CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

To leave the anecdotes out of policy, which is about human affairs, is to leave out the small but cumulative celebrations that we all really do see every day. We should show exactly why teachers are teachers. It's not to count heads and fill out forms. An appeal to the heart is a human thing. Human beings are not natural science projects or statistical affairs. Each of us is "personal," and we should portray our field in the personal light that it is. We have been too long thinking the individual story is an unprofessional aspect of our profession. It's not. Rather, the personal story is the beating heart of the profession of teaching.

Catherine King (Private Correspondence)

Setting the Scene

The continuing education of adults is essential to maintaining America’s heritage as “the land of opportunity.” While the new global economy provides 30-year old information specialists with millions to retire, adults lacking the required skills and knowledge continue to struggle to provide for their families’ future. To address this educational divide, The National Literacy Summit 2000 issued a call to action to “ensure that all Americans have access to literacy services and equal opportunities for success.” In their summary report, From the Margins to the Mainstream, the steering committee of the National Literacy Summit 2000 called for a system of quality services for adult students, ease of access to these services, and sufficient resources to support both quality and access.

The first two significant issues identified by this report are student involvement and communication. Students are acknowledged as the field’s primary stakeholders and customers. Communication is recognized as an indispensable component in adult education’s latest crusade for recognition and resources. Those of us with long memories and a penchant for history have seen this battle waged again and again.

Today’s struggle has taken on the mantle of systems development and the mace of performance accountability. Performance accountability is one means of measuring the benefits or outcomes learners accrue from participating in adult basic and literacy education. Outcome assessment can be an effective tool for measuring program performance, planning for systems improvement, and formulating state and national policy. Yet, as Beder (1999) notes in his comprehensive study of adult literacy education outcome research, “after more than 25 years, only nine credible state studies have been conducted, and all are limited in one way or another (p.77).”

The difficulty in producing meaningful outcome assessment is linked to multiple concepts of adult literacy and fluid definitions of its purpose as impacted by the power of funding sources and the temper of the times. The present drive for national accountability via a National Reporting System (NRS) for Adult Education compounds the problem. As Merrifield points out “what is counted usually becomes ‘what counts. (1988, p.52).” She further maintains (1998, p. 7):