Second-Generation Americans: A Portrait of the Adult Children of Immigrants
The American dream is alive and well
The American dream is alive and well
In 2006, we wrote, “The policy debates over [immigration] in the halls of Congress will go on, but the hard task of blending millions of immigrants (legal or not) into American society marches on daily, at least in the nation’s schools.” While that hard task continues, this Pew study on second-generation Americans offers some assurance that the work is not for naught. It tracks census data from the 20 million second-generation Americas above the age of twenty-five—and supplements them with Pew’s own survey data—to compare the educational and economic status of these second-gen Americans to both their parents’ generation and the broader populace. Bottom line: Children of immigrants are climbing the socioeconomic ladder. Second-generation adults fare better than those in the first generation in median household income (by $22,000), college degrees (by 7 percentage points), and more. They’re also 16 percentage points likelier to have finished high school. And most of these favorable comparisons hold within racial subgroups. This may be partly because fully three quarters of both Hispanic second-gen’ers and Asian second gen’ers (groups that comprise three-quarters of this population) believe that “most people can get ahead if they work hard.” By contrast, only 58 percent of the general American public feels the same way. That said, Pew analysts also point to some worrisome trends. Among them, second-generation Hispanics were considerably worse off than their Asian counterparts on such gauges as economic achievement and educational attainment. Our 2006 assertion still rings true.
SOURCE: Pew Research Center, Second-Generation Americans: A Portrait of the Adult Children of Immigrants (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, February 2013).
As state legislatures pass new charter school laws and tinker with the old, this National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) rating of such laws increases in worth. Now in its fourth iteration, the report ranks all relevant states’ charter laws based on the NAPCS’s own twenty-part model—and explains that charter laws are generally improving across the land: By basing its statute on the NAPCS model, Washington State’s newly minted law now ranks third. (Minnesota and Maine top the Evergreen State, taking spots one and two, respectively.) Louisiana, which enacted sweeping charter reform this year, bumped from thirteenth to sixth on the state rankings. Further, three states (HI, ID, and MO) lifted caps on charter school growth, three (CT, HI, and UT) improved their support for charter funding and facilities, and ten strengthened their authorizing environments. That said, more progress is needed: Only Maine and Louisiana received the top rating (four of four) for components of their charter-authorizing legislation—Maine for requiring performance-based charter contracts and Louisiana for requiring a transparent application, review, and decision-making process. Yet quality authorizing is pivotal to creating and running successful charter schools (and shutting those that don’t measure up).
SOURCE: Todd Ziebarth and Louann B. Palmer, Measuring Up to the Model: A Ranking of State Charter School Laws, (Washington, D.C.: National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, January 2013).
Three years ago, Patrick Wolf and colleagues published a powerful defense of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP): In an IES-funded, gold-standard study, they found that merely offering a student access to a voucher through OSP increased that student’s graduation rate by 12 percentage points. Those who actually used a voucher saw their grad rates jump by 21 percentage points. This article resurrects that research—but with a twist. The authors reanalyze the data against the work that several economists have done to estimate the value of a high school diploma (based on lifetime earnings and tax payments, lifespan and health, and crime rate). Using these metrics, Wolf and co-author Mike McShane estimate the societal return on investment for the increased graduation rate afforded to the District of Columbia by the OSP. (Remember that the program is federally funded; DCPS was held financially harmless when students exited for private schools, meaning that the program’s price tag—$70 million—represented a real additional cost to all U.S. taxpayers, not just those in the District.) Analyses show that the OSP marked a net societal value of about $183 million over the lifetime of the graduates, or $2.62 in benefit for every dollar spent (though Wolf and McShane admit to working with imperfect metrics; depending on how they sliced the data, the benefit ranged from 36 cents to $7.82). Just further proof that D.C.’s voucher program is well worth it.
SOURCE: Patrick J. Wolf and Michael McShane, “Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze? A Benefit/Cost Analysis of the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program” (Association of Education Finance and Policy Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, 2013).
Awash in logical fallacies and pro-labor ideology, this position paper from the Chicago Teacher Union takes a swing at “corporate reform groups” (hat tip to Advance Illinois and Stand for Children for making that list!) and the accountability reforms that they support. And it whiffs. Time and again. The paper is premised on the notion that “as much as 90% of variation in student growth is explained by factors outside the control of teachers” and, therefore, evaluating educators based on student growth is roundly unfair. Yet myriad studies have shown that teachers are the number one in-school factor for student success. And gobs of educators—many of them unionized—have shown that, in fact, demography is not destiny. (The CTU authors also ignore the latest value-added techniques that make it possible to identify the best teachers regardless of student background.) The eight pages of this skimpy screed are rife with diluted or twisted truths that downplay the importance of a high-performing teacher in every classroom (and do little to prove that standardized testing would harm any but the lowest performing teachers—which harm might well turn into great good for their oppressed pupils). Still, there is one line in the brief with which the Gadfly can agree: “Research shows students who are tasked with intellectually demanding work that promotes disciplined inquiry…score higher on standardized tests.” Good thing that the accountability movement doesn’t preclude (and, indeed, encourages) just such quality teaching.
