Readin', Writin' and 'Rithmetic
One More Time:
The Role of Remediation in
Vocational Education
and Job Training

MDS-309

A Report to Congress, the Secretary of Education
and the Secretary of Labor

W. Norton Grubb,
Judy Kalman, and Marisa Castellano
University of California at Berkeley

Cynthia Brown and Denise Bradby
MPR Associates, Berkeley

National Center for Research in Vocational Education
University of California at Berkeley
1995 University Avenue, Suite 395
Berkeley, CA 94704

Supported by
The Office of Vocational and Adult Education
U.S. Department of Education

September, 1991

FUNDING INFORMATION

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• SUMMARY
• INTRODUCTION
  • A Note on Terminology
  • The Organization of This Report
• THE AMBIGUITY OF THE PROBLEM: THE NATURE OF BASIC SKILLS
• THE CURRENT STATE OF REMEDIAL EFFORTS
  • Postsecondary Vocational Education: Community Colleges and Technical Institutes
  • Adult Basic Education
  • The Job Training Partnership Act
  • Welfare-to-Work Programs
  • Secondary Vocational Education
  • Guessing the Scope of the Remediation System
  • The Nature of Remediation in the Education and Training System
  • Coordination in Remedial Programs: Its Status and Value
  • Information and Evaluation
• THE NATURE OF EFFECTIVE PROGRAMS: THE CONVENTIONS AND THE STRUCTURE OF SKILLS AND DRILLS
  • The Conventions of Good Practice in Adult Education
  • The Assumptions of Skills and Drills
• ALTERNATIVES TO SKILLS AND DRILLS
  • Meaning-Making: Reversing the Assumptions of Skills and Drills
  • The Eclectic Approach to Remediation
  • Functional Context Literacy Training
  • Programs Integrating Basic Skills and Vocational Training
  • Center for Employment Training, San Jose
  • Ohio's Applied Academics Program
  • A Whole Language Approach: The Eastern Michigan University Workplace Education Academy
  • Some Conclusions: The Varying Ambitions of Remedial Education
• DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE POLICY
  • Reforms for Now: Coordination, Effectiveness, and Pedagogy
  • Reforms for the Future: The Purposes of Remedial Education
• REFERENCES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDIX A
• APPENDIX B
• APPENDIX C

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the research for this report, we spoke with administrators and supervisors of remediation in community colleges, technical institutes, area vocational schools, adult schools, JTPA programs, welfare-to-work programs, and community-based organizations in twenty-three regions. Almost without exception, these individuals--most of them extremely busy, grappling with the most difficult educational challenges and attempting to balance the demands of conflicting program requirements--were generous with their time and insights, and we thank them for their participation. Many others in the adult and remedial education community, again too many to acknowledge individually, shared their knowledge of the literature, of common practice, and of exemplary programs, and we thank them as well.

Several individuals read an early draft of this report and provided helpful (if not always complimentary) comments; these include Sarah Friedman, John Losak, Rena Soifer, Cathy Stasz, Brian Stecher, and Thomas Sticht. While we have incorporated most of their criticisms, we have also tried to follow our own advice and work within the "meaning-making" tradition that we present in our "Alternatives to Skills and Drills" section; so our interpretations of the current "system" of remedial education are ours alone.

SUMMARY

A furor has erupted in this country over basic skills. Complaints from the business community about the deficiencies of the labor force, criticism of the educational system, and alarm about high levels of illiteracy have all increased concerns about skill levels. Deficiencies in basic skills are also problems for the work-related education and job training programs, as many have felt unable to proceed with relatively job-specific training without first wrestling with the problem of underprepared individuals. Most postsecondary educational institutions and job training programs have increased the remedial education they provide, and most of them agree that the problem will become worse.

This report--part of a series from the National Center for Research in Vocational Education (NCRVE) examining the coordination among vocational education, Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) programs, and welfare-to-work programs--examines the relationship between remedial education and job-related skill training because so little is known about this nexus. Given the proliferation of both work-related training and remedial education, one important issue is the coordination problem--both the coordination among the major providers of remedial education and the coordination between remediation efforts and job-specific training. A second crucial question is effectiveness. Since remediation is instrumental to achieving other goals--especially entry into and success in vocational education or job training--the question of whether existing remedial efforts are successful in preparing individuals for subsequent job training is paramount. A final issue which proves central--and is linked closely to that of effectiveness--is that of teaching methods. Despite the variety of institutions providing remediation, most programs use similar teaching methods--an approach we label "skills and drills"--despite several a priori reasons to doubt its effectiveness.

The Existing System

To examine these issues and to describe the vast array of remediation efforts linked to vocational education and job training, we completed telephone surveys of providers in twenty-three regions within nine states, supplemented by visits to a variety of typical and exemplary programs. The survey results enable us to describe common practices in community colleges, technical institutes, adult basic education programs, JTPA programs, and welfare-to-work programs--publicly supported efforts that dwarf the voluntary literacy efforts and community-based programs that often receive more media attention. In all the communities we studied, remediation proves to be ubiquitous, with a wide variety of institutions providing some form of basic skills instruction. A second characteristic of local systems is that, in theory, they are structured to provide a hierarchy of programs leading from the lowest levels of literacy (and often math competency) to the collegiate level. In practice, however, the mechanisms of referral among programs are poorly developed; systems of guiding students through the maze are almost nonexistent; most programs have very modest ambitions; and dropout rates are high--so that the smooth continuum of courses which might exist is rare. Within such a system, the common practice of referring individuals to other institutions for remediation--one that appears to maximize cooperation and coordination--may in fact be counterproductive.

Within most remedial programs, a "new orthodoxy" about teaching methods has emerged despite the lack of any national standards or a national curriculum: In place of the uniform curriculum that prevailed fifteen years ago with progress based on seat-time, most programs now describe themselves as individualized, self-paced, with the majority also competency-based and open-entry/open-exit, allowing students to proceed at their own pace and to leave when they have mastered certain competencies. In addition, almost all of them follow an approach to teaching we label "skills and drills," in which complex competencies such as reading, writing, and mathematical facility are broken into discrete skills on which students drill.

The popularity of "functional context literacy training," which presents literacy training in the context of skills required on the job, and the emerging convention that students learn best when competencies are taught in some concrete application (or contextualized) suggest that coordinating remediation with job skills training might be effective. However, almost no remedial programs allied with vocational education and job training programs relate the content of remediation to the job skills training that will presumably follow. The most common practice is to require students to complete remediation before entering vocational education or job training--a sequential order implying that students who fail to complete remediation are denied entrance to vocational education and job training.

A final characteristic of the existing system is that there is almost no information about its activities and effectiveness. Some providers cannot even tell how many individuals are enrolled in remedial programs; almost none can provide any systematic information about completion rates (though they are clearly low); evaluations of subsequent effects are almost nonexistent, and most evaluations are methodologically flawed. The result is that there is almost no evidence to suggest which of the many programs now offered are effective and still less information that would enable teachers and researchers to improve current practice.

Effectiveness and Pedagogy

In the absence of direct evidence about which remedial efforts are effective, it is necessary to rely on indirect arguments. The consensus on good practice in adult education provides some guidance. The dominant teaching methods in remedial programs are those we describe as "skills and drills"--an approach which encompasses many assumptions about the classroom practices, the nature of individualization, the roles of teachers and students, the nature of learning as an individual and decontextualized activity, the nature of curriculum, and the sources of motivation. While these teaching methods are logical, internally consistent, apparently efficient, and well established at most levels of the educational system, their assumptions prove to violate many of the conventions of good practice in adult education. In addition, most individuals in remedial programs have failed to learn basic reading and math despite eight to twelve years of instruction in skills and drills within elementary and secondary schools; why the same approach should succeed for adults when it has previously failed is unclear. Indeed, it is all too plausible that the high dropout rates and paltry learning gains in most remediation efforts can be blamed partly on the dominant pedagogical methods.

The alternatives to skills and drills are difficult to describe precisely because they have not been codified or standardized. However, the approach we label "meaning-making" reverses the assumptions of skills and drills, leading to very different classroom practices, roles for teachers and students, and assumptions of curriculum. While it is difficult to find pure examples of meaning-making, many programs--especially in community colleges--can be described as eclectic, borrowing from both skills and drills and meaning-making as teachers experiment with alternatives appropriate to their adult students. In addition, functional context literacy training, which "integrates literacy training into technical training," replaces the decontextualized content and methods of skills and drills with materials and exercises drawn from functional contexts--in most cases from the requirements of employment. However, functional context approaches have little to say about the other assumptions underlying teaching methods, and so can lead to programs that resemble meaning-making or programs that look like conventional remediation in almost all their details.

While programs integrating basic skill instruction and vocational training prove to be rare, a few provide distinct alternatives to skills and drills. Finally, it is possible to describe literacy programs based on meaning-making, though they are few and far between and their effectiveness is difficult to judge. However, they clarify that alternatives to the well-established practices of skills and drills can be developed, offering substantial promise in remedying some persistent problems in remediation--the motivational problem, the fact that many adults report skills and drills programs to be boring, the irrelevance of many programs to subsequent education or job training, the conclusion that most remedial efforts violate the conventional assumptions of good adult education, and the fact that many adults have previously failed to learn through skills and drills in the schools.

Directions for Future Policy

Virtually every administrator of remedial education forecasts increasing demand, and so reforms in the existing system are crucial to those who enroll, to the vocational education and job training programs who find themselves with underprepared students, and ultimately to employers and to the productivity of the economy. Several reforms can be undertaken without substantial increases in resources or institutional reconstruction. The first involves coordination and the current haphazard patterns of referrals among programs. Vocational education and job training programs should develop coherent policies about referrals to remedial programs to ensure that individuals are referred only to appropriate forms of remediation and to institutions of adequate quality. In addition, tracking mechanisms need to be developed to follow individuals among programs and prevent them from becoming lost in the system.

