Standards for Adult Literacy: Focal Points for Debate

The prospect of developing content, performance, and opportunity-to-learn standards for adult literacy has generated much discussion. However, the lack of a common vocabulary and the relatively narrow range of interests represented in these discussions have been major impediments to progress in developing standards for adult literacy. This paper reviews literature on the theory and practice of education standards and summarizes the progress toward designing content, performance, and opportunity-to-learn standards for adult literacy. This review helps to highlight the technical issues and challenges to standards-based reform of the field. The development of efficient and equitable accountability systems for adult literacy programs will require ongoing efforts to define desirable knowledge and skills and to develop more authentic measures of learning outcomes. The particular challenges posed by issues of equity, diversity, and coordination of service provision call for a broadly based participatory process in developing and implementing adult literacy standards.