The Education Gadfly Weekly

Richard Fry, The Pew Hispanic Center
September 5, 2002

Based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, this report finds that large numbers of Latino high school graduates-10 percent, as compared to 7 percent of the total population of high school graduates-are enrolled in college-level courses, but Latino students are more likely than any other group to enroll in two-year programs or as part-time students. A greater proportion of Latino high school graduates enroll in post-secondary education after the age of 24, and fewer Latinos pursue graduate and professional degrees. Author Richard Fry is concerned about the number of Hispanics who pursue educational paths associated with lower chances of earning a bachelor's degree, but when he turns to hypothesizing about why this is the case, the ground on which he rests grows shakier. For example, Fry explains the high level of enrollment by Hispanics in community colleges by stating that "an emphasis on close family ties is one characteristic shared by most Latinos...and among Latino immigrants this often translates into an expectation that children will live with their parents until they marry" so they will not choose to enroll in institutions where they might need to reside on campus. The author's assumption here may or may not be true, but if he wishes to boost the number of Hispanic college graduates, he will need more data, and fewer assumptions, about what causes these low graduation rates. "Latinos in Higher Education: Many Enroll, Too Few Graduate," by Richard Fry, September 5, 2002, http://www.pewhispanic.org/site/docs/pdf/latinosinhighereducation-sept5-02.pdf.

Myron Lieberman, Cato Institute
August 28, 2002

The Cato Institute recently issued this 14-page paper by veteran crusader Myron Lieberman, arguing that public-school teachers themselves are ill-served by the monopoly that results from having just two teacher unions (one in most places) and that they'd be better off with greater competition among providers of "representation." "Such reform would open up competition to non-membership organizations, solo entrepreneurs, negotiators, lawyers, and college bargaining companies. Teachers would retain the right to go without an exclusive representative, and each representation option would compete against all the others." An interesting idea, cogently presented in this paper, which you can find at http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-450es.html.

Linda Darling-Hammond, Education Policy Analysis Archives
September 6, 2002

In this long article, also found in the dubious on-line holdings of the Phoenix-based Education Policy Analysis Archives, Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond responds to the October 2001 report on teacher certification by the Abell Foundation ("Teacher Certification Reconsidered: Stumbling for Quality," by Kate Walsh, Abell Foundation, 2001, http://www.abell.org/TeacherCertReconsidered.pdf) and to Secretary Paige's use of that report in his own recent "Annual Report on Teacher Quality." ("Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge: The Secretary's Annual Report on Teacher Quality," by Rod Paige, US Department of Education, June 2002, http://www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/News/teacherprep/AnnualReport.pdf) This is not Professor Darling-Hammond's first response, but she will henceforth claim that it's a "peer-reviewed" study. It concludes just what you would expect, that Abell was wrong in a hundred ways and that the Secretary of Education was wrong to rely on Abell. So be it. That debate will continue. But the essay also contains this fascinating admission by Darling-Hammond: "It is true that certification is a relatively crude measure of teachers' knowledge and skills, since the standards for subject matter and teaching knowledge embedded in certification have varied across states and over time, are differently measured, and are differently enforced from place to place." Well said. Nobody ever contended that certification matters not at all. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. The big question is whether going through the things one goes through to get certified should be the only possible pathway into public school teaching, or whether schools should be free to choose between candidates who did those things and those who arrived via other routes. The sensible observer might say let's quit trying to fine-tune this "crude" instrument for controlling entry and shift instead to actual measures, such as testable teacher knowledge and hard evidence of teachers' classroom effectiveness. But of course that's not where Professor Darling-Hammond goes. Instead, she repairs to her usual destination, a call "to improve preparation opportunities and certification standards." Have a look for yourself at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n36/.