The intent of the first recommendation is to require programs to refer individuals only to effective remedial programs. This leads to a second recommendation: Given the near-complete absence of information about effectiveness, resources for evaluation need to be increased. Such results could not only prevent individuals from being referred to ineffective forms of education, but they could also provide information about improving instruction.

This leads naturally to a third recommendation: Given the dominance of methods based on skills and drills and the evidence against this approach, policymakers and administrators need to consider variations and improvements in teaching methods. We are convinced that substantial improvement in remediation will be impossible without moving to the more active forms of teaching associated with meaning-making. But whether these or other approaches to teaching adults are the most effective, our recommendation is that there needs to be much more experimentation with alternative pedagogies, along with evaluation designed to identify good practice.

Other reforms will require much more debate about what we as a nation require of our system of work-related education and training, including remedial education. The current discussions about deficiencies in the labor force do not clearly point out whether the underlying problem is one of basic academic skills, work habits, interpersonal abilities, "higher-order" capacities, or judgement. Another ambiguity involves who the beneficiaries of remedial efforts should be, and whether wage earners, employers with relatively low-skilled (and low-paid) jobs, or the economy as a whole is the target. If the problem is one of "higher-order" abilities, or interpersonal skills, or judgement, or a shift to a high-skill, high-productivity economy, then the current narrowly defined remedial programs--which generally confine themselves to low-level cognitive capacities--are wholly inadequate. From this vantage it may be necessary both to revise these programs substantially by providing much more intensive instruction, and to start the much more difficult reforms of reshaping the K-12 education system, changing the nature of teaching throughout the system and providing much more sophisticated (and expensive) forms of education to larger fractions of the population. These are reforms for the long run, of course, but they are unavoidable if we as a country are serious about developing a world-class labor force with capacities more sophisticated than simple reading, writing, and arithmetic.

INTRODUCTION

A furor has erupted in this country over basic skills. The business community has complained about the incompetence of the labor force, asserting that lower productivity--from an inability to read instructions and warning signs, mistakes in measuring and simple arithmetic, and poor communications skills--has contributed to the noncompetitiveness of the American economy. Others have raised concerns about the level of literacy in the American population, with estimates of the number of "illiterates" ranging from twenty million to sixty million. The worries over levels of basic skills are part of a concern with academic competencies that goes back at least to 1983, when A Nation at Risk presented the spectre of "unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament" as a result of declining school performance. This concern may even go back to the most recent "discovery" of illiteracy around 1970. However, those with longer memories remind us that there has been a virtually constant worry in this country about illiteracy, especially among immigrants and Blacks (Kaestle, 1991); indeed, an address by the U.S. Commissioner of Education in 1882 entitled "Illiteracy and Its Social, Political, and Industrial Effects" (Eaton, 1882) could easily have been part of the past decade's hand-wringing.

At the same time, quieter changes have been taking place in postsecondary institutions and job training programs to remedy deficiencies in basic skills. Virtually every community college in the country has expanded its remedial offerings (often termed developmental education), as have large numbers of four-year colleges. The demand for non-credit adult education, sponsored by a variety of school systems and postsecondary institutions, has by all accounts expanded enormously; however, as in the case of college programs, the lack of consistent data makes it impossible to quantify the trend. Programs sponsored by the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) have increasingly realized the need for more basic education to enable their clients to progress past unskilled entry-level jobs, and Congress has sought to direct JTPA toward longer-term training that incorporates more basic skills. Welfare-to-work programs for welfare recipients, funded by the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) program authorized by the Family Support Act of 1988, have incorporated yet another group into the public institutions preparing individuals for work, with many programs finding that they have to provide more remedial education than they had anticipated. The Department of Education has implemented a series of workplace literacy demonstration projects, and other proposals related to workplace literacy have come from the Department of Labor. Between the expansion of remedial education in existing institutions and proposals for new programs, remedial education appears to be the fastest-growing component of the publicly funded system of education and job training.

The need for remediation has been increasingly apparent within vocational education and job training as well. A common complaint from vocational educators at both the high school and the postsecondary levels is that students come unprepared. They lack the basic skills in reading, writing, communications, and math necessary for reading instruction manuals, understanding blueprints and diagrams, writing simple letters, filling out forms, or calculating measurements in woodworking and metalworking. Similar complaints from JTPA and welfare-to-work programs, which typically enroll individuals even less well-prepared than those in vocational education, confirm the extent of the problem. As we examined vocational education, JTPA programs, and welfare-to-work programs (Grubb, Brown, Kaufman, & Lederer, 1989; Grubb, Brown, & Lederer, 1990), many reported that they were unable to proceed with their major purpose--providing relatively job-specific skill training for an increasing fraction of individuals. Clearly, then, deficiencies in basic skills have become problems for the work-related education and training system, just as they have for the academic side. The resolutions have varied, of course: Some programs have increased the amount of remedial education they provide with their own funds or have referred individuals to other programs, while others, limited by resources or philosophically unwilling to provide remediation, have rejected applicants not meeting minimum achievement levels. But virtually every program has had to wrestle with underprepared individuals, and almost all agree that the problem will become worse.

As a result, we began to examine the relation of remedial education to job-related skill training. One important aspect is the coordination problem, a familiar problem from many areas of education and social policy.[1] Given a proliferation of programs with overlapping responsibilities, it is common to see both cooperation and competition--cooperation when programs send their clients to other programs or collaborate to provide services jointly and competition when programs stake out "turf" and fail to collaborate. Congress, as well as some state governments, has always been concerned about coordination because of the fear that competition would lead to duplication and waste. Conversely, cooperation promises certain economies, particularly if different agencies can establish a division of labor in which each provides those services at which they are best. As programs providing some form of remediation proliferate--with adult education; community colleges and technical institutes; JTPA programs; welfare-to-work programs; community-based organizations (CBOs) funded by JTPA and welfare, as well as other sources; firms with workplace literacy efforts; volunteer literacy campaigns; and public libraries all contributing in some measure--the coordination issue has become more important, and it appears to be one of the major concerns of those administering literacy programs.[2] Despite its potential importance, coordination among remediation programs has never to our knowledge been examined.

A second crucial issue is effectiveness. In our prior analyses of vocational education, JTPA, and welfare-to-work programs, we found that duplication and poor coordination are not as serious as is usually asserted and that a great deal of cooperation exists. What is more important and more difficult to assess is whether cooperation leads to more effective services. While it is reasonable to assume that coordination leads to greater effectiveness--because it typically expands the options open to individuals and allows different programs to "specialize" in those services they perform best--evidence about effectiveness is usually missing. In the case of remediation linked to vocational education and job training, the question of effectiveness is especially crucial because remediation is rarely seen as good in itself. Instead, it is instrumental to achieving certain work-related goals such as entry into a job skills program, improved performance in vocational programs, receipt of a GED to enhance (one hopes) the chance of employment, or mobility once an individual has found an entry-level job--or other personal goals linked to literacy such as the ability to read to one's children and the ability to participate politically. The question of whether remedial efforts achieve any of these goals is critical. Both in examining specific programs around the country and in looking at exemplary programs, we have searched for evidence of effectiveness. To be sure, the question of how one might measure effectiveness proves to be difficult--since there is substantial disagreement about the goals of remedial programs--but the issue of effectiveness is unavoidable.

In the case of remedial programs linked to vocational education and job training, a particular coordination issue linked to effectiveness is the relationship between the two components. For reasons we examine more closely in the section entitled "Alternatives to Skills and Drills," an increasingly popular proposal--though a rare practice--is remedial education whose content is in some way linked to, or drawn from, or integrated with vocational skills training. This proposal, perhaps best known in the form of "functional context literacy training" (Sticht, Armstrong, Caylor, & Hickey, 1987; Sticht & Mikulecky, 1984), has some obvious advantages in providing motivation for individuals to complete programs and in giving remedial education a relevance, or context, that it might otherwise lack. More generally, functional context literacy training raises the question of whether and how remedial education and job skills training should be linked. This is, in effect, another issue related to coordination--not coordination among different institutions providing remedial education and skills training, but coordination between remediation and skills training.

The proposals to adopt functional context training raise a more general question about the pedagogies used in remedial programs. Despite the variety of institutions providing and funding remedial education, most programs use very similar teaching methods--an approach we label "skills and drills." Unfortunately, there are several a priori reasons to doubt the effectiveness of skills and drills, and so--in the interests of examining the effectiveness of remediation--it becomes necessary to examine alternative pedagogical methods. Issues of pedagogy are generally unfamiliar to those policymakers and administrators who shape public programs, so our discussion of pedagogy may seem foreign. But we are convinced that without confronting teaching methods and their underlying assumptions, it will be difficult to improve the current systems of remedial education.

To analyze the issues of coordination, effectiveness, and pedagogy, we have used several different kinds of evidence. Remediation in community colleges, adult education programs, JTPA programs, and welfare-to-work programs is a vast, sprawling enterprise, difficult to describe in its variety. Indeed, each of its components is bewildering. In a first attempt to describe this unwieldy "system," we undertook telephone surveys of providers in twenty-three regions within nine states. These surveys describe the major patterns in remediation, as well as the extent of coordination among programs. In addition, we visited a variety of remedial education and job training programs--choosing some which appear typical and some which were nominated by others as being exemplary, including computer-based approaches as well as conventional classroom programs. These visits provided considerable insight into the responses we received from telephone surveys, as well as more information about what actually happens within remedial programs. In particular, these visits clarified the dominance of skills and drills and enabled us to distinguish what is different about other programs we describe in our "Alternatives to Skills and Drills" section. Finally, we have relied extensively on the literature about remediation, including the enormous amount of recent writing about literacy. While this literature is largely prescriptive and hortatory rather than empirical, and, thus, largely useless as a guide to current practice, it does help clarify the differences among program goals and methods.

