The Education Gadfly Weekly

This readable, provocative, and exceptionally timely book by former U.S. education secretary Bill Bennett (and his young but astute coauthor) will rock the complacent aspiration of “college for all.” Intended more for students and parents than for policymakers and propeller heads (and equipped with a short, well-chosen list of “colleges worth attending” and a dozen “hypothetical scenarios” by which to make decisions about college enrollment), its fundamental argument is that much of contemporary U.S. higher education is a waste of time and money, that many people emerge from the campus with more in debts than in rewards, that there are plenty of viable and rewarding alternatives (especially to the classic “four-year bachelor’s degree”), and that big changes are afoot in the postsecondary realm—technology above all—that many who inhabit that realm seem all but blind to. He rebuts the contemporary dogma that “returns on higher education are higher than ever” by showing that, for many students (and of course millions of taxpayers), the costs outweigh the benefits. Right on, Mr. Secretary!

SOURCE: William J. Bennett and David Wilezol, Is College Worth It? (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, April 2013).

After decades of fretting over girls’ academic opportunities and achievement, it seems the worm has turned with a vengeance. MIT economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman, using Census data from 1970 to 2010, studied differences among males and females in educational attainment and economic well being. They emerged with two main findings. First, while girls are gaining ground in high school and college-graduation rates, boys are slipping. Among those aged thirty-five in 2010, the female-male gap in college-going rates was 10 percentage points, while the gap in four-year college-completion rates was 7 percentage points. Second, men’s wages are faltering: Between 1979 and 2010, the real earnings growth for males with less than a four-year degree declined between 5 and 25 percent (the steepest such fall was found among the least-educated and youngest males). And though tough economic times have also taxed women, their earnings did not decline as far; in fact, the earnings of highly educated women have risen sharply since the late 70s, with the gender earnings gap among older workers (ages 40-64) narrowing from 60 percent in 1979 to 20 percent in 2010 for those with a post-college education. The analysts’ search for the root of these trends escorts readers through a review of shifting family structures: Over the last thirty years, the proportion of births accounted for by unmarried women has more than doubled, rising from less than 20 percent in 1980 to over 40 percent in 2009. What’s more, these trends were not driven by teen births but by women between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine. And on most any academic or economic measure, children growing up in single-parent homes have worse outcomes; but without a role model of the same gender, boys tend to fare worse than girls. This is depressing news indeed for our nation’s boys.

SOURCE: David Autor and Melanie Wasserman, Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor Markets and Education (Washington, D.C.: Third Way).

The Philanthropy Roundtable publishes a fine magazine for its members, addressing many aspects of philanthropy and often paying special attention to education, a major realm of interest and activity for the organization, as well as (obviously) for U.S. philanthropists. Never, however, in my long relationship with the Roundtable, has this been done more thoroughly and imaginatively than in the Spring 2013 issue of Philanthropy, commencing with a superb lead article by Christopher Levenick on how those who are serious about policy reform in education need to go beyond traditional “C-3” work. Also of value are Naomi Schaeffer Riley on citizenship education, Liam Julian on the philanthropic backdrop of the Common Core, Andy Smarick on badly needed governance changes, Laura Vanderkam on the potential of blended learning, and a swell interview with Betsy Devos. Check it out—and, if by any remote chance you happen to be a philanthropist who doesn’t already belong to the Roundtable, consider joining, too!

SOURCE: Philanthropy Roundtable, Philanthropy, Spring 2013 (Washington, D.C.: Philanthropy Roundtable, Spring 2013).

Checker and Kathleen consider Randi Weingarten’s call to suspend testing, pre-K finance jitters, and the fate of the testing consortia. Amber worries about wayward sons.

Amber's Research Minute

Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor Markets and Education by David Autor and Melanie Wasserman (Washington, D.C.: Third Way)

Thirty years ago, A Nation at Risk was released to a surprised country. Suddenly, Americans woke up to learn that SAT scores were plummeting and children were learning a lot less than before. This report became a turning point in modern U.S. education history and marked the beginning of a new focus on excellence, achievement, and results.

