Brookings: Experts - Ron Haskins

Subsidizing Higher Education May Not Be Paying Off

Isabel V. Sawhill and Ron Haskins — Tue, 07 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

A college degree has long been touted as a key component for a successful and prosperous life. But a more critical look reveals that coming in prepared and graduating is often the biggest challenge, especially for disadvantaged students. Senior fellows Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins discuss the findings from in the latest issue of The Future of Children journal which is devoted to post secondary education preparation as well as a new Center on Children and Families brief that examines the college return-on-investment.

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Subsidizing Higher Education May Not Be Paying Off

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Time for Change: A New Federal Strategy to Prepare Disadvantaged Students for College

Ron Haskins and Cecilia Elena Rouse — Tue, 07 May 2013 09:00:00 -0400

Abstract

If more children from low-income families graduated from college, income inequality would fall and economic opportunity would increase. A major barrier to a college education for students from low-income families is that they are poorly prepared to do college work. Since the War on Poverty of the 1960s, the federal government has funded several programs to help prepare disadvantaged students to succeed in college. Evaluations show that these programs are at best only modestly successful. We propose to consolidate these programs into a single grant program, require that funded programs be backed by rigorous evidence, and give the Department of Education the authority and funding to plan a coordinated set of research and demonstration programs to develop and rigorously test several approaches to college preparation.

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Time for Change: A New Federal Strategy to Prepare Disadvantaged Students for College

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Ron Haskins
Cecilia Elena Rouse

Publication: The Future of Children

Improving College Prep. for Low-Income Students

Ron Haskins and Cecilia Elena Rouse — Tue, 07 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

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Time for Change: A New Federal Strategy to Prepare Disadvantaged Students for College

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Ron Haskins
Cecilia Elena Rouse

Is There a Better Way to Prepare Disadvantaged Students for College?

Tue, 07 May 2013 09:00:00 -0400

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May 7, 2013
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036

A major barrier to college education for students from low-income families is that they are poorly prepared to do college work. Since the War on Poverty of the 1960s, the federal government has funded several programs to help prepare disadvantaged students to succeed in college. Evaluations show that these programs are at best only modestly successful.

On May 7, Princeton University and the Brookings Institution released the latest issue of The Future of Children—a journal that promotes effective, evidence-based policies and programs for children—which examines the state of postsecondary education in the United States. Journal co-editor Cecilia Rouse provided an overview of the issue’s contents. Ron Haskins of Brookings presented findings from an accompanying policy brief that proposes a plan to improve college preparation programs for students from disadvantaged families by consolidating them into a single grant program and requiring that funded programs be backed by rigorous evidence. Following their presentations, Harry Holzer of Georgetown University responded to the proposal from the policy brief. A panel of experts then discussed the proposed reform and offered their own thoughts on the value of postsecondary education for low-income students.

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On the Budget, Obama's Opening Bid Was Reasonable

Ron Haskins — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:26:00 -0400

It would be difficult to imagine an uglier process of enacting legislation on important issues than the last two years of attempts by federal policymakers to reduce the size of the nation's deficit. Although no single explanation would suffice to account for the difficulty of making bipartisan progress, a major philosophical difference between the political parties stands out as the major culprit.

Broadly speaking, Republicans want smaller government and lower taxes; Democrats want more government and higher taxes. Since enactment of the Social Security Act in 1935, the story of the federal government has been one of expanding programs, increasing federal spending, and increasing taxes. Republican denials notwithstanding, Republicans have often supported the thousands of laws that expanded government relentlessly over the years and even in raising taxes to support the programs, although they have often kept in check the higher levels of spending proposed by Democrats. Even so, for the last several years Republicans have talked more vigorously about the philosophy of small government and low taxes. Necessity met opportunity when the nation entered a slow-burning deficit mess, aggravated by a severe recession that soon convinced almost everyone that the federal government had to balance its books by cutting spending, raising taxes, or both. Roughly speaking, the need to reduce the deficit, combined with the fact that cutting spending would move the nation toward the Republican goal of smaller government, has given Republicans an opportunity to cut spending to an extent that would have otherwise been impossible.

By contrast, the deficit puts Democrats in a defensive posture because, as President Obama's budgets show, they typically propose increased government spending. Ironically, Democrats also have been able to seize on an external force to support their cause. That force was the Great Recession that began in December 2007 with effects, especially high unemployment, that continues today. In 2009, Democrats were able to pass an $800 billion plus stimulus bill to fight the recession and that bill expanded a host of programs for the poor and unemployed. Some of those changes have been made permanent, which has had the effect of permanently boosting government spending.

The recession and the stimulus have allowed Democrats to advance their agenda; the deficit and the compromise legislation Congress has passed to reduce it over the past two years have allowed Republicans to advance their agenda, although the fiscal cliff agreement in January did contain a $600 billion tax hike on the rich.

Now comes President Obama with his budget proposal for 2014. He proposes to increase taxes by imposing a minimum tax rate of 30 percent on earnings over $1 million, limiting itemized deductions for those in the top tax brackets, and increasing the federal tax on cigarettes to pay for expanded spending on preschool. Republican leaders have been scathing in their rejection of the tax increases. But the president also proposes changes in health care, primarily Medicare, by encouraging more Medicare recipients to use generic drugs and by making elderly couples with incomes over $170,000 pay for more of their care. And most importantly, Obama proposes to change the inflation adjustment in Social Security benefits in a way that would reduce spending by about $130 billion over the next decade and even more after that.

Although Republican leaders have been hostile to many features of the Obama budget, the Medicare and Social Security proposals are important and would both cut spending. It is even possible to see the inflation adjustment proposal as a breakthrough because a Democratic president has, at the cost of infuriating his political base, proposed to reduce spending on the program that is the greatest policy achievement of the Democratic Party. In the past, Republican leaders have urged the president to make the specific inflation adjustment proposal he now offers in his budget. Republicans should take it.

The President makes a number of new spending proposals in his 2014 budget, notably on infrastructure, preschool expansion, support for manufacturing, and making permanent several existing tax credits that help low-income families. But the Office of Management and Budget estimates that as a percentage of GDP, the nation's debt would decline from 76.6 percent in 2013 to 73 percent in 2023. Many analysts and politicians think the debt should be reduced more, but this reduction, if the OMB estimates are correct, would represent continued progress on the deficit and a major breakthrough on Social Security.

The opening question for serious negotiations about the 2014 budget and deficit reduction is whether both sides have shown enough give to justify serious bargaining. Whatever else it might do, the Obama budget proposal, by offering an important reduction in Social Security spending and a cut in Medicare spending that could be expanded in the future, shows considerable give on the president's side. So far the response from most Republicans has been dismissive. Maybe Republican leaders should take a second look and make a counterproposal that falls between the Ryan budget and the president's budget while retaining the Social Security and Medicare savings. If they have to offer something in taxes, which they will to get a deal, remind Democrats that the Social Security inflation adjustment would also increase income taxes by around $100 billion over ten years and accept the president's cigarette tax proposal. Something along these lines would allow both Democrats and Republicans to achieve part of their traditional agenda.

