News, Views, and Clues 

April,2006

National Lifelong Literacy Campaign

A Unique Learning Opportunity
2006 Research Symposium
Grant Funds Available

Immigration Issues
 

National Lifelong Literacy Campaign

April 6, 2006

Important Message from the Library of Congress

Dear Friend of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress and promoter of literacy:

The Library of Congress is excited to announce a new campaign, with its partners, the Ad Council and the Walt Disney Co., designed to promote literacy to children and their families.

This new public service announcement campaign, which will include television, radio, and print ads, uses characters from the Disney film "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" to promote the wonder of reading and to send viewers to the Library of Congress Web site.

Here is the link to a special introduction (requires Windows Media Player):
http://www.myhomefront.tv/media/E0063/video/E0063%20Ad%20Council%20LOC-Web_medium.wmv

Starting tomorrow, the Library will launch a new "Lifelong Literacy" Web site at www.loc.gov/literacy/ , with an assortment of links to Library of Congress collections and properties that promote reading and literacy. In addition, we will be driving Web traffic and interest to your site, through your affiliation with our Center for the Book.

Furthermore, our partners at the Ad Council will be working with us to promote the initiative as a news story with national and local media. We'll be furnishing the press with the names and contacts for all of our state center affiliates and reading promotion partners. We hope you won't mind the opportunity if local newspaper, radio, and television outlets want to talk with you about the subject of literacy, and starting the love of reading from an early age. (One of our press relations contractors, Home Front, may be contacting you directly if there is sufficient press interest.)

Finally, although this week's launch is a very important start, it is just the first step in a much broader campaign to promote literacy to children and their families. In the next few months, with the participation of external literacy partners, we intend to create a much more robust online resource to encourage reading. And we'll work with the Ad Council to develop an extensive promotional effort, in addition to the "Narnia"-themed ads, to bring awareness of this issue to the general public, and to bring them to you and to the Library for help in generating a love of reading for all ages.

 

A Unique Learning Opportunity

April 19, 2006

You will want to forward this message from Kristen to your local programs.

Oregon has been engaged in a collaborative two year Science and Math professional development initiative for our ABE/GED and ESL teachers. We are thrilled to share with other states that two Oregon adult literacy instructors were chosen to go on Teacher at Sea Expeditions to the Mariana Arc and the Antarctic with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. These are amazing opportunities for the field of adult education and for our instructors, many of whom are part time.

The great news is that instructors and students from all over the country can follow these adult education teachers during their trips via a website and email, ask them questions, participate in "real time" adult education math and science lessons, and use "real time" scientific research.
 
We would like to connect programs across the country to this teaching and learning opportunity. I've attached a flyer that describes the first trip to the Mariana Arc and how teachers can connect with the research. Our second trip to the Antarctic will be happening mid-year and I will send a flyer when we get closer.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thank you,
Kristen
------------------------------------------------------
Kristen Kulongoski
State Director of Adult Basic Education
Oregon Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development
255 Capitol Street NE/PSB
Salem, OR 97310
503-378-8648 ext. 375
503-378-3365 fax
kristen.kulongoski@state.or.us

2006 Research Symposium

April 20, 2006

We are pleased that California again is taking the lead in hosting the annual Research Symposium. Those of us who attended the one in Sacramento last year were amazed at the research that was available to us. Mark your calendars. Here is the first announcement from Jean with attached information. Thank you Jean.


A Meeting of the Minds II

The California Department of Education is joining with the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy to sponsor the second National Adult Education Practitioner-Researcher Symposium to be held in Sacramento, California on November 30, December 1-2, 2006.

Attached is a flyer and additional information about the symposium.           

Jean L. Scott
Administrator
Adult Education Office
1430 N Street, Suite 4503
Sacramento, CA 95814
(916) 323-5074
(916) 327-7089 Fax
jescott@cde.ca.gov

Grant Funds Available
April 21, 2006

Good News!

At the NTI in Denver we reviewed the Local Program Directors’ Professional Development Matrix that Kathi and I developed to help you plan for sequential training for local managers. In addition to offering the sessions as professional development, we talked about the possibility of offering a local program manager’s certification.

So we teamed up with ProLiteracy and received a one year Verizon Grant to begin to develop the training series with the certification option. NAEPDC will facilitate the training and ProLiteracy will develop the certification. So we are looking for three states that are willing to pilot test the first series with 20 local directors.

Here is the announcement. More details delow.

Announcing new NAEPDC/PLA training partnership: Grant funds available

As you are thinking about your professional development system in preparation for a new state plan, have you given thought to expanding or strengthening your training options for local program managers? If so, READ ON.

Through a partnership effort of NAEPDC and ProLiteracy America, grant funds are available from the Verizon Foundation to pilot a new program improvement training series for local managers in three states. The initial pilot, which will run from July 1, 2006 - June 30, 2007, will consist of three face-to-face workshops supplemented with online courses, Webcasts, interim activities, and a culminating learning project. The three pilot states will receive all of the training and materials at no cost, in addition to $23,000 grants to provide participant incentives for 20 program managers and to pay any other costs to the state such as taskforce planning meetings.

Following the pilot year, three new modules will be released annually and made available to interested states on a fee-based schedule. This is a wonderful opportunity to provide quality training and support for your local managers. As you will see in the attachments, in the future, participants can go for certification or just participate for the training content. The certification will be option for those who want it.

 

Washington, DC 20001

Immigration Issues

April 24, 2006

Lynn found this excellent article in the Post that illustrates many of the economic and political issues related to immigration. This article is worth a read.