This report covers a variety of programs, but it cannot be comprehensive. We concentrate on programs for adults that are linked to vocational education and job training; therefore, we do not analyze remedial programs aimed at in-school youth or JTPA-funded programs for youth. We concentrate on publicly funded programs, not private or charitable efforts, largely because of our concern with federal and state policy in vocational education and job training. (However, some rough numbers illustrated in our second section, entitled "The Current State of Remedial Efforts," show that publicly funded programs also provide the vast majority of remediation.) We also concentrate on programs for native speakers of English rather than English as a Second Language (ESL) programs. Although providers of adult education, job training, and vocational education have been overwhelmed by the demand for ESL in many regions of the country, ESL should not be considered remedial in any way; it presents its own teaching problems that are different from those in remedial programs for native speakers. Finally, we do not define literacy or remediation, provide counts of those needing remediation, or estimate the total funding in the remedial system because--as valuable as these definitional and counting exercises would be--they are a fool's errands, conceptually impossible because of substantive disagreements about what literacy is and practically impossible because of the dearth of information. There is much we leave out, then, but the task of understanding remedial education and its link to vocational preparation is crucial and must begin.

A Note on Terminology

Throughout this report, we use the term "remedial education" to describe all efforts to increase the competencies of individuals whose proficiencies in such areas as reading, writing, oral communication, and mathematics are thought--by themselves or by others--to be inadequate. We, as well as many others, dislike the term remedial education because it connotes that the individuals in such programs are deficient or that their innate abilities are deficient. As we shall argue in greater detail in our third section, entitled "The Nature of Effective Programs: The Conventions and the Structure of Skills and Drills," the assumption of deficiency is one of the pernicious aspects of skills and drills.

Occasionally, there have been efforts to avoid the negative connotations of the term remediation. In part, for this reason, community colleges often use the term developmental education. Occasionally, there are efforts to give developmental education a more specific meaning; for example, Cross (1976) has argued that developmental education ought to be applied to efforts to "develop the diverse talents of students, whether academic or not" (p. 31), in contrast to remedial education which seeks to correct academic deficiencies. However, too often the term developmental education has simply become a substitute for remediation.

In this report, for lack of a better and well-accepted term, we use the term remedial education. However, as we argue in our third section and in our fifth section, which is entitled "Directions for Future Policy," the successful alternatives to skills and drills must find a way to replace the assumption of deficiency with methods that draw upon the real abilities of students.

The Organization of This Report

Although the purpose of remediation may seem obvious, the current furor over "basic skills" encompasses several strands and several conceptions. Such conceptual issues are important because programs designed to improve certain capacities--for example, the ability to do simple arithmetic or to understand the main point of a short reading passage--may be completely inappropriate for addressing other capacities such as interpersonal skills or the ability to make informed judgements. In the first section, entitled "The Ambiguity of the Problem: The Nature of Basic Skills," we contrast the various critics to explore the ambiguity in what constitutes basic skills.

The second section, "The Current State of Remedial Efforts," presents information about remedial offerings within vocational education, JTPA, and welfare-to-work programs, drawing on our telephone questionnaires as well as on insights from our program visits. This section clarifies the type of remediation provided, as well as the coordination that now exists. These results also indicate the lack of information in the existing system--information on even basic elements such as enrollments, as well as more complex measures of outcomes.

The third section, "The Nature of Effective Programs: The Conventions of the Structure of Skills and Drills," then assesses the effectiveness of current remedial efforts. An extensive literature describes good practice in adult education and remediation based largely on experience. However, there prove to be few outcome evaluations of remedial programs, and many of these are based on inappropriate research designs. Furthermore, most evaluations pose the wrong question, asking only whether programs should be continued or terminated rather than asking how they might be improved. Given the lack of information, it is, therefore, necessary to examine the structure of existing programs to see whether they conform to common conventions about good practice. As a result, in this section we detail the assumptions underlying the dominant approach of skills and drills. Skills and drills proves to violate most conventions of good practice in adult education, and the logic of using methods for adults that have failed to teach them adequately in the K-12 system is baffling. In the absence of any positive evaluation evidence, then, there is a prima facie case that the pedagogical methods of most remedial programs are inappropriate.

Next, Section Four, "Alternatives to Skills and Drills," describes some alternatives to skills and drills to clarify that many methods are possible. We first characterize an approach which in many ways reverses the assumptions of skills and drills--one that we label "meaning-making." Next, we examine "eclectic" approaches, combining methods from different pedagogical traditions, and we examine for functional context literacy training to analyze how this approach differs from skills and drills. We then describe several other programs that integrate remediation with job skills training, including several which depart in important ways from skills and drills.

Finally, in the last section, entitled "Directions for Future Policy," we examine the implications of this investigation for future policy. Clearly, the demands for remediation will increase, and publicly funded programs appear to be proliferating. Questions about what ought to be done are, therefore, not academic: The current efforts involve large, though uncertain, sums of money; they enroll large, though unknown, numbers of people; yet there is little evidence that this activity makes much difference. In our view, public policy needs to confront two issues that have previously been ignored: the question of effectiveness, an issue which is familiar in most public debates but which has been strangely absent from discussions of remediation; and the issue of appropriate pedagogy, a subject which is unfamiliar in policy circles. Finally, given the disagreements over what remedial programs should try to accomplish--disagreements stemming in part from the ambiguity of what basic skills mean--it is necessary to confront the purposes of public programs.

This report is quite often critical of current practices in remedial education, and so a corrective is necessary. Most of the individuals we have interviewed are making strenuous efforts to grapple with difficult educational problems. Many teachers are dedicated to their students and have tried desperately, in as many ways as they know how, to find solutions to the low skill levels of their students. They face problems not of their own making--problems which originate, for example, in the failures of high schools, in the poverty which has gotten worse in the past decade, in the social and demographic changes that have made family life in big cities so chaotic, in the continuing (and probably worsening) discrimination against minority parents in labor markets and minority children in schools, and in the unavoidable adjustments of immigrants new to this country--without having any control over these causes. They are given the responsibility of helping individuals get back into the mainstream of economic life, but with scant and uncertain resources, relatively low salaries, and little guidance about appropriate practice. They face a task--providing basic education to individuals who have already completed up to twelve years of schooling, but who have still not mastered certain basic abilities--which is self-evidently difficult, and even in the estimation of some people impossible. If remedial programs are ineffective, it is not because the individuals running them are incompetent or lackadaisical. It is, in our view, because no one has grappled with the magnitude of the problem, the issue of appropriate resources, the need for evaluation at various stages, and the question of what pedagogies are appropriate; the "system" has developed haphazardly in response to the necessity posed by too many underprepared individuals with little sense of how it ought to develop. The failures are those of public policy, not of the individuals who run the programs--and the solutions must, therefore, come from reform of public policy at every level.

THE AMBIGUITY OF THE PROBLEM: THE NATURE OF BASIC SKILLS ^[3]

In one sense, the nature of the problem confronting educational institutions and job training programs seems obvious. Widely cited reports from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicate that only fifty-eight percent of thirteen-year olds and eighty-six percent of seventeen-year olds perform at the "intermediate" level of reading, while only eleven percent of thirteen-year olds and forty-two percent of seventeen-year olds perform at the "adept" level (Kirsch & Jungeblut, 1986). Typical complaints describe the problem as a lack of very simple skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic operations:

The Department of Education estimates that there are about 27,000,000 adult Americans who can't really read. Almost all of them can sign their names and maybe spell out a headline. Most are totally illiterate in the way we used to define illiteracy. But they can't read the label on a medicine bottle. Or fill out a job application. Or write a report. Or read the instructions on the operation of a piece of equipment. Or the safety directions in a factory. Or a memo from the boss. Maybe they even have trouble reading addresses in order to work as a messenger or deliveryman. Certainly they can't work in an office. (Lacey, 1985, p. 10)

The consequences for business are often greater than for the individual's access to jobs. A joint report of the Departments of Education and Labor, pointedly entitled The Bottom Line: Basic Skills in the Workplace (1988), described one instance of the problem:

In a major manufacturing company, one employee who didn't know how to read a ruler mismeasured yards of sheet steel, wasting almost $700 worth of material in one morning. This same company had just invested heavily in equipment to regulate inventories and production schedules. Unfortunately, the workers were unable to enter numbers accurately, which literally destroyed inventory records and resulted in production orders for the wrong products. Correcting the errors cost the company millions of dollars and wiped out any savings projected as a result of the new automation. (p. 12)

In an article in the December 19, 1988 issue of Time magazine, Christine Gorman reported that "the skill deficit has cost businesses and tax payers $20 billion in lost wages, profits, and productivity. For the first time in American history, employers face a proficiency gap in the work force so great that it threatens the well-being of hundreds of U.S. companies" (p. 56). These kinds of complaints suggest the need for the kinds of remedial programs that we see most often in adult education, community colleges, JTPA programs, and welfare-to-work programs: efforts focused on teaching reading comprehension of simple paragraphs, writing coherent paragraphs, and applying arithmetic skills such as fractions, decimals, and long division--all staples of the elementary school, and "basic" by almost any definition.

