Brookings: Experts - Hugh B. Price

Mobilizing Communities: School Reform's Missing Link

Hugh B. Price — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 16:04:00 -0500

Whenever President Barack Obama addresses the need to improve American education, he invariably mentions a vitally important ingredient that is missing from most school reform recipes. That is the role of parents and communities in motivating youngsters to achieve.

As recently as this winter’s State of the Union address, the president reiterated this point. “We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl that deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair.” I urge President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to use their matchless bully pulpits and convening power to transform exhortation into action.

Most of the energy, resources, and policymaking devoted to improving student performance these days is concentrated on schools and school systems. This makes obvious sense. Yet the emphasis on what happens inside schools overlooks another important facet of the solution, namely the need for communities to create a culture of achievement and encourage youngsters to learn.

In 1997, when I headed the National Urban League, we mounted a Campaign for African-American Achievement. Our ambitious goal was to mobilize civic and social groups, schools, churches, youth-services agencies, libraries, and an array of other community organizations to spread the gospel of achievement. While the campaign admittedly did not live up to my loftiest expectations, we often succeeded in energizing youngsters to take education more seriously and strive to improve academically.

I subsequently wrote a book based on the league’s campaign, titled Mobilizing the Community to Help Students Succeed. In the course of writing it, I came upon persuasive research which substantiates some common-sense notions about the influences that help shape the mind-set of students toward school. For starters, student motivation—or the lack thereof—unquestionably plays a role in spurring academic performance. Also, it is critically important for youngsters to feel valued by adults, be they parents, teachers, or community groups.

Furthermore, children benefit from belonging to positive peer groups that espouse and adhere to constructive values. Frequent recognition and rituals that reward youngsters for their accomplishments, however modest, help stoke motivation. The military figured this out eons ago. Finally, community groups can play an instrumental role in encouraging children to strive to do better in school and enabling them to bask in the glow of being celebrated as achievers.

There are many ways that local school boards and educators; PTAs; and civic, faith-, community-based, and business groups could team up to encourage and recognize academic achievement. For instance, they could designate September as Achievement Month and stage rallies, assemblies, and street fairs that herald the resumption of school and enlist students and parents in attendance to recommit to academic excellence in the coming year.

These groups can establish community-based honor societies, which serve as a coveted form of recognition and peer camaraderie for students who have earned solid, if not stellar, grades in school. Drawing on a model devised by the educator Israel Tribble, the Urban League created a National Achievers Society, or NAS, to recognize “achievers” in grades 3-12 who had earned B averages or better in school. We also saluted so-called “believers,” whose GPAs fell just shy of a B. I vividly recall attending an NAS induction ceremony at Bayview Baptist Church in San Diego for some 350 African-American students, roughly half of whom were boys. An enthusiastic, overflow crowd of nearly 2,000 parents, grandparents, and other well-wishers filled the church that day to cheer the achievers.

A compelling idea for boosting literacy skills is to hold book-reading contests. During the 2000-01 school year, Ronald Ross, the superintendent of schools in Mount Vernon, N.Y., declared that any pupil who read 50 books or more would receive a free bicycle. So many more students exceeded the goal than expected that the community sponsors had to scramble to secure enough bicycles for all the winners.

Schools and community centers can mount achievement fairs akin to county fairs. Like the 4-H members who tout their prize livestock, students could present their science projects or recite the stories and poems they have composed before an appreciative audience of families and community members.

"The whole idea is to envelop youngsters in a culture of achievement. This means keeping up the drumbeat with a series of activities throughout the year."

Communities routinely hold parades to herald a wide array of triumphs. Why not stage Achievement Day parades that celebrate students when they successfully clear key academic milestones, such as graduating from elementary, middle, and high school? Or even when 4th graders and 8th graders pass state exams in reading and math? Since so many youngsters are lagging behind academically, I prefer events that recognize and inspire the maximum number of students.

Activities like these should not be viewed as isolated undertakings. The whole idea is to envelop youngsters in a culture of achievement. This means keeping up the drumbeat with a series of activities throughout the year.

The feedback we received from the youngsters who participated in the Urban League’s campaign suggests that our activities made a favorable impression on them. An assessment conducted by the Academy for Educational Developmentor AED, found that the campaign “fills a long-unmet need for recognition on the part of young African-Americans who excel academically.” The AED report continued: “Focus-group respondents actually marveled at the turn of events whereby their peers were seeking them out to find out how ‘to get one of those [NAS] jackets.’”

The AED also commended the league for creating “believers groups” for students whose grades were not quite good enough to merit induction into the National Achievers Society: Parents, teachers, and even academically marginalized students interviewed by the AED all noted that those groups “promote the philosophy that the community believes that these young people, with extra effort, can become tomorrow’s Achievers.”

For their part, President Obama and Secretary Duncan could jumpstart a community crusade to motivate children to achieve. Consider this scenario: The White House invites the national leaders of a cross section of organizations with vast affiliate networks to attend a summit. The kinds of groups I have in mind are the major civic and social clubs in the very communities that are saddled with high achievement gaps, as well as faith-based organizations, service-oriented business groups like the Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, the National PTA, teachers’ unions, and the national associations representing elementary and secondary school principals.

