standard educational and staff development requirements. this reflects the general step-child status of adult education. This comprehensive plan is the opportunity to relegate that inferior status, for both the program and its teachers, to the dustbin where it belongs.

Consider for a moment that in LA Unified, we have a student body (at least in terms of individuals, not student contact hours) as large as the elementary or secondary division -- over 400,000 students in the course of a year. Yet we serve this population on less that 1% of the district's budget. This is a "bargain" that is paid for in part by the sub-standard salary schedule and retirement options of adult educators, as well as by maintaining class size mininums that are larger than some of the maximums in K-12. Time for a change.