Over the past few years, the American Council on
Education and the publishing giant Pearson have been revising the GED exam to
make it more of a test of college readiness, rather than what it has been: a
test of basic high-school competencies. The new test has been in place for one
year, and the results have been devastating. According to Cleveland-based
reporter Daniel McGraw, the pass rate on the exam has dropped by 90%. You can
read his comprehensive article here
or incisive blogs on the article by Diane
Ravitch and Jan
Resseger. (A side note: Readers of my blog are familiar with Diane Ravitch.
If you are not familiar with Jan Resseger’s blog, do yourself a favor and sign
up. It’s first class.)
When I was doing the research for Back to School,
the revision of the GED exam was in the works, and a number of adult educators
I spoke with voiced concern over both the rationale for and content of the new exam.
It turns out that they were right. I post below an edited excerpt from Back
to School dealing with the GED. The passage begins with one of the
exceptional teachers I observed.
***
“No one can hide from her,” was one
of the first things I heard about Maria, and it was meant as a big compliment.
She is in her late 40s, medium height, brown hair cut in a simple style,
shoulder length. As she talks she looks at you, looking up from a filing
cabinet, looking sideways as you walk with her. In addition to coordinating the
Adult Secondary Education Program at her school, Maria teaches mathematics,
primarily to those preparing for the GED exam or a high school diploma. I
understood the “no where to hide” comment during my first visit to Maria’s
class. She calls on students, looking particularly at the last rows where the
reluctant sit. She jokes, and pleads, and hectors them to study, to do problems
at home, to come see her. She goes person to person to lock in a meeting: “What
time are you leaving today?” “Do you work every afternoon?” “Do you have Internet
at home?” “Do you live around here?” Then: “OK, I want you to come see me at
3:00.” She and the counselor, Betty, will call people if they begin to miss
school. “You all can do it,” she says to the class, leaning forward, both hands
on the desk. “Even if it is a nightmare, you can do it. But you have to ask for
help.” There is no escaping Maria.
Though some of her students did well
in school in other countries – and therefore have a solid basic education and a
certain assurance about school – many went to school in the U.S. and, for
various reasons, did not do well. School for them is not a pleasant place, and
their fear – which can manifest as withdrawal or rejection – is quivering right
beneath the surface. Nowhere is that fear more palpable than with mathematics.
Given the history of failure and the anxiety some of these students carry, it’s
quite a testament to their willpower that they show up. Maria passionately
wants to get through those emotional barriers: “It’s a light crust,” she says,
“and once you crack it, you can make a change.”
The GED and high school diploma
programs are test-driven, and students prepare for the tests through math and
English classes and through different levels of independent study in the
Independent Learning Center, a large room filled with computers, books, filing
cabinets, long tables, and chairs. This is also the place where students take
most of their tests. Units on science, units on math, all sorts of computer-based
tests on language arts – and written essays, too. So there is a good deal of
back and forth between students at desks or terminals and teachers or aides
going to filing cabinets or computer screens to check scores, monitor progress,
offer direction. On some afternoons when students from different classes
converge, the place is packed.
Given the importance of testing,
it’s no surprise that Maria focuses on test-taking strategies. “Read the
question,” she repeats. “Watch for what is being asked. Don’t do everything
right but forget to really look at the question.” She gives her students
problem after problem, making them read the problems out loud and state
precisely what the problem requires. “They’ll list answers that make sense if
you misread the problem. So, think first!” She gives them tips based on
experience: “The GED loves graphs or tables.” Or “You can bet there will be a
question on scalene triangles.” And she gives them problem-solving routines and
shortcuts. Tricks of the trade. Maria is trying to provide in a few months the
academic know-how that students successful in American schools gain over years.
***
Adult education normally gets little notice in policy
circles or in the media – it lacks status or a powerful constituency – but it
is the focus of attention now, particularly the GED. Every ten or fifteen years
the developer of the GED exam, the American Council on Education – an advocacy
and research organization that created the test during World War II for
military personnel who didn’t complete high school – revises the test, and a
major revision is currently in progress. A big concern is to bring the test in
line with what students will need to know to attend college, and thus reducing
the number of remedial courses many students with GED certificates need to
take, courses that jeopardize their chance of graduating. (By one estimate,
only 10% of GED recipients earn a college degree.) This goal of increasing
graduation rates is in line with a broader push in our society to facilitate
movement up the educational-credentialing ladder – evident in community college circles where
there is renewed emphasis on preparing students to transfer to four-year
schools. The United States is a credentialing society. One hundred years ago, a
high school degree was an unusual achievement (about 7% of the population held
a degree), while today the post-baccalaureate credential or degree is expected
if not required in many fields. The revision of the GED exam fits this pattern.
Approximately 40 million Americans don’t have a high
school degree or GED certificate, and if we want to meet the goals championed
by policy makers to equip more of our citizens with some kind of post-secondary
education, then we will have to tap that 40 million, yet the revision of the
GED exam, important as it is, does raise some concerns.
