The Education Gadfly Weekly

This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family that marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 release of the Moynihan Report.

This may seem like a ridiculous question: How can schools possibly persuade more adults to marry—and not have children out of wedlock? Fifty years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan himself decided it was inadvisable to offer solutions to problems afflicting minority families. Since then, our familial challenges have only grown deeper and wider, with four in ten American babies now born to unwed mothers. That includes a majority of all children born to women in their twenties and almost one-third of white babies. There are no obvious or easy prescriptions for reversing these trends.

And why put this on the schools? One could argue that reducing teenage pregnancy is a reasonable job for our education system—and that if we could encourage girls to wait until they were in their twenties, and educated, to have babies, they might also wait for marriage. Well, teenage pregnancy rates are down 50 percent from their peak in 1990. High school graduation rates are up from 65 percent in the early 1990s to 80 percent today. Yet out-of-wedlock birth rates are as high as ever—we merely pushed early childbearing from the late teens to the early twenties. Now the young adults having babies before marriage haven’t had any contact with the K–12 system for two years or more.

Yet for educators and education policymakers to ignore the issue of marriage seems irresponsible. We tell ourselves that one of the great purposes of education reform is to lift poor children out of poverty. Today’s main strategy is to prepare many more low-income youngsters for college. According to the Pew Economic Mobility Project, 90 percent of low-income children who attain a four-year college degree escape the lowest income quintile as adults, versus just 53 percent of the non-degree holders. Put another way, individuals who grow up in low-income families are almost five times as likely to become low-income adults if they fail to complete a four-year college degree.

The problem, however, is that just 10–15 percent of low-income children actually complete a college degree. An analysis by Andrew Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute finds that about one-third of low-income students start college but don’t finish. Kelly argues convincingly that a college degree is a “big payoff, low probability” strategy for economic mobility. Surely it can’t be the only arrow in our quiver.

So what if “college as a springboard to the middle class” isn’t the only strategy? What about “marriage as a springboard to the middle class,” and particularly marriage before childbearing? Or what Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution call the “success sequence”: get at least a high school diploma, work full time, and wait till you are at least twenty-one and married before having children. They estimate that 98 percent of individuals who follow those three norms will not be poor, and almost three-quarters will be solidly middle class. On the flip side, three-quarters of young people who fail to follow any of those norms will be poor, and almost none will be middle class.

Maybe it’s not so ridiculous to ask what schools can do to encourage young people to follow the success sequence, including putting marriage before children.

“Drifting” into Parenthood

Our first challenge is to understand why so many young people—especially those who are low-income—are choosing to have children before marriage. A related question is why most affluent, well-educated young adults wait until their late twenties or thirties, and for marriage, before having children. Assuming we don’t want to encourage teenage parents to marry, what can we do to encourage teenagers and those in their early twenties to wait until they are older, educated, employed, and married before having children?

This has been the subject of vast debate and increasingly sophisticated research for decades. A foundational question is whether young adults are “choosing” to have children—or whether it is happening by accident because they are having sex without using birth control. Are they deciding to start a family, or are they “drifting into sex and parenthood,” in the words of Sawhill?

The current consensus is that most young people having children before marriage aren’t exactly doing so on purpose, but they also aren’t trying very hard to prevent it. It’s not that they don’t understand how birth control works, or fail to use it in the heat of the moment (though that’s part of it). Rather, they make a somewhat conscious decision to stop using birth control once they have been “associating” with someone for a while.

Some of the best work on this subject comes from Johns Hopkins sociologist Kathryn Edin. She and her coauthors spent years living in low-income and working class Philadelphia and Camden neighborhoods, where they met and interviewed young parents, white and black. They found that most young people weren’t sad when they learned that they—or their girlfriends—were pregnant; they treated the news with excitement rather than regret.

So have the baby, and raise the baby, they did. But didn’t they know they were consigning their children and themselves to a life of hardship? Didn’t they understand that if they were going to “climb the mountain to college”—or even to a decent-paying job—doing so with a baby in a stroller would make the ascent that much tougher?

What Edin and her co-authors show is that the young women and men see parenthood as a chance to “start over” and to do something good with their lives, as well as to connect deeply with another human being. “In these decaying, inner-city neighborhoods, motherhood is the primary vocation for young women, and those who strive to do it well are often transformed by the process,” she and Maria Kefalas write. Furthermore, “children provide the one relationship poor women believe they can count on to last. Men may disappoint them. Friends may betray them. Even kin may withdraw from them. But they staunchly believe that little can destroy the bond between a mother and child.”

