1 Introduction

It was drizzling, and I was standing on a busy sidewalk outside the adult basic education (ABE) program where I was conducting research for my dissertation. Chad, a 60 year old, African-American ABE student, stood facing me, telling me about his class that day. After a lifetime of difficulty reading, Chad decided to join a reading class. He had been enrolled for a few months and felt he was making some improvement, but his scores on the state-mandated assessment test were not changing. That day, Chad had been given a month to improve these scores or he would no longer be allowed to participate in the class.

In the common parlance of adult education, Chad might be considered a learner who is hard to serve, though Jacobson (2021) suggests a better descriptor is “ill-served” (p. 55). These learners may arrive at programs with limited reading skills, learning difficulties, and/or multiple barriers that constrain their participation. Recent assessments suggest that 43 million adults in the United States have difficulty completing basic reading tasks, like comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making simple inferences (Mamedova and Pawlowski 2019). The Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act (WIOA), the federal legislation that regulates and funds adult education, nominally prioritizes adults who are considered “most in need” of these services (29 U.S.C. § 3254) but there is long-standing concern that federally-funded programs might not be serving lower-performing students well (Chisman 2002).

In particular, WIOA’s use of accountability measures to evaluate student performance might incentivize service to higher-performing ABE learners (Jacobson 2017; Prins et al. 2018), and its focus on workforce preparation might discourage the type of holistic literacy instruction that can effectively support adults who have difficulty reading (Belzer and Kim 2018). Although these concerns have been widely theorized, little empirical research has explored how policy implementation has shaped service provision, with scant attention to lower-performing readers.

Studying the provision of adult education services is difficult because of the limited data available. Although quantitative data regarding ABE are available within the National Reporting System (NRS), these data are confined to outcomes outlined in WIOA and may not capture learner experiences or local processes enacted to produce these outcomes. Furthermore, the infrastructure and funding that support ABE services vary by state (Foster and McLendon 2012). State administrators are likely to have intimate knowledge of local conditions since they allocate local WIOA funding, determine performance targets, report program data to federal agencies, and shape professional development offerings (Belzer 2007; United States Department of Education et al. 2023). Therefore, this study sought the perspectives of state ABE administrators to better understand WIOA-funded services to adults who have difficulty reading and to identify areas for future research. Given concerns documented in previous literature, this analysis asked:

(1) What challenges had state ABE administrators encountered as they sought to serve adults who have difficulty reading?

2 Theoretical framework

This research was undertaken using a critical lens. Traditional critical theory centers the inherently unequal social and economic structures created under capitalism, and critical research has explored how these inequities are reproduced in adult education policy and practice (Nesbit 2005). A more expansive view of critical analysis includes race, disability, gender, indigeneity, and other facets of identity or experience as lenses for exploring systems of oppression (Brookfield 2010; Crenshaw 2017). The central concern of this analysis is the provision of publicly-funded educational services for adults who have difficulty reading. In the U.S., this learner population is disproportionately comprised of racially marginalized participants (Mamedova and Pawlowski 2019) and may include high rates of learning disabilities (Patterson 2019), characteristics that have historically resulted in educational exclusion (Thorius and Tan 2016).

Apple (2010) argued that critical educational research can be categorized generally as focused on redistribution or recognition. Redistribution scholarship explores opportunities for success within existing systems of knowledge and education. Recognition scholarship addresses power imbalances that situate certain knowledges as dominant norms and supports rebuilding more inclusive systems. Although these threads of analysis can sometimes be in tension, Apple argued that real-world educational practice is best served by research addressing both.

This article’s focus on provision of publicly-funded adult literacy services places it largely within a focus on redistribution. However, my analysis is also guided by the Freirean tenet that education can support marginalized adults’ abilities to engage as social and political actors in the transformation of society towards justice (Freire 1970/2018). Increasing the availability and quality of publicly-funded programming can support both redistribution of educational opportunity and larger social recognition of learners’ knowledges and experiences.

3 Background

In WIOA-funded ABE, learners are assessed at enrollment and categorized using six educational functioning levels (EFLs). Based on federally provided descriptions, learners with reading EFLs 1, 2, or 3 may have difficulty reading independently, with levels 1 and 2 considered to have the greatest difficulty (USDOE 2016). These readers may not understand sound-letter relationships, recognize sight words, or successfully determine the main idea and key details of a simple text (USDOE 2016). Readers at level 3 may have difficulty executing fluent decoding, summarizing simple texts, or making inferences (USDOE 2016).

