STATE OF GEORGIA
GOVERNOR’S OFFICE OF WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT ATLANTA 30334-0900
Nathan Deal Tricia Pridemore
GOVERNOR EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
2 Martin Luther King Jr. Dr., SW, 1408 West Tower, Atlanta, GA 30334 ▪ Telephone: (404) 463-5030 FAX (404) 463-5043
SPEECH TRANSCRIPT: Georgia Adult Education Association
Begin Speech: Thank you. It is an honor to be here with you and I appreciate the work and role of this body in providing the opportunity for us to come together to talk about a topic as important as adult education. To highlight the importance of adult education allow me to first take you back to my experience. I want to read you the first two paragraphs from an article printed in the Asbury Park Press about the city that I grew up in.
“It’s 1 a.m. and from the grainy surveillance video, it seems like an ordinary late night on Asbury Park’s Main Street. A man with a white paper bag opens the driver’s door to a dark-colored sedan and climbs behind the wheel to sit next to his passenger.
In an instant, two men rush from across the street, guns drawn. Bang, bang, bang!
Shots are fired into both sides of the car. Three muzzle flashes appear on the video. And then, the shooters are gone. The victims run from the vehicle, stumbling to the curb just as a city police cruiser pulls up. The officer radios for help. The two men, both of Asbury Park, are rushed to the hospital in critical condition. In an instant, the two men became the 28th and 29th victims of the city’s rampant shootings this year.
The gun violence has become an unfortunate part of life for those on the west side of the city, bordered by Main Street, trouble that has been fueled by the easy availability of guns and a long-thriving illegal drug trade.
“We’re not going to arrest our way out of this,” Mayor Ed Johnson said. “We could have police on every single corner of the city and it won’t stop this. We have to deal with the customers, the dealers, the gang members, and then create opportunities and make sure there are jobs.”
I grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey across the street from a public housing development called Asbury Park Village, in a small multi-family apartment that sat on top of a corner store. A dark alley led the way to an entrance on the back of the building that was our front door. The town itself is only 1 and a half square miles, yet I checked this year – the local high school graduated just 24% of its students according to New Jersey’s Governor; there were 283 drug related arrest through mid-September; 340 illegal hand gun possession charges through the same time, and 43 shootings – about one each week.
We all know the numbers – the average dropout can expect an annual income of just $20,241 – that’s a mere $389 a week. That’s if you can find a job – 30% of all drop outs live in poverty – almost exactly the poverty rate in Asbury Park, New Jersey today and incarceration rates are 63% higher than those of a typical college graduate. As you know, students from low-income families are 2.4 times more likely to drop out of school and children of parents who do not graduate from high school are themselves far more likely to drop out of high school. And in my family, high school graduation was not typical and we were living in poverty. I didn’t grow up with images of academic achievement around me. There were no photos of people in graduation gowns around the house.
But what I remember most about education while growing up is my grandmother in the newspaper after receiving her high school diploma from MAECOM Adult Learning Center just before her 47th birthday. She went on to finish an LPN program at the local community college and became a licensed practical nurse. My aunt Jennifer – a high school dropout – walked across the stage on the same day with my grandmother after completing her high school diploma program. My mother – another high school dropout – walked across the stage the same year receiving her high school diploma when she was 30 years old. I watched her work as a certified nurse’s assistant while attending night school to earn an associate’s degree from the local
community college and pass her state board to become a registered nurse. I was supposed to be a statistic – adult education may well have made the difference in my life and in the life of my siblings and cousins.
Just over a year ago, Governor Nathan Deal launched the Go Build Georgia program as his skilled trade jobs initiative. The Go Build Georgia program was designed to educate young people on the value of learning a trade, dispel their misconceptions about the skilled trade industry and inspire them to consider building a career as a skilled tradesman. Through this public awareness effort, public relations and social media campaign, Go Build Georgia aims to provide better opportunities for craft tradesmen, more highly skilled employees for businesses and enhanced economic development for Georgia and the nation. The program cuts across five industry sectors including manufacturing, industrial construction, transportation, energy, and telecommunications. It is within these industries that Georgia is seeing significant career opportunities. 185,000 new skilled tradesmen are needed every year - 16,500 in Georgia alone. Our office expects 82,000 new skilled trade job availabilities over the next four years.
The program was designed for high school aged young people – and that’s good because students who are informed about career pathways and career options that they believe are attainable are less likely to drop out. But we have seen increased interest in Go Build Georgia from chronically unemployed adults. There are over 200 million adults over the age of 25 in the United States and approximately 15 percent have not earned a high school diploma or its equivalent. For these adults and their posterity, a vicious cycle of poverty, incarceration, chronic unemployment and dysfunction await. And for them, the barriers to employment are greater than the exercise of completing an application. This population is accustomed to failure, low expectations, and concrete barriers. For me and my family adult education was the only answer to halting that vicious cycle and reversing that trend. For instance, today black unemployment is just under 14% - yet - there are 12,778 truck drivers needed in our state alone - as we speak! In addition to 4,906
construction laborers; 2,824 electricians; 2,613 construction managers and 2,050 welders. There are literally thousands of career opportunities that cut across the five Go Build Georgia industry sectors that could be filled after short term adult education programs that last between 9 weeks and 2 years depending on the occupation.
And the information age is requiring even an educated population to address the same issues. Today, increasingly Americans are required to compete in an internet-connected, globally competitive, knowledge based world. When professionals apply for work they used to compete against others in their community – however, with online job boards and remote working capabilities professionals are competing against talent from around the world for local jobs. Technology is moving at such a rapid click that it is forcing processes, standards and information to change constantly. What we know about today’s world is that change is constant but also that change is rapid. It is estimated that technology is moving at such a pace in Advanced Manufacturing that its workforce knowledge base will be obsolete every five years! That means that every five years the work environment, its technologies, processes and standards have all changed completely until it is unrecognizable. In IT the changes are so rapid that industry certifications such as PMP, CISSP and EPIC are more valuable than a bachelor’s degree! That is to say, what matters to today’s employers is a talent pool with up-to the minute skills as indicated in a certification not static skills as indicated by a degree.
Karen LaMarsh points out in her recent article “Sometimes non-degree programming is the best option for adults” that, by 2018, we will need at least 4.7 million new workers with postsecondary certificates and that occupations requiring an associate’s degree or industry certification are actually projected to grow slightly faster than occupations requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher. The Brookings Institution reports that 19 of the 30 occupations with the largest projected job growth over the next decade do not require a four-year
degree. I would not be surprised if postsecondary certifications became the new product paradigm for colleges and universities in the next 20 years.
So then, it is important that we see adult education as the very real solution to poverty, to increased incarceration, to chronic unemployment and to the end of that vicious cycle so many in my family were freed from but also as the only solution to a rapidly evolving world in which knowledge and technology shift at exponential rates. The question my grandmother asked is increasingly true for everyone – what is education if it is not continuing education?