Due in large part to this report, we now judge a school by whether its students are learning rather than how much money is going into it, what its programs look like, or its earnest intentions. Education reform today is serious about standards, quality, assessment, accountability and benchmarking—by school, district, state and nation. This is new since 1983 and it’s very important.

Yet we still have many miles to traverse before we sleep. Our students still need to learn far more and our schools need to become far more effective.

To recall the impact of A Nation at Risk these past three decades and to reflect on what lies ahead, watch this short retrospective developed by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the American Enterprise Institute: A Nation at Risk: Thirty Years Later.

Everyone from President Barack Obama to U.S. Representative Paul Ryan to Bill Gates seems to have a plan for improving the Federal Pell Grant Program for higher education.

Worthy though some of these efforts may be, none get to the crux of the problem: A huge proportion of this $40 billion annual federal investment is flowing to people who simply aren’t prepared to do college-level work. And this is perverting higher education’s mission, suppressing completion rates, and warping the country’s K–12 system.

About two-thirds of low-income community-college students—and one-third of poor students at four-year colleges—need remedial (a.k.a. “developmental”) education, according to Complete College America, a nonprofit group. But it’s not working: Less than 10 percent of low-income students who start in remedial education graduate from community college within three years, and just 35 percent of such students earn a four-year degree within six years.

What if the government decreed that, starting three years hence, students would only be eligible for Pell aid if enrolled in credit-bearing college courses, thus disqualifying remedial education for support?

One could foresee various possible outcomes. Let’s start with the positive. Ambitious, low-income high school students would know that if they want to attend college at public expense (probably their only option), they would first need to become “college ready.” This would provide a clear sign and incentives for them to work hard, take college-prep classes, and raise their reading and math skills to the appropriate level.

Better Preparation

To be considered successful, the high schools serving these young people would need to get their college-bound students to a college-ready level, not just to graduation. They might offer more college-prep courses, especially for those pupils with the most promise, and make sure that teachers are up to the task.

Likewise, state officials concerned about college completion would be prodded to ensure that their high schools produce college-ready graduates, maybe boosting graduation standards accordingly. Better yet, they might start to include college matriculation and graduation rates in their high school accountability systems.

As for colleges, without a federal funding stream for remedial education many would become more selective, only admitting students who are ready for credit-bearing courses.

This would probably raise the academic tenor of the institution, for students and professors alike. And with fewer students using Pell aid, we could afford to make each grant more generous, removing financial barriers that force well-prepared low-income students to leave before graduation, or not to come at all.

In sum, disqualifying the use of Pell grants for remedial education would substantially reduce the gap between the number of students entering higher education and the number completing degrees.

Yes, there are obvious downsides. Most significantly, many students wouldn’t be able to afford remedial education and thus would never go to college in the first place. Millions of potential Pell recipients—many of them minorities—might be discouraged from even entering the higher-education pipeline. Such an outcome seems unfair and cuts against the American tradition of open access, as well as second and third chances.

Then again, it’s not so certain that these individuals are better off trying college in the first place. Most don’t make it to graduation.

Job Training

Many would be more successful in job-training programs that don’t require college-level work (or would be better off simply gaining skills on the job). Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that more than a third of jobs today only require a high school diploma or less. While these jobs won’t make young people rich, they will keep them out of the grip of poverty and can propel them to new opportunities.

Furthermore, it isn’t fair to spend scarce dollars on students who aren’t prepared for college; those dollars could instead be used by needy students who are ready. It would be better to place our bets on low-income individuals who are most likely to succeed by boosting the maximum value of a Pell grant. (At $5,500 a year, it’s worth much less today than when Congress created the program decades ago.)

Perhaps the greatest risk is that colleges would respond to the new rules in a perverse manner: by giving academic credit for courses that used to be considered “remedial.” This would be the path of least resistance. Everyone could keep doing what they were doing before, with a wink and a nod, but would further dilute the value of a college degree.

