WASHINGTON -- Pennsylvania faces a 75 percent cut in federal funding for its adult education programs if Congress approves budget reductions proposed by President Bush.

If the cuts are approved -- as state adult education officials fear -- federal funding for adult education programs in Pennsylvania would drop from $19.3 million this year to $4.8 million next year.

As a result, Pennsylvania would be able to serve only half of the 53,000 people currently enrolled in adult education classes to earn their high school diploma or equivalent, learn to read or learn basic math skills, said Rose Brandt, director of the Bureau of Adult Basic and Literacy Education of the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

"You can call it devastating. You can call it shortsighted," Brandt said. "Everyone talks about the fact that we don't have a workforce with the skills needed to compete in a global economy, yet we're not willing to invest in helping them develop those basic skills."

It could get even worse, said Amy-Ellen Duke, a policy analyst for the Center for Law and Social Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group focused on issues facing low-income families.

"It's a state match program," said Duke, explaining that the federal government provides 75 percent of the funding for adult education programs, while states and localities provide 25 percent.

"And it's our expectation that states would cut their adult education funding in a proportional manner [to the federal cuts], leaving a skeleton of a program at a time when we're hearing from employers that they need skilled workers."

In presenting his fiscal 2006 budget request to Congress, Bush said he wants to reduce funding for the adult education program because an analysis by the Office of Management and Budget found that it was difficult to assess the program's effectiveness.

Administration officials acknowledged in their budget proposal that the adult education program "was found to have a modest impact on adult literacy, skill attainment and job placement." But they also said "data quality problems and the lack of a national evaluation made it difficult to assess the program's effectiveness."

Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education, said, "Our budget request is consistent with the administration's goal of decreasing funding for programs with limited impact or for which there is little or no evidence of effectiveness. At a time when there are a lot of constraints being put on the budget, hard decisions had to be made."

But Lennox McLendon, executive director of the National Adult Education Professional Development Consortium, said adult education programs nationwide have been meeting performance targets set by the education department -- targets that are different from the ones used by the Office of Management and Budget.

"[OMB officials] were looking for numeric targets. We use percentage targets," McLendon said. "It's ridiculous. We have plenty of data; all of the states are meeting their performance standards. It's a difference of opinion between OMB and the Department of education. We're following what the federal government said to do, and we get whacked."

For example, Brandt said that one of the Pennsylvania program's annual goals is to ensure that 47 percent of adults working each year to earn their high school diplomas succeed.

"Our goals are high, especially given the population we are working with -- people who have already failed the system or the system has failed them. We are working with the hardest people to serve and we are meeting our goals," she said.

Despite a major lobbying effort by state officials, Congress has taken the first step toward approving an administration proposal to reduce funding for adult education programs from $569 million this year to $200 million next year. Last month, lawmakers rejected an effort by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., to provide more money, but the process of crafting the fiscal 2006 budget is far from over.

House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over adult education have approved maintaining current funding. But the adult education provisions are just a small part of the overall measures approved by the committees, and controversy over other parts of the bills could hamper their passage.

In addition, House and Senate appropriations committees have to weigh in on funding for adult education. Few people in the adult education community are optimistic about overturning Bush's proposed cuts, however, given the size of the federal deficit and the fact that the adult education program is just one of dozens of programs that the president has proposed to severely reduce or eliminate.

"This is the most that the program has ever been threatened," Duke said. "It's really a pretty dire situation."

Congress began to target federal grants to states for adult education in 1964, according to a history published on the Web site of the National Adult Education Professional Development Consortium.

The aim was to create a federal-state partnership to offer classes in basic education to adults who hadn't graduated from high school. In its first year, the federal government provided nearly $19 million for adult education programs serving 38,000 adults.

By the 2001-2002 school year -- the most recent for which national statistics are available -- the program had grown to serve 2.8 million people each year with a budget of $470 million. But that's only a small percentage of the people who qualify for the program because they lack a high school diploma, can't read or need more math skills, McLendon said.

In Allegheny County, 6,358 adults were enrolled in adult education classes in 2003-2004, Brandt said. That's second in the state only to Philadelphia, where program served 13,236.

Pennsylvania spends about $780 per student, slightly more than the national average of $770 per student (in 2001-2002), she said.

Adult education programs are important to the success of other federal programs, McLendon added. For example, they help parents help their children in school and meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law, while giving adults the skills they need to get a job and get off of welfare, he said.

"Adult education is the underpinning for a lot of other social initiatives," he said. "If adults don't have the skills they need, then the other programs can't work."