I'm belatedly following up on Cynthia's question about the dual enrollment programs mentioned in the recent publication "Working Together."  I'm really excited about this approach because dual enrollment shortens the timeframe for adults who want a postsecondary credential and it allows them to transition from adult education to postsecondary already invested in continuing on because they've already completed college coursework. The students do not have to have earned their GED before entering these dual enrollment programs. Some of these programs integrate remediation and job training and they tend to contextualize the adult education or ESL portion of the program. Others integrate adult education and college remediation (developmental ed) and tend not to be contextualized.  Regardless of whether there is contextualization or not, the dual enrollment approach forces content alignment between adult education and the postsecondary programs the students want to enter as the exit criteria becomes the entry criteria for the next education step in the career pathway. Here are a couple examples:  

•	The Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training initiative (I-BEST) in Washington State pairs adult education/ESL instructors with vocational instructors to integrate contextualized remediation and English language services with occupational training.  I-BEST students earned five times more college credits on average, and were 15 times more likely to complete workforce training than other ABE/ESL students.  Further, ESL students in I-BEST classes made the same progress learning English language skills as other ESL students did.   

•	The Kentucky Community and Technical College System’s Transitions Pilots dual enrolled students in adult education and college remediation, enabling them to work toward their GED and complete college coursework at the same time.  For example, in Jefferson County (Louisville), the adult education program and the community college have jointly enrolled over 5,000 students and enabled 88% of them to bypass at least one college developmental education course, saving them time and over $400,000 in tuition costs.  The program retains an impressive 72% of its students.     

Students in these classes are counted in the adult education National Reporting System and also generate FTE for the college.  In some cases the students are charged tuition (WA state I-BEST) and in other cases not (KY adult ed-dev ed model).  Both KY and WA use federal adult education funding for these programs.

Hope this is helpful and I'd be interested in hearing about other similar programs you're involved in, what you're learning about how best to carry out this approach, and what federal or state policy barriers you might have encountered as you do it.

Thanks!   Julie


Julie Strawn 
Center for Law and Social Policy
2240 Forest Street Denver CO 80207
720-941-1665



-----Original Message-----
From: focusonbasics-bounces at nifl.gov on behalf of Cynthia Zafft
Sent: Mon 2/26/2007 3:05 PM
To: focusonbasics at nifl.gov
Subject: [FocusOnBasics 653]  about counting students
 
Dear Julie and Barbara

Going back to Barbara's earlier question about how programs count
students...students enrolled for college credit classes who may also be
enrolled in ABE.  Barbara mentioned that...

these students test below the NRS level 6 and therefore are eligible for
ABE and she would like to know if other ABE programs do this and, more
importantly, whether they count these students in their ABE reports as
ABE students (only for the time that ABE serves the student and also
complying with state assessment policies). 

Julie, in the publication you recently co-authored ("Working Together: 
Aligning State Systems and Policies for Individual and Regional
Prosperity") you mention dual enrollment and other "blended models." 
Would these be similar to what Barbara is doing and did you find that
other programs shared her concern?  How did they deal with this issue?

To read "Working Together" go to the CLASP website at
http://www.clasp.org/publications/wsc_working_together.pdf

Cynthia



Cynthia Zafft, Director
National College Transition Network (NCTN)
World Education, Inc.
44 Farnsworth Street
Boston, MA 02210
(617) 482-9485
www.collegetransition.org
----------------------------------------------------
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