Authors

Ron Haskins

Publication: Real Clear Markets

Image Source: © Jason Reed / Reuters

Brookings Expert Roundtable on President Obama’s Federal Budget Proposal for FY 2014

Ron Haskins, Isabel V. Sawhill and Bill Frenzel — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:00:00 -0400

President Obama’s FY 2014 budget proposal offers a blueprint that will cut the deficit by $1.8 trillion dollars over the next decade, invest more in infrastructure and early childhood education and is intended to improve the nation’s failing fiscal health. But can it really do that? And more? We examine the budget proposal and its impact in this discussion.

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Knot Yet: The Future of Marriage in the U.S.

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 09:00:00 -0400

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March 20, 2013
9:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

One of the major demographic and social changes of the last four decades has been the dramatic increase in the average age at which Americans first marry, from the early twenties in 1970 to the late twenties today. Delayed marriage in America has helped to bring the divorce rate down since 1980 and increased the economic fortunes of educated women, according to “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America,” a new report from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, and the RELATE Institute.

But another important consequence of this change is that a majority of young adults under 30 now have their first child before they marry. “Knot Yet” explores the causes and consequences of this revolution in family composition and explains why premarital childbearing is associated with dramatically different family formation strategies. The great crossover in childbearing and marriage is concentrated among the 60 percent of young adults who have a high school degree but not a college degree.

On March 20, the Center on Children and Families at Brookings hosted a discussion to explore the policy and cultural responses that may help reconnect marriage and parenthood. One of the report’s authors summarized the findings and recommendations; several authors and critics, representing an array of political viewpoints, provided their reactions.

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Three Simple Rules Poor Teens Should Follow to Join the Middle Class

Ron Haskins — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Policy aimed at promoting economic opportunity for poor children must be framed within three stark realities. First, many poor children come from families that do not give them the kind of support that middle-class children get from their families. Second, as a result, these children enter kindergarten far behind their more advantaged peers and, on average, never catch up and even fall further behind. Third, in addition to the education deficit, poor children are more likely to make bad decisions that lead them to drop out of school, become teen parents, join gangs and break the law.

In addition to the thousands of local and national programs that aim to help young people avoid these life-altering problems, we should figure out more ways to convince young people that their decisions will greatly influence whether they avoid poverty and enter the middle class. Let politicians, schoolteachers and administrators, community leaders, ministers and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.

Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class.

Consider an example. Today, more than 40 percent of American children, including more than 70 percent of black children and 50 percent of Hispanic children, are born outside marriage. This unprecedented rate of nonmarital births, combined with the nation’s high divorce rate, means that around half of children will spend part of their childhood—and for a considerable number of these all of their childhood — in a single-parent family. As hard as single parents try to give their children a healthy home environment, children in female-headed families are four or more times as likely as children from married-couple families to live in poverty. In turn, poverty is associated with a wide range of negative outcomes in children, including school dropout and out-of-wedlock births.

It is sometimes said that Americans are turning their back on the marriage culture. The high divorce rate, soaring nonmarital birth rate and consequent rise of single-parent families are certainly weakening marriage as an institution. But look again and discover that college-educated women have high marriage rates, low nonmarital birthrates, and low divorce rates. The marriage culture seems to be alive and well for those with a college degree. These families usually not only have enough money to afford good schools for their children, but they also provide a stable family environment that allows children to flourish.

The recent attacks by Planned Parenthood on Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s mayor, for launching a campaign designed to inform teenagers of the consequences of teen pregnancy provides a good example of how many in our society face the effects of nonmarital births on teen mothers and their children. In one of the campaign posters, a baby with tears rolling down his face says: “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen.” Another shows a girl saying to her mom: “Chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me?” Planned Parenthood criticized the ads, displayed in the subway and bus shelters, for ignoring racial and economic factors that contribute to teen pregnancy. Other critics say the ads stigmatize teen parents and their children.

Granted, most teen moms are from low-income families and face a number of barriers to success. Along comes Bloomberg with a direct message to get the attention of teenage girls and warn them not to make their situation worse and to think more about their future. If the mother wants to improve her future by continuing her education, being a teenage parent is precisely the wrong way to do it. As for blaming the victim, no one is blaming the baby—yet the baby will also bear long-term consequences.

Teenagers are capable of understanding principles and of using them to help make decisions. Anyone who delivers messages to teens about the consequences of decisions that could affect them and others for many years should be praised not criticized.

Bloomberg should next launch a public campaign about the value of marriage to adults, children and society. There will be at least as many critics of this message as the message that young people should avoid teen pregnancy. Good. The bigger the controversy, the more the media will cover the debate, and the more the nation will have the opportunity to reflect on what is at stake. I am confident that most Americans will conclude that organizations like Planned Parenthood have it wrong, and Bloomberg has it right.

Authors

Ron Haskins

Publication: The Washington Post

Image Source: © Brian Snyder / Reuters

Establishing a Task Force for Expanding Preschool Programs

Ron Haskins — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:39:00 -0500

In a single paragraph, President Obama’s State of the Union address opened the door to implementing important changes in the nation’s multitude of preschool programs and to increasing the number of children participating in quality programs.

Of all the opportunities to promote the development of poor children and to increase opportunity in America, none is as promising as high-quality preschool programs. Although there are still disagreements about the strength of evidence on these programs, the literature on preschool’s impacts on a host of short-term and long-term child outcomes is strong, and there are several excellent benefit-cost studies as well.

Research leads to the conclusion that if poor children attended high-quality preschool, they would be better prepared to achieve and behave well in public schools. There could also be longer-term outcomes including higher graduation rates, less delinquency, less teen pregnancy, and higher rates of employment and income. But these benefits and their corresponding budget savings will not be achieved unless the preschool education is high-quality, provided by highly effective teachers. Today, most preschool facilities do not meet that standard.

As would be expected in a State of the Union address, the president gave only a hint of what he had in mind for preschool. His goal was to “make high-quality preschool available to every child in America.” If the Obama administration is serious about expanding early childhood programs, here is one way to proceed.

The first order of business should be to figure out how to get the most out of the programs we now have and the money we now spend. The president should appoint a small group within the administration that includes one senior official from the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Labor, as well as the White House and Office of Management and Budget, and charge them with presenting a bold plan for coordinating these programs. The president’s task force should consult widely, especially with the states, for how these programs can be better coordinated at the state and local level.

Second, the president should abandon his idea of providing high-quality preschool for “every child in America.” Rather, his task force should assume that only children from poor and near-poor families would be eligible for federal subsidies. Especially in this time of budget crisis, it is likely to be decades before the combined financing of the federal and state governments can afford the additional billions of dollars that would be required to provide free, universal preschool programs.

Third, the task force plan should include strategies for providing the poorest children and families, as well as those at risk of abuse and neglect, with home visiting and other support services. For this relatively small group, the services should begin in the prenatal period and extend throughout the preschool years.

Fourth, we will eventually need additional dollars to make sure every poor and near-poor child can receive services. Thus, the group should make an estimate of the costs of their system and propose several alternatives for sharing the burden between the states and the federal government.

The nation should stop setting preschool policy by merely creating more programs and adding money to existing ones in accord with political feasibility. Instead, we need a vision of the comprehensive system we should build and estimates of the long-term costs of the system. As President Obama said several times during his State of the Union address, “we can do this.”