Not surprisingly, though, the conception of what is "basic" varies substantially. The report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk--the report which in many ways ignited the reform efforts of the 1980s--identified the "New Basics" as four years of high school English, three years of math, three years of science, three years of social studies, and one-half year of computer science. The report then went on to specify the content of each area, outlining the need for capacities such as knowledge of "our literary heritage and how it enhances imagination and ethical understanding" (p. 25), geometry, algebra, elementary probability, and statistics--capacities well beyond simple arithmetic and reading for comprehension.

Other manifestoes define the problem somewhat differently, and identify still other capacities as "basic skills." A report of the American Society for Training and Development (Carnevale, Gainer & Meltzer, 1990), a group which sponsors training within firms, moves well beyond academic competencies in defining necessary skills:

Reading, writing, and math deficiencies have been the first to surface in the workplace; but, increasingly, skills such as problem-solving, listening, negotiation, and knowing how to learn are being seen as essential. . . . [Employees] are less supervised, but they are frequently called upon to identify problems and make crucial decisions. (p. 2)

The report, Workplace Basics: The Skills Employers Want, identifies as "basic skills" such capacities as adaptability, the ability to innovate, strong interpersonal skills, the ability to work in teams, listening skills, the ability to set goals, creativity, and problem-solving skills (Carnevale, Gainer, & Meltzer, 1990, chap. 2). Others have echoed the claim that simple academic abilities are insufficient:

Reading, writing, and arithmetic, however, are just the beginning. Today's jobs also require greater judgement on the part of workers. Clerks at Hartford's Travelers Insurance Company no longer just type endless claim forms and pass them along for approval by someone else. Instead they are expected to settle a growing number of minor claims on the spot with a few deft punches of the computer keyboard. Now, says Bob Feen, director of training at Travelers: "Entry-level clerks have to be capable of using information and making decisions." (Gorman, 1988, p. 57)

Still others have denied that any of these skills matter much, at least for the moment. The Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce surveyed a sample of firms, and only five percent reported that education and skill requirements are increasing. The Commission concluded that, with some exceptions, "the education and skill levels of American workers roughly match the demands of their jobs." Instead of deficiency in conventional skills, their sample identified a different area of deficiency (National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), 1990):

While businesses everywhere complain about the quality of their applicants, few refer to the kinds of skills acquired in school. The primary concern of more than 80 percent of employers is finding workers with a good work ethic and appropriate social behavior--"reliable," "a good attitude," "a pleasant appearance," "a good personality." (p. 24)

The report went on, however, to forecast a "third industrial revolution," one which will "usher in new high performance work organizations that have higher skill requirements than exist today" (p. 56), and then it outlined the necessary capacities, including "foundation skills." These skills include the following:

the demonstrated ability to read, write, compute, and perform at world-class levels in general school subjects (mathematics, physical and natural sciences, technology, history, geography, politics, economics and English). Students should also have exhibited a capacity to learn, think, work effectively alone and in groups and solve problems. (p. 69)

Like the "New Basics" of A Nation at Risk, this conception of "foundation skills" suggests the inadequacy of basic skills as conventionally defined for a world-class labor force, a point echoed by many others forecasting a continued increase in the skills necessary for the future workforce (e.g., see Johnston & Packer, 1987).

From these commission reports and manifestoes, then, comes an ambiguous definition of the problem. Whether basic skills should be defined as reading comprehension, simple writing abilities, and arithmetic computation, or as academic competencies usually associated with a college preparatory curriculum and restated in the "New Basics" and the "foundation skills" of more recent reports, is unclear. Whether the serious deficiencies in the labor force are those of simple academic competencies, "higher order skills" such as problem solving, interpersonal skills such as the ability to work in teams, or behaviors lumped under the term "work ethic" is another subject of contention. Whether workers need more sophisticated academic skills, or whether employers really need judgement--a highly complex capacity that requires the ability to understand the multiple goals of an organization and balance competing demands--is similarly unclear. Whether the deficiencies in the labor force are present now, or whether the current labor force is adequate to the tasks demanded of it but not to those of a future and still imaginary organization of work, has also been the subject of some dispute. Something seems amiss in the labor force; however, what is wrong and how to fix it are ambiguous.

A second major ambiguity involves the focus of concern--the question of who is suffering because of deficient skills. From one perspective, skill deficiencies are a problem because they make it impossible for individuals to qualify for jobs necessary to make them self-sufficient; they may be able to work at unskilled jobs--if they can manage to complete application forms and get hired--but they can't aspire to much more. Even so, most reports that focus on skill deficiencies have shown little concern for the well-being of individuals. Instead, what is at stake is the competitive condition of the country; and the major beneficiaries of remedial efforts appear to be employers and then the American economic system.

Both of these concerns are highly vocational and utilitarian; that is, they emphasize the purpose of enhancing basic skills, or eradicating illiteracy, in terms of employment and productivity on the job. In contrast, another parallel discussion about literacy and illiteracy has stressed that the capacities associated with literacy--including the reading and writing abilities usually included among basic skills--are valuable beyond their vocational goals; their purposes include political uses for informed citizens, familial uses for parents educating their own children, the ability to participate actively in community and non-work organizations, aesthetic goals for those who read fiction and poetry, avocational pursuits, and various forms of self-improvement too numerous to catalogue and even to describe as purposeful.[4] From this perspective, narrowing the definition of literacy to those forms which are job-related--as many of the commission reports do when they concentrate on the skills necessary to build a world-class workforce, or as functional context literacy does when it reduces literacy to those skills required in a specific work context (Kazemek, 1985)--is inappropriate, since individuals may seek to become literate for many different reasons (Fingeret, 1990).

In the context of institutions struggling to provide remedial education, these concerns may seem academic. Most community colleges are straining simply to keep up with the demands for remedial education and ESL, and most job training programs and welfare-to-work programs have found themselves without sufficient resources to provide very much basic skills instruction. In this situation, arguments about whether remediation and literacy programs ought to include more elements are simply pointless without additional resources. However, keeping the different conceptions of basic skills and literacy in mind helps interpret what programs are doing. For example, a program that relies heavily on individual computer-based instruction in reading and computation is quite different from one that uses a variety of reading, writing, and interactive activities to provide practice in interpersonal communication; what we will label the "skills and drills" approach to remediation has very different ambitions from the eclectic approaches sometimes developed in community colleges; and programs which link remediation to the requirements of particular jobs have advantages and disadvantages, compared to other programs, that are inseparable from their goals.

Most importantly, the current debates about basic skills and literacy, and the clarion calls to do something about the sorry state of the American labor force, cannot change federal and state policies without some decisions about the purpose of remedial efforts. To expand the nation's efforts in remediation, as many recent reports call for, it is necessary to specify what the scope of such efforts should be. Even if this is done by omission--by failing to specify the goals of remedial efforts, leaving that decision to local institutions--this still constitutes a decision about scope and purpose. When we return in the last section of this monograph to the questions of what ought to be done with the remedial programs that are part of vocational education and job training, the question of purpose will prove crucial.

THE CURRENT STATE OF REMEDIAL EFFORTS

While there has been a surge of writing about literacy and skill deficiencies, there have been almost no examinations of what programs are offered and what the relationships among them are.[5] To provide some initial information, we conducted telephone interviews with administrators of vocational education and job training programs and providers of remedial education in twenty-three regions located within nine states (see Appendix A). Eight states--California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin--were chosen because of some feature of interest to this study. For example, several of them (California, Florida, and Michigan) have welfare-to-work programs that have been operating for some time; North Carolina has resource centers in its community colleges that we knew to be widely used by JTPA and welfare recipients; California has a large number of community colleges as well as a long-running welfare-to-work program. Tennessee has JTPA programs operated by community colleges, and also has a basic skills and adult education program at the state level that channels JTPA 8-percent funds to literacy programs; and Michigan and Wisconsin have relatively well-developed mechanisms of coordination. In addition, we interviewed programs in Hartford, Connecticut because that city has pooled all its education and training funds, providing a potentially interesting case of coordination. We had previously visited each of these states (except Connecticut) to examine coordination in their job skills training, so we were relatively familiar with state policies and institutional structures.

Within each state, we tried to choose one urban area, one rural region, and one suburban or semi-urban region; the regions where we conducted our interviews are typically cities or collections of neighboring counties.[6] We began each interview with the director of the JTPA Service Delivery Area, and then interviewed administrators in charge of remediation in any local community colleges, technical institutes, area vocational schools serving adults, adult education schools, and welfare-to-work programs. (We did not interview individuals associated with secondary vocational programs.) In each institution that provided remedial education, we also interviewed the individual in charge of remediation--that is, the individual operating the learning lab or overseeing the teachers within the remedial programs, an individual who would be likely to know the curriculum and philosophy of the program. In Service Delivery Areas (SDAs) that provide remedial services through several different subcontractors, we interviewed one or two subcontractors; in community colleges that provide remediation within English and math departments, we interviewed the heads of those departments. Through this set of interviews we hoped to develop a comprehensive picture of remedial education within each region, including the patterns of referrals among programs; and we also gathered information about policies and funding--information administrators are likely to know--and about the programmatic details of curriculum, philosophy, and purpose.

The questions we asked covered descriptive aspects such as the numbers of individuals enrolled and the types of programs offered; funding; relationships among programs, including practices of referring individuals to or receiving students from other programs; the effects of state and federal policies; and a long list of questions designed to elicit as full a description of the programs' methods and curricula as possible. In addition, we asked for information about the numbers of individuals who enrolled and who completed any evaluation evidence, including pre- and posttests, and any follow-up information. The questionnaires we used are included in Appendix C.