Edin and Timothy Nelson pick up this theme: “Fatherhood offers the opportunity to connect with a child—an unsullied version of oneself—in an intensely meaningful way. But fatherhood is also a tool, almost a magic wand that youth…can use to neutralize the ‘negativity’ that surrounds them as they come of age in chaotic and violence-charged neighborhoods like East Camden.”

Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, these hopeful attitudes eventually give way to the grinding reality of daily life. Most of the romantic relationships between the parents fall apart within a few years. The dads desperately want to spend time with their kids, but not with their kids’ mothers—an arrangement that eventually proves untenable. And so another generation of children is raised in poverty, with single mothers doing most of the child care and trying to make ends meet, and fathers having additional babies with other women in a fruitless quest to “start fresh” and “do the right thing.”

What might be done to change this dynamic? Edin (like Sawhill) is a proponent of making low-cost, long-acting birth control available to young people, and there’s good reason to believe that it can reduce unplanned pregnancies significantly. But the most important “intervention,” according to Edin, is hope: a realistic plan for a life trajectory that is more compelling than early motherhood and fatherhood. (William Damon at Stanford University calls this “purpose.”) This means, among other things, having meaningful opportunities for higher education and interesting, decently paid work.

Hope and purpose are why affluent, well-educated young men and women wait until their late twenties or early thirties to have children. For them, having a baby before finishing their educations or launching their careers is something of a catastrophe—a huge wrench in their plans and aspirations. They would risk missing out on all manner of fun and fulfilling experiences—college, international travel, living in a big city, enjoying the single life, climbing the ladder—if they were raising a child.

A key issue is motivation. In particular, how can we motivate young women, and particularly young low-income women, to wait until they are older, educated, employed, and married before they have children? The answer: First, help those young women develop strong prospects for interesting, decently paid careers. And second, give those young women access to “marriageable men”—young men who themselves have strong career prospects.

Next week, we’ll explore what schools can do to boost those career prospects for young men and women alike. 

I’ve always liked Fridays as much as the next guy, but this year I especially like them. The reason is that every Friday, my students and I read an obituary together. If that sounds morbid, let me tell you what I tell the kids: An obituary is the story of a life; death is just the detail that gets it printed.

How do I select the weekly life story we read? I don’t. I have other people do it for me. I’ve been asking folks around town—elected officials, businesspeople, civic leaders, colleagues, and friends—this question: If you could pick one person from the past whom you wish kids would learn about in school, who would it be?

With their introductions, we’ve made the acquaintance of Phyllis Jen, a beloved family doctor, Ruth Batson, a civil rights activist who helped desegregate our schools, and Tom White, a businessman who gave away his riches to the poor. In upcoming weeks, we’ll be reading about a firefighter, a judge, and a rowing coach. And I’ve got lots more in my pile, all marvelously interesting—and inspiring. It’s embarrassing to admit that I’d never heard of most of these people before, but I’m glad to have finally met them. And I’m very pleased to introduce them to my students.

For a teacher, obituaries are useful classroom texts. They offer short history lessons, excellent vocabulary (for example, “ephemeral” and “posterity”), and align well with the new Common Core standards. But the greatest value of the obituaries we read is this: They’re fine examples of how to live. We’re not merely reading life stories, we’re learning about lives worthy of emulation. By the end of the year, my students and I will have met dozens of excellent role models.

Susan Cain, author of the book Quiet, observes that instruction in America used to promote a culture of character in which “what was important was the good deeds that you performed when nobody was looking.” Now, she believes, we’ve developed a culture of personality in which… well, I don’t know who the next celebrity will be, but I’ll bet my next paycheck whoever it is won’t have achieved fame by quietly performing good deeds.

Too often, those who deserve our admiration—and our emulation—remain unsung. It doesn’t have to be this way. Obituaries provide character education with real characters. These good men and women were part of our communities, and if you ask to be introduced, you can meet them. Their obituaries present life stories of those who lived well, who did good deeds, and who offer virtuous examples to follow. By making the passed present, we don’t just honor these fine citizens. We do our civic duty.

Peter Sipe is a sixth-grade teacher at Boston Collegiate Charter School. See his previous Flypaper editorials, "At ed schools, a low degree of difficulty" and "How to challenge voracious young readers."