Authors

Ron Haskins

Publication: Spotlight on Poverty

A State of the Union Wish List

Ron Haskins — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 09:00:00 -0500

Here are three things I wish Obama would say, but probably won’t, in next Tuesday’s State of the Union address. The first is to start delivering on his first-term promise to change the tone of debate in the nation’s capital. In his January 14 press conference, the president said that House Republicans have suspicions about government’s role “to make sure that seniors have decent health care as they get older” and to “make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat.” Issuing blanket statements like this about your political opponents is neither the way to change the tone of debate in Washington nor the way to publicly characterize people you’re about to negotiate with over issues – such as deficit reduction, immigration, and gun control – that are vital to the nation’s future. Obama would be well advised not only to avoid negative and mostly unjustified accusations of this type, but even to try to say something nice about Republicans.

Second, the president should say something as specific as possible about his ideas on further deficit reduction. Between the 2011 Budget Control Act and the 2012 American Taxpayers Relief Act, Congress and President Obama have reduced the deficit over the next ten years by $2.4 trillion (including interest savings). If the $1.2 trillion (again including interest) from the sequester is actually implemented, the total deficit reduction so far will be $3.6 trillion over ten years. Not bad for a dysfunctional government. But at least another $1 or $2 trillion is needed even to maintain a steady debt/GDP ratio over the next decade. Worse, there has been virtually nothing saved from entitlement programs, and no agreement so far that would put Medicare and other health programs on a more sustainable growth path. It would be a breakthrough if the president highlighted and expanded his offer of changes in entitlement programs like he did in his recent press conference. He should also say that he is ready to talk about savings in Medicare – while perhaps adding that he would be especially interested in discussions about savings that could be achieved by having the higher income elderly pay a higher fraction of their health care costs.

Third, President Obama and his wife and children have set a wonderful standard for marriage and American family life. It would be difficult to exaggerate the damage that is being done to American children and the nation’s GDP by the tsunami of nonmarital births and the relentlessly rising share of American children being reared by single parents. For starters, kids in female-headed families are four times as likely to be poor as kids living with their married parents. Black children bear the heaviest burden in this regard because well over 70 percent of them are born into single parent families. Similarly, over 50 percent of Hispanic children are born outside marriage, imposing a heavy burden on them as well. Economic opportunity is a theme President Obama has strongly emphasized, but the astounding level of nonmarital births is like a little motor pushing up poverty rates and reducing opportunity for millions of American children – and disproportionately so for black and Hispanic children.

The president has a better chance than anyone in the nation to have an impact on this problem. He should include at least two paragraphs about marriage in his State of the Union address. In the first paragraph, he should describe the advantages of marriage to adults, children, and society, which can be done without mentioning the negative effects of single-parent families. In the second paragraph, he should announce that once a month for the next year, he plans to attend a predominantly black, Hispanic, white, or integrated church – as often as possible accompanied by his wife – to sing the praises of marriage and the great contribution his marriage and family have made to his personal life and to lives of his wife and children.

President Obama has a chance to hit a policy trifecta – encouraging civility in the nation’s capital, reducing the deficit while at last addressing entitlement and especially Medicare spending, and speaking out for marriage as a way to reduce poverty and increase opportunity in America.

Authors

Ron Haskins

Do Republicans Stand a Chance on Immigration Reform?

Ron Haskins — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

After its failure to defeat a vulnerable President Obama and to retake the Senate in the 2012 elections, leading Republicans and conservative thinkers have conducted a searching critique of their Party. National Review, Commentary, and the Weekly Standard, three of the most important voices of conservative thinking, devoted nearly entire issues to dozens of penetrating and often scathing critiques of the Party by major right-leaning thinkers.

Although it would be a stretch to say that a consensus developed about any single factor accounting for the Party’s poor electoral performance, a prominent culprit was what might be called right-wing absolutism. In Rule and Ruin, Geoffrey Kabaservice gives an insider’s view of the cleansing of moderates from the Republican Party since the Goldwater/Johnson presidential election of 1964. The cleansing of moderates has in turn resulted in Republicans who win House and Senate seats being, on average, well to the right of the American public. On issue after issue, including taxing the rich, budget compromises that include spending cuts and tax increases, the Dream Act and general immigration reform, and increasing the debt ceiling, polls show that Republicans have been out of step with the public. Indeed, the intransigence and rhetoric of some Republicans on these issues have contributed greatly to public polls showing that a majority of the public blames Republicans for the gridlock in Washington. In a New York Times/CBS poll, for example, 60 percent of those surveyed say the president is attempting to negotiate with Republicans to work things out while only 27 percent said Republicans are making the same effort.

Perhaps chastened by defeat and their standing in the polls, Republicans so far in the 113th Congress appear to be presenting a more reasonable public persona. Speeches on poverty and opportunity by Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Marco Rubio were thoughtful and well received. The decision to avoid a showdown and instead to compromise on the debt ceiling is another sign of new Republican thinking. But the biggest opportunity of all is presented by immigration reform.

A Bipartisan Issue

It would be difficult to overstate the advantages to our economy of immigration reform. A key part of reform should be adjusting the basis for admitting immigrants from the current overemphasis on family relationships to immigrants already in the country, to a greater emphasis on the education, skills, and experience of those we admit. Other nations are attracting well-educated immigrants by giving them preferences for admission and a clear path to citizenship. We’re losing out. We should make it especially easy for students to enter and stay in the U.S. According to a recent Brookings study, immigrants are 30 percent more likely to found a business than native Americans. A study by the Kauffman Foundation reported that immigrants were involved in the founding of a quarter of engineering and technology companies created between 2006 and 2012. There is also evidence that immigrants who work in science and technology substantially increase employment among native-born Americans.

Another reason so many conservative thinkers are recommending that Republicans support immigration reform is that Hispanics are an increasing portion of the American population and are a critical part of the electorate in many states. One number shows the Republican problem: Romney received 27 percent of the Hispanic vote. With nearly a quarter of all children (and rising) now being Hispanic, the Hispanic share of voters is sure to increase in the future. Immigration reform gives Republicans a chance to overcome the perception that they are anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic.

What About Illegal Immigration?

Thus, Republicans have every reason to support immigration reform. But there are two problems. The first is that our borders are not secure. While it is true that the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has declined in recent years, the reason is that our economy has lost some of its sheen. But when the economy starts humming again, illegal immigration is certain to rise. Violating the nation’s laws is not a good way to begin a path to becoming an American citizen. So tightening border security is a real issue.

But the barn door has been open for many years and we have around 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the country. What should happen to them? Again, Republicans are justifiably concerned that creating a path to citizenship for those who violated our laws to get in is tricky business. The common Republican argument that if we once again allow illegal entrants to become citizens, as we did in the immigration reform legislation of 1986, why would any future illegal entrants not think they can violate U.S. laws and still eventually become citizens?

It's Time for Compromise

A reasonable Republican response to the twin issues of containing illegal immigration and dealing with undocumented immigrants already in the U.S. begins with the realization that Republicans are the minority party and must compromise to get a deal. Further, Republicans should enter the debate understanding that there will not be a bill unless the issue of undocumented immigrants is addressed. So Republicans must find political tradeoffs between increasing border security, especially by strengthening measures to prevent undocumented entrants from getting jobs, and creating a path to citizenship for those already here. In a perfect world, adults who enter the U.S. illegally should not be able to stay and become citizens. But we don’t live in a perfect world and both humanitarian and political considerations overmatch the reasonable desire to keep illegal entrants from becoming citizens. Achieving a compromise on immigration will be the most important test of whether Republicans are now willing to get things done by compromising with Democrats and the president.

