[FocusOnBasics 578] A Holiday Bon Bon for Everyone
Gail Spangenberg
gspangenberg at caalusa.org
Wed Dec 20 17:00:03 EST 2006
Friends, I am pleased to share this wonderful bon bon with you. It is
authored by Samuel Halperin, who was in on the founding of our adult
education system. Sam is a member of the new National Commission on
Adult Literacy and, I am proud to say, a member of CAAL'S board of
directors. Enjoy, remember, and dare to hope. Merry Holidays and
Happy New Year. Gail Spangenberg
REFLECTIONS ON THE FORTIETH BIRTHDAY OF THE ADULT
EDUCATION ACT OF 1966
Samuel Halperin
December 22, 2006
In November 1966, the United States took a small, but potentially
momentous, legislative step to support a federally aided network of
adult education providers under the Adult Education Act of 1996.
(Technically, the Act is Title III of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), as amended).
Who would have guessed then that this relatively unheralded act would
spur a national network providing education and literacy services to
over 2.5 million adult learners annually, including one million 16-24
year-olds, about half of whom study English as a second language?
With hindsight, making sure that adults have a second chance to raise
their literacy skills and continue their education beyond high school
would seem to be clearly in the public interest. Yet, this obvious no-
brainer required no less than a massive realignment of Congressional
attitudes, a perceived serious threat to national security, and quite
possibly a presidential assassination to turn a simple idea into
legislative reality.
The legislative paths to enactment of the Adult Education Act merit
reflection in this 40th anniversary year because they demonstrate how
extremely malleable, porous, and often quirky is the process of
making our laws, and also because it illuminates the many
opportunities for advocates who perceive opportunities and know how
to seize them to make progress in the public interest.
Here are brief personal memories of those early days, as viewed from
my experience as an executive branch “lobbyist” for Presidents John
F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson:*
In the early 1960s, adult educators were barely a presence in the
halls of Congress.
“None of its advocates,” notes veteran educator Thomas Sticht, “was
having much success getting adult education or adult literacy
education implemented in federal legislation.”**
Ever since the demands of World War I had revealed how poorly
prepared for military service were so many potential recruits --
intellectually through very low literacy as well as physically, an
Adult Basic Education bill (ABE) had been intermittently introduced
in Congress beginning in 1918, and then promptly ignored.
In a Congress long dominated by southern conservatives, “adult basic
education” became conflated with efforts by liberals and the growing
civil rights movement to teach “Negroes” how to pass the literacy
tests that southern states had erected as effective barriers to the
exercise of voting rights. (Southerners also noted with suspicion
that the U.S. Office of Education’s small adult education branch was
headed, and almost exclusively staffed, by a de facto segregated
staff of distinguished African American educators in a federal agency
where Black senior executives were notable mostly by their absence.)
After the defeat of President Kennedy’s education proposals in
1961-62, his Administration devised an omnibus education bill, the
National Education Improvement Act of 1963 (NEIA), consisting of 14
parts and incorporating everything from teacher salaries, vocational
education, public libraries, student financial aid, higher education
construction, and several long-languishing proposals, including adult
basic education. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel, leading
the NEIA legislative effort, knew that the entire 14-part package
would not survive the church-state hurdles that had doomed earlier
Kennedy proposals, but hoped that it might reduce the internecine
warfare then prevailing among Washington’s many diverse and
fragmented education associations.
Through hard work by House and Senate education committees headed,
respectively, by Rep. Adam Clayton Powell and Sen. Wayne Morse, major
parts of NEIA advanced in early 1963. But progress soon stalled as
House and Senate chairs and various education associations quarreled
and checkmated each other.
It took the shock of President Kennedy’s assassination and Lyndon
Johnson’s rise to vigorous leadership to open the legislative
floodgates. By year’s end, major bills for vocational and higher
education were signed into law. Indeed, by the end of 1964, 12 of
the less controversial parts of the NEIA had become law.
During that period, too, several developments made it conceivable
that adult education, with its anti-poverty focus, could at last get
attention on Capitol Hill. In 1963, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an
assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Labor, was struck by
the fact that among potential draftees under the Selective Service
System at least one-third were found unfit for induction due to poor
health or mental limitations, that is very low levels of literacy.
(Analysts believed that if all 18 year-olds had been examined, fully
one-half would be found unfit.). At the urging of Moynihan, Secretary
of Labor Willard Wirtz, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and
General Lewis Hershey of the Selective Service System, President
Kennedy ordered a Task Force on Manpower Conservation to develop
appropriate plans for federal action. The Task Force report, One-
Third of a Nation, was delivered to President Johnson on January 1,
1964. The report did not call for immediate legislation, nor is
there any evidence that it led to Congressional action. Nevertheless,
the critical connections between low literacy, national security, and
poverty were given new and high-level visibility in the Nation’s
Capital. A mood was fast developing that some kind of federal action
was long overdue.