SOURCE: Chicago Teachers Union, “Debunking the Myths of Standardized Testing: A CTU Position Paper,” Chicago Teachers Union (February 2013).
Mike and Adam discuss school-choice regulations with John Kirtley of Step Up for Students. Amber talks up the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.
“Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze? A Benefit/Cost Analysis of the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program” by Patrick J. Wolf and Michael McShane (Association of Education Finance and Policy Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, 2013).
Most of Obama's education-policy wishlist can't be done successfully in Washington—but can be done in a well-led state. Photo from Policymic |
Maybe Barack Obama should follow the Pope’s example and resign—but then he should run for governor, presumably in Illinois (where he would definitely be an improvement on the last dozen or so)
Because, at least when it comes to education policy, just about everything he wants the federal government to do involves things that can’t be done successfully from Washington but that well-led states can and should do: raise academic standards, evaluate teachers, give kids choices, and more.
His latest passion in this realm is “quality early childhood education for all.” And as post–State of the Union specifics seep from the White House, we see more clearly what he has in mind: a multi-pronged endeavor, including home visits by nurses, programs for poor kids from birth to age three (“Early Head Start”), more Head Start (mostly for three-year-olds), lots more state-sponsored preschool for four-year-olds (subsidized up to twice the poverty line), and full-day Kindergarten for all.
All are plausible undertakings by states. Only one, however, could be satisfactorily carried out by Uncle Sam: a thorough and much-needed makeover of the five-decade-old Head Start program. But that isn’t likely to happen. The retrograde Head Start lobby is too strong, and the program’s iconic status means it’s easy to resist fundamental changes in it.
Yet Head Start is by far the largest extant preschool program in the land—serving about a million kids, well targeted at low-income families, and costing about $10,000 per child. The problem is that every program evaluation over many years has reached the same sorry conclusion: Head Start is fine and dandy as a provider of child care, social services, decent food, and some dental and health care, but it’s a total washout in terms of school readiness. Whatever limited cognitive gains its participants show after their year in the program vanish soon after (or even before) they enter school.
Yes, we can blame elementary schools for failing to capture those gains, but as Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution points out, the main culprit is Head Start itself, which doesn’t try very hard for cognitive gains and which has defenders who stoutly resist even viewing it as an education program. (That’s why it’s housed in the Department of Health and Human Services.)
To its credit, the Obama Administration has pushed to reform Head Start (as did several prior presidents), but with very limited success. The fact is that big federal programs, once entrenched, are exceptionally hard to change. Head Start should be turned over to the states—where, with governors like Barack Obama, it might be merged into states’ own efforts to provide preschooling to those who need it.
But states face mighty challenges of their own on this front. Besides cost, two are paramount.
First, the early-childhood-education crowd cannot agree on what “quality” means in preschool education. What it should mean is evidence of school readiness and a preschool operator’s success in getting kids to meet curricular standards that mesh with the state’s Kindergarten standards. What “quality” usually ends up being defined as, however—and the White House documents half-slip into this trap—is a bunch of “inputs” related to class size, room size, teacher credentials and such.
Second, the politically appealing impulse to promise “universal” preschool education is in direct conflict with who actually needs it and isn’t getting it today. The overwhelming majority of American four-year-olds already participate in some form of preschool—and more than 40 percent enjoy the publicly financed kind. Universalizing access to public preschool, besides being very expensive for taxpayers, amounts to a huge windfall for public schools (and their teacher unions), as well as for middle class families and communities that have already found ways of obtaining it for their kids. And it’s invariably a low-intensity program that doesn’t deliver the degree of help and duration that might put the neediest youngsters onto a more level education playing field. (Essentially all the evidence of lasting gains—and long-term savings—from preschool comes from a few very pricey and intensive boutique-style programs targeted on small numbers of exceptionally disadvantaged children.)
These are tough nuts for states to crack, but the federal government can resolve neither. In a time of tight budgets and staggering debt, Uncle Sam can’t do much on the cost front, either.