It’s hard to know how many institutions would be willing to disregard academic integrity in such a way; one could imagine it being a lamentably large number. It would be incumbent on government agencies and watchdog groups to shame colleges that attempt to take this route.

On balance, withdrawing Pell subsidies from remedial courses appears promising enough to try. Congress should require the Education Department to create a demonstration program in which colleges and universities volunteer to eliminate their remedial courses and, in return, their qualified low-income students become eligible for more generous Pell-grant money, thus reducing their own financial-aid obligation.

Perhaps offer the deal to an entire state. Study what happens. My guess is that it would have a salutary effect on the K–12 system, on higher education, and on college-completion rates. Let’s find out.

This piece originally appeared on Bloomberg View.

Though few Americans have ever heard of the “Common Core,” it’s causing a ruckus in education circles and turmoil in the Republican Party. Prompted by tea-party activists, a couple of talk-radio hosts and bloggers, a handful of disgruntled academics, and several conservative think tanks, the Republican National Committee recently adopted a resolution blasting the Common Core as “an inappropriate overreach to standardize and control the education of our children.” Several red states that previously adopted it for their schools are on the verge of backing out. Indiana is struggling over exit strategies.

What, you ask, is this all about?

Thirty years after a blue-ribbon panel declared the United States to be “a nation at risk” due to the weak performance and shoddy results of our public education system, one of the two great reforms to have enveloped that system is the setting of explicit academic standards in core subjects, standards that make clear what math youngsters should know by the end of fifth grade, what reading-and-writing skills they must acquire by tenth grade, and so on. (The other great reform: widespread acceptance of school choice.)

Up to now, individual states have set their own academic standards. Some did this well, but according to reviews undertaken by Fordham and others, most stumbled badly, putting forth vague expectations that lack content and rigor and often promote left-wing dogma. And even the good ones differ so much from state to state that school and student performance cannot be compared around the country, much less with other lands.

Public education is indisputably the responsibility of states—embedded deeply in their constitutions—but preparing young Americans to succeed in a mobile society on a shrinking and more competitive planet calls for some commonality of education expectations across the land, expectations that, if met, truly prepare young people for college and good jobs.

Many state leaders understand this and, beginning five years ago, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (to which most state superintendents belong) launched a foundation-funded project called the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which gave birth to a set of commendably strong standards for English language arts and math from Kindergarten through high school. Our reviewers found them superior to the academic expectations set by three-quarters of states—and essentially on par with the rest.

But would states actually embrace them in place of their own? This was—and remains—totally voluntary, but decisions grew more complicated when the Obama administration started pushing states toward such adoptions by jawboning, hectoring, and luring them with dollars and regulatory waivers.

Whether it was the standards’ intrinsic merit, administration pressure, or the potential advantages of commonality—not just comparability but also cheaper textbooks and tests that need not be tailored to each state’s specifications—forty-five states plus D.C., several territories, and the Pentagon’s school network signed on. (Texas and Virginia are the big exceptions.) The top-priority education initiative in most of those places today is preparing teachers, parents, and others for these demanding standards—and for the likelihood that scores will plummet on the tougher tests now under development.

Then came the backlash. Some arose on the left from foes of testing and teacher groups wary of being evaluated against sterner criteria. Some arose from parents and educators fretful that heavier emphasis on English language arts and math will eclipse music, art, and the rest of a balanced curriculum.

The heavy artillery, however, came from the right. In true tea-party style, the Common Core was presented as a federal plot—worse, an Obama plot, in cahoots with the Gates Foundation, maybe even the United Nations—to take over American schools, end local control, undermine state sovereignty, and abolish school choice. Some decried the Common Core as a lowering of standards because, for example, it doesn’t mandate algebra in eighth grade. (Never mind that few eighth graders study real algebra today.) Others prophesied that Jane Austen and Mark Twain would be replaced by close study of auto-repair manuals. (The list of recommended readings that accompanies the Common Core is excellent—but bad choices by teachers or curriculum directors can subvert any standards.)

