Response to There Are No Hard-to-Serve Learners, Only Ill-Served Ones by Erik Jacobson, Montclair State University

Authors

Joni Schwartz, CUNY La Guardia Community CollegeFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Winter 2021

Abstract

A decade and a half ago, the community of adult educators to which I belonged called the phenomenon that Jacobson describes in There Are No Hard-to-Serve Learners as “creaming.” This is the practice of choosing to serve certain students, in this case those with high scores on their initial GED® practice test or students with advanced TABE® scores, so that we fulfilled our performance objectives and more easily demonstrated employability. We knew what we were doing. The reasons were economic; we needed to show outcomes that would continue to make our adult education program eligible for funding.

Comments

This article was originally published in Adult Literacy Education, available at http://doi.org/10.35847/JSchwartz.3.1.60