Well-led states can make some headway. Oklahoma (mentioned by the president) hasn’t done badly. Neither has Florida, despite its risky embrace of “universalism”. Washington can surely jawbone—Arne Duncan is far better at this than Kathleen Sebelius—and may deploy some modest incentive dollars for states to match. But if Mr. Obama really wants to make a difference on the preschool front, he should first clean up the Head Start mess, then go back to Illinois and straighten out his own state’s policies and programs.
A version of this article also appeared on The Corner.
Standardized testing and engaging pedagogy are not mutually exclusive. Photo by woodleywonderworks |
Across the United States and beyond, the anti-testing movement seems to be reaching its crescendo. Yet the case against testing is remarkably weak, resting on a foundation of four fundamental misunderstandings of the role that assessments play in our schools.
Perhaps the most common anti-testing refrain is that we should get out of the way and just “let teachers teach.” The idea is that teachers know best and that standardized testing—or any kind of testing, really, other than the teacher-built kind—is a distracting nuisance that saps valuable instructional time, deflects instructors from what’s most essential, and yields very little useful information about student learning.
What you don’t often hear is how research has consistently demonstrated that, absent independent checks, many teachers hold low-income and minority students to different standards than their affluent, white peers. This bias is rarely intentional, but it has been found time and time again.
Standardized tests not only help us unearth these biases but also put the spotlight on achievement gaps that need to be closed, students who need extra help, schools that are struggling, and on. And by doing so, they drive critical conversations about the curriculum, pedagogy, and state and district policies that we need to catch kids up and get them back on the path to success.
As anyone who went through public schools before 1990 can attest, the days of ditto-driven instruction are not unique to the testing era. Too many testing foes hearken back to the pre-accountability days, imagining a Lake Wobegone era where all teachers were above average and all instruction was great. But the truth is that “drill-and-kill” was as popular in the era of mimeograph machines as today; it’s a function of low teacher capacity, failed leadership, or excessive within-class achievement variability, not overzealous accountability.
What’s more, plenty of research suggests that, if teachers really want to improve student performance on standardized tests, they would be wise to embrace engaging pedagogy and intellectually challenging content rather than test prep. All else being equal, the students who typically fare better on state tests are those whose teachers focus not on empty test-taking tricks but rather on content-rich and intellectually engaging curriculum. Ironically, a position paper focused on “debunking” standardized tests that was released by the Chicago Teachers Union this week showed that students whose teachers focused more on test prep than on content scored lower on the ACT test than did their peers. These findings echo the results of a 2001 study from the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research. Regardless of socioeconomic background, “students who received assignments requiring more challenging intellectual work” achieved greater gains on standardized tests.
In education, standardized tests have come to be seen only for what they can’t do, not for what they can. A familiar complaint is that they fail to measure “what really matters” in education—the kind of critical thinking that students need to succeed and the social and emotional skills that great teachers reinforce every day. Of course, no test can measure everything that’s worth teaching and learning. But to suggest that tests should be abandoned because they are necessarily limited is shortsighted. There is real content that students need to master; there are questions that have right and wrong answers; and there are many skills that can be evaluated using well-crafted standardized tests, including even the multiple-choice kind. To be sure, teaching is a craft, which means, like all professions, it requires both art and science; the science of teaching benefits greatly from the information collected through well-crafted tests.
Another all-too-common refrain from the anti-testers is perhaps the most sweeping: the suggestion that “standardization”—i.e., the process of setting standards; developing large-scale, aligned assessments; and holding schools and districts accountable to them—is a fool’s errand.
Many point to the now-famous Finnish success story as “evidence” that the best education systems in the world are those that give teachers broad autonomy, don’t use standardized tests, and have devolved accountability to the local level. In fact, Pasi Sahlberg, author of Finnish Lessons, has argued,
But that telling of the Finnish story skips some of the most relevant facts. Yes, Finnish schools and teachers today enjoy broad autonomy. But that autonomy came after nearly three decades of tight central control and standardization. In Finland, that standardization took the form of a centrally developed, tightly scripted, mandatory national curriculum that was forced on all schools (including private schools that were part of the nation’s “comprehensive school reform”). As the national curriculum was rolled out, a state inspectorate worked to ensure effective and systematic implementation. And over the course of several decades, the entire teacher workforce was retrained so that they had the content expertise needed before the state began slowing loosening its control a little more than twenty years ago.