Lynn Reports: “Here is another article on immigration you may find of interest. For example, it states that about a third of adult immigrants don't have a high school diploma. At another point in the article, it mentions that the proportion of the adult labor force, including immigrants, without high school diplomas has dropped to just 10 percent.”


Effect of Immigration on Jobs, Wages Is Difficult for Economists to Nail Down

By Nell Henderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 15, 2006; Page D01

According to the economic models, it's a no-brainer: a surge of low-skilled immigrants should increase the supply of such workers, driving down wages at the expense of working-class Americans.

Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), explaining why he opposes legislation to allow more legal immigration, said recently: "I don't think you need a professor to understand that when you import substantial cheap labor, it displaces American workers."

But recent research suggests that the economic impact of immigration is not so simple. The effects are difficult to disentangle from other factors that have dampened wage growth for most workers in recent decades, including new technologies, the decline in manufacturing jobs, the drop in unionization, globalization and recessions.

Yes, an influx of immigrants has helped depress the incomes of the lowest-skilled workers in recent decades, many economists agree. But they argue about the magnitude of the effect; some say it's big while others see it as slight.

Meanwhile, increased immigration -- legal and illegal -- helps keep inflation low, boosts rents and housing values, and benefits the average U.S. taxpayer while burdening some state and local governments, other research finds.

"Immigration provides overall economic gains to a country," wrote economist Albert Saiz, summarizing the literature in a 2003 article for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. "Indeed, the U.S. experience as an immigrants' country is one of phenomenal economic growth. However, there are winners and losers in the short run."

The primary losers in this country are workers who do not have high school diplomas, particularly blacks and native-born Hispanics, according to George J. Borjas, a Harvard University economist who has studied immigration for years.

From 1980 through 2000, immigration reduced average wages for the nation's 10 million native-born men without high school educations by 7.4 percent, Borjas wrote in 2004. They earned an average of $25,000 a year in 2000.

Other economists contend that the effect is much smaller -- a wage reduction of close to 1 percent -- and has dissipated as Americans have become better educated. The proportion of the adult labor force, including immigrants, without high-school diplomas has dropped to just 10 percent.

The proportion of immigrants in the U.S. adult urban population nearly doubled from 1980 to 2000, from 9.5 percent to 18 percent, according to census figures cited by David Card, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, in a paper presented at a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia conference last year. The Washington area mimicked the national trend, with the immigrants' proportion growing from 9.6 percent to 20.6 percent during those two decades.

And immigrants are, on average, less schooled than native-born Americans. Looking at census data from hundreds of the nation's urban areas where immigrants cluster, Card found that in both 1980 and 2000, more than a third of adult immigrants did not have high school diplomas. But the proportion of working-age natives at that education level fell from 23 percent to 13 percent from 1980 to 2000, "more than offsetting the inflow of less-educated immigrants."

The wage gap between high school graduates and dropouts stayed relatively constant from 1979 to 2000, with the graduates earning 25 to 30 percent more, Card wrote.

The "evidence that immigrants harm native opportunities is scant," he concluded, observing "a surprisingly weak relationship between immigration and less-skilled wages."

Immigration also has made up for population losses in some parts of the country. In New England and the Mid-Atlantic, the labor force would have declined from 1990 to 2000 without immigration, according to a report released in February by Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies.

Other economic trends have had much more impact on wages, analysts say. Perhaps the biggest is the general health of the economy.

During the 1990s, the surge in immigration coincided with an economic boom driven in large part by investment in new technology and rising stock prices. Unemployment fell below 4 percent in 2000, for the first time in three decades, and wages rose for workers at all skill levels.

Since 2000, increasing immigration has coincided with the 2001 recession, an initially weak recovery and a period of lackluster wage growth for most workers.

In the 1990s, "you saw all boats being lifted, whether foreign-born or native," said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

The recent downturn also coincided with a steep loss of manufacturing jobs -- more than 2.7 million shed from the start of the recession in March 2001 through last month, accelerating a trend that began in 1979, according to Labor Department figures.

The quarter-century decline in manufacturing jobs, which often paid middle-class wages and benefits, is one factor that has contributed to the fall during that period in average hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation, economists say.

Those losses were part of the long-term evolution of an industrial-based economy into one based more on services and information. Those jobs have been lost to international competition or erased by new technologies that have boosted overall worker productivity.

The shrinking of the manufacturing sector has also corresponded to a drop in union membership to 13 percent of the workforce currently from 24 percent in 1979, weakening labor's power to bargain for better wages.

"An extra million immigrants a year cannot possibly explain why the vast majority of workers in a labor market of 150 million workers have had stagnant wage growth," said Harry J. Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University. "All these other factors matter more."

To the extent that cheap low-skilled labor helps hold down prices, there is more demand for some services, fostering economic growth. Lower menu prices encourage consumers to dine out more, leading to the opening of more restaurants. Lower construction costs make home-building more profitable and home remodeling more affordable.

Low-wage immigrant labor generally has helped keep inflation low in recent years, for items other than energy and housing, economists say.

The nation's 34 million immigrants also collectively pay more in taxes than they consume in public services and benefits, according to a National Research Council study. A high proportion of them work and pay federal, state and local taxes. Many return to their home countries before retirement and never claim Social Security payments or Medicare coverage.

But the effects vary locally. In states such as New Jersey and California, with high proportions of immigrants and relatively generous social services, immigrants pay less in taxes than they use in government services such as public schools, the NRC study found.

Such burdens "cannot be ignored," Saiz wrote, "although which mix of distributive or immigration policies is better for dealing with them is a matter of opinion."