Editor's note: This post originally appeared in a slightly different form in the Boston Herald.

• Though House of Cards returned magnificently to form last weekend, ESEA doesn’t look like it’s headed for a similar renewal any time soon: Friday’s expected House vote on the Student Success Act went up in a puff of smoke and a fit of Mephistophelean laughter from the spirit of Frank Underwood. The Republican bill suffered somewhat from the mad rush to keep the lights on at the Department of Homeland Security, which took most of the air out of the chamber. Ideology played a role, too—after the Heritage Foundation and Club for Growth came out strongly against proposal, conservative votes were hard to find. Let’s just hope members of the leadership can find some common ground and pass a bill soon, without resorting to a string of murders and expository narration.
• When thinking about ways to improve educational outcomes, it’s natural to start from the bottom and move up. We start with the kids themselves, making sure they begin their schooling with the literacy and socialization tools they need to excel; then we focus our attention on teacher quality, the gradual improvement of which demands better ed programs and sensible forms of evaluation; we might even ponder our opaque system of cultivating principals and superintendents. But how often do we discuss the highest level of local education leadership, the school board? That’s what Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim do in their new book, profiled briefly by the Wall Street Journal. The two scholars argue that these ubiquitous small-scale democracies have amassed powers and resources far too grand for their purpose, and the only solution is to scale them back. It’s a topic Fordham’s investigated before, and one that demands greater consideration.
• If you want to know what the Republican presidential contenders have to say about education, they’re happy to tell you—often with the help of a megaphone (and, when the subject turns to Common Core, a wink and a nod). But the Democratic slate is much less transparent, mostly because there is no Democratic slate. The once and future frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, is maintaining a sphinxlike inscrutability on the issue that Education Week’s Alyson Klein has helpfully begun to penetrate in a terrific profile. Going back to her days as the first lady of Arkansas, Klein reveals, Clinton has championed standards, bashed merit pay, proposed universal pre-K, and stated her firm support for Mom and apple pie. The piece is a useful guide to where she may end up as a candidate…if she ever declares.
• The New York Times has a dispiriting look at the New Jersey parents instructing their kids to sit out the new PARCC exams this week. If opposition to the new, more rigorous assessments is as strong there as it is across the river in New York, tens of thousands of children could avoid participating. The cost of that avoidance—though you wouldn’t know it from the frenzied Facebook groups and union-sponsored television advertisements arrayed against PARCC and Common Core—is that the state will be deprived of vital information on how its schools are performing and whether its students are learning. Anyone telling their kids to skip school obligations has actually “opted out” of a responsible way to lodge their complaints.

ESEA reauthorization, the op-out movement, Indiana vouchers, and college access. Featuring a guest appearance by the Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey.

SOURCE: Joshua Goodman, Michael Hurwitz, Jonathan Smith, "College Access, Initial College Choice and Degree Completion," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 20996 (February 2015). 

Mike:            Hello. This is your host Mike Petrilli at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. I'm here at the Education Gadfly Show and online at edexcellence.net. Now, please join me welcoming my co-host the Neil Patrick Harris of Education Reform, Neal McCluskey.

Neal:            You just call me Duke. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Mike:            I've never seen you in your tidy whities unlike Neil Patrick Harris but I can only imagine that you are just as ripped as he is.

Neal:            You’d be better off not to think about me in my tidy whities.

Mike:            Before I started sporting the goatee but after I shaved the head following in your example Neal, people were telling me that I look a lot like Vladimir Putin and I always think if only you saw me without my shirt and on horse back.

Neal:            You see, Neil Patrick Harris isn't the only one who can do comedy.

Mike:            Nice. You're good Neil. Neil, what's your title over at Cato? You're chief provocateur?

Neal:            I should have such a lefty title. I'm also the associate director of the Center for Education Freedom at the Cato Institute.

Mike:            There it is, very good. Neil and I have spent the last ... God, it feels like forever sparring over first, the idea of national standards and then what is now known as the common core. We do it in a friendly way, in respectful way.

Neal:            You only punched me twice.

Mike:            Exactly. Yeah.

Neal:            It didn't even hurt.

Mike:            It's only that one strangling incident. Okay. We are going to talk about to many things. There is going to be a common core question here. Don't worry, we'll get to talk about that but that's not it because the big news is of course ESEA. Let's get started Ellen with pardon the Gadfly.