Our own history suggests that it is exactly the states that have set rigorous standards connected to strong accountability regimes—most notably, Massachusetts—that have seen the greatest gains for all students, not just our most disadvantaged. Tests deserve not to be derided but celebrated for the crucial role they are playing in our schools. They are not the only answer to what ails American education, but it’s hard to think of a meaningful reform effort that doesn’t require the effective measurement of student achievement that tests make possible.
Kathleen Porter-Magee is the senior director of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s High Quality Standards program and a Bernard Lee Schwartz policy fellow. She can be found on Twitter @kportermagee.
Jennifer Borgioli is a former special-education teacher perpetually working towards her PhD in special education. She works for Learner Center Initiatives and supports schools around assessment design and data analysis. She can be found on Twitter @DataDiva.
We laughed. We cried. We wondered how in the world his proposals wouldn’t increase our deficit “by a single dime.” President Obama’s fifth State of the Union delivered an aggressive call to expand pre-Kindergarten opportunities to all four-year-olds (the overall cost of which remains decidedly murky), to create a Race to the Top offshoot focused on pressing high schools to better prepare students for high-tech jobs, and to hold colleges accountable for keeping tuitions affordable—a classic liberal wish list to be funded via voodoo economics and shell-game fiscal policies.
Maryland told nine of its counties—including smug Montgomery, whose teacher-evaluation proposal the state rejected earlier this month—that the Maryland School Assessment must comprise at least 20 percent of their teacher- and principal-evaluation models. “My team and I are fully prepared to make visits to your district to provide clarification and to assist you in reaching approved status,” Dave Volrath of the state education department offered helpfully to Montgomery County. Yeah. We’re sure it’s all just a big misunderstanding.
Since 2007, hundreds of California school districts and community colleges have used $7 billion in “capital-appreciation” bonds to finance school-construction projects. The catch? Capital-appreciation bonds can balloon to more than ten times the amount borrowed over as much as forty years. For scale, compare this to a typical thirty-year home mortgage, which will wind up costing two to three times the amount borrowed. We are speechless. We thought pensions were the most vivid example of states and districts kicking the education-financing challenge down the interstate. We were wrong. And California is not alone.
Michigan, Florida, Tennessee, and Georgia—three states that recently revamped their teacher-evaluation systems and one that’s running a pilot program—continue to churn out suspiciously high percentages of “effective-or-better” teachers. Stakeholders in Michigan, a state that saw 98 percent of teachers judged effective or better, postulated that the new policies are bumping up against “cultural challenges” (particularly with regards to the observation components). Whatever the cause, this is clearly a case where a change in policy did not beget a change in practice—and we should take note. What good are new teacher-evaluation systems that yield the same old results?
Many proponents of private school choice take for granted that schools won't participate if government asks too much of them, especially if it demands that they be publicly accountable for student achievement. Were such school refusals to be widespread, the programs themselves could not serve many kids. But is this assumption justified?
A new Fordham Institute study provides empirical answers. Do regulations and accountability requirements deter private schools from participating in choice programs? How important are such requirements compared to other factors, such as voucher amounts? Are certain types of regulations stronger deterrents than others? Do certain types schools shy away from regulation more than others?
These are just some of the questions that David Stuit, author of the Fordham study, will discuss with a panel featuring John Kirtley of Step Up for Students (Florida), Larry Keough of the Catholic Conference of Ohio, and Paul Miller of the National Association of Independent Schools.
Many proponents of private school choice take for granted that schools won't participate if government asks too much of them, especially if it demands that they be publicly accountable for student achievement. Were such school refusals to be widespread, the programs themselves could not serve many kids. But is this assumption justified?
A new Fordham Institute study provides empirical answers. Do regulations and accountability requirements deter private schools from participating in choice programs? How important are such requirements compared to other factors, such as voucher amounts? Are certain types of regulations stronger deterrents than others? Do certain types schools shy away from regulation more than others?
These are just some of the questions that David Stuit, author of the Fordham study, will discuss with a panel featuring John Kirtley of Step Up for Students (Florida), Larry Keough of the Catholic Conference of Ohio, and Paul Miller of the National Association of Independent Schools.
In 2006, we wrote, “The policy debates over [immigration] in the halls of Congress will go on, but the hard task of blending millions of immigrants (legal or not) into American society marches on daily, at least in the nation’s schools.” While that hard task continues, this Pew study on second-generation Americans offers some assurance that the work is not for naught. It tracks census data from the 20 million second-generation Americas above the age of twenty-five—and supplements them with Pew’s own survey data—to compare the educational and economic status of these second-gen Americans to both their parents’ generation and the broader populace. Bottom line: Children of immigrants are climbing the socioeconomic ladder. Second-generation adults fare better than those in the first generation in median household income (by $22,000), college degrees (by 7 percentage points), and more. They’re also 16 percentage points likelier to have finished high school. And most of these favorable comparisons hold within racial subgroups. This may be partly because fully three quarters of both Hispanic second-gen’ers and Asian second gen’ers (groups that comprise three-quarters of this population) believe that “most people can get ahead if they work hard.” By contrast, only 58 percent of the general American public feels the same way. That said, Pew analysts also point to some worrisome trends. Among them, second-generation Hispanics were considerably worse off than their Asian counterparts on such gauges as economic achievement and educational attainment. Our 2006 assertion still rings true.
