Grubb, W. N., Kalman, J., Castellano, M., Brown, C., & Bradby, D. (1991). Readin', writin' and 'rithmetic one more time: The role of remediation in vocational education and job training (MDS-309). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.

INTRODUCTION

• A Note on Terminology
• The Organization of This Report

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.

[1] The National Center for Research in Vocational Education (NCRVE) is required by the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act to report to Congress and the Secretary of Education on the coordination between vocational education and JTPA. This has so far resulted in two reports: Grubb et al. (1989) and Grubb et al. (1990), which investigated welfare-to-work programs as well as vocational education and JTPA because of the potential importance of JOBS programs as a source of training. This report is the third in this series. We chose to examine remediation efforts rather than job skills training that was the focus of the earlier reports for the following reasons: The need for remediation was so often mentioned by the programs we visited earlier; we knew of no prior examination of the relation of remediation to job skills training; and coordination in job skills training has been sufficiently studied--even overstudied. In addition to the earlier reports from the NCRVE, see Trutko, Bailis, and Barnow (1989) for a review of the extensive literature.

[2] In a survey of state directors of adult education, Holmes, McQuaid, and Walker (1987) found that coordination was generally the third-ranked barrier to the development of effective adult literacy efforts, after lack of funding and lack of motivation among students.

Grubb, W. N., Kalman, J., Castellano, M., Brown, C., & Bradby, D. (1991). Readin', writin' and 'rithmetic one more time: The role of remediation in vocational education and job training (MDS-309). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.