In 2020, 60.1% of ABE participants were identified as level 1, 2, or 3 (USDOE 2020), but public data do not indicate if a math or a reading assessment was used to make this determination; therefore the percent of ABE students with reading EFLs of 1, 2, or 3 is unknown. Furthermore, assigned levels may not present a complete picture of learners’ skills and capacities: some learners will likely have greater (or less) facility than a single test score suggests. This analysis addresses services to learners who are: identified as levels 1, 2, or 3; situated in the ABE branch of WIOA services, rather than English Language Learning (ELL); and working to establish foundational reading skills. For the purposes of this study, these learners will be referred to as adults who have difficulty reading or ABE learners who have difficulty reading.

For many years, federally-funded programs provided free literacy classes for adults who have difficulty reading. Formalized federal support for these programs began as part of a suite of legislation in the 1960s known as the War on Poverty (Roumell et al. 2020). Although improving participants’ employment prospects has always been a stated purpose of federal policy, this goal took on increased prominence as the general neoliberal turn in national educational policies was codified in ABE (Shin and Ging 2019). With the passage of the 1998 Workforce Investment Act (WIA), transitioning participants to unsubsidized employment in the private marketplace emerged as a driving purpose of ABE programming (Belzer 2017).

As part of this drive, WIA instituted an accountability system of employment-related outcomes to which states and programs receiving federal funding must aspire. WIA’s replacement, the 2014 WIOA, continues to use this approach. WIOA outcomes focus on students’ participation in unsubsidized employment, median earnings from unsubsidized employment, attainment of postsecondary credentials or a secondary school diploma, demonstration of measurable skills gains, and “effectiveness in serving employers” (Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act 2014, Sec. 116). Data on student performance are compiled and organized by state in the National Reporting System database.

These outcomes have been critiqued for prioritizing employers’ needs over student needs (Shin and Ging 2019) and for their potential to turn ABE programs’ attention away from dimensions of adult life beyond the workplace (Belzer and Kim 2018). Adults have often turned to free ABE programs for support accomplishing print literacy-related life tasks, engaging in cultural, religious, and political activities, and navigating an increasingly digital world (Reder 2020). In my experience as a practitioner and researcher, adults who have difficulty reading often have goals such as helping children and grandchildren with homework, navigating healthcare systems, reading for personal growth and pleasure, and passing the driver’s license test. Although WIOA does not preclude federally-funded programs from teaching these topics, its power to define the field of practice may encourage providers to focus on the outcomes it outlines, at the expense of other instructional topics (Hughes and Knighton 2020). Furthermore, since these outcomes regulate funding, programs may be incentivized to tailor programs to only those adults whose skill sets position them as closer to achieving these goals (Jacobson 2017; Prins et al. 2018). In short, many scholars have expressed concern that WIOA may limit services for adults considered less prepared to quickly enter the private marketplace, such as adults who have difficulty reading.

Whether these concerns have been realized is not well understood. The literature exploring implementation of WIOA is limited (Cherewka and Prins 2023), and only a few empirical studies have addressed services to learners who have difficulty reading. Chad’s story, above, was drawn from an ethnography of one ABE reading classroom in which practitioners’ attempts to comply with accountability policy resulted in instruction narrowly focused on testing and the exclusion of learners who did not perform well on assessment tests (Pickard 2021a, b). Britton and Austin (2020) found that in one adult ELL program, efforts to comply with the WIOA mandate to contextualize instruction in terms of employment resulted in practices inconsistent with research on effective teaching, limiting learners’ opportunities to develop vocabulary. Clymer et al.’s (2017) examination of family literacy programming nationally found that although WIOA explicitly allows adult education funding to be used for these programs, decreases in funding had left many programs disjointed and without components related to adult literacy.

Cherewka and Prins (2023) posited that future research regarding WIOA should “inquire for whom WIOA works, where it works, and under what conditions it is or isn’t successful in helping learners to flourish” (p. 1). This study attempts to understand how WIOA is working for ABE learners who have difficulty reading by exploring the challenges state adult education administrators experienced as they sought to serve these learners.