Many respected conservatives back the Common Core, including such scarred veterans of the education-reform wars as Jeb Bush, Bill Bennett, Chris Christie, Rod Paige, and Mitch Daniels. They understand that academic standards are just the beginning, describing a destination but not how to get there. They understand, too, that a destination worth reaching beats aimless wandering—and that a big modern country is better off if it knows how all its kids and schools are doing against a rigorous set of common expectations. As good conservatives, they realize that the Common Core in the long run should save dollars, enhance accountability, hasten development of powerful instructional technologies, strengthen American competitiveness, give a boost to the country’s shared civic culture, and (by supplying parents with better information about school performance) advance school choice.

They also recognize, however, that the Common Core is voluntary and that states unserious about implementing it are better off not pretending to embrace it.

Some day, we’ll know whether schools and students in the Common Core states do better than those in places that opt to go it alone. It’s hard to imagine that they’ll do worse.

Education reform is hard. Admiral Rickover once compared it to “moving a graveyard.” Standards-setting is just part of it—and common standards aren’t inherently better. (Newly released standards for science appear to have serious shortcomings.) But when a group of state leaders, many of them Republicans, can come together to set expectations for the curricular core that surpass what most of them set on their own, conservatives ought to applaud, not lash out.

Snaps to Gov. Jerry Brown for his fierce defense of a weighted-student-funding plan for California’s schools, one that would reform the state’s questionable financing system by directing more—and much more flexible—funds to districts with high numbers of English learners and low-income families. We only hope that, behind the bluster, he’s willing to talk shop with his state Senate; the kids of California need a win.

A new report out of Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research heralded an uproar over pre-K financing: We spend $1,100 less per student than we did 2001, blared the headlines. But before you go building an ark and gathering all your pets onto it, note that preschool enrollment increased from 14 percent of four-year-olds to 28 percent during this period. The money increased, too, just not as fast as the headcount, meaning that per pupil funding edged downward even as total pre-school spending rose. What we’re seeing here is dubious policy, not disappearing dollars: Schools should be targeting these dollars at the neediest kids.

The Florida Senate killed a proposed parent trigger for the state just the way it did last year—in a 20–20 vote, this time with six Republicans joining all Democrats in opposition. The bill had been diluted during the legislative session to give school boards the final say over parent-triggered turnaround options, yet the compromise failed to win over skeptics, including one Republican who called the legislation “hopelessly bad.”

AFT president Randi Weingarten warned this week that implementation of the Common Core hasn’t fully ramped up and called for a moratorium on the high stakes related to testing while it does. We don’t see states suspending their tests, nor should they, but a one- or two-year pause in test-based, high-stakes teacher accountability might give instructors a bit of an opportunity to focus on learning how to teach to the new standards rather than watching over their shoulders lest they be dinged by the old ones.

Thirty years ago, A Nation at Risk was released to a surprised country. Suddenly, Americans woke up to learn that SAT scores were plummeting and children were learning a lot less than before. This report became a turning point in modern U.S. education history and marked the beginning of a new focus on excellence, achievement, and results.

Due in large part to this report, we now judge a school by whether its students are learning rather than how much money is going into it, what its programs look like, or its earnest intentions. Education reform today is serious about standards, quality, assessment, accountability and benchmarking—by school, district, state and nation. This is new since 1983 and it’s very important.

Yet we still have many miles to traverse before we sleep. Our students still need to learn far more and our schools need to become far more effective.

To recall the impact of A Nation at Risk these past three decades and to reflect on what lies ahead, watch this short retrospective developed by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the American Enterprise Institute: A Nation at Risk: Thirty Years Later.

Thirty years ago, A Nation at Risk was released to a surprised country. Suddenly, Americans woke up to learn that SAT scores were plummeting and children were learning a lot less than before. This report became a turning point in modern U.S. education history and marked the beginning of a new focus on excellence, achievement, and results.

