The rate of student departure from adult literacy programs is as high as 80% within the first 12 months (Porter, Cuban, & Comings, 2005). An examination of the literature reveals two perspectives concerning learner persistence: a "control perspective" and an "acknowledgement and accommodation perspective." The control perspective emphasizes the role of programmatic barriers and learners' dispositional attitudes as influences on learner persistence and seeks to remediate the "problem" of low learner persistence. The acknowledgement and accommodation perspective views low learner persistence as the result of a complex web of factors that includes the lived experiences of individuals in cultural and community contexts, negative systemic social forces such as gender inequality and poverty, and values/goals disjunctures between students and programs.