Transcript for Presentation by Silja Kallenbach, National College Transition Network At

Transcript for presentation by Silja Kallenbach, National College Transition Network at World Education
“What Research Says About Effective College Transitions for Adults”

SILJA KALLENBACH: Good afternoon. This is a great symposium. Thank you for inviting me, CALPRO. I really want to start,of course, first by acknowledging the leadership and vision of both Mariann and Debra Jones for convening this symposium. Particularly, at this time I know how tough things are here in California. They are all over the country but it’s great to see that you have your sights set on the future and how to make it better for our field and our learners. I also want to applaud the directors who are here for your vision and resilience and for your focus on program improvement. I know that you had to apply to come here.Not everyone, I’m sure, applies. But you make that choice to take this time out of your business schedule when I know things are tough on the home front, with the budget crisis, so thanks for that.
For starters, I thought to bring you greetings from Boston. You know, we’re based in BostonWorld Education is the home of both the National College Transition Network and the New England Literacy Resource Center, among other things, so greetings from Boston. Sometimes very attractive there. Come and visit us sometime. It looks like this. You know you have your wild fires--we have our snow and ice. We have parking wars sometimes. Try taking that parking slot after that guy shoveled the snow. That’s Boston in the winter. We’re heading there, or it looks like this. So nice to be here in California, but I didn’t come to talk about Boston, of course, as much as we need to talk about this college readiness business.

You all know already that this proverbial bar has been raised on our field and our students with this changing economy. That much we know now. We know now that the GED or the diploma is not enough. When we thought our work was done, and here we are realizing, we have to do more with the same, or less.

According to several studies, namely Education Testing Service most recently, there really are substantial economic benefits to pos secondary degrees and if you can read this chart, you’ll see that it’s about $7,000 increments a year, as you get even some between high school and college. That’s a considerable sum of money in the worklife of a person and that’s a message that we should at least tell our students. We should know that, but we need to know thatare they adult learners. Because that’s motivating. We add this up, and let’s say that the person is 32 by the time they get some college under their belt coming out of ESOL or GED program. That’s close to $250,000 in their remaining worklife. That’s not a negligible sum of money, and we would do well for our students if we let them know that.

So we used to think that enrolling students in postsecondary educational training is the culmination of our efforts. The NRS still seems to think that, but now we know that’s not enough. Access is just not enough. It doesn’t really count for much, to get people into college, if they can’t stay there and that message came out loud and clear this morning, I know.

There are studies that show that the economic returns can be almost nothing from just one or two courses. Norman …. is a researcher who has looked into that. So we need to know what’s the tipping point and that happens there is a study called the Tipping Point Study. (I’m surprised no one has yet mentioned the State of Washington where this study was done. It seems to be mentioned in every event of this sort.) There they found that what adults need 45 credits and a credentials. That’s the tipping point for those $7,000 on the average additional earnings a year. It behooves us to know some college but it’s a certain sum amount. It’s not just one class and that’s because access by itself isn’t good enough for us any more.