SOURCE: Pew Research Center, Second-Generation Americans: A Portrait of the Adult Children of Immigrants (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, February 2013).
As state legislatures pass new charter school laws and tinker with the old, this National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) rating of such laws increases in worth. Now in its fourth iteration, the report ranks all relevant states’ charter laws based on the NAPCS’s own twenty-part model—and explains that charter laws are generally improving across the land: By basing its statute on the NAPCS model, Washington State’s newly minted law now ranks third. (Minnesota and Maine top the Evergreen State, taking spots one and two, respectively.) Louisiana, which enacted sweeping charter reform this year, bumped from thirteenth to sixth on the state rankings. Further, three states (HI, ID, and MO) lifted caps on charter school growth, three (CT, HI, and UT) improved their support for charter funding and facilities, and ten strengthened their authorizing environments. That said, more progress is needed: Only Maine and Louisiana received the top rating (four of four) for components of their charter-authorizing legislation—Maine for requiring performance-based charter contracts and Louisiana for requiring a transparent application, review, and decision-making process. Yet quality authorizing is pivotal to creating and running successful charter schools (and shutting those that don’t measure up).
SOURCE: Todd Ziebarth and Louann B. Palmer, Measuring Up to the Model: A Ranking of State Charter School Laws, (Washington, D.C.: National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, January 2013).
Three years ago, Patrick Wolf and colleagues published a powerful defense of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP): In an IES-funded, gold-standard study, they found that merely offering a student access to a voucher through OSP increased that student’s graduation rate by 12 percentage points. Those who actually used a voucher saw their grad rates jump by 21 percentage points. This article resurrects that research—but with a twist. The authors reanalyze the data against the work that several economists have done to estimate the value of a high school diploma (based on lifetime earnings and tax payments, lifespan and health, and crime rate). Using these metrics, Wolf and co-author Mike McShane estimate the societal return on investment for the increased graduation rate afforded to the District of Columbia by the OSP. (Remember that the program is federally funded; DCPS was held financially harmless when students exited for private schools, meaning that the program’s price tag—$70 million—represented a real additional cost to all U.S. taxpayers, not just those in the District.) Analyses show that the OSP marked a net societal value of about $183 million over the lifetime of the graduates, or $2.62 in benefit for every dollar spent (though Wolf and McShane admit to working with imperfect metrics; depending on how they sliced the data, the benefit ranged from 36 cents to $7.82). Just further proof that D.C.’s voucher program is well worth it.
SOURCE: Patrick J. Wolf and Michael McShane, “Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze? A Benefit/Cost Analysis of the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program” (Association of Education Finance and Policy Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, 2013).
Awash in logical fallacies and pro-labor ideology, this position paper from the Chicago Teacher Union takes a swing at “corporate reform groups” (hat tip to Advance Illinois and Stand for Children for making that list!) and the accountability reforms that they support. And it whiffs. Time and again. The paper is premised on the notion that “as much as 90% of variation in student growth is explained by factors outside the control of teachers” and, therefore, evaluating educators based on student growth is roundly unfair. Yet myriad studies have shown that teachers are the number one in-school factor for student success. And gobs of educators—many of them unionized—have shown that, in fact, demography is not destiny. (The CTU authors also ignore the latest value-added techniques that make it possible to identify the best teachers regardless of student background.) The eight pages of this skimpy screed are rife with diluted or twisted truths that downplay the importance of a high-performing teacher in every classroom (and do little to prove that standardized testing would harm any but the lowest performing teachers—which harm might well turn into great good for their oppressed pupils). Still, there is one line in the brief with which the Gadfly can agree: “Research shows students who are tasked with intellectually demanding work that promotes disciplined inquiry…score higher on standardized tests.” Good thing that the accountability movement doesn’t preclude (and, indeed, encourages) just such quality teaching.
SOURCE: Chicago Teachers Union, “Debunking the Myths of Standardized Testing: A CTU Position Paper,” Chicago Teachers Union (February 2013).