New York, NY, Dec. 29, 2004 --  The Council for Advancement of Adult 
Literacy has released the final working paper in its series on adult 
education/literacy and community colleges. This 73-page report, 
FORGING NEW PARTNERSHIPS: Adult and Developmental Education in 
Community Colleges, is by Hunter Boylan, director of the National 
Center for Developmental Education at Appalachian State University. 
Several colleagues from the Center assisted him. The paper studies a 
largely unexamined corner of the adult education universe. It looks 
at the relationship between developmental and adult education in 
community college settings, the nature of collaboration between the 
two programs in colleges that provide both, and characteristics that 
foster collaboration.

Among other findings, the report indicates that most of the 1,195 
community colleges spread across the American landscape provide 
developmental education. Moreover, a significant number provide both 
developmental and adult education programs. Developmental education 
programs generally offer higher-level skills upgrading than adult 
education, but that is not always the case. Moreover, in institutions 
that provide both programs, there is a large gray area where services 
overlap and students can easily enroll in one or the other. One of 
the report's major conclusions is that adult education service in the 
nation can be substantially improved through new partnerships between 
them.

CAAL's community college study and publication of this paper are made 
possible by funding from the Ford Foundation, The McGraw-Hill 
Companies, Verizon, Lumina Foundation for Education, the Nellie-Mae 
Foundation, Household International, and individual donors. CAAL is 
sincerely grateful for their support. The eight working papers in the 
series were designed to help inform a two-year task force study of 
the role and potential of community colleges in adult education and 
literacy. A final project report will be issued shortly after the 
first of the year.

Due to NIFL security protocols, FORGING NEW PARTNERSHIPS cannot be 
attached to this e-mail, nor is a direct link-through allowed. But 
the report is available at no charge from CAAL's Web site 
(www.caalusa.org), which lists task force members and goals for the 
community college project along with abstracts of the other seven 
papers in the series. Other CAAL publications are also available in 
PDF form at the Web site.

-- 
Gail Spangenberg
President
Council for Advancement of Adult Literacy
1221 Avenue of the Americas - 46th Floor
New York, NY 10020
212-512-2362, fax 212-512-2610
www.caalusa.org