Ildiko Laczko-Kerr and David C. Berliner, Education Policy Analysis Archives
September 6, 2002

The title and subtitle will give you a sense of the objectivity of the so-called on-line "peer-reviewed scholarly journal" named Education Policy Analysis Archives, edited by Gene V. Glass. Like most such journals in education, it obviously selects peers who agree with its editors' policy biases and those of the authors whom they like and wish to publish. In this case, the authors are Ildiko Laczko-Kerr, who currently works at the Arizona Department of Education, having recently completed a doctorate at-where else?-Arizona State University, where her co-author, David C. Berliner, is a bigfoot in the College of Education and where this "journal" is "published." (The article is derived from Dr. Laczko-Kerr's dissertation, entitled "Teacher Certification Does Matter.") The early pages contain a thoughtful review of some previous research on the interaction of subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical prowess in influencing the effectiveness of public-school teachers. Not too surprisingly, they conclude that teachers tend to be more effective when they know something about what they're teaching, and that knowledge becomes more consequential as grade levels rise. The new "research," however, leaves much to be desired. The authors picked five Arizona school districts with teacher shortages, mostly low income communities, then selected "matched pairs" of certified and "under-certified" teachers who began work in their public schools in 1998 or 1999. (Of the "under-certified" group, two-thirds held "emergency" certificates which, it is commonly realized, have nothing to do with programs like "Teach for America" but simply getting a "warm body" in front of the class. Of the certified teachers in this study, incidentally, half were products of Arizona State.) The authors compare the test scores of the students of the certified teachers with those of the "under-certified" teachers and find that the students of the certified teachers have higher scores. Since there are no controls in the study for the prior test scores of the students, the researchers are on extremely shaky ground in drawing conclusions about the "value added" by the two groups of teachers. It is entirely possible that "under-certified" teachers were assigned to classrooms with students whose prior level of achievement was below that of other students. The authors attempted to control for differences across classrooms by matching teachers in similar schools or districts, but they are unable to match classrooms on the most important variable: prior student achievement. The authors themselves admit that some of the matches they made across districts were flawed. If the authors had used longitudinal student achievement data for their study, they would have been able to control for prior student achievement and to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the different groups of teachers. If you want to evaluate this study for yourself, you can find it on-line at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n37/.

Danny Cohen-Zada and Moshe Justman, National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
July 2002

Economists Danny Cohen-Zada and Moshe Justman of Ben-Gurion University wrote this "occasional paper" for the series produced by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia. It turns out to be an extremely interesting if quite technical "political economy model of education finance and school choice in which parents who differ in the advantage they attribute to religious education choose from among public, private nonsectarian and religious schools." The analysis, says the authors, "[S]upports the implicit conclusion of the [U.S. Supreme] Court, that participation of religious schools in the Cleveland voucher program was essential for achieving its goal of helping low-income parents in a failing school district." That is partly because the voucher amount was too low to enable low-income parents to exercise choice in any way other than by enrolling their kids in parochial schools. But it also bespeaks a preference among many parents for a religious education for their children. "Larger vouchers would have reduced the share of religious schools in the [Cleveland] program, though they would still have attracted a majority of students." Strikingly: "If unrestricted voucher funding of religious education should be allowed, our analysis suggests that, holding the tax rate fixed, a majority coalition of religious and high-income households would prefer receiving an unrestricted voucher and having public education discontinued, to a public education system without vouchers." See for yourself at http://ncspe.org/keepout/papers/00055/981_OP53.pdf.

In Chattanooga, Tennessee, the mayor has developed a performance-pay plan whereby teachers and principals in struggling schools will earn big bonuses if their students make significant progress on state tests. Inspired by the plan, twelve top teachers have made the move to at-risk schools in the city. For details see "More teachers graded for their pay," CNN.com, September 9, 2002.

Last year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) administered its latest U.S. history assessment to approximately 29,000 students in grades 4, 8, and 12 in schools across the country. NAEP's web site now offers the public the opportunity to test their knowledge of American history and see how their performance stacks up against students in the nationwide sample. Visitors to the web site can answer actual multiple choice questions from the 2001 NAEP, can see how many students answered the same questions correctly, and can then read about the knowledge that NAEP's architects intended for those questions to test. Check it out at http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/kidsquiz/index.asp?flash=false.

Reporter Larry Slonaker took a one year leave of absence from The Mercury News to fulfill a lifelong dream of teaching in a California public school (using an emergency teaching credential). Surprised as much by his own deficiencies as by his students' woeful lack of skills, he deems his stint as a seventh grade language arts teacher "surprising, irritating, elevating, frustrating," but most of all, hard. See "My year as a teacher," by Larry Slonaker, The Mercury News, August 25, 2002.