In general, these questionnaires were too ambitious, and the information they elicited proved to be incomplete.[7] Many programs lack information about their own operations; many JTPA programs, for example, are unable to say how many individuals receive basic education because the decision to provide remediation is often left to subcontractors; many welfare-to-work programs were only barely underway, and had not yet developed information systems that allowed them to report what services individuals receive. Even simple figures such as enrollments are difficult to collect on a consistent basis since institutions establish different ways of counting individuals. This poses a serious problem for remediation in educational institutions because students may or may not receive credit or the courses themselves may be difficult to distinguish from college-level English or math. The time period of remediation programs, with many relatively short or operated as open-entry/open-exit programs in which students determine the amount of time they spend, creates yet other problems. Describing the curricula offered proved simple only in the cases where providers are using well-known curricula (e.g., the Comprehensive Competencies Program or the PLATO computer-based system). In other cases, it was difficult to tell what the curriculum was meant to be, though visits to selected programs (listed in Appendix B) provided information that helped interpret responses; most providers had a difficult time articulating their philosophy and methods.

Despite the incomplete responses to our questionnaires, unmistakable patterns emerged. We first describe remedial efforts for specific types of vocational education and job training programs, and we then draw together our results into three larger issues: coordination among programs, the nature of what is provided, and evidence about effectiveness.

Postsecondary Vocational Education: Community Colleges and Technical Institutes

Comprehensive community colleges and their specialized peers, technical institutes, have become some of the largest providers of remedial education.[8] The institutions have found their incoming students increasingly underprepared, particularly since the vast expansion of enrollments in the 1960s and 1970s, so they have added remedial programs to their more traditional vocational and academic offerings. Virtually every community college now offers some form of remediation;[9] estimates of the fraction of entering students in need of some form of basic instruction vary from twenty-five percent to fifty percent (Cahalan & Farris, 1986, Table 6; Plisko & Stern, 1985; Roueche, Baker, & Roueche, 1987) to seventy-eight percent in the Tennessee system (Riggs, Davis, & Wilson, 1990). Although there has been some resistance to remedial education, partly on the grounds that such programs compromise claims to being "colleges," most community colleges seem to have accepted the legitimacy of these offerings (Mickler & Chapel, 1989); many have expanded their offerings in response to greater numbers of very poorly prepared students from JTPA and welfare programs, as well as increasing numbers of foreign-born students in need of English as a Second Language (ESL).

The expansion of remedial education appears to have taken place as a result of local responses to need rather than as a result of state policies, since relatively few states have adopted specific policies for remediation.[10] However, virtually all states fund remedial education through state aid to community colleges and technical institutes--though a few establish limits on the number of remedial courses per student that receive state support--and many use their Perkins funds for remedial programs for vocational students. Receiving state aid on the basis of enrollment or attendance distinguishes community colleges from most other providers of remediation and creates a fiscal incentive for other programs--notably JTPA and welfare--to send their clients to community colleges.

All of the community colleges in our sample provided some form of remedial education, or "developmental education" as some individuals termed it. The estimates of the fraction of students enrolled in such programs varied from twelve percent to eighty-three percent, with two modes at about thirty-five percent and seventy percent. However, several administrators asserted that this question is difficult because the boundary between what is remedial and what is truly college-level is a matter of judgement. In addition, they claimed that conceptions of who is a "remedial student" vary from all those who are taking at least one remedial course to those enrolled in an entire remedial program. Community colleges provide remediation in several different ways: Some offer courses within English and math departments; some have established separate learning labs or centers where students can go for individualized instruction; and some have established remedial departments which may offer a variety of courses as well as learning labs, and even non-remedial English and writing courses in some institutions.[11]

Not surprisingly, offerings vary widely among community colleges. At one end of the spectrum, some colleges seem to offer only a learning lab equipped either with programmed or computer-based instruction, which students can use on their own initiative with relatively little guidance. However, the most ambitious community colleges offer a great deal more and provide good examples of the eclectic approach to instruction described in Section Four: They provide courses at different levels of difficulty, typically encompassing coursework below the fourth grade level; coursework ranging between the fourth and the eighth grade level; and coursework leading up to college-level competencies in reading, writing, and math, rather than offering only one or two of these subjects; they include labs in all three subjects, where students can work at their own pace under the guidance of instructors; in reading and writing courses, they distinguish between offerings for native speakers of English and those for non-native speakers, since the two groups have different learning needs; and they provide one-on-one tutoring. The best of the community college programs are quite varied in their offerings, then, especially compared to the other providers of remedial education.

Colleges also vary in whether they require developmental education of students who score below some standard or whether remediation is "strongly advised" but not required. There has been a shift toward requiring remediation (Boylan, 1985), since colleges have been under pressure to increase persistence; and eleven states now require mandatory placement in developmental education (Boylan, 1985). However, even with such a requirement, students can usually enroll concurrently in other vocational and academic courses. Most of the institutions that we surveyed advised but did not require underprepared students to take developmental courses. Almost all institutions allowed concurrent enrollment in other courses. (There are exceptions, however; students in Tennessee scoring below college proficiency on the state's basic skills assessment must complete a remedial program before enrolling in courses that use skills which they lack.) As a result, low scores on standardized tests are only rarely a barrier to enrollment in vocational education in community colleges--contrary to the practice in many JTPA programs, for example, in which low scores prevent individuals from entering certain training programs.

Almost all of the community colleges we surveyed include either welfare or JTPA clients, most of them in the regular remedial programs rather than in special courses. In some states, including California and Florida, welfare-to-work programs have not been allocated funds for basic skills instruction, so welfare programs must send their clients either to adult education or community colleges. When welfare clients enroll in community colleges, the tracking requirements under the JOBS program entail extensive paperwork; therefore, community colleges know exactly how many welfare recipients they have in JOBS-sponsored programs. However, unless a community college has a subcontract with a SDA to provide remediation--something which happened in only two community colleges in our twenty-three regions, largely because JTPA avoids using its own resources for remediation--or has received an 8-percent grant for JTPA clients, the college is unlikely to know and has no need to know if a student is also a JTPA client; consequently, individuals referred by JTPA to community colleges for remediation may enroll, but neither the college nor JTPA knows that such a referral has been completed. As a result, many colleges report that they do not know how many JTPA clients they have, even in regions where the SDA reports that it refers individuals to the community college.

In most community colleges, remediation is relatively independent of both transfer education and vocational education. Remedial programs usually have lower status; they are more likely to be taught by part-time instructors than by regular full-time faculty; and they are likely to be seen as precursors to vocational and academic coursework, rather than as complements. In practice, this means that no community colleges in our sample have tried to coordinate remediation with vocational or academic programs. There has been, based on our survey, little attempt to develop "functional context training" in which the content of remedial courses is somehow drawn from or linked with the content of vocational programs. While concurrent enrollment in both remedial and "regular" courses is widespread, and is widely reported to have advantages in keeping students motivated and enrolled, it does not mean that the content of remedial and vocational courses has been coordinated or integrated in any way. To be sure, there has been some discussion among instructors of the need to teach basic skills within the context of "regular" courses--usually courses in literature, the humanities, and the social sciences (Luvaas-Briggs, 1983; Bojar, 1982; McGlinn, 1988; Baker, 1982; and for four-year colleges, Ganschow, 1983). In addition, our site visits identified a few efforts to use vocational material in remedial courses. By and large, however, developmental education efforts in community colleges remain independent of the transfer and vocational programs for which they presumably prepare their students.

Because community college funding is enrollment-driven, community colleges can generally provide good information on how many students are enrolled in their remedial programs. However, other evidence is spotty. Data on the proportion of students starting remediation who complete different stages or who then go on to complete certificates or Associate programs is also very limited, though administrators estimated that between ten percent and fifty-nine percent of students complete remedial courses. Administrators often report that they have evaluation evidence, usually in the form of pre- and posttests; nevertheless, while they may use such information for evaluating the progress of individual students, it is much rarer to see such information used to evaluate the effects of courses or programs. Of the institutions we contacted, several sent us enrollment figures, but only one sent an evaluation of any kind--an analysis of retention rates of students in developmental education.

In the literature on developmental education, there are relatively few evaluations; indeed, complaints about the lack of evaluation evidence are staples of prior examinations (J. E. Roueche, 1968; Cross, 1976; Roueche & Snow, 1977; J. E. Roueche, 1983; Cohen & Brawer, 1989). A meta-analysis of college programs for high-risk and disadvantaged students through the early 1980s (Kulik, Kulik, & Shwalb, 1983) located only nine evaluations of remedial or developmental programs, of which six were for community colleges and none of which was published more recently than 1971. While the analysis found that these programs have positive effects on the average, community college programs and remedial programs have lower effects and usually statistically insignificant effects on both grade point average and persistence. More recently, one can find summaries that claim positive outcomes--such as the claim that "well-designed programs that are challenging and motivating but not overwhelming produce positive results far beyond the expectations of the instructors" (Mickler & Chapel, 1989, p. 3)--as well as relentlessly gloomy interpretations. A few states have carried out substantial evaluations of their programs, notably California, where a consortium has identified colleges with adequate evaluation information and compiled evidence showing test score gains of students in remedial courses (Learning Assessment and Retention Consortium (LARC), 1988a, 1988b, 1989a, 1989b); and New Jersey, whose results focus on attrition rather than test scores (Wepner, 1987; Morante, Faskow, & Menditto 1984). The results indicate that community college students who passed remedial courses had an attrition rate from one semester to the next of thirteen percent, compared to an attrition rate of forty-two percent for those judged in need of remediation who did not complete courses, twenty-seven percent among those in need of remediation who never enrolled in such courses, and twenty-one percent for those judged not in need of remediation--suggesting that completing remediation among those in need of it sharply reduces attrition. However, while the results from New Jersey and California are generally positive, they may not be representative of all developmental programs,[12] and the underlying methodologies are weak (for reasons that will be explored later in this section).