Authors

Ron Haskins

Publication: Yahoo! Finance

Image Source: © Robert Galbraith / Reuters

Brookings Expert Roundtable on President Obama’s State of the Union Priorities

Sarah A. Binder, William A. Galston, Ron Haskins and Thomas E. Mann — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 13:30:00 -0500

President Obama will use the first State of the Union address of his second term on February 12 to present his agenda for the year ahead, the issues he wants address and the battles he hopes to win. In a roundtable discussion, Brookings experts Tom Mann, Sarah Binder, Bill Galston and Ron Haskins preview the hot-button issues the president is likely to cover in his speech. The nation’s economy and the debt crisis top their list, and they offer insights about how the still-pervasive partisanship on Capitol Hill could stand between the White House and its goals.

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Going Big On Deficit Reduction Is Dead. Now What?

Ron Haskins — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 21:40:00 -0500

Nearly everyone understands that the nation’s deficit will eventually bankrupt the federal government and have a catastrophic effect on the American economy. But, hey, interest rates are low and investors are still willing to purchase the federal debt despite receiving almost no return. There seems to be no immediate threat. So those who don’t want to fix Medicare, the heart of the nation’s deficit problem, have a continuing excuse – don’t take anything away from the elderly, continue borrowing a trillion or so a year, and above all don’t do anything to harm the limping economy.

We’ve seen this routine before. It’s now time for deficit hawks to face facts. Democrats aren’t willing to cut spending, least of all in Medicare where cuts are most needed, and Republicans are not willing to raise taxes. Both sides have been forced by factors they could not control to violate their most fundamental values a little, and as a result future deficits have been reduced by a little over $2 trillion as compared with a baseline that assumed the continuation of the Bush tax cuts. If we could be confident that the 2011 deficit commission deal, last year’s debt ceiling deal, and the recent fiscal cliff agreement were initial steps along a path leading to an end of deficit spending and a stable federal debt, the achievements of the last two years would look almost reasonable.

But the problem is that all the factors that made deficit hawks hopeful of a grand bargain are now dead. The president’s offers on entitlement reform, modest in the first place, are now shown to be Lucy’s football; the odds of getting another tax increase through the House are minuscule; and the Democrats’ fervent protection of entitlements seems stronger than ever. And the biggest factor of all is that the American public does not want entitlement cuts or tax increases unless they are confined to the rich. Once again, the baby boom generation shows itself to be perfectly willing to send the bill for their benefits to their children and grandchildren.

So forget going big or even medium on deficit reduction. Now we need to go tiny. And what is tiny? Following William Galston of Brookings, I define tiny as holding the line on the accumulated debt of the federal government as a percent of GDP over the next ten years. The debt-to-GDP ratio is now 73 percent. If our goal is to treat this 73 percent as our deficit line in the sand, how much will we need to slow spending growth or increase revenue to arrive at New Year’s Eve in 2023 with a federal debt at or below 73 percent of GDP? A more accurate estimate will be possible when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) publishes its new baseline that includes the $600 plus billion tax increase from the fiscal cliff agreement, but the figure looks like it will be somewhere between $1.0 and $1.5 trillion. Can the federal budget be reformed to achieve even this pitifully tiny goal?

Fortunately, we have three pending deadlines – the debt ceiling and the re-emergence of the spending sequester that will occur at the end of February and the end of the continuing resolution that is keeping the government open on March 27 – that will in all likelihood lead to messy, last-minute compromises. So there’s not much time for deficit hawks in both parties to come up with a plan. Even assuming that Medicare cuts and further tax increases are off the table, there are still substantively and politically reasonable ways to come up with something close to $1 trillion in saving over the next decade:

Mike O’Hanlon of Brookings has suggested several ways to achieve between $150 billion and $200 billion in defense without making any of the more than $500 billion in defense cuts in the sequester
Changing the cost-of-living adjustment in Social Security and the tax code to yield a more accurate increase in benefits each year could save around $150 billion to $200 billion
Lowering the rate at which Medicaid expenditures are reimbursed for states with high per-capita income could save as much as $180 billion
The federal government spends about $630 billion on entitlement programs other than the Big Three of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; the COLA change, reforms in agriculture programs, and reforms of the SNAP, Supplemental Security Income, Unemployment Compensation, and Earned Income and Child Tax Credit Programs could yield another $200 billion to $300 billion

These reforms, combined with the savings in interest payments of about $120 billion they would produce, will yield a little less than $1 trillion in total savings over the next decade.

There is no obvious way in the near future to reduce the nation’s debt to some safer level of, say, the 60 percent of GDP recommended by the National Research Council and the National Academy of Public Administration. But in the meantime, we should apply the Socratic Oath to deficit reduction – first, do no harm; don’t let the deficit grow. Greater deficit action than this will probably have to await a fiscal crisis. Meanwhile, the nation continues to be in grave fiscal jeopardy.

Authors

Ron Haskins

Publication: Real Clear Markets

Image Source: © Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

The Exaggerated Death of the Middle Class

Ron Haskins and Scott Winship — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Mark Twain, upon reading his obituary in the New York Journal, famously quipped that the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. The same could be said today of reports from the scholarly world, the media and even the White House about the shrinking of the middle class. Here’s why.

The most easily obtained income figures are not the most appropriate ones for assessing changes in living standards; those are also the figures that are often used to reach unwarranted conclusions about “middle class decline.” For example, analysts and pundits often rely on data that do not include all sources of income. Consider data on comprehensive income assembled by Cornell University economist Richard Burkhauser and his colleagues for the period between 1979—the year it supposedly all went wrong for working Americans—and 2007, before the Great Recession.

When Burkhauser looked at market income as reported to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the basis for the top 1 percent inequality figures that inspired Occupy Wall Street, he found that incomes for the bottom 60 percent of tax filers stagnated or declined over the nearly three-decade period. Incomes in the middle fifth of tax returns grew by only 2 percent on average, and those in the bottom fifth declined by 33 percent.

Things appeared somewhat better when Burkhauser looked at the definition of income favored by the Census Bureau which, unlike IRS figures, includes government cash payments from programs like Social Security and welfare, and looks at households rather than tax returns.

Still, the income of the middle fifth only rose by 15 percent over the entire three decades, much less than 1 percent per year. The Census Bureau reports that from 2000 to 2010, the income of the middle fifth actually fell by 8 percent. With numbers like these, it’s understandable why so many people think the American middle class is under threat and in decline.

But there are three reasons why even the Census Bureau figures are deceiving. The size of U.S. households, which has been declining, is not taken into account. The figures ignore the net impact on income of government taxes and non-cash transfers like food stamps and health insurance, which benefit the poor and middle class much more than richer households, and the value of health insurance provided by employers is also left out.