A long story in The Christian Science Monitor looks at where Rod Paige came from to try to understand how he became so single-minded about leaving no child behind. Reporter Amanda Paulson interviewed neighbors, family members and former colleagues for this colorful portrait of the Secretary of Education. "True believer," by Amanda Paulson, The Christian Science Monitor, September 10, 2002.

Special education is receiving a lot of attention these days. The federal program to provide special accommodations and services to students with disabilities has been critiqued by a Presidential Commission, by multiple authors of a Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Progressive Policy Institute volume, and by both Democratic and Republican members of Congress. Although there is some overlap in opinions about how IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) should be reformed, Democrats (and a certain Independent Senator) tend to argue that the system is merely under-funded, Republicans that it fails to deliver clear results, and less partisan academics that it is over-regulated and obsessed with proceduralism.

Into the fray recently jumped Congressman Fortney "Pete" Stark (D-CA) with HR 5001, the "Realizing the Spirit of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act." His basic proposal is to allow states to earn their way to full funding of the federal share of special education by narrowing various yawning outcome gaps between their regular and special-needs student populations.

In the U.S. today, special education primarily takes the form of an under-funded federal mandate. Federal laws bestow upon disabled students certain rights regarding their education. These include the right to a diagnosis by a trained professional to determine if the child suffers from a disabling condition that affects learning. Students diagnosed with a disability are then guaranteed a "free and appropriate public education" at taxpayer expense. Congress once "pledged" to pay 40% of the additional cost of educating students with disabilities. However, that promise is not an entitlement, and federal appropriators have never come close to reimbursing states and localities for 40% of the actual difference between special education and regular education expenses. The Fiscal-Year 2002 federal appropriation for special education will cover only an estimated 16.5% of the $50 billion in additional costs for special education.

A second problem with special education is that we have little idea what is being accomplished with those $50 billion. Prior to the 1997 amendments to IDEA, states and localities were not required to test special-needs students to assess their academic progress. Consequently, few jurisdictions conducted rigorous assessments. The 1997 amendments broke new ground by requiring that states include as many special education students as possible in their state assessments and report their performance. However, the law contains so many opt-outs, waivers, and weak penalties for non-compliance that few states have taken it seriously. HR 5001 seeks to change that undesirable state of affairs.

Congressman Stark's proposal applies the basic principle of "pay-for-performance" to the funding of special education. States that narrow the performance gap between special and regular education students in (1) academic achievement, (2) attendance, (3) retention, (4) high school graduation, or (5) post-secondary employment or education would receive annual bonuses of 0.2-1% in federal funding for each gap narrowed, depending on the amount of ground made up, to a maximum of 5% per year. A state that consistently and substantially narrowed all five gaps would achieve the Holy Grail of 40% federal funding within five years. States would never experience a reduction in their percentage of federal funding for special education, which would change from an annual appropriation to an entitlement. We could be confident that states wouldn't perversely attempt to "back into" gap-narrowing by sabotaging their regular education programs, since doing so would risk tough sanctions under the recently-enacted No Child Left Behind Act.

HR 5001 also contains a number of specific provisions to enhance the validity of performance numbers. The average gap on each measure for the preceding three years would be used as the baseline for measuring progress in subsequent years. At least 90% of a state's special education population must be included in the calculation of each performance level. Students diagnosed as qualifying for special education would remain in that category, for purposes of calculating performance, for the remainder of their schooling, and any testing accommodations afforded to them would remain consistent year after year.

HR 5001 is not likely to satisfy every special ed reformer. Once states attain the 40% federal funding level, full funding is guaranteed in perpetuity, thus removing any financial incentive for further gains. Educational achievement is not especially privileged in the bonus calculations, as states could gain as much by boosting the attendance of special education students as by demonstrating increases in their actual learning. More importantly, HR 5001 does nothing to change the current system of procedural over-regulation that steers resources away from the special education classroom and into meetings, official forms, administrator salaries, and judicial proceedings. Nor does it enhance parental choices. If the analysts are right, however, and the rigidities and cumbersome oversight systems of special education are interfering with the ability of educators to obtain results for special-needs students, then Congressman Stark's proposal would create incentives for special educators and administrators to join reformers in trying to trim back the red tape. As such, HR 5001 may, in the long run, accomplish its professed goal of realizing the spirit of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. In my opinion, it at least represents a reasonable place to start the reform debate regarding the reauthorization of IDEA.