The most thorough evaluations have taken place in Miami-Dade Community College, with its relatively sophisticated institutional research office.[13] Some results (e.g., Losak & Morris, 1983) suggest that completion of developmental courses has made little difference to student success. However, the extensive results in Losak and Morris (1985), reproduced in Tables 1 and 2, are more positive. These tables provide richer information than most other evaluations because they describe outcomes such as persistence and CLAST (College Level Academic Skills Test) scores (scores from a "rising junior" exam which students must pass to transfer from two-year to four-year colleges in Florida) which are more meaningful than changes in standardized test scores. In addition, they allow comparisons among different groups of students. The data in these tables also allow

calculation of rates at which students remedy deficiencies; for example, forty-two percent (=651/1524) of students below a college-level score in one area completed remediation in that area, but only twenty-four percent of those deficient in two areas and eleven percent of those deficient in three areas completed remediation in all subjects. The results indicate that for students found to need remediation, completing more developmental courses improved retention and CLAST scores; but that completing such developmental courses did not eliminate the differences between students entering with deficiencies and those not needing any remediation.[14] That is, developmental education can narrow the differences among students, but it cannot eliminate them--at least not as it is currently practiced at Miami-Dade. Furthermore, completing remedial courses obviously requires substantial time and effort, especially for individuals who need to take such courses in two or three subjects, and so large fractions of students entering with scores below college-level never complete the appropriate remedial sequence.

There is, then, relatively little evidence about the effects of remediation in community colleges despite its growth over the last two to three decades. Although the evidence that exists is positive, particularly the findings from Miami-Dade, it probably describes the best institutions rather than the average practice, and is still subject to methodological flaws.

Adult Basic Education

A large system of adult education in this country provides various offerings for remediation--from ABE, GED, and ESL courses to citizenship training, hobby courses, and various self-improvement courses. The institutional sponsorship of adult education is bewildering: In most states, school districts have responsibility, though typically districts can choose whether or not to provide adult education. In some states (e.g., California), both school districts and area vocational schools provide adult education; in others (e.g., Illinois), adult education is the responsibility of community colleges. In a few cases, there has been a division of labor; for example, in Florida, school districts provide adult education in fourteen counties, and they provide community colleges in the remaining fourteen. Adult education is generally funded by state aid per person enrolled, and so--like community college programs--is an inviting target for JTPA and welfare programs seeking remediation at someone else's expense.

ABE programs have the distinct advantage of being ubiquitous: There are ABE programs in every community in which we interviewed. Programs such as JTPA and many state welfare-to-work efforts lack funding specifically for basic skills. Moreover, these programs do not see themselves as educators and do not want the responsibility of developing educational curricula. Therefore, ABE programs are the most obvious places to send clients in need of remediation, partly because of funding but also because JTPA and welfare programs are also under substantial pressure to use existing resources to avoid duplication of services. As a result, in the majority of communities we surveyed, both programs refer clients to ABE when they fall below specific scores on standardized tests. For example, JTPA programs often establish minimum test scores for entry into certain job skill programs; clients with lower test scores are referred to ABE programs, presumably allowing them to increase their scores and then gain admission to training.

Within adult education, a common practice is to offer GED classes, as well as courses at a lower level of difficulty (often labeled ABE or pre-GED), designed to prepare students for GED classes. ABE classes are equivalent to work roughly between the fourth and eighth grade levels, while GED classes cover material roughly equivalent to grades six or seven to ten.[15] Most ABE and GED courses cover reading comprehension and arithmetic computation, but incorporate little writing; compared to community college developmental education, their range is quite restricted. Most ABE operate as open-entrance/open-exit programs, using texts or programmed workbooks which students can follow at their own pace, or (rarely, because of the lack of funds) using computer-based programs. Overwhelmingly, program directors described curricula as individualized and self-paced. "Individualized" means that programs ascertain an individual's level of performance through a standard test--often the Test of Adult Basic Education (TABE) or the Adult Basic Living Exam (ABLE)--and then start each student at the appropriate level in reading and math. The role of instructors appears to vary greatly. They tend to have little training in adult or remedial education, and they are almost all part-time (e.g., see Balmuth, 1985, and Darkenwald, 1986); since the instructional materials are designed to allow students to progress on their own, teachers need do little other than respond to occasional questions. However, a few ABE directors in our sample mentioned that they develop alternative curriculum materials to vary the format and media of the curriculum and to incorporate some writing and some group discussions into their programs. We suspect, then, that instructors vary enormously, from being relatively passive managers of prepackaged curriculum materials to being more active in devising their own approaches.

Uniformly, the ABE programs we interviewed lack information about completion rates. However, there is a general consensus that completion is very low; figures of fifty percent were commonly cited by the programs in our sample. ABE literature supports these figures, too (e.g., the review by Balmuth, 1985). Because of the lack of records, any figures on completion are simply guesses. What emerges consistently is an image of lackadaisical attendance in ABE: Directors describe many participants as attending sporadically, sometimes over long periods of time, and making slow and uncertain progress.[16]

One goal common to most adult education programs--evident in the structure of pre-GED and GED classes--is to have students pass the GED exam, to have their high school equivalency. In turn, many JTPA and welfare programs have taken GED completion as their goals, and so the GED appears to drive a great deal of existing remediation. Unfortunately, the evidence that completing a GED enhances employment or access to postsecondary education is weak. A number of adult educators we interviewed expressed that a GED "is only the first step," or is not enough to get worthwhile jobs. The literature examining the effects of the GED--scattered, often of low quality, and in great need of synthesis--suggests that the GED may provide a small advantage to those that complete it, but that this advantage might be attributed to motivation, prior preparation, or other personal characteristics that distinguish GED completers from high school dropouts (Passmore, 1987; Olsen, 1989; Quinn & Haberman, 1986). Given the enormous influence of the GED on the goals and methods of adult education, it is disconcerting to find so little support for its effectiveness.

We were unable to collect any evaluation evidence from the programs we interviewed. As in many community colleges, some ABE programs claim to perform evaluations using pre- and posttests, but they use tests for individual assessment rather than program evaluation. Just as none collect systematic information about rates of progress and noncompletion, none collect information about the subsequent experiences of their participants. The fraction of participants who go on to complete a GED or other high school diploma equivalent,[17] the fraction who gain access to vocational training, the fraction among those referred by JTPA or welfare who subsequently enter training and find employment--these and other obvious measures of success are completely lacking. Nor could we find much evaluation evidence in the literature to supplement the information we received from our questionnaires.[18] While a few studies find positive results, most of them are seriously flawed.[19] Even those studies with positive outcomes acknowledge that gains are small. For example, Diekhoff (1988) claims that "there is little doubt that the average literacy program participant achieves a statistically significant improvement in reading skill" (p. 625), citing a 1974 study for the Office of Education that documented a half grade reading gain over a four month period. But given the limited amount of time most adults spend in ABE, with only twenty percent enrolling for longer than one year, most ABE students will improve by one year or less, and their gains--from a fifth to a sixth grade reading level, for example--are trivial in practical terms. As he concludes,

Adult literacy programs have failed to produce life-changing improvements in reading ability that are often suggested by published evaluations of these programs. It is true that a handful of adults do make substantial meaningful improvements, but the average participant gains only one or two reading grade levels and is still functionally illiterate by almost any standard when he or she leaves training. But published literacy program evaluations often ignore this fact. Instead of providing needed constructive criticism, these evaluations often read like funding proposals or public relations releases. (p. 629)

The general tenor of writing is discouraging, acknowledging the low levels of motivation, high dropout rates, and the lack of any but the most infrequent and anecdotal success stories. This literature generally confirms the information from our surveys--of a large, unwieldy set of programs, with varied institutional sponsorship and content, lacking any systematic information about enrollments, completion, progress, or success.

The Job Training Partnership Act

The Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) allows local programs great discretion in the services provided to eligible individuals, and it allows basic or remedial education either by itself or in combination with occupational skills training (NCEP, 1987). However, most local SDAs have chosen to concentrate on providing classroom-based skills training provided by community-based organizations (CBOs) and educational institutions, on-the-job training provided by firms, and job search assistance. While it is impossible to ascertain at the national level how much of JTPA's resources support remediation, basic education does not figure prominently in most discussions of JTPA,[20] and prior studies have found relatively few SDAs providing any remediation.[21] In our prior observations of JTPA programs (Grubb et al., 1989; Grubb et al., 1990), it became clear that JTPA performance standards have discouraged basic skills for two different reasons. Remediation increases costs, and, therefore, has made it more difficult for programs to meet the cost-per-placement standard (a standard which has recently been abolished). In addition, several administrators claim that JTPA clients are more likely to drop out during remediation because they find it boring, irrelevant to their job goals, and too reminiscent of the schooling in which they have previously failed--and dropouts for any reason make it difficult to meet placement standards. At the same time, many administrators acknowledge the need for more remediation, and some are trying to find new resources to support more instruction in basic skills.