4 Methodology

4.1 Participants

Directors of adult education in all U.S. states and territories were invited to participate. Recruitment consisted of direct email and an announcement at a national meeting for state adult education directors; 14 representatives from 11 states agreed to participate. In one state, the participant was the professional development coordinator, rather than the state director, and in three states a second state level professional participated in addition to the state director. Although not all participants disclosed the number of years they had been involved in adult education, for the 8 participants who did disclose, 23 years was the mean.

To maintain confidentiality, participating states are not identified and have been assigned a letter (state A, state B, etc.). Furthermore, ‘they’ is used as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun to describe study participants, both to promote inclusive language (APA 2022) and to help to ensure confidentiality. Although this was a sample of convenience, it offered a wide range of perspectives: participating states represented three out of four census regions in the U.S. and contained substantial urban and rural populations, as well as wide variation of racial and ethnic groups. However, input from additional regions, particularly the Northeast and U.S. territories, would have added to the scope of the data.

4.2 Data collection

Multiple meeting times were proposed, and participants were invited to attend one that worked best for them. Focus groups were selected as an effective, efficient way to collect targeted data among a set of people who share features or experiences, such as serving as a state administrator (Patton 2014). The social context of a focus group can enhance richness of data by allowing participants to clarify their perspectives as they explore contributions from others with comparable experiences (Kitzinger 1995). Furthermore, focus groups can give researchers access to a variety of conversational modes, including “day-to-day interactions” like jokes and anecdotes, which can reveal group norms not readily accessible via other means of data collection (Kitzinger 1995, p. 300).

Data were collected during five sessions: four focus groups and one in-depth interview (Patton 2014) (at one meeting time, only one participant attended). Discussions were semi-structured and explored participants’ experiences serving adults who have difficulty reading in the context of WIOA. Prompts were revised after each session for clarity or to build on themes from earlier sessions. Two sessions were held in person at the national meeting, and three subsequent sessions were conducted virtually. Session duration ranged from 50–83 min. For the four focus groups, the number of participants ranged from 2 to 4. Although the groups were smaller than anticipated, this allowed for deeper discussion than might typically be expected. The author facilitated all sessions; in three out of five sessions, a second facilitator took notes and asked follow-up questions. All sessions were audio-recorded and transcribed.

4.3 Data analysis

Given my interest in variation across state systems of ABE, the unit of analysis for this study was the individual state, rather than the data collection session in which administrators participated. Because the sample was small, both patterns across participating states and instances of “substantive significance” (Patton 2014) are included in the reporting. Data are considered of substantive significance when they do not form part of a larger pattern but describe impactful consequences for the participant involved or shed deeper light on the phenomena under study. Thematic content analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) was used to identify patterns, and instances of substantive significance were identified when data shared by even one state administrator was judged by the researcher to have significance for understanding WIOA-funded services to adults who have difficulty reading.

Recordings and transcripts were reviewed multiple times; corrections were made and memos indicating early ideas for analysis were generated (Patton 2014). Coding took a theoretical approach (Braun and Clarke 2006), which lies on the continuum between inductive and deductive coding processes; although the data are approached without a pre-determined list of codes, the research question acts as a lens informing the development of codes as the data is reviewed. Here, all five transcripts were coded using ‘challenges to serving adults who have difficulty reading’ as the lens. Then, related codes were compiled into categories and data was organized by state. Searching for themes involved considering relationships among codes, categories, and patterns across states. Proposed themes were rejected if data within did not meaningfully cohere or produce clear distinctions between themes. Themes that were distinct and cohesive were considered together, to determine if they accurately represented the data as a whole. This process continued until the four themes below were considered to meaningfully and accurately express the challenges these state administrators encountered as they sought to serve adults who have difficulty reading.

5 Findings

The following themes emerged from the data: (1) limited interest from other administrative stakeholders, (2) limited instructional capacity, (3) limited availability of programming, and (4) limited funding. When available, data describing state administrators’ responses to these challenges are included.

5.1 Limited interest from administrators

Some state administrators reported lack of interest in serving adults who have difficulty reading among other administrative stakeholders, in particular state-level WIOA administrative partners and local ABE program administrators.

