Sign up now to subscribe!
Sign up now to subscribe!
Shelly Silver, On the Couch First Spitzer Transition Team Meeting Set Socialist Won’t Socialize 10 Questions with Malachy McCourt GOP Challenger Says Bing Doesn’t Do Enough Tough Times for Local GOP Crowley on Malcolm Smith and Gay Marriage Paterson on Malcolm Smith and Democratic Strategy Krueger Faces a Challenge Political Transitions for Transit Workers The Money Trail: Loose Laws for Leftovers A Cabinet Stocked with Imports Instead of Political Curry For Alternate-Party Candidates, Winning Is Not Everything Slow Progress for Disabled Voting City’s Adult Literacy Programs Grapple with Funding Cuts Though the Competition is Over, the Campaign Continues
The October Poll: Which Council Member Would Have the Best Survival Skills on a Desert Island? Photos from the City Hall lauch/Rising Stars party The Hows of Political Activism at the Y Pastrami and Pickles with Rep. Anthony Weiner Editorial: When the Council Fears Debate The View from Albany: Rivalries and Détentes as Albany’s Old Guard Meets New Guard by Alan Chartock Read the Fine Print on Library Funding by City Council Member Vincent Gentile Observation: At the Empire State Pride Agenda Dinner, Highlights and Pitfalls by Allen Roskoff
On a sun-baked stretch of Union Street between Fourth and Seventh avenues in Brooklyn, Bruce Carmel picks up a rotting, garbage-stained copy of the Sunset News.
Stuffed into one of the many hairline crevices running along the mucky cement sidewalk, a headline splashed across the paper’s front page details the neighborhood’s latest robbery. Carmel scans the page intently as he trudges along Union Street, an up-hill cement corridor that gets steeper as it climbs toward Seventh Avenue.
He does not turn the page. After a minute, he rolls it up and holds it at his side. For Carmel, this is one of many lost remnants littered throughout the borough, another of the splintered cultural identities he is trying so purposefully to collect.
“I’ll stay as long as I can be useful,” says Carmel of his future in the neighborhood, where he has been working for a little over three years.
Seventh Avenue is the location of one of two educational facilities that belong to Turning Point, a non-profit community outreach program. Carmel, the organization’s deputy executive director of educational services, oversees its adult literacy and educational programs.
Turning Point is one of 36 community-based organizations funded under the umbrella of the New York City Adult Literacy Initiative. The program, run out of the Department for Youth and Community Development, was founded in 1984 by Mayor Ed Koch’s (D) administration as a means of continuing education for adults and public school dropouts.
Of the city’s 36 community-based organizations
running adult literacy program, Turning Point is one of 27 which cobbled together funding from various city and state education sources. The others’ literacy programs received no government funding.
As a result, their futures are tenuous at best.
Since then, the initiative has experienced funding setbacks.
The state and the city used to decide together how to divide their share of federal education dollars. Three years ago, changes to the system were made. Instead, programs like the Adult Literacy Initiative must competitively bid for funding with other adult educational programs around New York.
When the changes took effect this July, the city’s adult literacy initiative went without federal funding for the first time in its history.
“It was a totally new paradigm,” said Richard Fish, the director of the city’s Adult Literacy Initiative. “There are communities in New York City that don’t have the services they used to.”
Of the city’s 36 community-based organizations running adult literacy program, Turning Point is one of 27 which cobbled together funding from various city and state education sources. The other literacy programs received no government funding. As a result, their futures are tenuous at best.
To prove that a community-based organization is meeting accountability standards, it must annually report meeting federally mandated targets of students advancing to the next educational level.
But because so many communities have adults with little or no educational background – Sunset Park, for example, has a population of roughly 120,000 and no local high school – meeting the targets is, according to Carmel, as much a matter of bookkeeping as it is of effectiveness.
“You have to be savvy with your data,” he said. “It’s not enough to provide quality educational programs.”
And that is not the only problem.
“Some organizations are working with immigrants who have no literacy in their own language,” Fish added. “Every community has a different profile.”
At Turning Point’s Seventh Avenue location, Carmel solicits students to talk by holding the crumpled newspaper he picked up on Union Street and saying “newspaper” emphatically.
An elderly Chinese woman trots over and sputters, with less skill but more enthusiasm than some of her classmates, why she enjoys the program.
“I like to learn English,” she says very triumphantly, “because I live in America.”
She emigrated from China in 1994, and worked in a garment factory until she lost her job after Sept. 11th.
Students like her, who range from teen dropouts to those old enough to retire, seem evidence alone of Turning Point’s success.
Any success that programs like Turning Point’s might have in educating the otherwise-forgotten might be marred by the political waltz that is non-profit funding.
“We used to get together and say, ‘What’s the best way to teach people how to read and write,’” Carmel said of his 17-year career in adult literacy. “Now we get together and say, ‘What’s the best way to record our data?’"