The reason why it really matters is that it’s very likely that the majority of adult ABE and ESOL learners really never get to enjoy those economic benefits the way things stand right now. And the worst-case scenario is that they’re worse off, if they go to college. Why? We know why. Because they may be in debt and they may have lower self-efficacy because they flunk those courses. No one told them that you have to get a “C” grade point average or you have to attend classes every day and it counts toward the grade, and you have to participate because with the grade. We don’t teach those things in ABE usually. So they could be worse off. We also know that the vast majority of ABE and ESOL learners go into college through Developmental Studies. What’s perhaps a little less known is that, according to study that just came up this year –and this to me was shocking-- is that for the first year 40% referred to Developmental never showed up to the first course. We think we’ve enrolled them: these are people who were just enrolled, they didn’t want to go there. Or in California, apparently, you can just enroll in Psych. 101 and flunk there. Out of the folks who made it to the course, half didn’t complete it. So it’s a really uphill battle. So many adults do get stuck in those Developmental classes and that’s our challenge here: to figure out how do we help in this process of helping them accelerate their learning and actually complete the degree or credential. The same was in Washington State, before they got to the IBEST program that I’ll tell you a little bit about later. They found that less than 30% of ABE and GED learners actually made it to college-level courses in the five years that they were in Developmental. For ESOL students, it was 13%, so five years in Developmental. 13% made it to college-level credit-bearing courses. Not good. And they either paid for it out of pocket, or they had the grants. So it’s also if you think about our common resources, our tax base, it’s not good economics to pay for that, when people aren’t ready to really benefit from it. So the task falls on us.
The reality, of course, is that we are not set up as a field, we’re not accustomed to thinking about these as performance goals. To measure access, to measure how well people do in college and we’re certainly not funded to do that, and that’s an issue . But we need to come to terms with the fact that unless we prepare adult learners, they’re not going to get there. And that’s certainly been the message of the day. But the good news is that we actually know what to do, we know how to do it, there’s plenty of research and professional wisdom. Not that there isn’t more to do, but we know what to do. The women before me right before lunch, what great concrete advice they gave you. So before we go on to talk about this college readiness, I don’t feel I could go on to talk about it without acknowledging the lack of funding we have to do that. Because there are program improvements we can do with what we have right now. But nationally anyway, the range of cost-per-student is somewhere between 700 and 1800 per student. We can’t do a good job with that amount. We can tinker around the edge but we cannot provide the service to bridge this gab. At least I don’t think we can. There’s a huge role for advocacy here. I’m glad that we have Brenda Dann-Messier in a high position here, who really understands the realities at the adult program level. I’m fond of saying that, in Boston, when a kid drops out of Boston public school and walks down the block and enrolls in a GED program, their slot, the value that we place on their slot, drops from 13,000 to about 1800, for the same goal of graduating that young man or woman for graduating and preparing for college and of course teaching them life skills. So it’s an equity issue, frankly.

Meanwhile, we do know…(I wanted to acknowledge this before I go on and on to talk about college readiness, and I should tell you that any research that I reference, at this point, is going to be a handout later and we’re going to break for discussion, so I’m not going to talk here for an hour. ) But we do need to define college readiness before we go on in order to define where we want to go. The National College Transition Network has been working on that. We have the Toolkit, as you know, but we also will be coming out with a Framework of College Readiness for Adults. You might know that there are already frameworks and guides for college readiness for high school students, but they’re relevant but they have things like Advanced Placement classes and there are assumptions that their parents are involved, and so they’re not really applicable to us, 100%: we need our own framework. And the framework that we’ve come up with has four components. There’s of course the Academic Knowledge and Skills, and I’ll talk about that more momentarily. There’s this College Knowledge. There’s also this Career Awareness and Plan and then there’s a piece that’s particularly important for adults that many others have referenced, and that’s the Personal Readiness piece.
So let’s look at these a little bit more in detail. And let’s start with the Academic Knowledge and Skills, the stuff that we are probably most used to thinking about when we think of college readiness: the academic reading, writing, math. In this category, we also include the skills of academic self-management that I’ll talk about later, because they are very, very important for our adult learners and by and large they are not ones that we are used to teaching or focusing on, but they can make or break a person’s persistence in college.

So in the Academic Knowledge and Skills piece, it’s a big chunk of work…On the math side. In New England we had a demonstration project that Dorcas Place was part of, for seven years, called ABE to College Transition Project. We tracked the data by student and we did pre- and post-testing with the AccuPlacer and various, more qualitative assessments and surveys of students’ readiness. And the Achilles heel was always the math, by and large. Seventy-two percent of the English students after attending a 14-week transition program, in addition to the GED, once they took a post-test, they did place in college-level courses. On the Math, it was a different story altogether. There we are looking at 11% placing in college-level math. They’re not…15% moved up to the highest-level Developmental Math class. Still, that left us with 74% of people who, did not, after 14 weeks of additional prep, make it to college-level math.
Now perhaps we could have run a more accelerated program. These were, by and large, working adults, average age 32, income below 35,000, going an additional 10-12 hours a week. Add that to a GED, and I’m not sure how much time people have. We do know from research that if you can offer a more intensive course—shorter and higher intensity—the learning gains tend to be higher. Now you rule out folks who have two jobs and raise families. That’s one of our many challenges in our field. It’s not a reason to not offer it if you have enough pooled students who could commit to that maybe over summer--those models exist. They’re probably not a feasible model for most of our field, given the demands on our students’ time.

So the buzzwords on the academic side, the academic skills, is these words that have been said over and over today: integration, alignment, or you were calling it articulation. Maybe the alignment has less of a connotation of articulation with four-year colleges, but alignment of the curriculum and integration. The integration is often done in two ways: one is dual-enrollment, or credit by exam, that seems to be an option in this state, which is a great thing to investigate. Or though really co-instruction model, dual enrollment could be that you take one course at the ABE level and another course at the college level, and htat requires often an agreement with the postsecondary institution and we’ll get to that.