Then, in May 1964, President Johnson committed his administration to
wage War on Poverty. He directed federal agencies to suggest what
they could contribute to the development of what soon became the
Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and its new federal agency, the
Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).
Assigned as the Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s liaison
to the OEO legislative task force headed by Adam Yarmolinsky, I
argued there that several parts of the still-pending NEIA bill had
relevance for any effort to combat poverty, and that such
Administration proposals as adult basic education (ABE), libraries
and college work study could be appropriately incorporated in the
emerging OEO bill.
Future OEO director Sargent Shriver and Yarmolinsky, however,
rejected any targeted earmarking of anti-poverty funds, preferring to
wield the broadest possible blanket authority to wage war on poverty
in all its forms. Moreover, OEO people wanted nothing to do with a
state grant program like ABE that would, they argued, be administered
by unsympathetic, possibly even racist, state and local officials.
Knowing that passage of the OEO bill in the Congress depended on
gaining the support of southerners, many of whom saw ABE as a wedge
to undercut state literacy voting laws, ABE would have no place in
the fast-developing OEO bill.
But legislative possibilities changed dramatically when Congress
passed the historic Voting Rights Act of 1964. The power of state
literacy tests to thwart voting by Blacks would sharply decline, if
not entirely disappear. The mood and tactics among southern
lawmakers shifted accordingly. As one leading southern senator said
in closed caucus, “If we are going to have to let ‘them’ vote, we had
better be sure they can at least read.”
In the House of Representatives, responsibility for overseeing the
contents of the draft Economic Opportunity bill was assigned to a
subcommittee chaired by Carl Perkins, the ranking majority member on
the House Education and Labor Committee, who represented an East
Kentucky district characterized by high poverty and even higher
illiteracy. During a meeting of Committee members and our HEW
legislative staff to consider the provisions of the draft OEO bill, I
raised with Mr. Perkins the relevance of including HEW’s proposals
for ABE and college work-study. Mr. Perkins immediately and
enthusiastically embraced incorporating both provisions in the OEO
bill when it was reported to the House of Representatives for its
approval. Despite opposition from OEO to these inclusions, Perkins
argued that the added provisions would strengthen support for the
overall bill. Thus, when President Johnson signed the Economic
Opportunity Act on August 20, 1964 (Public Law 88-452), its Title
IIB, the Adult Basic Education Act, authorized OEO to make grants to
state education agencies to advance adult literacy. OEO promptly
assigned administration of the two new programs to the U.S. Office of
Education.
On March 1, 1966, ABE and the college work-study legislative
authorizations were formally transferred from OEO to the Office of
Education. These transfers were much less the result of adult
educators’ lobbying efforts than of OEO’s desire to rid itself of an
unwelcome burden and, more especially, of the energetic campaign of
Edith Green of Oregon, subcommittee chairman for higher education
issues on the House Committee on Education and Labor. Mrs. Green, a
formidable education leader, was strongly critical of President
Johnson’s war on poverty and, particularly, of the powers and funds
it conferred on the new OEO “super-czar agency” to intervene in the
traditional operations of many levels of government, including
schools. Amid mounting sharp criticism of OEO’s initial ventures in
community action and legal services, Mrs. Green met scant resistance
to “returning” HEW’s original proposals to the U.S. Office of Education.
Thus, forty years ago, the Adult Education Act was born, a small but
durable foundation stone on which to build a much-needed adult
learning system for the American people.
Today, however, research shows that 93 million Americans over age 16
lack the literacy and skill levels needed to function effectively in
a globally competitive, economically challenging world, one
characterized by massive in-immigration of low-literacy workers. We
must question whether a 40 year-old, generally under-funded adult
education “system,” staffed 80 percent by part-time instructors and
often detached from the needs of cutting-edge economic developments,
is even faintly adequate to meeting the challenges of the 21st Century.
This is clearly not America’s moment to rest on the anniversary
laurels of 1966. Rather, we must forge ahead to help our nation’s
children and adults become the most skilled, the most literate, and
the most empowered generations in our national history.
* As Assistant U.S. Commissioner of Education for Legislation and
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Legislation in the Department of
Health, Education and Welfare during the years 1961-1969.
** Sticht, T. (2002). The Rise of the Adult Education and Literacy
System of the United States: 1600-2000, in
J. Comings, B. Garner and C. Smith (eds.) Annual Review of Adult
Learning and Literacy, vol. 3, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp.10-43.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/focusonbasics/attachments/20061220/00371ced/attachment.html
More information about the FocusOnBasics
mailing list