Education is delivered in a complex social system;
changes in one domain will have an effect on what happens in others. Rethinking
the GED exam as a measure of college readiness will make it harder to pass,
which is not on its own merits a bad thing; raising educational expectations
and preparing people for advancement will have some beneficial consequences. A
previous revision added a writing sample to the multiple choice questions,
which overall led teachers to pay more attention to writing. But if standards
are raised, what will happen to those low-skilled adults who struggle now to
pass the exam, people, who, some studies suggest, stand to gain the most labor
market benefit from it? The test-developers say that they plan to have two
levels of pass, the traditional high school equivalency level and a new level indicating
“college and career readiness.” Fair enough, though the traditional level will
be symbolically rendered even more of a second-class certificate.
The goal of the reformers is, in the words of one
college president, to make the GED “an aspirational degree.” But for some, the
GED certificate already represents a monumental goal, aspiration more dogged
and hopeful than many of us can imagine. Some low-skilled adults at this time
in their lives do not have the finances, family arrangements, support systems,
or work schedules that make any goal beyond passing the exam feasible. If we
want them to achieve more, then we need to go way beyond the amping up of a
test to provide more employment opportunities, childcare and healthcare, and
other social services – all of which are being cut back rather than enhanced.
As we toughen up the GED exam, what will we make available to those for whom
the old exam was barely within reach?
A number of the adult educators I spoke to expressed
a further concern that the increased focus on the enhanced GED, especially in a
time of limited – and shrinking – resources, will draw attention and funding
away from the other sectors of Adult Ed. When we make programs more demanding,
we also have to assure that we have other programs in place to address the
needs of those who risk getting left behind. Otherwise, we will continue to
help the (relatively) better off at the expense of the truly vulnerable,
keeping in place a sizable educational underclass.
A major concern among economists and policy makers is
whether or not the GED and other Adult Ed programs are worth the money. What is
their “return on investment?” This concern is a primary driver of the current
revision of the GED exam. GED recipients, as I just noted, often have to take a
number of remedial classes when they transfer to college, their rate of degree
completion is low, and some studies suggest that their success at finding a job
is poor. The University of Chicago economist James Heckman argues that the GED
confers no labor market advantage. But there are other studies drawn from
Arizona to Michigan to Rhode Island – summarized in a recent report from the
McGraw-Hill Research Foundation – suggesting that adult education does provide
economic benefit to the individual and to the local economy. As well, these and
other studies point toward non-economic social benefits: from improved health
and health literacy, to reduced crime rates, to enhanced quality of life for
the students and their families.
Because these social benefits tend to be given
short-shrift in our economically-driven policy discussions, I’d like to dwell
on them a bit. They do, in fact, have
big economic consequences and, as well, take us to important questions about
the good life and the good society. The social benefits of Adult Education and
other compensatory and second-chance programs are particularly salient with
people who have been living on the fringe of society: caught up in street life,
violent or addicted or both, not infrequently coming out of prison. When these
people reenter school, they are often walking right on the line, jumpy or
sullen, wanting to make this work, but at times terribly unsure that it will.
And as the months progress and they slowly build occupational skill or gain
proficiency in English and math or get interested in psychology or political
science or literature – as they begin to experience
this kind of achievement – then you start to see the transformation. Their
demeanor changes. They develop confidence based on skill and knowledge. (“I’ve
never been able to build things,” a construction trades student marveled.) They
calm down. They begin to draw a bead on the future. The crazy life on the
streets can still call to them, and some give in, but others reject it and
distance themselves from those who still live it. Along with distancing, there
are attempts to heal awful wounds inflicted on families and to reunite with
estranged children.
Still, adult education and literacy programs are
threatened; “we’re an endangered species,” one director of a literacy program
told me. That report from McGraw-Hill notes that the cost per student of adult
education is about one-fourth to one-fifth of the cost of educating a student
tin the K-12 system. Still the doubts among some legislators about the economic
returns on adult ed are strong and threaten funding, especially in economic
hard times dominated by demands for austerity.
Hand in glove with the austerity perspective there is
a belief, held by many in positions of power, that those in adult education who
went through American schools blew it the first time through, and why should
society pay again for what should have been learned already. (The same argument
plays into funding for college remedial programs.) This belief clashes with the
notion of the United States as a second-chance society.
***
A few weeks before the Christmas
holiday break at the Adult School, Maria asked the students to anonymously post
on the large colorful bulletin board in the main hallway their thoughts as the
year comes to an end and a new one looms. Over the week, more and more notes –
some handwritten, some typed – appear across the red and green board:
I hope that
in the next year I improve
even more
than I did in 2011.
I am really
struggling to get my high school
diploma, but
I know someday I will.
I am going
to get more involved at my children’s
school to
learn about their progress in
their
education.
I am
thankful for having such a blessed
life.
Without school I have no idea where
I would be.
By
the last day, the board is full.