Burkhauser and his colleagues show that if these factors are taken into account, the incomes of the bottom fifth of households actually increased by 26 percent, rather than declining by 33 percent. Those of the middle fifth increased by 37 percent, rather than by only 2 percent. There is no disappearing middle class in these data; nor can household income, even at the bottom, be characterized as stagnant, let alone declining. Even after 2000, estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) show the bottom 60 percent of households got 10 percent richer by 2009, the most recent year available.

Making sense of income trends

Aside from the brighter picture presented by the Burkhauser and CBO analyses, there is a more complicated trend emerging in the United States. Four factors, both inside and outside the market, explain those trends.

The first market factor affecting middle-class income is a longtime trend of low literacy and math achievement in U.S. schools, which partially explains why conventional analyses of income show stagnation and decline. Young Americans entering the job market need skills valuable in a modern economy if they expect to earn a decent wage. Education and technical training are key to acquiring these skills. Yet the achievement test scores of children in literacy and math have been stagnant for more than two decades and are consistently far down the list in international comparisons.

It is true that African American and Hispanic students have closed part of the gap between themselves and Caucasian and Asian students; but the gap between students from economically advantaged families and students from disadvantaged ones has widened substantially—by 30 to 40 percent over the past 25 years.¹

In a nation committed to educational equality and economic mobility, the income gap in achievement test scores is deeply problematic. Far from increasing educational equality as an important route to boosting economic opportunity, the American educational system reinforces the advantages that students from middle-class families bring with them to the classroom. Thus, the nation has two education problems that are limiting the income of workers at both the bottom and middle of the distribution: the average student is not learning enough, compared with students from other nations, and students from poor families are falling further and further behind.

It is difficult to see how students with a poor quality of education will be able to support a family comfortably in our technologically advanced economy if they rely exclusively on their earnings.

The second market factor is the increasing share of our economy devoted to health care. According to the Kaiser Foundation, employer-sponsored health insurance premiums for families increased 113 percent between 2001 and 2011. Most economists would say that this money comes directly out of worker wages. In other words, if it weren’t for the remarkable increase in the cost of health care, workers’ wages would be higher. When the portion of market compensation received in the form of health insurance is ignored in conventional analyses, income gains over time are understated.

Turning to non-market factors, marriage and childbearing increasingly distinguish the haves and have-nots.

Families have fewer children, and more U.S. adults are living alone today than in the past. As a result, households on average are better off since there are fewer mouths to feed, regardless of income. At the same time, single parenthood has grown more common, thereby increasing inequality between the poor and the middle class. Female-headed families are more than four times as likely to be in poverty, and children from these families are more likely to have trouble in school as compared with children in married-couple families. The increasing tendency of similarly educated men and women to marry each other also contributes to rising inequality.

The most important non-market factor is the net impact of government taxes and transfer payments on household income. The budget of the U.S. government for 2012 is $3.6 trillion. About 65 percent of that amount is spent on transfer payments to individuals. The biggest transfer payments are: $770 billion for Social Security, $560 billion for Medicare, $262 billion for Medicaid, and nearly $100 billion for nutrition programs. In addition to these federal expenditures, state governments also spend tens of billions of dollars on programs for low-income households. Almost all of the over $1 trillion in state and federal spending on means-tested programs (those that provide benefits only to people below some income cutoff) goes to low-income households.

Thus, taking into account the progressive nature of Social Security and Medicare benefits, the effect of government expenditures is to greatly increase household income at the bottom and reduce economic inequality.

Similarly, federal taxation—and to a lesser extent state taxation—is progressive. Americans in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution pay negative federal income taxes because the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit actually pay cash to millions of low-income families with children.

IRS data on incomes incorporate only the small fraction of transfer income that is taxable. Census data includes all cash transfer payments but leaves out non-cash transfers—among which Medicaid and Medicare benefits are the most important—and taxes.

The bottom line is that market income has grown, and government programs have greatly increased the well-being of low-income and middle-class households. The middle class is not shrinking or becoming impoverished. Rather, changes in workers’ skills and employers’ demand for them, along with changes in families’ size and makeup, have caused the incomes of the well-off to climb much faster than the incomes of most Americans.

Rising inequality can occur even as everyone experiences improvement in living standards.

Even so, unless the nation’s education system improves, especially for children from poor families, millions of working Americans will continue to rely on government transfer payments. This signals a real problem. Millions of individuals and families at the bottom and in the middle of the income distribution are dependent on government to enjoy a decent or rising standard of living. While the U.S. middle class may not be shrinking, the trends outlined above make clear why this is no reason for complacency. Today’s form of widespread dependency on government benefits has helped stem a decline in income, but far better would be to have more people earning all or nearly all their income through work. Getting there, though, will require deeper reforms in the structure of the U.S. education system.

1 Sean F. Reardon, Wither Opportunity? Rising Inequality and the Uncertain Life Chances of Low-Income Children (New York: Russel Sage Foundation Press, 2001).

Authors

Publication: Americas Quarterly

Image Source: © Norbert von der Groeben / Reuters

A Bipartisan Proposal: Go Medium to Avoid Fiscal Cliff

Ron Haskins and Michael E. O'Hanlon — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 17:37:00 -0500

After a year of drama and high expectations, it appears increasingly likely that the current session of Congress will not solve the nation’s fiscal woes. Perhaps it was always too much to expect a lame duck to ride to the rescue. Especially after a close election and with a still-divided government, there is no clear consensus on who won a mandate to do what.

But we should be able to agree that the American people did vote for something to be done about the nation’s crippling deficit, without impeding economic recovery in the process. They also surely expressed a collective view that a balanced approach is essential. This assessment should lead President Obama and members of Congress to one central conclusion: if it proves impossible to “go big” and truly solve the nation’s long-term fiscal dilemma in the short time remaining before the New Year, they could go medium for now.

Our proposal would ask Republicans to accept slightly higher taxes than they prefer, but through reductions in deductions and exemptions as they advocate, rather than a raising of rates. It would ask Democrats to accept significant cuts to entitlements – but cuts that nonetheless phase in gradually and protect the basic integrity of all existing programs. It would also generally protect discretionary accounts including defense and domestic investments, which have already been hit by last year's deficit reduction legislation.

Some of the problems with the existing positions of key leaders are becoming apparent. President Obama wants to restore tax rates of the Clinton years on the rich and fully half of his deficit reduction dollars come from new revenues (it is not persuasive to count as savings costs from future military expenses that were never going to happen anyway). The Republicans consider this a non-starter. Republican congressional leaders talk of raising revenues through closing of tax loopholes, but to date they are unwilling to be specific. No one puts social security on the table except through bromides such as an expressed desire to “strengthen it” for the long term. And the much-heralded Simpson-Bowles plan, while a brilliant piece of work in many ways, makes too many cuts in areas like national defense.