5.2 State-level WIOA partners

Although WIOA expects alignment among state-level initiatives offering different services to the same population (Roumell et al. 2020), administrators from three states (D,F,G) reported encountering lack of interest in adult education as they negotiated partnerships within this alignment. For example, the administrator from state D described resistance from their state Department of Health and Human Services to connect welfare recipients with ABE programming, rather than training from their Department of Labor, and all three administrators reported encountering reluctance to serve adults who have difficulty reading from their Departments of Labor. A participant from state F described these concerns as tied to expectations about these learners’ slow educational progress:

State F: Labor typically wants everything fast. So the training, they want it fast. And your 1, 2s, and 3s can’t do it fast … [When I worked in another state], there was a takeover from the Department of Education to the Labor entity of the state of adult education. And I use the work takeover on purpose because it was a hostile takeover. Very hostile. And the thought process that we heard from Labor at that time was, “We don’t care about the GED. We just want them to get jobs. They need the short term training.” They even, at that point, at the state level talked about, “Well should we restrict it to this level and above?” And luckily that didn’t happen. There is a disconnect there and it still exists no matter what partnerships you build.

A participant from state G similarly reported that their state Department of Labor had previously taken over administration of WIOA funded ABE programming and for five years had excluded adults testing at levels 1 and 2 from participating in classes. However, at the time of data collection, state G reported having moved away from this model, resulting in 50% of their students testing at levels 1, 2, or 3.

By contrast, the State E administrator reported that a partnership with their state’s agency on aging, disability, and rehabilitation had increased ABE practitioners’ access to professional development and assistive tools to support adults with disabilities, which they described as enhancing their service to adults who have difficulty reading.

5.3 Local program administrators

Study participants from six states (A,B,D,F,G,J) reported encountering lack of interest in serving ABE learners who have difficulty reading from local program administrators. Lack of interest was described as resulting from concerns that adults who have difficulty reading may not produce sufficient measurable skills gains to meet WIOA accountability requirements or may have more life barriers, and thus be less reliable students, than other participants. In one extreme instance, the state administrator reported that lack of interest had led to a complete absence of WIOA-funded ABE programming in some regions of their state:

State A: [T]he ABE population in my state as I know in many states is very challenging. And most people if we asked them just say it’s easier to work with ESL. Which is too bad … I actually work with counties that have few to no English learners, but even so, the few adult ed programs that are in this very rural isolated area do not almost ever offer ABE. They offer high school diploma or high school equivalency. So if you are not at the level to do that, you may not have any other options.

While no other participants described such a complete lack of programming, five state administrators (B,D,F,G,J) reported encountering programs that focused their efforts on higher scoring learners. As the administrator from state D put it, when WIA accountability measures were initially put into place “[P]eople got very careful about who’s going to be coming in.” The administrator from State B went further:

State B: I think just some programs are more invested [and] they see the importance of that lower level. I think a lot of times the attention goes to the higher ASE level students, those who are preparing specifically for the GED exam because that’s where you’re getting your results.

In response to, or anticipation of, these challenges, four state administrators reported encouraging programs to serve adults who have difficulty reading. Administrators from states G, H, and J reported requiring service to learners at all EFL levels as a condition of receiving WIOA funding, and the administrator from state I reported developing a point-based funding system they believed incentivized ABE programs to better serve adults who have difficulty reading.

In contrast, two state administrators (B,F) suggested that inclusion of adults who have difficulty reading in WIOA-funded programs may not the best approach to serving these learners. As a participant from State F explained:

State F: [W]e also acknowledged that if you had a non-reader, a person that is starting from square 1, they need more than a class. So where I started off in adult education there was a program that we referred students in that situation to. It was a one-on-one tutoring instead of the class setting, and as such was not reported under [WIOA].

However, seeing one-on-one tutoring as the most appropriate way to serve adults who have difficulty reading was described by the state H administrator as “the old mindset.” They suggested that including adults who have difficulty reading in ABE classrooms or small group settings was both a more effective way to serve these learners and the requirement of the WIOA grant.

5.4 Limited instructional capacity

Administrators from four states (B,C,E,H) expressed concerns about teachers not having adequate knowledge to instruct adults who have difficulty reading. The participant from state H‑ who had themselves previously been a literacy instructor- put it this way: “I think a lot of teachers, and I’m kind of speaking for myself, don’t know how to teach reading.” In keeping with the language used in WIOA, these state administrators frequently expressed concerns about instruction in terms of helping learners “make gains,” or move from one EFL level to the next. For example, the administrator from state E offered, “We don’t show very good gains at low levels. We just don’t.” Instructional concerns included teachers’ lack of knowledge about direct, explicit reading instruction, the need for differentiated instruction in multi-level classrooms, uncertainty about how to teach adults who have difficulty reading online, and programmatic difficulty creating the degree of intensity described as necessary for adults who have difficulty reading to improve.