As I’ve been visiting the Adult
School, I’ve been reading the criticisms of adult education along with articles
on the revision of the GED exam. So much of the criticism has to do with
quantifiable outcomes – pass rates, rates of enrollment in some post-secondary
school or program, employment rates – and the targets of the criticism are the
adult education and literacy programs themselves. This is legitimate criticism.
The quality of instruction and tutoring across this complex landscape of
services is highly uneven, and many of the people – for the most part, decent,
committed people – who do the work have minimal training. And the curriculum
used in many programs is outdated and limited. We as a society have to continue
to push through our biases, our faulty notions about learning, our lowered
expectations and do better by the educationally underprepared.
But we can’t achieve this goal to
any degree while funding to these programs is being cut. And we can’t achieve
the goal through educational programs alone. The people who enter adult
education and literacy programs are typically facing a number of hardships:
housing, sporadic or no employment, family disruption, problems with
immigration, the criminal justice system. The best programs, so called
“wrap-around” programs, provide multiple social and health services along with
education, but most programs do not. Historian Harvey Graff coined the term
“literacy myth” to characterize the belief that achieving a certain level of
literacy alone will enable a person to overcome the hardships of poverty and
discrimination. These days a lot of education reform at all levels seems to
operate with this assumption, and, for that fact, so do some literacy programs.
To stay in educational programs and to thrive, people who carry a big burden
often need help from agencies beyond the classroom.
I also worry that we will not
develop powerful programs for those seeking a second chance with the kind of
analysis that currently dominates education policy and the technocratic
solutions that emerge from that analysis. As I noted, most of the policy
studies of adult education seek to demonstrate economic effects of programs
through statistical outcomes that can be readily defined and measured, such as
the number of certificates or diplomas earned by those who passed the GED exam.
Such information gives a broad view of trends, and I am not at all dismissing
the importance of this perspective. However such studies, because they deal in
averages, often do not tease out important differences in programs or
participants that get washed out in the aggregate. Take the GED examination as
an illustration. A fair percentage of people prepare for the test on their own,
so the amount of effort put into preparation and what they learn could vary
widely. Those who enroll in a program might have quite a different educational
experience around the GED – and recall that the quality and duration of
programs vary widely as well. To make claims about the overall effectiveness of
the GED examination without accounting for such variation is to miss the detail
of failure or success.
There is another issue, and that is
the fact that any statistical analysis taken alone is limited, and, as good
statisticians will tell you, can miss a lot. If in an occupational program a
student quits before completing a certificate or degree, he or she is tallied
up as a negative for the program. A drop out. Yet what I’ve seen with some
frequency is that people – often declaring upon entrance that they want to
complete a degree – will leave once they develop sufficient skill to get a job.
This has a positive economic impact, but in many analyses would register as a
program failure. One more thing: This behavior – going for the short-term
payoff – is often cited as an illustration of poor peoples’ inability to delay gratification and form
long-term goals. That’s possible – there are people in all income brackets who
have problems with long-term goals – but in my experience, most of the people
taking those immediate jobs do so because the rent is due, children need to be
fed, members of the family are sick. They are very aware of the trade-off and
say they want to return to finish the program, for they could improve their
long-term job prospects with more education. We’ll see if circumstances will
permit a return, but it is absolutely not true that they left just to buy a few
bright, shining objects or to kick it with friends. We have such demeaning ways
of talking about the choices poor people make when the wolf is at their door.
If our economic analysis can miss
the mark, our understanding of the personal and social benefits of adult
education programs is even more narrow. Few studies take us in close to
people’s lives, to the desire in those notes on the bulletin board. To be sure,
these human moments do not tell the whole story of the Adult School, but they
certainly tell us something beyond a general outcome measure. What we lack in
the reports is the blending of the statistical table with the portrait of a
life. Without both, we’ll get one-dimensional policy fixes driven by numerical
data removed from the daily lives of the people from whom the data is
abstracted.
***
Along the top of the north wall of
the Independent Learning Center, right over a row of computer terminals, Maria
has written out in big script her five goals for the program: Each student will
be a life-long learner, and a critical thinker… ending with a new goal that she
is trying to enact through public events – a clothes drive, visiting senior
centers – put on by the Adult School.
Each student
will be able to participate and
contribute
as a citizen of his/her community.
Her
work, finally, she said to me one day, “is to help people grow and become full
citizens in the world.”
Maria’s desk is in the front center
of the room; the goals are up on the wall to her right. She is sitting
alongside a young man who started but gave up on the essay portion of the GED
exam. He is slumped down in the chair, but looking up at Maria, a knit cap, a
pierced eyebrow, a gentle non-expressive face, “I think you gave up too early
on your essay,” she says, cocking her head slightly to the left to hold his
gaze. “You got a high score on grammar. You can do this.” She puts her hand on
his shoulder, “No writing like text messaging. You’re going to show the person
who reads this all your knowledge.” The fellow pushes his hands into his jacket
pockets. “Come on, can’t you squeeze one little essay out of you?” He takes
this in for a moment, then his face warms into a slight smile. “Cool.”
It happens one person at a time.
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