Ellen:            It appears the conservatives in the House have succeeded in killing the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. That means two more years of Arne Duncan as waver in chief. Was this smart of them?

Mike:            Neal?

Neal:            The first thing I'd say is certainly people on the right had a lot to do with this not going through. But I think it's worth remembering a lot of Democrats didn't like it either. It's not just people on the right. We're in a very bad position. I don't think there's any question that we don't want the secretary of education essentially dictating by giving out wavers. The same token, I think if you looked at legislation, there were things we should be concerned about.

                        In particular that the secretary could still kick back state plan if he said, well, if it wasn't scientifically supported. Of course,  there's no definition of that. The regulation writing would be very important. I think there is a good reason to be concerned and the fact of the matter is we're in quicksand and somebody pulling you from the left, somebody pulling you from the right, not pulling very hard.

Mike:            No, no. I know. Look, I am sympathetic to those conservatives. I mean I would at this point after that everything that's transpired over the last decade, pretty much be happy just giving it all back to the states including the money. All right, I mean I have a strong love for a strong federal role of education at this point. The problem is, there's nothing to vote for that. It's a tactical question. It's saying, all right, the conservatives are not going to get precisely the policy that they want so is it better to hold out for that?

                        In some hope that I don't know what, what that maybe with the Republican president, maybe with 60 Republicans in the senate, I mean I guess that's one strategy but the downside is we just keep waiting as long as now like seven years overdue for re-authorization and we're still living with it. There's no doubt that any bill that could pass Congress at this would strength the federal role compared to what we have right now.

Neal:            Yeah, I mean I think it was probably move in the right direction at least you get rid of NYP and all of that other stuff. Maybe there are some hope. I don't know what it's based on but maybe there's some hope that the senate version will be more palatable to the people in the right.

Mike:            It does not seem likely.

Neal:            It doesn't. I'm just ... This is conjecture at this point but I do think that what you've seen is what you've seen in the whole lot of issues. Which is people on the right is saying we're not going to accept this really piece-meal differences. You know you'll get what of NYP. I think in particular the fact that the secretary still have a lot of power it seem under this legislation to tell states what was or what's not acceptable. Look, that's not a big enough difference. Maybe we'll see some compromise come out of it, maybe.

Mike:            All right. It's topic number two.

Ellen:            There's a growing movement for parents to opt out of the standardized test linked to the common core standards. Is this a legitimate form of protest?

Mike:            Neal, this is driving me crazy. All right, I totally agree that parents have every right to opt out. That's called a home school. I think they can send their kids to private schools. I think that's totally legitimate, right? If you're going to send your kid to public school like I do and have the public, the tax payers pay the bills, here's the deal, I mean you say what the public wants is just wants to know how kids are performing, right? It just wants that transparency.

                        You might not want little Billy to have to spend a couple of days in marsh taking the PARCC test, okay? It's not just about little Billy. It's about saying, this is the deal. The public just wants transparency around results. You don't allow that to happen, you're not fulfilling your side of the bargain.

Neal:            I wish I had time to answer everything that you said. I'll start by saying of course these parents are tax payers. I don't know that they have less right to get what they want in the school than other tax payers. If you choose home school and you choose private school, you're essentially saying I'm going to give up that money. That's a big problem for people. The next thing is part, it's not just two days. I mean PARCC testing, most places are set up 10 days. Now, you may not be testing that whole time but that is a big imprint.

Mike:            It is. There are definitely stories that are being very destructive in that. That is a legitimate problem that needs to be fixed.

Neal:            Ultimately, I mean this comes down to a very philosophical question about what ... First of all, you say, when the public wants that, when I meet somebody who's name is the public and that person makes decisions on their own, then I'll accept that. When we know that the public is just consisting of millions of individuals who all want different things, the public wants something ceases to be particularly moving to me. The fact of the matter is, this is the country that's supposed to be based on individual liberty, individual desires.

                        Not forced uniformity so I think that the opt out move is a good one. This is how people say, I am not happy with the status quote.

Mike:            Look ... That they are ... I think it's fine to have protest, it's fine. If they want a petition in their legislatures to dump the PARCC test, I would disagree to that but that is the right. I do worry though that we are using children as pawns in this thing. Here's the problem Neal in a very practical way. You get a lot of kids opting out, right? Now, you're the principal of John Q. Elementary School and you start thinking to yourself, Billy is not going to do so well in this test.