Perhaps we can still hope for a Christmas-season miracle, but failing that, it is time to start readying a backup plan to avert the huge disruption to our economy that would result from a plunge off the fiscal cliff. Further deficit reduction of some $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion would result from the following ten-year deficit reduction plan, to complement the $1.2 trillion in savings (mostly in defense as well as domestic discretionary accounts) already achieved under the first tranche of the 2011 Budget Control Act:

Seek roughly $1 trillion in revenue increases, less than President Obama’s preferred $1.6 trillion but still a substantial amount. This is measured against a baseline that assumes continuation of the Bush tax cuts. To ensure maximum support from Republicans, these additional revenues should be achieved Simpson-Bowles style by capping deductions and exemptions rather than raising rates.
Put social security on the table but in a careful and gradual way. In principle, Social Security is not the main cause of our deficit woes. But that is only because social security taxes are, relatively speaking, so high. The hefty taxes used to support social security in effect deprive the rest of the government of funds for other purposes. Therefore, changes to the system that make it less expensive to the Treasury are warranted. At a minimum, changes like adjusting the formula for cost-of-living increases in social security payments by roughly 0.5 percent a year can save more than $50 billion annually by 2020 without affecting anyone precipitously or dramatically. Most experts agreed that the current COLA overstates inflation.
Avoid further substantial net cuts in domestic discretionary accounts for now. While reallocation is appropriate, these crucial parts of the budget fund our investments in infrastructure, science and education while also providing safety in our airports, our food supply, and our borders among other things. Under existing stipulations of the Budget Control Act – that is, the cuts made last summer – their cost is already headed towards a smaller share of GDP than at anytime under Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. A modest $150 billion in additional ten-year savings is ample.
Limit further defense cuts to $150 billion over ten years as well. Given last year’s budget agreement, this is ambitious enough. Today, U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan; Iran continues moving towards nuclear bomb capability; other parts of the Middle East remain in turmoil, and North Korea prepares missile launches while China squares off with other Asian powers over disputed islands and waterways. This is no time to cut the military deeply again based on hand-sweeping arguments about how the Department of Defense’s real budget is still bigger than during the Cold War. While that may be true, it is also true that as a fraction of GDP, it is headed towards 3 percent, historically a modest figure.Z
Medicare reforms should be adopted that would produce $300 billion in savings over ten years. Three possible reforms, to be suggested in any deal but left to Congressional committees to detail in 2013, would be to gradually raise Medicare eligibility to age 67, to increase co-payments for high income recipients, and to reduce payment rates in areas of the nation that have high Medicare costs. For the long-term, congress should provide funds to the Centers on Medicare and Medicaid Services to conduct demonstrations on premium support in up to five states. The version of premium support envisioned by the Ryan-Wyden and Domenici-Rivlin proposals hold great promise for using market forces to control the growth of health care costs, but we won’t know if premium support will actually work unless we try it.
Entitlement programs other than Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid will cost $630 billion this year. We think it reasonable to achieve $300 billion in savings over ten years in these programs by adopting different COLA adjustments in civilian and military retirement programs, among other reforms.

This modest approach may not turn the Fiscal Grinch into a completely nice guy, but it will at least stop him from throwing the economy off the edge of Mount Krumpet this holiday season. And that may be good enough for now.

Authors

Publication: CNN

A Poverty and Opportunity Agenda: What’s in Store for the Next Four Years

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 09:00:00 -0500

Event Information

December 5, 2012
9:00 AM - 11:30 AM EST

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

Register for the Event
Following an election in which President Obama scored a large victory in the Electoral College, Democrats increased their majority in the Senate, and Republicans maintained control of the House, intense pressure remains – particularly from Republicans – to reduce spending on safety net programs as a means of addressing the nation’s deficit. In addition, tax increases on higher income families will likely be part of the mix.

On December 5, the Center on Children and Families at Brookings and Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity held an event to examine the impact of the election on programs affecting the poor and contributing to opportunity for economic advancement. How has the election affected threats to enact major cuts in anti-poverty programs like Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)?

To answer this and related questions, we heard from two major political figures within the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as well as a panel of experts with extensive experience in previous administrations.

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A Poverty and Opportunity Agenda: What’s in Store for the Next Four Years

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Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

20121205_Poverty_and_opportunity

The Fiscal Cliff: Predictable, Reprehensible, But Still Avoidable

Ron Haskins — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 10:35:00 -0500

As most Americans realize by now, after the election Congress and the president will face a so-called "fiscal cliff." The cliff is a series of tax and spending provisions that will either expire or start right after January 1. All the provisions have the effect of decreasing the deficit by either increasing taxes or reducing spending. If Congress fails to prevent these provisions from being implemented, the simultaneous increase in tax rates and the reductions in government spending, which would total nearly $8 trillion over 10 years according to the Congressional Budget Office, will cause the nation to fall back into recession. To avoid this outcome, Congress can continue its past behavior and kick the can down the road by delaying implementation of the provisions.

Although no one planned for all these provisions to come into play at one time, there can be no doubt that Congress and the president have failed to deal with every element of the cliff until now. Moreover, anyone with a calendar should have known for a year now that these revenue and spending elements of the cliff were going to hit simultaneously shortly after New Year's Eve. Further, there have been any number of opportunities in the last several years to extricate the nation from the geological fault that caused the cliff - the nation's expanding debt.

When Congress reassembles for its lame-duck session on November 13, there are lots of good options that could actually turn the cliff into an occasion for serious and permanent progress on the debt. Here are four elements of a fine compromise, a version of which has been proposed by the Bipartisan Policy Center and that enjoys some support on Capitol Hill (in Las Vegas terms, the odds of this compromise passing during the lame duck session would be about 1 in 100,000 - add more zeros if you like).

First, the various elements of the fiscal cliff would be postponed for six months or so and the debt ceiling raised to avoid another fight over whether the nation is going to actually pay its bills. Second, following regular Congressional procedure, Congress would be given until June 1 to come up with a grand bargain that would result in deficit reduction of a set amount - perhaps $5 trillion over 10 years. The provisions from the Congressional committees involved would be folded into a single bill that Congress would have to consider in an up or down vote with no amendments. Third, the compromise would include an automatic backup plan with tax increases and spending cuts sufficient to produce an equivalent amount of deficit savings should Congress fail to meet its June 1 deadline. Finally, for those opposed to total can kicking, the compromise would include spending cuts over the next ten years of around half a trillion dollars that would become law upon enactment during the lame duck.

This plan is reasonable and potentially effective in making both a down payment on spending cuts in the sequester and simultaneously putting Congress in position to achieve a bipartisan grand compromise that includes tax reform and entitlement reform in the next six months. Of course, this wise and even clever compromise will in all likelihood enjoy the same fate as previously wise proposals like the recommendations of the Bowles-Simpson plan or the Domenici-Rivlin plan—death by Congressional and presidential can kicking.

Although Congress and the president get and deserve a lot of criticism for not taking effective action to reduce the debt and avoid a financial crisis that could cripple the nation's economy for many years, the real problem is the American people. Polls show that Americans are more likely than in the past to say they want serious action on the deficit. But when asked whether they would support broad tax increases and cuts in Social Security or Medicare necessary to reduce the long-term deficit and continued accumulation of debt, they are opposed. The public knows that passing the bill to their children and grandchildren has worked so far. Why change now at the price of incurring a little discomfort?

Without the American people behind spending cuts and tax increases, the pusillanimous political class will continue applying their by now highly perfected routine of can kicking—never mind that every kick brings the nation closer to a financial disaster. The cardinal rule of American politics continues to be: above all, cause no pain.