Study participants reported addressing these concerns primarily through professional development (PD). Administrators from three states (E,G,H) reported providing state-directed PD related to reading instruction for adults who have difficulty reading, with one state (E) reporting the recent hiring of a reading specialist to enhance these trainings. The administrator from state H reported a substantial, ongoing financial investment with a local university to provide PD targeting instructional capacity to work with both beginner and advanced adult readers. Additionally, administrators from four states (A,C,D,H) reported current or previous participation in the federally-funded Student Achievement in Reading program (STAR), a multi-month PD focused on improving reading instruction. Although STAR targets adults identified as intermediate readers, administrators from states C, D, and H reported that this training also helped teachers work with adults who have difficulty reading. State D required every program accepting WIOA money in their state to have at least one STAR trained staff member.

Despite these efforts, administrators from states H and C reported difficulty getting teachers to engage in reading-related PD or connecting that PD with improved outcomes for learners. The administrator from state H reported that, “[W]e don’t get people to sign up like they should … it’s always that, ‘our students need math.’ So when there’s math trainings offered, yeah, they jumped right on it, but … I don’t know. I just don’t think enough attention is on reading.” The administrator from state C reported that even with widespread participation in PD, practitioners were not consistently using information from trainings to guide their reading instruction or programming design. In these cases, PD served as only a partial solution to developing instructional capacity.

5.5 Limited program availability

Many state administrators described challenges developing programs that were inclusive of adults who have difficulty reading, especially career pathways programming, such as integrated education and training programs (IETs) and apprenticeships, and distance learning programs.

5.6 Career pathways

Although WIOA mandates that career-oriented programs are part of ABE infrastructure, eight state administrators (A,D,E,F,H,I,J,K) discussed limitations in their states’ availability of these programs for ABE learners who have difficulty reading. As the participant from state E explained, “For all our standards-based alignment initiatives and for IET, we haven’t been focused on that low, low level … we’re really starting at that maybe second grade. So we were getting there, but that’s a new focus for us.” Three state administrators (A,H,I) reported being incentivized by private or federal grants to develop IETs for beginning English language learners, but had yet to develop programs for similar level learners in ABE.

Obstacles to developing these programs included state administrators’ confusion about which program structures would best incorporate adults who have difficulty reading and the challenges of getting new programs on board. The policy push for rapid post-secondary outcomes and a lack of preparedness among community colleges and vocational programs to serve lower-level students were reported as challenges to partnering with existing career-focused programs.

Administrators from only one state (G) reported what they perceived as career-focused programs with wide availability and positive outcomes for all learners. They credited this accomplishment to early partners who were willing to “think creatively” about including adults who have difficulty reading, which allowed them to establish models for building inclusive IETs.

Additionally, the administrator from state E reported positive outcomes in one IET, developed using money from a federal program for unemployed workers. Although these outcomes were described as atypical for adults who have difficulty reading in their state’s programs, several conditions reportedly influenced this success. First, the population in this program may have been more likely to succeed due to their recent years of work experience. Second, the partner for this program had abundant funding to support co-teaching and a “cohort model,” in which learners worked with others at a similar level and programming took place for many more hours per week than in traditional community programs. State G similarly credited the success of one workplace pathways program to its cohort model with a higher intensity of program hours in a shorter period of time.

5.7 Distance learning

Four state administrators (A,B,C,K) described encountering challenges as they sought to expand online programming to include adults who have difficulty reading. Some challenges were general to the student population, such as lack of internet (for rural populations especially) and lack of devices, but others were particular to adults who have difficulty reading, including learners’ unfamiliarity with using a computer or navigating the internet and their degree of difficulty engaging in independent learning around these tasks. As the administrator from state B explained:

State B: [W]hen I was an instructor, I had level one and level two students and it was so difficult for them to even just log on to a computer. To remember what their password was, what their username was, to understand that the password is blocked so that you cannot see what it is … you’re constantly scaffolding for them so that they’re able to do these things. Well, when they get home, they don’t have that scaffolding, they may not have support, they may not have someone in the home who can help them do that.