                        Because he is way behind. Maybe I'll encourage Billy's parents to quote opt out, right? It would be ... It just raises the possibility for the gaming that we try to put an end to 15 years ago because we knew if you're going to hold schools accountable for test core results, they have a huge incentive to encourage certain kids to stay home untested.

Neal:            Yeah, unless I'm wrong though. I mean it's still the requirement is 95% of people can test it.

Mike:            Yeah, but what if the parents opt out?

Neal:            You've already got the impetus to say why don't you margin out 5% not show up on test day so this isn't something new and I think that it is much more important that we always recognize and support the understanding in this country that it is about individuals. It is not about government deciding you all do X, Y, or Z so that we can get the public whoever that is can get whatever outcome it is the "Public" meaning government desire.

Mike:            I took the bus yesterday and I really want to opt out on some of those bus stops on the way in. It's going so freaking slow. Okay, topic number three.

Neal:            That's why we have cars.

Mike:            Yeah, exactly. That's the ... That's exactly my point. You pay for the car yourself. You take public transportation, it's subsidized by the government. You have to suck it up a little bit.

Neal:            I know which is why public transportation is a whole other subject to bet. Bad effects ...

Mike:            This is why whenever Neal advise me to the Cato Institute to speak, I always take a bus just to rub it in. Go ahead, Ellen. Number three.

Ellen:            Indiana saw large increase in voucher use last year and its Department of Education just expanded the program. Does this mean that fears about the testing requirement in Indiana were overblown?

Mike:            A little back around here Neal, there's been some debate in the choice world about whether the fact that voucher schools in Indiana have to have their kids take the state test and report those results whether that is dampening the interest of private schools in participating in this program versus other states that do not have those testing requirements. At Fordham, we've been in favor of those testing and transparency requirements. The more Libertarians generally have not been so what do you think? We're seeing the Indiana program grow? Does that mean that some of these original concerns were overblown?

Neal:            Yeah, the first thing. I'm maybe wrong on this one. This I haven't to call on my recollection but I think there was a study that came out recently that suggested their schools ... I think it's New Orleans, I could have the wrong place that are choosing not to participate because of regulations. I may have the wrong place.

Mike:            In Indiana, I mean Freedman was looking at Indiana as well. Now, it's a little unclear which regulations were bothering them.

Neal:            Maybe, I'm thinking Freedman's report on Indiana. Regardless, that actually isn't my fear. My fear is not that schools will choose not to participate. Although, that would be a bad thing. My fear is that they will participate because they want the money and then we reduce how meaningful the choice is because we'd say what you choose has to be very similar to the other schools. Let's say we'll hold them accountable to particular test, state case.

                        In some cases nationally norm but regardless what the test is, you have now set up a situation where if you want again to take money that is also your tax dollars to your school of your choosing. It has to be more like the schools you don't want. I'm really worried that you were taxing some vouchers and you lose the power of choice because schools want the money. They need the money so they take the regulation.

Mike:            Let me ask you about this. I understand that argument and I certainly understand that you're putting the primary value and it's an important value on what the parent wants, make education more like other goods and services in our economy and make schools more responsive to parents. If there is any public funding at use and you say there is a public interest in a well-educated citizenry, how do you square that? Is there anything that you think the public has a right to demand from those kinds of schools?

Neal:            I think that generally there's no problem if you say look, you need to have an outside audit show that there's some financial malefficiency. As soon as you start to say though well, you must choose these particular test, you have greatly reduced choice and of course the choice is ...

Mike:            No, I understand that but what's the alternative? I mean like, are you willing to say that anything that calls itself a school and has the kids in school for 180 days a year, you have no ... You don't care at all what they do during that time. They could be ... It would be a super, super lefty progressive school where the kids come in and do basically whatever they want, you're fine with that?

Neal:            It depends on how you define that. I think people should be able to choose super, super lefty schools because I think you need to have lots of different ways to deliver education. Compete with each other and understanding kids are different people, have different values and things like that. I think the way that you get the accountability I mean ideally as people ultimately pay with their own money for the school they choose and they really have skin in the game but there are tax credit programs.

