Work-Related Basic Education in the United States: A Mixed Bag

PAUL JURMO

In Good Practice in Use: Guidelines for Good Practice in Workplace Education, Mary Ellen Belfiore summarizes guidelines for effective workplace education programs. These guidelines draw on work done by practitioners and researchers in Canada and several other countries.

A similar study done in the United States for the U.S. Department of Education in 1998 likewise identified guidelines for work-related basic education (Jurmo, 1998.) This report broadened its scope to look at work-related learning in both workplace settings (for incumbent workers) and in community adult education programs (for either employed or unemployed learners). This latter study drew on evidence from both workplace education programs (including the excellent work done in Canada in the 1990s) and job-training and adult basic skills programs which attempted to provide education and other services to help adults get and succeed in jobs.

In the five years since that report, the field of work-related basic education in the United States has been a mixed bag. On one hand, there has some promising work by creative practitioners and researchers which could be used as building blocks by the field as a whole. On the other hand, policy makers and funders (at the national, state, and local levels, and within all sectors — government, employers, and unions) have largely shown a lack of awareness, support, and leadership for this work. Compounding this lack of support from policy makers and funders is the fact that those who create and benefit from effective work-related basic education programs are generally not organized as an effective constituency to educate and pressure policy makers for the support they need.

In this paper, I would like to describe a few examples of promising developments in the field.

New Standards For Work-Related Basic Skills

Equipped for the Future (EFF) is a systems reform initiative of the National Institute for Literacy. Begun in the mid-1990s, this effort drew on input from many stakeholder groups — including employers, unions, and adult learners — to clarify what “adult basic skills” should now mean in U.S. society. The result: “basic skills” now was to be expanded beyond the traditional “3Rs” of reading, writing, and math to include problem-solving, teamwork, research, technology, lifelong learning, and other skills.(1) The EFF skills are also very consistent with the work of adult educators who for years called for a broader and more thoughtful definition of basic skills for adults.