Patrick J. Wolf is an assistant professor of public policy at Georgetown University and has testified before Congress regarding the reform of special education.

* * *

Two papers co-authored by Patrick Wolf and Bryan Hassel appear in Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, published by the Fordham Foundation and the Progressive Policy Institute in 2001. See "Effectiveness and Accountability (Part 1): The Compliance Model" and "Effectiveness and Accountability (Part 2): Alternatives to the Compliance Model" at http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/special_ed_final.pdf.

Are charter schools really different? Two studies published by the Fordham Foundation in recent years found that charter schools were serving as promising seedbeds for new approaches to finding, employing, and keeping better teachers. These innovative policies are described in "Do Charter Schools Do It Differently" by the Gadfly's own Chester Finn and Marci Kanstoroom, published in the September 2002 Phi Delta Kappan (which is not available online). The two reports that underlie this article, "Personnel Practices in Charter Schools" and "Autonomy and Innovation: How Do Massachusetts Charter School Principals Use Their Freedom," are available at http://www.edexcellence.net/issues/index.cfm?topic=4.

Elected urban school board members are not accountable to the public, possess modest skills, are conflict-prone and politicized, and cannot work successfully with superintendents, concludes University of Memphis professor Tom Glass in a yet to be published report described by Jay Mathews at WashingtonPost.com. Glass, who has spent a career studying school district leadership, thinks mayors or governors ought to select school board members and thinks school boards ought to be independently evaluated, with ineffective board members removed. See "Playing Politics in Urban City Schools," by Jay Mathews, Washingtonpost.com, September 10, 2002

The Reading First program, part of the No Child Left Behind Act, offers $5 billion over six years to states and school districts to support research-based reading instruction, but not everybody is happy about the strings attached to this funding. In a front-page story in Tuesday's Washington Post, reporter Valerie Strauss gives voice to critics of Reading First who try to paint the program as "promoting corporate control of the education of our children."

Detractors have two main gripes: that the Education Department will only provide funds for programs that explicitly teach phonics, and that the Department is strongly encouraging the use of certain commercial phonics-based programs that are highly structured or scripted. The first complaint flies in the face of solid evidence that explicit instruction in phonics is crucial for children struggling to read, and only a few holdouts at the International Reading Association (naively described by Strauss as apolitical) continue to claim otherwise.

The second complaint, that the Education Department is pushing specific phonics-based reading programs, is denied by officials there, who say that there is no magic list of approved reading programs. Any list of demonstrably effective reading programs, however, would by necessity include highly structured or scripted programs like Direct Instruction, since independent research has found them to be among the most successful at teaching children to read, and the Department of Education has, in fact, mentioned some of these programs as examples of effective reading programs. But instead of reviewing the evidence for the effectiveness of different reading programs being recommended by the Department, the Post article digresses into an exploration of the connections between the publishers of certain popular reading programs and the Bush administration, as if it were friendship and profit that drive the government's decisions and advice on reading instruction rather than programs' effectiveness in teaching youngsters to read.

The Post article portrays a battle between ed school professors who believe that teachers must be freed from highly-scripted reading instruction and publishing companies that sell materials based on principles of reading instruction that really work. It would be a shame if fear of the profit motive prevented us from making the best possible decisions for kids.

"Phonics pitch irks teachers," by Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post, September 10, 2002.

The following appeared on The Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web Today" page on September 9:
"In a letter to the editor of The Washington Post, one April Falcon Doss explains why she chose to send her daughter to a private school:
For a card-carrying liberal, I was surprisingly unapologetic about our decision. Why should I sacrifice our daughter's future to an abstract principle? I wasn't up to battling the school system about class size, curriculum and extracurricular activities. And by the time any changes could be made, our daughter would have already missed out on a vibrant education.
Here in a nutshell is the definition of an American liberal: one who is willing to sacrifice the future of other people's children to an abstract principle." From "My Public Spirit Stops at My Daughter" at http://opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110002241.