                        Ideally tax credit programs not just where you get a tax credit for your own choice but where donors give the scholarship granting organizations and they can choose among different scholarship granting organizations. In that case, one, you have a choice where to donate to begin with. Then two, if you don't like what donor one does. Say, they give to crazy lefty schools or whatever you want to call them, you choose another one. Then you'll have a lot of that accountability built in without the stultifying regulation that comes with vouchers.

                        One of those regulations just saying well, this is the test or here's your choice of test on which you'll be held accountable.

Mike:            All right. Very good. All right, that is all the time we've got for part in the Gadfly. I'll let you have the last word on that Neal. Now, it's time for everyone's favorite. Amber's Research Minute. Amber, welcome back to the show.

Amber:            Thank you Mike.

Mike:            What do you think of Neil Patrick Harris at the Oscars?

Amber:            I mean coming on your underwear? Come on.

Mike:            You don't like that? [Crosstalk 00:13:22] Of course it is. It's entertainment.

Amber:            That's just weird. I don't know and he has no body hair. It's just a little ... It made me uncomfortable. Did not make everybody uncomfortable? Maybe ...

Mike:            Amber is now coming from the perspective of ... Now that she lives in the south. You are maybe have more southern manners about those things.

Amber:            Right. We don't walk around publicly in our underwear.

Mike:            Amber has been a resident of Richmond for about five days now.

Amber:            Five days. I'm already loving it.

Mike:            Yes, good. The accent coming back?

Amber:            I mean it did never left, right?

Mike:            That's right. Okay, what you got for us?

Amber:            All right. We got a new NBR study, well you know all of these. Attempts to parse whether the low degree completion rate of US college students is attributable to the students themselves or their choice of college? Interesting question. Problem is you can't go random assignment on college selection.

Mike:            You could but it would not have a lot of support.

Amber:            It would not be supportive. They attempt to solve this problem by studying all of the SAT test takers in the state of Georgia since they have a minimum SAT requirement for admission to their 4 year public universities in that state. That serves as external or what be called exogenous variable that impacts initial college choice so analyst can compare the relatively low skilled students just above and below that required threshold. The students end up comprising about the 20th to the 20th percentile of the skill distribution.

                        These are fairly low skilled kids. On each side of the cut off, they're virtually identical on their key demographics and their academic skills so that's neat. The student level data for the graduating high school classes of 2004 to 2007, they use college board data, National Student Clearing House. They have demographic data, SAT scores, post secondary enrollment. Transfer and degree completion so that's a rich data.

                        They construct a measure of college quality based on what that college's students average scores were on the PSAT so you have a little college quality indicator in there. Four key findings. Number one, access to four year public colleges divert students largely away from tier colleges. We'd expect that. Even though some who have attended other four year colleges or no colleges at all, most of them were swayed away from the two years. Number two, I'm calling them bubble kids.

                        That's what we call them I used to go to high school. The estimate for the bubble kids access to the four year sector increases the probability of enrollment in a four year college by 77% points. That's a lot. Further they show that one quarter of low income bubble kids would go nowhere if they were denied access but the non-low income bubble kids denied access do tend to go elsewhere. Number three, enrollment in four year colleges instead of other alternatives substantially increases bachelor degree completion rates by over 30 percentage points.

                        Again, even more or so for low income students so about 50 percentage points. Starting at a two year college and we've heard this before, starting in a two year college actually can reduce the probability of earning a bachelor's degree. Fourth and finally, they find that enrolling in a college where in a substantially less academically skilled than their peers is actually beneficial at least in terms of degree completion. In other words we hear some of those about over matching and how that's harmful.

                        They found no events of that at least in terms of this degree completion. They end up saying, the fact that these really small test score differences make a huge difference in college choice and degree completion is somewhat concerning. They have to use these recommendations. They basically say, these kids at least in Georgia need to take the entrance exam and they need to keep their options open as much as they possibly can.

Mike:            It's interesting. It's almost similar to the peer effects findings that keep finding that if you are almost always better to be in class with higher achieving peers, right? The problem is that, that's for high achievers too and so that gets into these difficult moral dilemmas but yeah. You're better off going to places where you're going to get pulled up by the quality of your peers. That's very interesting. Does this at all get into questions around just preparedness and remediation? I mean these are for kids who are already to take credit bearing courses at these four year colleges?

Amber:            Right. Yeah, they don't ask about their remediation tangle.

Mike:            I mean, but the bubble kids they're saying you're still ... You're better off going on a four year than a two year.