In our sample of SDAs, virtually all offer some remediation. Most SDAs did not know precisely how many clients received basic education, however, because this decision is often left to subcontractors and is not reported to the SDA. Several programs that did hazard guesses estimated that around fifteen percent of their clients received some form of remediation.[22] Most commonly, an SDA will subcontract with various agencies, and some will provide basic skills instruction along with vocational skill training--in short-term secretarial and clerical programs, for example. When this happens, it is difficult to determine what the balance of remediation and job skills training is or what approaches are used in the remediation component because these decisions are left to subcontractors. In only a few cases did SDAs report that they had established a policy to guide subcontractors in their provision of basic skills. When a policy exists, it is usually limited to increasing client test scores by only a few grade levels. It is also common to provide remediation only to those who can prepare for the GED with a minimal brush-up (a month or two); clients with low tests scores may be supported for four to six weeks--clearly not enough to reach any minimum competency level--or, much more likely, they may be referred to an ABE or volunteer literacy program. Some JTPA programs match remediation to the client's employment goal; for example, an individual interested in office occupations may be encouraged to complete a GED, while those in janitorial programs will be encouraged to reach a seventh grade reading level. However, explicit policies about remediation are relatively rare, and SDA administrators were generally unfamiliar with the remedial programs offered by subcontractors.[23]

In a few instances, however, SDAs have established clear expectations about basic skills. Both the San Diego Private Industry Council (PIC) and the San Francisco PIC have declared that all providers of training should also incorporate basic skills instruction as appropriate, either by providing such instruction directly or by referring individuals to other agencies. Typically this is accomplished by dividing the day, for example with skill training provided in the morning and remediation in the afternoon and with no necessary relationship between the two components (though the San Diego SDA supports several organizations that do integrate remediation with vocational skills training in more meaningful ways). The policies of these two PICs are clearly exceptions, at least within our sample, though their decisions are consistent with the drift of federal policy to emphasize more remediation.

Less commonly, SDAs will subcontract with an agency (including various educational institutions) to provide remediation only. For example, the community colleges in San Diego and Danville, Illinois, have contracts to provide remediation for JTPA clients. The Berrier-Cass-Van Buren SDA in Michigan has just started contracts with several CBOs to offer basic education and employability skills based on the competency-based Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System (CASAS); they were expecting the average duration in these programs to be about four weeks. Contracts specifically for remedial education are more common in youth programs within JTPA, for which mastery of academic competencies is an acceptable outcome. In most adult programs, however, the emphasis remains on job skills training and work experience.

The most common approach of JTPA programs is to refer individuals to other remedial programs. Based on an initial assessment, an SDA may suggest that an individual enroll in a remedial program concurrently with job skills training. The initial assessment may also be used as a barrier to some types of training and as a possible source of "creaming"[24]: Certain training programs have minimum scores necessary for enrollment, and individuals with low scores are then referred to ABE or GED programs in the hopes that they can increase their scores and later gain admission to job training. North Carolina has extended this practice statewide: A seventh grade reading level is necessary to enroll in JTPA, and all individuals below this level are referred to ABE programs.

In referring JTPA clients to other programs, there appears to be a preference for sending individuals to ABE programs rather than community colleges. The timing of ABE programs--which often take place in the evening and which are typically open-entry/open exit--may be more appropriate for individuals who are in job skills training during the day. In addition, community college developmental education in some areas does not offer remediation at a low enough level for many JTPA clients. The tuition charged by community colleges may also be a barrier. However, in states where community colleges have established special remedial centers--as in North Carolina's Human Resource Development Centers or Wisconsin's special learning centers--then JTPA and welfare-to-work programs appear to refer more clients to community colleges.

The most obvious problem with referral is few SDAs have developed mechanisms to follow individuals whom they refer to other programs. Therefore, SDA officials never know whether someone they refer elsewhere enrolled in that program, whether they completed it, or whether they made it back into job skills training.[25] The mechanism of referral may seem like an appropriate form of cooperation among education and job training programs, but it is just as likely to exclude individuals from training and cause them to be "lost" among programs.

Finally, a substantial, though unknown, fraction of JTPA 8-percent funds are used for remediation. These funds, which are designed "to facilitate coordination of education and training services" (Section 123, Job Training Partnership Act), are often allocated through departments of education, following state priorities. In many cases these priorities include remediation; for example, Georgia recommends that 8-percent funds support remediation, GED programs, and support services for JTPA clients in technical institutes; Massachusetts has used its funds for a program called Workplace Education, providing ABE, GED, and ESL instruction through employers; Michigan uses its 8-percent funds for the Summer Training and Education Program (STEP), providing basic skills to in-school youth, and for literacy and basic education provided by local agencies; Illinois allows remediation as an option for 8-percent funds, and several SDAs use all their resources for basic education; Tennessee has allocated half of its funds to the State Department of Education for statewide literacy programs; Washington has recommended that 8-percent programs emphasize basic educational skills and workplace literacy; and California has established, as one of two priorities, programs that combine basic skills and vocational skills. In addition, several states (including California) have allocated some of their 8-percent funds specifically for welfare recipients, and these resources are also likely to find their way into remediation. The 8-percent funds are generally viewed within JTPA as relatively unconstrained resources--meaning, in particular, that they are not subject to performance standards--and have, therefore, been widely used in novel or experimental programs, or those including hard-to-serve groups. As a result, many remedial programs have at least a little 8-percent money supporting them.

The remediation funded by JTPA follows a consistent pattern. Because JTPA funds relatively short programs--rarely longer than twenty weeks and often less than half that--there is constant pressure to achieve gains in short periods of time; programs will therefore report gains (usually in grade-equivalent scores) per one hundred hours of instruction. Second, there is a distinct preference within JTPA for self-contained remedial programs--that is, programs that have curriculum materials (including teacher aides) already developed that can be implemented without a great deal of time for teacher preparation, curriculum development, or the participation of skilled educators--including computer-based programs such as the PLATO system and IBM's Principles of the Alphabet Literacy System (PALS), sometimes referred to as "turn-key" systems. JTPA administrators often distinguish themselves from educators, claiming to be job-oriented and performance-driven rather than academic and enrollment-driven. This distinction leaves some of them uncomfortable with developing educational programs; a typical comment about the decision to refer clients to ABE programs is that "we'll leave that to the educators." Finally, with the exception of some programs incorporating employability skills and several innovative programs described in our "Alternatives to Skills and Drills" section, the vast majority of remediation provided within JTPA has not been modified to incorporate occupationally oriented material or to integrate knowledge required in job skills training. Almost all of it follows the model we label "skills and drills." Unfortunately, the limits of skills and drills are especially obvious within JTPA, which includes many high school dropouts and others who have not done well in conventional schooling; several administrators volunteered that remedial programs are boring and demeaning to their clients, and that some JTPA clients score poorly on standardized tests and drop out despite being able to read relatively well.

As in every other area of remediation, there are no evaluation results about the effects of basic skills within JTPA on other outcomes such as completion of job skills training, placement, or subsequent earnings. Even though SDAs must compile information on performance standards, these data are used for compliance but not for evaluation purposes; as a result, no JTPA program in our sample could provide evidence about the effectiveness of remediation. More general evaluation evidence about the effects of JTPA will begin to come out only when the National JTPA Study is completed, in 1992 (Gueron, Orr, & Bloom, 1988).

Two other recent evaluations of JTPA-related programs are tantalizing, though far from conclusive. One study examined the JOBSTART demonstration programs, which offer comprehensive services to disadvantaged high school dropouts (Auspos, Cave, Doolittle, & Hoerz, 1989). The evaluation differentiated those programs offering both remediation and job skills training concurrently, those offering remediation before job skills training (sequentially), and those providing remediation and referring their clients elsewhere for occupational skills training. The preliminary results indicate that those in JOBSTART received more education and training, and were more likely to receive a GED,[26] compared to control groups, but results about the effects of different patterns of education and training have yet to appear. A second study, an evaluation of the Minority Female Single Parent Demonstration, examined four programs designed to help low-income single mothers move from welfare to employment (Burghardt & Gordon, 1990). Three of the programs had no significant effects, compared to control groups; the one with a significant influence in increasing employment rates and earnings--the Center for Employment Training (CET), based in San Jose and described in greater detail in our "Alternatives to Skills and Drills" section--is a CBO that integrates basic skill training with job skill training. The authors of the evaluation concluded that programs which integrate remediation and skills training are more effective than those that provide the same services in a non-integrated fashion. Appealing as this conclusion is, the contention that integration explains the effectiveness of CET--rather than any other differences among the programs--cannot be supported by this kind of research.[27] In any event, the kind of linkage between remediation and job skills training in the experimental programs evaluated by these two reports is quite different from the general practice in our sample of SDAs, in which relatively few programs provide any basic skills training and largely refer their clients to ABE programs.

Welfare-to-Work Programs

The Family Support Act of 1988 established the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) program, which requires states to establish welfare-to-work programs and to compel some welfare recipients to participate. A wide range of services can be provided, including vocational training, basic or remedial education, postsecondary education, job search assistance, work experience, on-the-job training, and support services such as child care. In theory, the JOBS program could be used to provide a rich array of services to welfare recipients--a rebirth of the "services strategy" of the 1960s. However, many of the experimental welfare-to-work programs established during the 1980s provided paltry amounts of education and training,[28] and our previous investigations confirmed that many states have not appropriated enough money to provide much education or job training (Grubb et al., 1990). The major services in most welfare-to-work programs are short-term job search assistance and counseling.