Berkeley High-the only public high school in Berkeley, California-sends many of its students on to top colleges but consigns just as many to failure. Though the school, one of the first in the land to desegregate voluntarily, is highly diverse, a UC Berkeley study concluded that it suffers from "apartheid-like segregation," with white students racing ahead in Advanced Placement courses and poorly prepared black students struggling to keep up in a "sink-or-swim" atmosphere. Learn about the school's desperate attempts to close its exposed achievement gap-which likely went undetected before the era of standards and testing-in "Top-Notch School Fails to Close Achievement Gap," by John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2002.

Researchers from Teachers College and the University of Maryland sought to find out "what actually happens to children during an entire school day" so they asked elementary teachers to complete a time diary. From this, they computed how much time was spent on academic subjects, enrichment activities (for example, art, music, and health instruction), maintenance activities (like packing up or traveling between classrooms), and recess, with results broken down by students' race, gender, grade, special needs, family characteristics, and classroom characteristics. They found that white students were significantly more likely to have longer school days, that minority students spent more time on core subjects at the expense of recess and enrichment activities, that students in larger classes spent more time on academics, and that the type of school (private or public) explained a large percentage of the variance in the uses of students' time. "What Happens During the School Day?: Time Diaries from a National Sample of Elementary School Teacher," by Jodie Roth, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Miriam Linver and Sandra Hofferth, Teachers College Record, 2002 (free registration required).

Danny Cohen-Zada and Moshe Justman, National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
July 2002

Economists Danny Cohen-Zada and Moshe Justman of Ben-Gurion University wrote this "occasional paper" for the series produced by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia. It turns out to be an extremely interesting if quite technical "political economy model of education finance and school choice in which parents who differ in the advantage they attribute to religious education choose from among public, private nonsectarian and religious schools." The analysis, says the authors, "[S]upports the implicit conclusion of the [U.S. Supreme] Court, that participation of religious schools in the Cleveland voucher program was essential for achieving its goal of helping low-income parents in a failing school district." That is partly because the voucher amount was too low to enable low-income parents to exercise choice in any way other than by enrolling their kids in parochial schools. But it also bespeaks a preference among many parents for a religious education for their children. "Larger vouchers would have reduced the share of religious schools in the [Cleveland] program, though they would still have attracted a majority of students." Strikingly: "If unrestricted voucher funding of religious education should be allowed, our analysis suggests that, holding the tax rate fixed, a majority coalition of religious and high-income households would prefer receiving an unrestricted voucher and having public education discontinued, to a public education system without vouchers." See for yourself at http://ncspe.org/keepout/papers/00055/981_OP53.pdf.

Ildiko Laczko-Kerr and David C. Berliner, Education Policy Analysis Archives
September 6, 2002

The title and subtitle will give you a sense of the objectivity of the so-called on-line "peer-reviewed scholarly journal" named Education Policy Analysis Archives, edited by Gene V. Glass. Like most such journals in education, it obviously selects peers who agree with its editors' policy biases and those of the authors whom they like and wish to publish. In this case, the authors are Ildiko Laczko-Kerr, who currently works at the Arizona Department of Education, having recently completed a doctorate at-where else?-Arizona State University, where her co-author, David C. Berliner, is a bigfoot in the College of Education and where this "journal" is "published." (The article is derived from Dr. Laczko-Kerr's dissertation, entitled "Teacher Certification Does Matter.") The early pages contain a thoughtful review of some previous research on the interaction of subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical prowess in influencing the effectiveness of public-school teachers. Not too surprisingly, they conclude that teachers tend to be more effective when they know something about what they're teaching, and that knowledge becomes more consequential as grade levels rise. The new "research," however, leaves much to be desired. The authors picked five Arizona school districts with teacher shortages, mostly low income communities, then selected "matched pairs" of certified and "under-certified" teachers who began work in their public schools in 1998 or 1999. (Of the "under-certified" group, two-thirds held "emergency" certificates which, it is commonly realized, have nothing to do with programs like "Teach for America" but simply getting a "warm body" in front of the class. Of the certified teachers in this study, incidentally, half were products of Arizona State.) The authors compare the test scores of the students of the certified teachers with those of the "under-certified" teachers and find that the students of the certified teachers have higher scores. Since there are no controls in the study for the prior test scores of the students, the researchers are on extremely shaky ground in drawing conclusions about the "value added" by the two groups of teachers. It is entirely possible that "under-certified" teachers were assigned to classrooms with students whose prior level of achievement was below that of other students. The authors attempted to control for differences across classrooms by matching teachers in similar schools or districts, but they are unable to match classrooms on the most important variable: prior student achievement. The authors themselves admit that some of the matches they made across districts were flawed. If the authors had used longitudinal student achievement data for their study, they would have been able to control for prior student achievement and to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the different groups of teachers. If you want to evaluate this study for yourself, you can find it on-line at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n37/.