Amber:            Right, exactly.

Mike:            Bubble does not mean maybe you're not quite ready for credit bearing courses.

Amber:            Right. It just means you're right above in that threshold. Above or below the threshold of what you have to get in SAT to get gain entry, access to a four year college. Yeah, I mean it's just by bubble I just mean you are right and you're right there what you need to have to get into college in Georgia.

Mike:            Yeah, what are you thinking?

Neal:            I mean I'm always hesitant to talk about any study until I've read the study. You see how they [Crosstalk 00:18:04]. This is my advice. A lot of these are interesting but you'd really want to see the methods that they use. How much can we apply this outside of the state that it was in. It also gets in the higher ed which unfortunately we spent time on that too. I think anything that we can see that suggest that we could increase completion rates would be good with the proviso that of course completion doesn't necessarily mean more learning or more useful learning.

Mike:            Yeah, but it does seem to indicate is that the president's free community college plan is big, big zero. I mean come on. The full point here is that these kids do better if they don't go to community college so why are we preferencing these things called community college?

Amber:            There's a section in the paper that discusses that but I chose not to summarize because yeah, that's a quagmire but that's right. That's one implication you can take away from the study.

Neal:            Yeah. I'm not going to defend that community college proposal. It is possible though that one of the things you want people to go to school for learning discreet skills, maybe that's still something community colleges do. That wasn't part of the proposal.

Mike:            Absolutely and I think community colleges can do a great job on things like post-secondary credentials, employment, these credentials that employers value that are not necessarily two year or four year degrees that the technical side of community college as in many cases do great work and are well aligned with the needs of employers. What I don't we should be doing is warehousing kids in these remedial classes that they're unlikely to ever get out of.

Neal:            I mean it's indisputable that you have a whole lot of people go to community college. It's like 80% say their ultimate goal can be four year program and it's like 10% that ends up doing it. There are clearly huge problems. I mean ultimately the problem though is if you look at all that the outcomes data at the work force requirements is we're frankly sending too many people to college as you well know Mike. Even if we get people to four year schools, there's so many big questions about what does that degree signify?

                        What do they do with it? How much debt do they incur for maybe degree that actually doesn't help them in the work force? There's a whole lot that needs to be discussed.

Amber:            It's not the four year folks fault, right? Because they make the pipeline so easy like I know in the government college you can go directly into MC.

Mike:            All you need is a high school diploma or a GED.

Amber:            Yeah, so I mean I think the four years have done as much as they can to get these two year kids to like come in the door but that wasn't ... That wasn't the problem.

Mike:            All right. That is all the time that we've got for this week. Until next week.

Neal:            I'm Neal McCluskey.

Mike:            I'm Mike Petrilli at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute signing off.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Moynihan Report. The great tootling racket now bursting your eardrums is the trumpet blast of memorials, think-pieces, and reflections commemorating the occasion.

The report, which kicked up a generations-long debate on race and culture far afield from its technocratic origins, primarily concerned itself with the vanishing of two-parent families in the black community. That phenomenon is also the subject of this counterintuitive Education Next study. Its authors, however, have no need to limit their focus on a particular racial category, since single parenthood is now commonplace across multiple demographics. The proportion of white children raised by a single parent today (22 percent) is precisely the same as for black children in 1965. Meanwhile, the proportion of black children living in the same circumstances has continued to rise astonishingly, to 55 percent.

Contriving to measure the educational influence of these developments, the study analyzes data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a broad-ranging sample of roughly 6,000 children who came of age between the late-1970s and the late-2000s. Their conclusion is both surprising and noteworthy: Measured against a number of other factors, including the age of the mother at the time of birth, number of siblings, and the mother’s educational attainment, the effects of having only one parent are by no means the most consequential.

Over the course of three decades, children who spent 1.2 years with a single parent between the ages of fourteen and sixteen received about a quarter of a year less schooling than their peers and were 5 percent less likely to graduate college by age twenty-four. That’s certainly less than ideal, but not exactly a blight of pathology. By comparison, increasing the mother’s level of education by one standard deviation could increase the child’s likelihood of college graduation by 14 percent—nearly triple the impact. What’s more, nearly the entire correlation between family structure and educational achievement is negated when adjusted for family income.

