Kansas City, Mo. ? The Kansas Adult Education and Family Literacy Program has won state and national plaudits for its success in helping meet students’ goals, and for the unusual way it distributes money for the programs.

Kansas determines the success of its program through an annual review of how many students complete it, get jobs, pass the General Equivalency Degree program, learn English, go on to post-secondary education or meet whatever goals they had when they started. Programs that show the greatest success receive more funding.

In 2004, the program had 2,036 students hoping to keep a job or improve it, and 1,364 of them met that objective, a 67 percent success rate. In 2005, the program had a nearly 80 percent success rate on that objective.

The success rate for meeting enrollees’ objectives has improved every year since Kansas began measuring that in 2000, said Diane Glass, director of the state’s adult education division.

Glass is adamant that the nearly $700 a year it costs the state to educate each student goes only to programs that bring results.

Kansas began performance-based, instead of enrollment-based, funding with 37 adult education programs in 2000. When six programs failed to meet the new, stricter standards, their funding was distributed to more successful programs.

“When we have a program that is underperforming to the point that it is so out of range with the other programs, it makes you say, ‘Wait, something is not right here.’ I have to say we can get more bang for the buck if we put that money somewhere else,” Glass said.

No other state adult education program in the country distributes, as Kansas does, as much as 88 percent of its state and federal dollars based on performance, said Steven Klein, a consultant with MPR Associates, a firm commissioned last year by the U.S. Department of Education to review performance-based funding models across the country.

MPR looked at 10 states and profiled Kansas, Indiana and Missouri. Indiana allocates 5 percent of its budget based on performance and Missouri, 13 percent.

“What we saw was that allocating money based on performance motivates them (instructors) to achieve and to look at their data and try to do better because they know if they do, their program gets money,” Klein said.

Susan McCabe, director of the Johnson County Community College adult education and literacy program, said she thinks the change is responsible for improving the quality of the state’s program.”