Poverty and Adult Learning

Objectives

Demonstrate the contextualization of ESL, ABE or ASE instruction to address adult learners’ personal, educational and career goals.

Lecture Notes / Audio Lecture

Poverty and Adult Education

By Christine Liebe

Adult educators must consider the effects and scope of poverty in the United States and world wide in order to understand adult students and deliver an effective educational experience.

Colorado has 5.5 million people (Colorado Quick Facts, 2016). One in five Coloradans is on Medicaid(Colorado Quick Facts, 2016). Eleven percent of Coloradans earn an income falling below the poverty rate (Colorado Quick Facts, 2016). According to the Colorado Department of Education (2016), in 2015-2016 there were 10, 530 high school dropouts in Colorado. The National Center for Educational Statistics (2016) reports that the national high school drop out rate declined from 12.3% to 7.1% between 1990 and 2014. How many people is 7.1%? If there are roughly 325 million Americans and 25% of us are under the age of 21, meaning about 81 million divided again by 4 to estimate the teen population results in about 20 million U.S. teenagers (“US and World”, 2016). If 7.1% of 20 million drop out of high school, that means that 1.42 million people did not get a high school diploma. Ok, lets look back over two decades and even though the high school drop out rate was much higher in 1990, we can still estimate there are around 28.4 million high school drop outs in the US since 1990. Each year’s class of high school dropouts will cost the United States $200 billion dollars over the course of their lifetimes (“Economic Impact of Dropouts”, 2016). If you multiply 200 billion times the 28.4 million dropouts since 1990 results in a massive drain on the American economy and a large adult education population. All these people have the compounded problems of poverty such as poor health, mental illness, addiction, criminal records, poor housing, and few resources needed to be a successful student (Putnam, 2015). According to Barro and Lee (2010), there is a clear correlation worldwide over decades between educational attainment and workplace earnings.

Therefore, the work of adult educators is crucial to reducing poverty, the personal devastation of poverty, and the massive economic drain poverty creates.

Barro, R., Lee, J. (2010). A new data set of educational attainment in the world, 1950–2010. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

http://www.development.wne.uw.edu.pl/uploads/Courses/DW_barrolee_2010.pdf

Colorado Department of Education dropout statistics (2016, January 20). Retrieved from https://www.cde.state.co.us/cdereval/dropoutcurrent

Colorado quick facts. (2016, January 20). Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/08

Economic impact of dropouts. (2016, January 20). Retrieved from http://dropoutprevention.org/resources/statistics/quick-facts/economic-impacts-of-dropouts/

National Center for Educational Statistics dropout rate. (2016, January 20). Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16

Putnam, R. (2015). Our kids. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

U.S. and world population clock. (2016, January 20). Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/popclock/

Reading / Resources

Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. John Wiley & Sons.

Chapter 3

https://www.ahaprocess.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Understanding-Poverty-Ruby-Payne-Poverty-Series-I-IV.pdf