In other words, living in a one-parent family isn’t so much the problem as the economic hardship that often suffuses that experience. (It’s hard to earn a middle class living when you have to play both breadwinner and caretaker all by yourself.) While that sounds like good news, the authors warn that things may be changing; since the time of the Moynihan Report, the educational gap between kids in one- and two-parent families has grown somewhat. That’s a shift that bears careful observation. In the meantime, the rest of us can find a government study of newer vintage to obsess over.

SOURCE: Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest, Greg J. Duncan, and Ariel Kalil, “One-Parent Students Leave School Earlier,” Education Next Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring 2015).

There is no shortage of theories to explain how learning works and how teachers, as purveyors of knowledge, should disseminate that knowledge to students (though there tends to be a shortage of supporting evidence for any of them). In The Teaching Brain, doctoral candidate and former New York City schoolteacher Vanessa Rodriguez proposes yet another: Forget learning styles and multiple intelligences; teaching is all about “awarenesses”—of learners as individuals, of teaching practices, contexts, and interactions, and of one’s “self as a teacher.” 

She casts off older theories as antiquated, instinctive, and too student-centered, arguing that they’ve hindered educational innovation and stifled educators’ professional development. How students learn ought not be our only concern, she says. Instead, the book introduces “system-centered teaching,” which aims to infuse instruction with awareness of both how students’ brains work when they learn (“the learning brain”) and also how teachers’ brains work when they teach (the so-called “teaching brain”).

Because this is somewhat uncharted territory, a large portion of the book purports to examine the minds of expert educators. Rodriguez concludes that the brains of teachers differ considerably, which means that one-size-fits-all approaches to instruction are bound to fail. What may work for one teacher might not work for another. Instead, every educator has a unique optimal style of instruction, and each must work hard to unveil it.

Rodriguez infuses this section with an awful lot of new-age jargon, like “synergy” and “shared energy.” To find his or her best-fit teaching brain, a teacher needs to be mindful of her instruction methods, how well her students are connecting with the material, and how the former affects the latter; then she ought to experiment with various teaching styles and see what produces the best results.

Despite a concluding chapter entitled “Next Steps for Education Reform,” there are few concrete suggestions for how schools should act on this, aside from designing new frameworks for teacher evaluation and student assessment that would match Rodriguez’s more flexible approach. After so many pages devoted to finding connections between teachers and students, The Teaching Brain left me feeling rather cut off.

SOURCE: Vanessa Rodriguez and Michelle Fitzpatrick, The Teaching Brain: An Evolutionary Trait at the Heart of Education (New York, NY: The New Press, 2015).

Florida—home to Disney World, sunny skies, and bizarre crimes—is probably best known for its sizable elderly population. Yet a new report from the state’s Foundation for Excellence in Education warns that we are all Florida, or will be soon enough. Dr. Matthew Ladner, who pens the report, predicts that by 2030, the demographics in most of the country will mirror those in today’s geriatric Sunshine State. And that doesn’t bode well for our nation’s fiscal health.

Seventy-six million Baby Boomers will soon leave the workforce. Growing along with this cohort—albeit at a lesser rate—is the school-aged population. As a result, the total percentage of young and old Americans dependent on government-financed education, healthcare, and Social Security will jump from 59 percent in 2010 to 76 percent in 2030.

Fortunately, just as readers might consider panicked calls to parents begging them to reconsider retirement, the report offers some hope. The future workers of America are in school at this very moment. Providing them with an excellent education is the best step towards building a large base of wage-earning, tax-paying citizens. According to Ladner, one of the most cost-effective ways to do this is to expand school choice. Charter and private school programs would provide the necessary additional space for the growing school-age population while demanding fewer district dollars and producing higher-achieving students than their traditional public school counterparts.

More importantly, this could also improve achievement. Despite having one of the most expensive public school systems in the world, 64 percent of America’s current high schoolers can’t read proficiently. The autonomy of non-traditional schools allows for greater innovation and efficiency, Ladner insists, which are both necessary to prepare future working Americans for success in a tough, increasingly global job market. Though there are now over six thousand charter schools and thirty-three thousand private schools nationwide, the report warns that this is not enough. The year 2030 will be upon us sooner than we think. In order to rapidly improve the state of education, we must grow schools of choice much more aggressively. And we need to start now.

SOURCE: Dr. Matthew Ladner, “Turn and Face the Strain: Age Demographic Change and the Near Future of American Education,” Foundation for Excellence in Education (January 2015).