The chapter first discusses the major national policy impetus of a quarter century ago for educational reform in the nation, the War on Poverty, and how that influenced the education and training of numerous educational providers regarding how adult literacy programs should be designed and delivered. The goal is to set the stage for understanding how the various approaches to job-linked literacy that exist today emerged from this historical background.

The chapter then discusses the shift in the national policy emphasis for educational reform that was announced in 1983 with the publication of the report on A Nation at Risk.. This shift has brought about the current interest in workplace literacy programs and, in general, a first-time emphasis upon the education and training of non- management, non-supervisory, "line" employees in America's workplaces. Interestingly, changes that have taken place in just the last three to five years, in various so-called "high performance" businesses and industries which emphasize the "empowerment" of line employees by having them participate in collaborative planning, decision making, and quality monitoring, seem to be influencing the processes for the design and delivery of workplace literacy programs.

The shift seems to be away from the "top-down" approach advocated by the U. S. Departments of Education and Labor in their report on The Bottom Line, in which a literacy task analysis or audit is performed and a curriculum is developed based on that task analysis. Under the "empowerment" philosophy, more and more businesses and educational providers are following an "interactive" approach in which educational providers encourage both management (top-down) and employees (bottom-up) to participate interactively to determine what the workplace literacy program will look like and when and how it will be delivered.

From Poverty Warriors to World Competitors

In 1983 the report on A Nation at Risk asserted that America was losing its competitive edge in the world economic order. Because this report was paid for by the U.S. Department of Education, it is not surprising that this loss of our competitive edge was placed, to a very large extent, on the inadequacies of the U.S. education system in preparing our nation's workforce with the literacy, mathematics, science, and other, so-called "higher-order" skills needed to compete in the new world marketplace. This report was followed by a plea for reforms that would require greater funds for education.

The significance of the Nation at Risk report for workplace literacy is that it focussed on the role of education for making the nation's businesses and industries competitive in the "new world economic order." This was a change from the earlier major call for educational reform that focussed on problems of poverty. Indeed, the War on Poverty was a rallying cry of the major initiatives of the 1960's that led to the implementation of Head Start preschool programs, compensatory education in the public schools, the adult education act that institutionalized adult basic and secondary "remedial" or "second chance" education in the U.S. Department of Education, and extensive programs to get people off welfare, into jobs, and out of poverty (e.g., the Job Corps; the Manpower Development and Training Act [MDTA] and its successors (CETA-Comprehensive Employment and Training Act which became the JTPA-Job Training Partnership Act, and which is now incorporated into the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998).