Linda Darling-Hammond, Education Policy Analysis Archives
September 6, 2002

In this long article, also found in the dubious on-line holdings of the Phoenix-based Education Policy Analysis Archives, Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond responds to the October 2001 report on teacher certification by the Abell Foundation ("Teacher Certification Reconsidered: Stumbling for Quality," by Kate Walsh, Abell Foundation, 2001, http://www.abell.org/TeacherCertReconsidered.pdf) and to Secretary Paige's use of that report in his own recent "Annual Report on Teacher Quality." ("Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge: The Secretary's Annual Report on Teacher Quality," by Rod Paige, US Department of Education, June 2002, http://www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/News/teacherprep/AnnualReport.pdf) This is not Professor Darling-Hammond's first response, but she will henceforth claim that it's a "peer-reviewed" study. It concludes just what you would expect, that Abell was wrong in a hundred ways and that the Secretary of Education was wrong to rely on Abell. So be it. That debate will continue. But the essay also contains this fascinating admission by Darling-Hammond: "It is true that certification is a relatively crude measure of teachers' knowledge and skills, since the standards for subject matter and teaching knowledge embedded in certification have varied across states and over time, are differently measured, and are differently enforced from place to place." Well said. Nobody ever contended that certification matters not at all. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. The big question is whether going through the things one goes through to get certified should be the only possible pathway into public school teaching, or whether schools should be free to choose between candidates who did those things and those who arrived via other routes. The sensible observer might say let's quit trying to fine-tune this "crude" instrument for controlling entry and shift instead to actual measures, such as testable teacher knowledge and hard evidence of teachers' classroom effectiveness. But of course that's not where Professor Darling-Hammond goes. Instead, she repairs to her usual destination, a call "to improve preparation opportunities and certification standards." Have a look for yourself at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n36/.

Myron Lieberman, Cato Institute
August 28, 2002

The Cato Institute recently issued this 14-page paper by veteran crusader Myron Lieberman, arguing that public-school teachers themselves are ill-served by the monopoly that results from having just two teacher unions (one in most places) and that they'd be better off with greater competition among providers of "representation." "Such reform would open up competition to non-membership organizations, solo entrepreneurs, negotiators, lawyers, and college bargaining companies. Teachers would retain the right to go without an exclusive representative, and each representation option would compete against all the others." An interesting idea, cogently presented in this paper, which you can find at http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-450es.html.

Richard Fry, The Pew Hispanic Center
September 5, 2002

Based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, this report finds that large numbers of Latino high school graduates-10 percent, as compared to 7 percent of the total population of high school graduates-are enrolled in college-level courses, but Latino students are more likely than any other group to enroll in two-year programs or as part-time students. A greater proportion of Latino high school graduates enroll in post-secondary education after the age of 24, and fewer Latinos pursue graduate and professional degrees. Author Richard Fry is concerned about the number of Hispanics who pursue educational paths associated with lower chances of earning a bachelor's degree, but when he turns to hypothesizing about why this is the case, the ground on which he rests grows shakier. For example, Fry explains the high level of enrollment by Hispanics in community colleges by stating that "an emphasis on close family ties is one characteristic shared by most Latinos...and among Latino immigrants this often translates into an expectation that children will live with their parents until they marry" so they will not choose to enroll in institutions where they might need to reside on campus. The author's assumption here may or may not be true, but if he wishes to boost the number of Hispanic college graduates, he will need more data, and fewer assumptions, about what causes these low graduation rates. "Latinos in Higher Education: Many Enroll, Too Few Graduate," by Richard Fry, September 5, 2002, http://www.pewhispanic.org/site/docs/pdf/latinosinhighereducation-sept5-02.pdf.