Because of these challenges, these state administrators suggested that “pure” distance learning might not be appropriate for adults who have difficulty reading. However, administrators from two states (C,K) reported widespread positive experiences using “blended” programming, which utilized a combination of face-to-face and online learning, to serve this group of learners. The administrator from state K suggested that blended models had been more effective for adults who have difficulty reading than either a pure distance model or pure face-to-face model and had begun requiring that all WIOA-funded ABE programs offer blended learning. They provided teacher PD to support the creation of virtual learning environments and the integration of virtual learning with classroom instruction.

Learners’ access to the internet and devices remained a challenge, even for those who reported successes with a blended model. Additionally, in one state (A), the administrator reported not having sufficient resources to provide the face-to-face instructional component needed to build an effective blended approach.

5.8 Limited funding

Data from this study suggest these state administrators’ strong agreement with previous arguments describing funding for ABE as woefully insufficient (Cherewka and Prins 2023). As the administrator from state K put it, the combination of WIOA and state money “barely scratches the surface of the need” for adult education services in their state. The administrator from State I described the particular absence of financial support for ABE learners who have difficulty reading:

State I: [W]e have never found any funding that allows levels, one, two, and three to go to school full time and still have financial aid available to them to actually make a meager living … So our most in need students, our lowest skilled students and our populations that are the largest numbers of students of color, we have no financial aid support to allow them to go to school for any extended period of time.

Furthermore, state administrators described a changing funding landscape for community-based organizations (CBOs) and library literacy programs, which have historically been sites of service for adults who have difficulty reading (Comings 2008). Previous literature suggested that programs serving these learners might lose WIOA funding based on poor student outcomes (Pickard 2016; Jacobson 2017). While administrators from five states (B,F,G,H,I) did report that a handful of community programs in their states lost funding due to poor performance, they also reported that most of these cases were due to perceived poor quality of service, rather than service to a specific learner population. In one state (H), the administrator reported de-funding two literacy programs because they chose to remain in the 1:1 tutoring model, rather than the group instructional model described by the administrator as a requirement of WIOA.

Administrators from three states (A,B,D) reported that literacy-focused programs in their state had voluntarily stopped applying for WIOA funding, principally because the purpose of programming under WIOA departed from their stated mission and/or the deliverables expected by WIOA were more than the program felt capable of providing. As the administrator from state D explained:

State D: [I]n our state, the CBOs have pulled out and their boards said, that’s not what we got into the business for. We got into the business to help people who didn’t know how to read and to help people who had problems with speaking English … now with all of the restrictions and all of the extra you’re putting [us] up to, that’s not our mission anymore. So literally, all of my CBOs who are literacy pulled out because they didn’t even go for the [application] process. I didn’t defund them, they chose not to become involved.

Administrators from four states (A,C,I,K) reported that other types of community education programs, such as those focused on adult ELL or a wider range of ABE students, had similarly stopped applying for WIOA funding.

From the data, it is unclear if these changes created gaps in service for adults who have difficulty reading. Administrators from two states (C,D) reported that the programs in question had alternate sources of funding and were able to continue providing programming, though more specific information was not shared. The administrator from state F reported that other nearby CBOs were, at least in theory, able to absorb students from a defunded program.

6 Discussion

This study sought to analyze state adult education administrators’ experiences, identify challenges serving adults who have difficulty reading across state contexts, and pinpoint areas for future research. Based on the literature and my own experiences as a researcher, I expected to find that efforts to serve these learners might be constrained by WIOA requirements, resulting in limited services to this population. While the findings were largely consistent with those expectations, substantial nuance and variation existed among states, informed by their differing infrastructures of service, geography, student populations, and administrators’ perspectives. From this analysis, the following recommendations emerged as important for future research regarding services to adults who have difficulty reading. In keeping with a critical focus on redistribution, these recommendations highlight the potential for existing programs to improve educational experiences and outcomes for adults who are often marginalized both outside of and within adult education programming.

6.1 Explore on-the-ground instruction

There was a lack of consensus among state administrators regarding best practices for serving ABE learners who have difficulty reading. For example, administrators differed in their reported beliefs about the benefits of one-on-one tutoring versus inclusion in small groups of similar learners or multilevel classrooms, the success of using distance or blended learning, and the incorporation of these learners into career pathways instruction. Generally, the field suffers from a lack of meaningful data about the relative outcomes of any of these choices. Although recommendations for reading instruction for this population do exist (e.g., Kruidenier et al. 2010; National Research Council 2012), research evaluating instructional methods for adults who have difficulty reading has produced only limited evidence of effectiveness (Scarborough et al. 2013).