Authors

Ron Haskins

The Looming Fiscal Cliff: Little Room for Optimism

Ron Haskins — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

With a fiscal cliff created by an ever-escalating deficit, a flimsy debt reduction plan looming, and with Congress in the throes of a lame duck session, the American people are facing tough economic times. Falling off the fiscal cliff means we’ll fall into higher taxes and spending cuts, says Senior Fellow Ron Haskins.

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The Looming Fiscal Cliff: Little Room for Optimism

Authors

Ron Haskins

Can Academic Standards Boost Literacy and Close the Achievement Gap?

Ron Haskins, Richard Murnane, Isabel V. Sawhill and Catherine Snow — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 10:00:00 -0400

Abstract: Good jobs in the nation’s twenty-first-century economy require advanced literacy skills such as categorizing, evaluating, and drawing conclusions from written texts. The adoption of the Common Core State Standards by nearly all the states, combined with tough literacy assessments that are now in the offing, will soon reveal that literacy skills of average students fall below international standards and that the gap in literacy skills between students from advantaged and disadvantaged families is huge. The authors offer a plan to help states develop and test programs that improve the quality of teaching, especially in high-poverty schools, and thereby both improve the literacy skills of average students and narrow the literacy gap.

U.S. schools are struggling to enable students, especially those from poor families, to attain the advanced literacy skills required by the twenty-first-century American economy. One approach to enhancing schools’ efficacy in this area is improved educational standards. Standards are routine in American life. Sports have them; businesses have them; professions have them. Standards are useful in clarifying the knowledge, skills, and competencies that society expects from individuals and organizations. Society also needs a way to determine whether the standards have been met, usually through testing, certification, licensing, or inspection systems. And a respected body of experts must be responsible for maintaining the integrity of the standards.

It is no surprise, then, that standards have become a key part of American primary and secondary education in recent decades. As mandated by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, every state now has standards that specify the skills and knowledge in literacy (and mathematics, which we do not address here) that children should have at specific grade levels. States also have standards that students must satisfy to graduate from high school. In the majority of states, these include passing state-specific English language arts and math exams. Now a new set of national standards has been adopted by nearly every state. These tough standards hold promise for playing an important role in an overall strategy for improving literacy skills for all students, including those from poor families who suffer from a striking literacy deficit. However, as we explain below, the new standards are only one step down a long road.

The Common Core State Standards

Thanks to an ongoing effort by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the fifty separate sets of state standards are being supplanted by a single set. Although we strongly support the standards movement in general and the Common Core State Standards in particular, our object here is to clarify the nation’s literacy problem, to build a case that standards are an important part—but only one part—of solving the literacy problem, and to briefly review the policies that must accompany standards if they are to enable the nation’s schools to make progress in boosting literacy, especially among children from poor families. We conclude with recommendations about using federal dollars to help all children, but especially those from poor families, meet the Common Core standards.

As shown in a recently released issue of The Future of Children, “Literacy Challenges for the Twenty-First Century,” America has a literacy problem—actually, two literacy problems. The basic cause of both is that the literacy skills demanded of Americans by today’s economy far exceed those required only fifty years ago. It is no longer sufficient to define reading as merely the ability to recognize words and decode text. The American economy, responding to technological advances and international competition, has shed blue-collar and administrative support jobs that involve simple operations and minimal reasoning skills while adding jobs that require the ability to select, categorize, evaluate, and draw conclusions from written texts. Think of twenty-first-century literacy as reading plus.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the reading skills of American children are inadequate for the heightened literacy demands of the twenty-first-century economy. Nor do American students perform well on international test score comparisons. U.S. students score lower in reading than students from fourteen other countries on the Programme for International Student Assessment conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. That is literacy problem number one—the literacy skills of the average American student do not match international standards. And although the NAEP scores of recent cohorts of black and Hispanic U.S. students have improved, the gap in average reading skills between students from high- and low-income families has widened. That’s literacy problem number two—in a nation committed to equality of opportunity and economic mobility, a widening literacy gap between students from rich and poor families is a national affront.

Enter the Common Core State Standards. In 2008, at least partly in response to the confusion created by the fifty-one sets of state standards and fifty-one definitions of proficiency that resulted from the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the NGA and the CCSSO set out to work with state educators, researchers, and others to develop detailed common standards in English and mathematics for grades K through 12. The standards, released in 2010, have now been formally adopted by forty-five states and the District of Columbia. The Thomas G. Fordham Institute compared the Common Core State Standards with state standards across the nation and concluded that the Common Core reading standards are more demanding than those of thirty-seven states. States with rigorous standards and the best NAEP scores have embraced the Common Core.

Beyond the Common Core

The impressive procedure followed by the NGA and the CCSSO, combined with the Fordham study, justify the conclusion that the Common Core is an excellent set of standards. If American children were to master the Common Core, they would fare better in international comparisons, the American economy would receive a boost, and the literacy achievement gap between disadvantaged and advantaged children might narrow somewhat—and in any case, disadvantaged children would boost their literacy skills, giving them a better opportunity to compete in the twenty-first-century economy.

But not so fast. Even the best possible standards cannot raise student literacy unless they are part of a larger strategy. Excellent standards are no more than a first step. Research by Grover Whitehurst and by Tom Loveless of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, for example, finds virtually no relationship between the quality of state education standards and the achievement test scores of students in the respective states. These and other studies offer little support for the expectation that even the fine standards developed by the NGA and the CCSSO will, by themselves, improve student learning.

Several articles in the new Future of Children issue identify additional elements of a strategy to boost student achievement in literacy and close the literacy gap. At least four elements stand out. The first is adoption by states of assessments now being designed to accompany the Common Core. These assessments, which will test how well students are performing relative to the Common Core standards, including those in literacy, are now under development by two groups of states with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education. The second is a common system for reporting results that will provide schools, parents, and communities with detailed knowledge about how their students are performing relative to the Common Core and to other communities. The third is a better curriculum that is aligned with the Common Core for every grade and every subject. Above and beyond these three, almost all researchers and practitioners agree, the single most important element in any strategy aiming to boost student literacy and close the literacy gap is improving the quality of teaching. It follows that institutions preparing teachers must undergo a major retooling to produce graduates who know the Common Core, who can teach challenging curricula, and who have developed skills requisite to helping students achieve the standards. Preparing teachers who can help disadvantaged children master the standards will undoubtedly require even greater efforts by schools of education. Similarly, teacher in-service education will need to become much stronger than the current mostly ineffective professional development programs.

In our view, the nation is now making significant progress on only the first of these four elements of a comprehensive strategy that would, together with the Common Core standards, boost average literacy achievement and close the gap. The two groups of states working with assessment firms to develop tests that gauge whether children are actually meeting the Common Core standards are expected to have quality measurement instruments ready by 2014. Then comes the grueling political challenge of developing common performance indicators acceptable both to states like Massachusetts, whose students do quite well on assessments, and other states like Mississippi, whose students’ scores are near the bottom.

If all the states that have adopted the Common Core also adopt the new assessments, a major flaw in NCLB will be resolved. Under pressure from NCLB to show that they could meet its standards, states developed tests and standards that made it easy for students to score as “proficient,” thereby overestimating student performance and obscuring the real comparative information about school, system, and state performance levels. With a common test and indicator system aligned with the Common Core—ideally a system adopted voluntarily by most or even nearly all states—the problem of inflated and misleading tests and indicators will be diminished (although teaching to the test in ways that narrow the curriculum will likely remain a problem).