In Kentucky, there’s a model that’s been highlighted often because they really co-branded--in their GED in Jefferson County a program in a technical college cobranded program, really joined forces in a really uncommon way: they called it the Education Enrichment Service. In this case the students really didn’t really know they were both GED and Developmental students at the same time so it’s an accelerated model. They tracked the data and they had a really impressive 82% completion rate.

That’s all about two institutions a school district-based program, not a college-based program, and college collaborating. Now as I understand they’re across the street from each other, which helped that relationship-building, I’m sure. So that’s a real fusion: concurrent enrollment model. There’s quite a bit of research on this dual-enrollment business from K-12, particularly. (Of course, our field always has less research than any other branch of education because we don’t have the money for it.) But on the K12 side Florida and New York City were sites, and basically, students were more likely to graduate from high school, to enroll in college, full-time, persistent to their second semester, get higher GPAs, take more credits, once they got that experience and motivation-- you already have some credits under your belt.

That is happening not only in Kentucky on the adult ed side but it’s definitely something to investigate if you’re not already looking into that. Washington State’s IBEST Model is what we call an integrated model where literally the faculty from college and the ABE, ESOL side co-instruct part of the time. Then students go off and take additional hours of instruction separately. Now that’s a more expensive model and the state more money into it. But it’s a model that’s tauted as a very effective one and one reasons being well documented by now.

As a system level… it’s a real system level model and one that’s probably more difficult to pull off at a local level, I’m not sure. Perhaps our Career Pathways folks here can look into that. El Paso is a place where we’ve done little bit of work with--El Paso Consortium, actually. So the contextualization through co-instruction: Washington State is one example. (Let me just look at my slides here so I know what I’m showing you.) And in El Paso we worked with consortium with school district based programs--and I know many of you are that—formed a consortium with a local, El Paso community college, for the purpose of creating a college transition program. We work with them to design that program. It involved three school-district based program and a college. The college actually paid for a coordinator who also taught a writing class. They developed a curriculum. It’s an all-ESOL, all-Latino program. The decided that what they needed was a pre-transition level program, that the gap was so large. In that program they of course, teach Academic English, Reading and Writing, but they also teach math. They use the [inaudible] curriculum. They teach Math at all levels of ESOL in that program as a matter of fact. Most of their students don’t have a lot of formal education.

Here’s the other key design element, from that experience that’s going on: they have very heavy emphasis on Personal Readiness for college. They do counseling, support groups, workshops (two-thirds women, Latino women) So they have workshops like: Woman’s Role in the Family and Outside the Family, Taking Care of Yourself. They concluded that the personal readiness was key to addressing it right side by side with academic skills if they were going to go anywhere. In the end it becameLevel Six or Seven of the ESOL and one of the three programs is running it in El Paso and the others refer to it. So that was their arrangement but they still work very closely with the college and the Texas professional…the CALPRO equivalent in Texas works with them Texas Learns. I mean Texas Grade Centers, I think they’re called. So that’s an El Paso model.

In New England, one of the projects that Sandy Goodman directs is called Transitions to College and Careers. In New England we were lots of small states with lots of small programs, so the IBEST model really doesn’t work for us in most places because we don’t have the critical massof students going for one career. All of our states run adult ed through a mixed delivery system or school districts. We don’t number of community college-based systems for ABE. So we had to solve this problem, “Well, how do you prepare people when you get 20 people in the class where 10 or 20 career aspirations. What’s the pre-transition component or the pre-voc component look like?” The solution we came up with blended model with an online course. The first one that we launched this year was Introduction to Health Sciences, where students who are going for Allied Health take that as a cohort, so students taking it from six sites together. And it’s blended model in that they are also taking a more generic academic skills onsite through a grant that we mediated but are also working with the State to take over funding of. This additional online course is where they learn Chemistry, they learn about Anatomy, Digestive System, Genetics, the kinds of pre-courses you need to get into Nursing programs and Allied Health Programs that their programs don’t offer as a rule and gives them a little bit of a leg up and go for that. Very good results! Students have loved it. The programs like it and we are looking into whether there are other career tracks where we could provide that service for smaller programs because they really shouldn’t have to do that on their own. In any cohort, you have maybe five or ten students going for a particular career--the numbers that we deal with. So that’s the blended online model.