NEWS
FOR MANY NASHVILLIANS, WITHOUT HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA, WAGES ARE LOW Adult education providers give more opportunity to students BY HANNAH HERNER
Over 41,000 Nashvillians do not have a high school diploma, according to the 2020 Community Needs Evaluation put together by Metropolitan Social Service Commission. Mayor John Cooper’s opening letter points out that the high number of people without their diploma means many are working low-wage jobs. “Some 41,000 Nashville residents lack a high school diploma. The result is that far too many residents work jobs that pay far less than the living wage,” it reads. “Nearly 39,000 Nashvillians work full-time jobs paying less than $12 an hour. Yet a living wage for residents with children in Nashville-Davidson County is $22.87 an hour. Increasing average wages in Nashville will require sustained investments in education and workforce opportunity — investments that I will work with the Metro Council to make, along with additional investments in community safety, housing, transportation and infrastructure.” Area Adult Education centers seek to remove some of the barriers to education, which can in turn, remove barriers to getting higher wage jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that people with a high school diploma make an average of around $8,000 more per year than those without one. The 41,000 number didn’t come as a surprise to Megan Godbey, systems manager of GOAL Collective, a collective of adult education providers in Nashville. In fact, she had been working off of a higher number. Godbey says only about a third of students end up keeping with the program until graduation the first time they try. More likely, they attend a few classes, and then life circumstances get in the way. Taking care of family, holding down a job, transportation to class, or just feeling discouraged with the difficulty of the work can stand in the way — often the same circumstances that led them to leave school to begin with, she says. “Adults really want to know, for everything, like, what's the cost? And what's the timeline? And we can't blame them,” Godbey says. “I mean, they're negotiating that against all the other priorities in their life. But many adult learners are coming to us with gaps in
PHOTO COURTESY OF GOAL COLLECTIVE
their learning that we can't quite identify. The answer about like, 'how long is it going to take me?' doesn't have a straight formula to it.” A report from GOAL shows that the pandemic actually removed some of the barriers to people getting their diplomas. With the imposed remote learning, students could be at home with their kids and work on their own time, around their work schedules. They didn’t have to worry about gas or bus fare to get to class, either. Margareth Caballero started classes with Begin Anew in May 2020, all online, and is well on her way to getting her diploma. As a single mom, doing school work from home with her daughter works well. “I always had it in mind, but you know I got pregnant, so I couldn't. But I always liked school. My parents were poor, we had to move from Texas to Tennessee, so I had to wait. And then I just started living by myself, you know, and things like that. I figured I wanted to be a good example for my daughter, so that's pretty much why I decided to do it now and not later,” Caballero says. But moving online was a challenge for both the tutors and students who weren’t initially tech-savvy like Margareth, who has a computer and wifi to
work at home as well. Out of Russel’s site of 25 students, 22 of them did not have computers, and the libraries weren’t an option. So they got textbooks in hands and tutors called to help over the phone. Through a grant, some were able to be loaned laptops. Some students needed basic digital literacy skills to learn, like using a mouse, creating an email and an online account for the curriculum. And even some of the teachers were only accustomed to pen and paper. “Their comfort level with acquiring those digital skills became a stumbling block to making sure that we can match them with students to tutor,” Godbey says. “So we ended up kind of grappling with the fact that we're all really adult learners, teachers, managers and volunteers alike.” With adult education in Nashville, each classroom does things quite differently — the curriculum, teaching style — and there isn’t a place for learners to evaluate what all is available for them. Because of this, figuring out what the best place to learn for a given student is can be a barrier in itself. GOAL seeks to compile all the solutions while helping organizations that offer classes figure out their strengths. The 2019 American Community Survey Data found that for people over 25 in
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Nashville, the higher the education, the lower the rate of poverty, and it’s always a higher rate of poverty for women.For women without a high school diploma, the rate is 33.5 percent who live in poverty, while 23.5 percent of men do. Furthermore, that rate drops to 18.3 percent of women and 13.8 percent of men once a diploma is obtained. In Russell’s experience with her students, some jobs don’t even take applications without a high school diploma. “It really hits you in the face when these students come in and you know they're willing to work and they want to work, and they're just not afforded that opportunity because of the decision they made when they were 14, you know, and it's just sad,” she says. A handful of graduates from Begin Anew will go on to higher education, and now that they have their high school diploma, they can take part in the Tennessee Promise education. But for adult learners as a whole, it tends to be about more holistic goals, Godbey says. “When we talk to adults about what they want for their life, the majority of them don't say, I want a college degree or I want to hold that diploma, what they say is, I want to read to my child, I want to have a better job so I can spend more time with my family. I want to be able to have a safe house,” she says. Caballero works as a receptionist today, but hopes to get into the beauty industry or be a surgeon in the future. In the midst of recovering from COVID and preparing for her daughter’s second birthday in December, she passed her reading and writing tests on the same day. “Then it just took me almost a year to take the algebra test. So, I've never been good in math. So when I got to a point on doing algebra, I felt like I wasn't going to continue anymore,” Caballero says. “But again, I mean, my daughter, my goals, I have immigrant parents, I'm an immigrant too, so I didn't want to disappoint my parents or my daughter and I wanted to prove that whatever you want to do in life, you can still achieve it. Even if you're a single mom, a teenager, immigrant, doesn't really matter. I want to be an example for other people. So that's what keeps me motivated.”