Furthermore, these evaluations may utilize a more idealized version of instruction than is typically available. For example, Scarborough et al. (2013) compared three different tutoring approaches (which produced similar results), but the tutoring was done by paid, trained tutors who were supervised by researchers as they executed the tutoring methods. While this type of research is extremely helpful for identifying effective instructional approaches, it does not address the many complex contextual factors frequently present in adult education settings, such as instruction by unpaid tutors and minimal training or oversight. Older analyses of instructional models in ABE, such as Beder and Medina (2001), did account for these factors, but in a vastly different service and policy climate and without attention to online learning or career pathways instruction. To better guide decision-making, future research should explore the enactment of evidence-based instructional methods as they are contextualized within the realm of practice, and this research should be widely disseminated among administrators and practitioners.

6.2 Explore reading-related professional development

Given state administrators’ reliance on PD to address practitioners’ capacity to serve adults who have difficulty reading, more information is needed to understand these efforts. First, many states in this study didn’t enroll in the federal reading PD, STAR, but the data was not sufficient to explain why. Additionally, some state administrators reported that when reading-related PD was offered, teachers were reluctant to engage. Because many teachers work part time and do not receive compensation for participating in PD (Smith and Gillespie 2007), it may not be surprising when teachers are reluctant, but why teachers were specifically uninterested in reading PD is unclear. Finally, some state administrators reported limited changes to instruction after teacher participation in reading-related PD. Research should explore states’ and practitioners’ decision-making about providing and attending reading-related PD, as well as the implementation processes and outcomes of these initiatives. In particular, more evaluation of STAR is needed, given the substantial resources already invested in this PD pathway to improve adult reading instruction. Some evaluations have suggested positive outcomes for teachers and students (Bell and Dolainski 2012; Johnson and Frank 2013), but a national appraisal of STAR efforts is needed to better understand how this PD is informing instructional practice and outcomes for learners.

6.3 Explore public funding for literacy programming

According to study participants, the role of literacy-focused programming in the WIOA-driven public adult education system was in flux. In some states, community literacy programs were described as full partners in the system; in others, they were relied upon as a sort of shadow system to serve learners who might not succeed in WIOA-funded programs. At the same time, some state administrators reported that community literacy programs were no longer applying for or receiving WIOA funding. Reliance on community programs to serve adults who have difficulty reading as these programs shift away from public funding suggests a transition of responsibility for adult literacy education out of the public sphere, with attendant ethical implications regarding equitable distribution of adult education funding and reductions in oversight of program quality. Research should explore the scope and nature of publicly-funded programs’ reliance on non-WIOA funded programs to serve adults who have difficulty reading, how changes in public funding have impacted community programs’ capacity to provide literacy services, and if and how the availability of free adult literacy services has changed over time.

6.4 Explore potential policy conflicts

Finally, study participants’ sense of working at cross-purposes with other state administrators suggests that conflicting policy aims may constrain services to adults who have difficulty reading. WIOA requires that state adult education administrators partner with other state agencies, such as departments of Labor, who target the same population but focus on other aims. More research is needed to understand how these potential policy conflicts affect adults who have difficulty reading. Quantitative analysis might explore how learners’ engagement in multiple WIOA or other government-funded initiatives influences their participation in adult education programming. Qualitative analysis of learners’ experiences might begin at “One-Stop” centers, where multiple WIOA-funded services can be accessed in one location (Collins 2022). Exploring the perspectives of administrators from other state-level departments that offer services to adult learners can illuminate points of tension or possibilities for collaboration.

7 Conclusion

This analysis of service provision to adults who have difficulty reading must be understood in the context of an ABE system that is itself deeply marginalized (Bridwell 2009). ABE professionals consistently work in conditions of scarcity, with few of the resources needed to create robust public adult education programs. This paper outlines challenges state adult education administrators encountered as they sought to serve learners in this system and offers recommendations for future research based on these challenges. Adults who have difficulty reading are important participants in the field of practice, and an evidence base that responds to real-world practitioner experiences can support their success in WIOA-funded ABE programming. In addition to more research, policy change is desperately needed. A clear policy mandate to provide foundational literacy services as part of ABE, with targeted funding to support teacher salary, teacher training, and the participation of adults who have difficulty reading, are essential to a public adult education system that serves all citizens.