Due in large part to this report, we now judge a school by whether its students are learning rather than how much money is going into it, what its programs look like, or its earnest intentions. Education reform today is serious about standards, quality, assessment, accountability and benchmarking—by school, district, state and nation. This is new since 1983 and it’s very important.

Yet we still have many miles to traverse before we sleep. Our students still need to learn far more and our schools need to become far more effective.

To recall the impact of A Nation at Risk these past three decades and to reflect on what lies ahead, watch this short retrospective developed by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the American Enterprise Institute: A Nation at Risk: Thirty Years Later.

This readable, provocative, and exceptionally timely book by former U.S. education secretary Bill Bennett (and his young but astute coauthor) will rock the complacent aspiration of “college for all.” Intended more for students and parents than for policymakers and propeller heads (and equipped with a short, well-chosen list of “colleges worth attending” and a dozen “hypothetical scenarios” by which to make decisions about college enrollment), its fundamental argument is that much of contemporary U.S. higher education is a waste of time and money, that many people emerge from the campus with more in debts than in rewards, that there are plenty of viable and rewarding alternatives (especially to the classic “four-year bachelor’s degree”), and that big changes are afoot in the postsecondary realm—technology above all—that many who inhabit that realm seem all but blind to. He rebuts the contemporary dogma that “returns on higher education are higher than ever” by showing that, for many students (and of course millions of taxpayers), the costs outweigh the benefits. Right on, Mr. Secretary!

SOURCE: William J. Bennett and David Wilezol, Is College Worth It? (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, April 2013).

After decades of fretting over girls’ academic opportunities and achievement, it seems the worm has turned with a vengeance. MIT economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman, using Census data from 1970 to 2010, studied differences among males and females in educational attainment and economic well being. They emerged with two main findings. First, while girls are gaining ground in high school and college-graduation rates, boys are slipping. Among those aged thirty-five in 2010, the female-male gap in college-going rates was 10 percentage points, while the gap in four-year college-completion rates was 7 percentage points. Second, men’s wages are faltering: Between 1979 and 2010, the real earnings growth for males with less than a four-year degree declined between 5 and 25 percent (the steepest such fall was found among the least-educated and youngest males). And though tough economic times have also taxed women, their earnings did not decline as far; in fact, the earnings of highly educated women have risen sharply since the late 70s, with the gender earnings gap among older workers (ages 40-64) narrowing from 60 percent in 1979 to 20 percent in 2010 for those with a post-college education. The analysts’ search for the root of these trends escorts readers through a review of shifting family structures: Over the last thirty years, the proportion of births accounted for by unmarried women has more than doubled, rising from less than 20 percent in 1980 to over 40 percent in 2009. What’s more, these trends were not driven by teen births but by women between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine. And on most any academic or economic measure, children growing up in single-parent homes have worse outcomes; but without a role model of the same gender, boys tend to fare worse than girls. This is depressing news indeed for our nation’s boys.

SOURCE: David Autor and Melanie Wasserman, Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor Markets and Education (Washington, D.C.: Third Way).

The Philanthropy Roundtable publishes a fine magazine for its members, addressing many aspects of philanthropy and often paying special attention to education, a major realm of interest and activity for the organization, as well as (obviously) for U.S. philanthropists. Never, however, in my long relationship with the Roundtable, has this been done more thoroughly and imaginatively than in the Spring 2013 issue of Philanthropy, commencing with a superb lead article by Christopher Levenick on how those who are serious about policy reform in education need to go beyond traditional “C-3” work. Also of value are Naomi Schaeffer Riley on citizenship education, Liam Julian on the philanthropic backdrop of the Common Core, Andy Smarick on badly needed governance changes, Laura Vanderkam on the potential of blended learning, and a swell interview with Betsy Devos. Check it out—and, if by any remote chance you happen to be a philanthropist who doesn’t already belong to the Roundtable, consider joining, too!

SOURCE: Philanthropy Roundtable, Philanthropy, Spring 2013 (Washington, D.C.: Philanthropy Roundtable, Spring 2013).