Our survey of remediation practices confirmed the lack of resources in most welfare-to-work programs. Almost universally, local administrators began planning jobs by convening all providers of education and training in the area, and then used existing providers for specific services--especially JTPA for job skills training and adult education for remediation (Grubb et al., 1990). For remedial education, the dominant practice is to provide an initial assessment--usually with a conventional test of academic skills like the Test of Adult Basic Education (TABE) or, particularly in California, with CASAS, a test which includes employability skills as well as conventional reading and math competencies--and then to refer individuals who have low scores to existing ABE and GED programs and individuals who are not native speakers of English to ESL programs. Quite often this is a matter of state policy: Florida does not provide funding for basic skills through the JOBS program, but relies instead on state funding of ABE through adult schools and community colleges; Georgia has decided to use JOBS funds only for support services and to rely on JTPA and ABE for education and training; Illinois similarly uses Project Chance funds to pay for support services, with community colleges providing education and training from special funds that the Community College Board and the State Board of Education supply; and California has required that adult schools and community colleges provide services to welfare recipients, though local programs are generally free to use their funds as they want.[29] In addition, as mentioned above, many states use large amounts of their JTPA 8-percent funds to support remedial programs for welfare recipients, so again welfare-to-work programs need not use their own resources.

In some instances, welfare-to-work programs have contracted with community colleges to provide remediation for groups of welfare recipients who enroll in the regular developmental education programs of the college but who may have received special tutoring and counseling as well.[30] This mechanism provides welfare recipients with a wider array of remedial courses than most adult schools provide. In addition, welfare recipients can claim to be going to college rather than remedial education; the atmosphere is less like the dreaded high school; and presence at a community college allows them to see the other offerings available. Finally, we have come across some remarkably innovative approaches in the JOBS program. For example, some programs use a mechanism of individual referral, allowing welfare recipients to attend virtually any education or training program in the area (including community colleges, four-year colleges, and proprietary schools), using caseworkers to guide individuals through the maze of possibilities. Fresno City College in California enrolls about five hundred and fifty Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN) recipients in the developmental programs of the college, providing them with additional tutoring and guidance; welfare workers have also located an office on the campus so that problems with eligibility, necessary information, and lost checks can be resolved without missing classes. However, these are admittedly rare; the typical welfare-to-work program provides assessment, referral to an ABE program for remedial education for those with low scores, and very short-term job search assistance, with education and job skills training relatively uncommon.

One important characteristic of the welfare system is that JOBS participants are assigned caseworkers who are responsible for monitoring progress. In addition, extensive reporting requirements allow programs to track clients. Therefore, the problem of losing track of individuals referred elsewhere, so prevalent in JTPA, should be less serious for welfare recipients. However, this is not necessarily the case: Many welfare programs in our sample are so new that their management information systems are not yet operating, and data on how many individuals have received various services is not available. In addition, there is a surprising tendency for individuals to become lost in the complex system. In California, for example, whose GAIN program has been running longer than almost any other, fourteen percent of single-parent families required to participate received basic education; ten percent received self-initiated education or training; ten percent received job search assistance; one percent received other education and training; and one percent received work experience--but twenty-nine percent did not attend an initial orientation, and thirty-seven percent did not participate in any service at all, largely for lack of follow-up or for being "deferred." Of the thirty-four percent who participated in an initial service (basic education, job search, or self-initiated education and training), ninety-one percent did not make it to the next stage of assessment (Riccio, Golden, Hamilton, Martinson, & Orenstein, 1989, Figure 2). Since large numbers of even mandatory participants are lost in the system or have dropped out, the ideal behind the caseworker model--that individuals have a supportive guide through the possible services they might receive--is in practice undermined. As one GAIN administrator in California commented, the lack of information about progress means that many clients "fall into the black hole of ABE," staying in ABE for long periods of time without much progress and without caseworkers knowing whether they have completed or not.

The dominant practice is to refer individuals to adult education or, less often, to community colleges, and these programs are typically not integrated with job skills training. As a result, remedial education for welfare recipients is rarely coordinated with job skills training. In fact, several states require welfare recipients to follow a rigid order of services. For example, California requires an initial appraisal, then basic education or ESL for those below a certain score, and finally three weeks in job search assistance; those failing to find jobs then go through vocational assessment and develop an employment plan that may include further education in vocational skills training. Similarly, Florida requires a sequence in which individuals who fail to find employment after a job search take the TABE, enroll in remedial programs, and only then go into job skills training. In such cases, remediation must precede skills training, often by relatively long periods, so the chance to coordinate remediation and skills training is lost. Recognizing the disadvantages of its sequential approach, California is now experimenting in four counties with "concurrency"; individuals enroll in remediation and skills training at the same time, but the dominant approach--for that very small fraction of participants who receive any skills training at all--is clearly still sequential.

Finally, and not surprisingly, there is no evidence about the effectiveness of remediation within welfare programs. Although there were careful evaluations of welfare-to-work pilot programs during the 1980s (see Gueron, 1987), none was able to distinguish the contributions of different services to changes in earnings and welfare dependence; indeed, it is difficult even to determine how much basic education individuals received in these pilot programs.[31] Although the evaluation of the Minority Female Single Parent Demonstration found the most effective program to be one which integrates remediation with job skills training (Burghardt & Gordon, 1990), this evaluation, too, could not disentangle the contribution of instruction in basic skills to the outcomes. Most welfare-to-work programs have discovered a much greater need for remediation than anticipated (e.g., see Riccio et al., 1989), and there is a consensus that remediation is one of the most important services that welfare-to-work programs can provide; however, in a strict sense this convention rests on assumptions rather than evidence.

Secondary Vocational Education

Although we did not include secondary vocational programs in this study, other research (Grubb, Davis, Lum, Plihal, & Morgaine, 1991) provides evidence about reforms at the secondary level related to the remedial programs we examined. For a variety of reasons, there has been an upsurge of interest in integrating vocational and academic education. Such integration can serve various ambitious goals, including the reconstruction of many aspects of high school; however, when the purpose of integration becomes the enhancement of basic skills among vocational students, it becomes a form of remediation.

One approach, has been to modify vocational curricula to include more academic or basic skills. These curricula are good examples of the skills and drills approach--providing drills in such conventional subjects as vocabulary and spelling, exercises filling in blanks in sentences, comprehension questions based on short reading passages, and arithmetic problems including word problems--with the vocabulary, reading passages, and word problems drawn from a variety of occupational areas. (The appendix to Grubb et al., 1991, lists a variety of these materials.) But apart from the fact that such materials promote a passive form of learning, they are only weakly connected to vocational skill training because they cover many occupational areas and most examples are trivial. We have never seen such materials used by vocational teachers; several reported that the existing materials are not useful because of inappropriate content, and others commented that teachers need to develop their own materials tied closely to their own vocational subjects.

A different approach has been to give the responsibility for remediation to academic instructors. A few area vocational schools, for example, have hired math and English teachers, who then teach modules to students in vocational classes, collaborate with vocational instructors to provide them ways of reinforcing academic material, work with students in small groups or one-on-one, and teach remedial classes. A more thorough change has been adopted in Ohio's Applied Academics program (Ohio Department of Education, 1990), in which academic instructors are assigned to teach courses in applied math, applied communication, and applied science to vocational students. This allows these classes to be tailored to specific occupational areas; for example, math teachers cover different subjects for electronics students than for drafting and design students; the applied communication class for secretaries covers rules of grammar, punctuation, and usage, while the same course for auto mechanics stresses communicating orally with customers and co-workers, reading instruction manuals, and filling out various forms. Because academic teachers spend some time each week in vocational classes, they become familiar with vocational skills training and can devise curricula that are closely connected to these skills. We saw some remarkable team teaching and some other exemplars of integrating vocational skills training with academic instruction in various Ohio schools. In addition, it was clear that the incorporation of academic instruction into vocational programs provided motivation that would otherwise be missing.

There are, then, some examples in secondary vocational education of remediation linked closely to vocational skills training. When we examine functional context training and its offshoots, in Section Four, these secondary examples provide some insight into the possibilities for integrating remediation with skills training. However, the Ohio approach also contains a serious limitation, one that affects other remedial programs. As long as vocational education or shorter-term job training aim to prepare students for entry-level positions in occupations which require relatively basic academic skills, the level of academic skill instruction will remain low. Although electronics and drafting may require algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, individuals preparing to be secretaries, auto mechanics, and animal care workers need no more than simple arithmetic; and the relatively low reading and writing skills required in most entry level occupations similarly set a ceiling on what it makes sense to teach. Without providing students a vision of a sequence of occupations requiring higher and higher levels of academic competencies, it becomes difficult to justify much more than remedial education in most applied academic courses.

Guessing the Scope of the Remediation System

How large is the current system of remediation? Generating national estimates would be nearly impossible. Some programs (e.g., JTPA) don't collect information which would allow national estimates to be derived; in other cases (e.g., community colleges), estimates are available for individual institutions, but aggregation to the national level would be difficult because of inconsistent data systems among states. The variation in adult education makes it extremely difficult to estimate the magnitude of the largest component of remediation, and the task of converting short-term enrollments to a consistent basis (e.g., full-time equivalents) presents yet another difficulty. We know of no effort to develop national figures.

However, the California Workforce Literacy Task Force (1990) has developed estimates for California that indicate probable orders of magnitude. These estimates, presented in Table 3, required great time and effort, and they are still subject to many limitations (see some of them noted at the bottom of the table). Still, they indicate patterns for California that we think are true nationwide. Most obviously, the adult education system--provided in California through both adult schools run by school districts and regional occupational centers and programs--accounts for the largest share of remediation, almost two-thirds of total spending. The community college system comprises the second-largest component, spending about fifteen percent of the total. In other states the balance of adult education and community colleges might be different, since some states give responsibility to community colleges for adult education; on the other hand, most other states have relatively smaller community college systems than California. However, the conclusion that remediati