English is more than just a job skill for adult learners

On July 15, just weeks after the Trump administration missed the deadline to distribute congressionally appropriated funding for English literacy and civics programs, the U.S. Department of Education announced its intention to turn the management of adult education and English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) programs over to the Department of Labor.

This is a bad idea, one that risks reducing a program focused on lifelong learning to mere job training.

Across the U.S., adult learners make time in their lives to study English. They bring with them skills, knowledge, and experience that can contribute to their communities.

They are parents, spouses, workers, neighbors, community members, and like any other adult, their complex lives pull them in many directions. They often come to classes in the evening, directly from their other obligations to lessons held in borrowed spaces, supported by patchwork sources of funding. Fortunate programs may be supported by government grants, but these are hard to come by.

Despite the massive need, adult education remains dramatically underfunded in the U.S.

If you walk into an ESOL class and ask folks why they are studying English, you will get a range of answers. Some will talk about finding work or getting a better job. Many are full-time parents, learning English for their families. They often express a desire to speak to their children’s teachers without needing their child to interpret for them. Others want to talk to their doctor more easily in English, and still others to feel more confident in the bank, the grocery store, the voting booth, or just chatting with their neighbors.

In our experience as teachers of English as a second language, asking this question, many simply gesture out the window as if to say, “The world here speaks English, and clearly I need it to get by.”

In spite of the host of good reasons that adult learners choose to study English, adult ESOL has been increasingly treated as a workforce skill over the past few decades.

Indeed, federal funding for adult education is now allocated under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. Federally funded ESOL providers must demonstrate the effectiveness of their programs by measuring and tracking learners’ progress in skills and achievements.

Of the credited outcomes, only one recognizes when learners improve their English. Nearly all others focus on whether students meet workforce goals like getting a job or increasing their earnings, regardless of students’ self-determined goals, which may be related to family, health, civic engagement, or community involvement.

This can put the incentives of programs at odds with the goals of our students, and many of us have spoken up for years about the limitations this imposes on programs and teachers — who want to support our students toward their own, self-determined goals.

Moving the management of these programs to the Department of Labor will only exacerbate this issue.

To tell adults that they must learn English for one of the preapproved outcomes related to their role in the workforce fails to recognize the huge range of real, material benefits for the individual and the community.

Adult education makes communities safer, improves family health, and increases voter turnout. The best way to improve a child’s achievement is to develop their mother’s literacy. It wasn’t so long ago that we all recognized this. The National Literacy Act, signed by George H.W. Bush in 1991, recognized the value of English literacy “to achieve one’s goals, and develop one’s knowledge and potential.”

There are countless concerns about the state of education today, and shifts in the management of funding may seem more like a matter of bureaucracy than one of urgency. But it’s an issue that should unite us, one where the hypocrisy is evident. The move comes at the same time that the Justice Department has added teeth to the executive order designating English as the official language, issuing guidance that federal agencies eliminate “nonessential multilingual services.”

Now more than ever, we should call upon our elected officials to ensure that adults have the option to learn English for the full range of reasons. Until we have a federal administration that will take these concerns seriously, donors, funders, and city and state officials should fund life-wide approaches to adult literacy.

It’s unreasonable to demand that adults learn English for life in America while simultaneously saying life in America isn’t a good enough reason to learn English.

Rob Sheppard is the vice president of PennTESOL East and of the Literacy Council of Norristown. He works as associate director of Temple Center for American Language and Culture. Eliza Brumbaugh is the executive director of the Literacy Council of Norristown and the advocacy chair of PennTESOL East. Jeff Hutcheson is the director of advocacy and public policy at TESOL International Association.