One virtually certain outcome of the Common Core and the assessments now under development deserves special attention. If states adopt the new assessments that measure students’ mastery of the Common Core literacy standards, the results will show a much larger literacy gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students than revealed by current achievement tests. The more demanding Common Core standards in literacy, based on reading comprehension, conceptual knowledge, and vocabulary as well as accurate and fluent reading, combined with accurate assessments of these skills, will reveal how far disadvantaged children lag behind on these more advanced literacy skills. This finding will ratchet up pressure on states and local school systems to oppose accurate assessments and may reduce the number of states that agree to use the new assessments. Similarly, the light shed on education outcomes may convince states that adopt the new assessments to abandon their use once they see how their students’ poor performance inflames public opinion.

Beyond Standards: What to Do

The solution to the nation’s literacy problems is adopting policies that improve schools, not abandoning accurate assessment instruments. After all, clarity about the nature and magnitude of a problem is critical to solving it. We recommend a strategy, based on recent research, that holds promise for helping students, especially those from poor families, achieve the new level of literacy required for success in the nation’s twenty-first-century economy.

A host of studies document what most parents already know, namely, that good teachers have substantial impacts on student learning. Indeed, we now know that having good teachers for several consecutive years leads to cumulative increases in learning by students, including students from disadvantaged families. Augmenting this already persuasive research is a recent study by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff showing that good teachers raise adult earnings, arguably the most important outcome of education in a society that for the past three decades has been characterized by large increases in inequality and by wage stagnation among workers at the bottom of the income distribution. As a result of this body of research, there is widespread agreement that good teachers can boost learning, increase test scores, and improve life outcomes. Thus, in anticipation that a very large gap in literacy between advantaged and disadvantaged students will be revealed by the new assessments, we stress the importance of improving teaching to help disadvantaged students learn these more complex literacy skills.

The task will be daunting. Numerous studies and surveys show that teachers in schools with high concentrations of students from poor families tend to be ineffective. As studies by Susanna Loeb and her colleagues find, the typical pattern in high-poverty schools is that as teachers accumulate experience and seniority, they tend to exercise their option to move to schools in low-poverty areas, thus creating a continuous inflow of new, inexperienced teachers into high-poverty schools. And a frequently replicated research finding is that the work days of beginning teachers are dominated by classroom management problems, thus causing their students to miss out on many opportunities for learning.

How can high-poverty schools attract and retain better teachers and create the collaborative work environment required for success? Several recent studies provide important clues. First, many teachers leave high-poverty schools because of poor social conditions for their work. Such schools lack the strong leadership, culture of collaboration and shared responsibility for learning, and resources needed to teach their challenging and needy students. Second, teachers, especially novices, are more effective when their grade-level colleagues are effective teachers. Third, the current system of basing teachers’ pay solely on educational credentials, years of teaching experience, and participation in professional development activities does not reward excellent teaching. Fourth, better pay does make a difference in attracting and retaining teachers in high-poverty schools, though it does not compensate for working conditions in which they feel ineffective.

An implication of these findings is that combinations of incentives and accountability can attract teams of effective teachers to high-poverty schools and create the conditions for their success. What is not clear as yet is just what the most effective combinations of incentives and accountability will be. For example, will it be less costly to attract effective teachers to high-poverty schools as individuals or as parts of teams? Is it more effective to hire a school principal and let her select teachers or to recruit a team of effective teachers and let them choose the principal? Will the availability of particular types of professional development attract teachers to high-poverty schools? These are just a few of the many questions that will arise in the process of designing initiatives to improve teaching in high-poverty schools.

We propose a plan to answer these and related questions as well as a way to pay for the plan. The core of the plan is for the federal government, redirecting a significant portion of funds from Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, to initiate a competitive grant program that encourages school systems to design and implement programs to improve teaching and learning in high-poverty schools. As outlined below, to be eligible for an award, the program must combine incentives and accountability.

The system for rating proposals should favor those in which the components, such as curriculum consistent with the Common Core standards, professional development approach, and teacher compensation strategy, have a favorable research base. To assure a balance between evidence-based components and innovative components, proposals that contain elements that show promise but do not yet meet high program evaluation standards, such as those promulgated by the Institute of Education Sciences, would also be eligible for funding. Each proposal must also show how the school system will continuously evaluate the impact of its plan on student literacy scores as measured by the new tests being developed in association with the Common Core. Thus, each school system plan will be evidence-based in two senses: its major parts will be consistent with what is known from the best research available, and its impacts on student literacy skills, especially those of students from disadvantaged families, will be continuously evaluated. The plans can include evidence-based elements that focus on basic reading skills such as those recently reviewed by the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy and the Social Genome Project but must also feature elements that promise to improve the teaching of advanced literacy skills, especially in high-poverty schools.

The Obama administration is well-prepared to implement an evidence-based initiative of this sort because senior officials in the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, and the executive agencies are now implementing six evidence-based initiatives in areas such as teen pregnancy, infant development and parenting, workforce training, and other aspects of education. These initiatives have provided senior administration officials with a wealth of experience in working with Congress to plan and fund evidence-based competitive grant programs.

We are confident that the coming assessment of whether state education systems are meeting the Common Core standards will reveal an expanded literacy achievement gap between children from advantaged and disadvantaged families. The cause will be the new twenty-first-century literacy standards that are specified in the Common Core and that, we assume, will be accurately measured by the assessments scheduled to be implemented in 2014. Rather than wait for the expanded literacy achievement gap to be revealed, U.S. policymakers and educators should begin now to shrink the gap. Based on solid research that supports a strategy centered on improving the quality of teaching in high-poverty schools, our plan would use funds redirected from Title I to help local school systems aggressively implement new programs based on both research-tested and innovative components that hold promise for improving the literacy, and thus improving the life chances, of students from poor families. Once implemented, these new programs could serve as models for school systems throughout the United States. Unless strong new reforms such as these are adopted, the nation will yet again discover that its schools are not meeting the needs of its disadvantaged students.

Additional Reading

Jon Baron and Kerry Searle Grannis, “Improving Reading Achievement for Disadvantaged Children” (Washington: Social Genome Project, Brookings Institution, 2012).

Sheila B. Carmichael and others, The State of State Standards—and the Common Core—in 2010 (Washington: Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2010).

Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff, “The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood,” Working Paper 17699 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2011).

Charles Clotfelter and others, “Would Higher Salaries Keep Teachers in High-Poverty Schools? Evidence from a Policy Intervention in North Carolina,” Journal of Public Economics 92, nos. 5–6 (2008): 1352–70.

Common Core State Standards Initiative, www.corestandards.org.

Arne Duncan, “Beyond the Bubble Tests: The Next Generation of Assessments,” Prepared remarks at Achieve’s American Diploma Project Leadership Team Meeting, Alexandria, Va., September 2, 2010.

Eric A. Hanushek, “The Failure of Input-Based Schooling Policies,” Economic Journal 113 (2003): F64–F98.

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Authors

Ron Haskins
Richard Murnane
Isabel V. Sawhill
Catherine Snow

Publication: The Future of Children