At the summit, Secretary Duncan would explain the administration’s strategy for improving K-12 education, but also make clear that schools cannot and should not be expected to go it alone. The president would then issue a call to action for community groups to get actively engaged in encouraging youngsters to achieve. Of course, the secretary could deliver this message. But for obvious reasons, it would be even more compelling—and irresistible—if issued personally by President Obama. The participants would then hear presentations about concrete ways that community organizations have gone about motivating youngsters to achieve and celebrating them for doing so. Following these preliminaries, the participants would break out into small groups to discuss the specific kinds of mobilization activities that they could imagine undertaking.

They would then report on the most promising ideas. They would be asked to commit, either on the spot or after consultation with their constituents, to collaborate in designing and implementing a series of, say, three activities in their communities in the coming academic year. The organizations that enlist in this effort would also be expected to reconvene a year or so later for a follow-up summit to review what has transpired, share best practices, and map plans for the second year. If this mobilization effort were to gain sufficient traction, it could become an annual summit, possibly with state or local versions conducted by the participating groups and including other newcomers genuinely committed to the enterprise.

To sustain the energy and engagement of these groups, President Obama could bestow highly coveted awards in various categories upon those outfits that during the past year have done the most effective job of motivating children to achieve.

The education challenges facing our country exceed the capacity of schools and educators to solve them on their own. Real-world experience illustrates the payoff of mobilizing communities to motivate students to achieve. We learned from the Urban League’s Achievement Campaign that youngsters will respond if only the adults in the proverbial village bestir themselves to inspire and then recognize them. Given the fateful stakes for the country and the kids, inertia is not an option.

Authors

Hugh B. Price

Publication: Education Week

Using Military Education and Training Methods to Help Struggling Students and Schools

Hugh B. Price — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:48:00 -0400

The following introductory paragraphs are from an article that was originally printed in the March 2010 edition of the journal for the National Association of State Boards of Education. The fully downloadable version comes courtesy of the National Association of State Boards of Education and The State Education Standard.

In an arresting report released last spring, McKinsey & Company, the noted management consulting firm, issued a stark assessment of the severe price America pays for various achievement gaps, namely those between America and better-performing nations, between black and Latino students and white students, between low-income and other youngsters, and between low-performing students and the rest. According to McKinsey:

“…(T)he persistence of these educational achievement gaps imposes on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession. The recurring annual economic cost of the international achievement gap is substantially larger than the deep recession the United States is currently experiencing.”

Compounding the challenge facing our schools is the reality that basic academic skills are necessary but not sufficient prerequisites for productive workers who are coveted by employers. An illuminating survey conducted by the Conference Board found that the most important skills in the opinion of employers are professionalism, teamwork, oral communications, ethics and social responsibility, and reading comprehension. Looking to the future, the employers surveyed project that the portfolio of necessary skills over the next five years will expand to include foreign language, critical thinking, creativity/innovation, and appropriate choices about their health and wellness.

Academic data tells us that meeting these employers’— and the country’s—needs will be a huge challenge: Minority students, principally Latino and black youngsters, have surged to 42 percent of public school enrollment nationally, up from 22 percent merely three decades ago. Despite heartening gains in some school districts, these economically indispensable young people, along with low-income students generally, consistently lag farthest behind academically. As recently as 2007, roughly half of all 4th graders who qualify for free and reduced-price lunches read “below basic” as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Nationally, about one-third of students drop out of school, with the rate for black and Latino youngsters considerably higher at roughly one-half. Many students repeat grades. Less documented, but no less ominous, are the large numbers of students who lose interest in school and give up trying to achieve. Some schools are failing so miserably that they have been labeled “dropout factories.”

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Authors

Hugh B. Price

Publication: National Association of State Boards of Education

Reflections on a Historic First

Hugh B. Price — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:42:26 -0400

As the clock neared 11 p.m. on the night of July 20, 1969, my wife and I roused our four-year-old daughter out of bed to join us around the electronic hearth, as televisions were quaintly called in those days, to watch astronaut Neil Armstrong become the first human being to set foot on the Moon. For a viewer like me who grew up in the 1940s, witnessing this triumph of American ingenuity, technology and sheer political will bordered on surreal.

As a child, I relished my weekly doses of the futuristic Flash Gordon movie serials where the heroic character played by Buster Crabbe hurtled into outer space aboard rocket ships to planets like Mongo where he did battle against fearsome adversaries like Emperor Ming the Merciless. Yet the prospect that man would someday explore planets in outer space struck me as utterly fanciful. “No way,” I recall muttering, even as I rooted for Flash to prevail.

To invoke a memorable quip by the philosopher Yogi Berra, it felt like deja-vu all over again this week as I watched the Democratic Party nominate Senator Barack Obama, an African American, as its candidate for president. Although flashier and noisier than the Apollo 11 landing, Senator Obama’s riveting acceptance speech and the accompanying spectacle at Invesco Field Thursday night evoked the same sense of awe and utter disbelief even as we viewed the event on our twenty-first-century electronic hearth, a big-screen high definition TV.

During my formative years, schoolteachers and political leaders routinely sought to inspire youngsters with the message that someday we could grow up to become president of the United States. I heard this initially in the segregated public schools for black students that I attended prior to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing school discrimination, and in integrated schools thereafter. “Not in my lifetime,” I vividly remember thinking at the time.

Despite the widespread skepticism that the ultimate glass ceiling in American society would be shattered in any living person’s lifetime, civil rights groups and their allies bravely soldiered on in a resolute crusade to vanquish all vestiges of legally-sanctioned segregation, ensure the vote for all Americans, and expand opportunity in higher education and employment. The history books tell the stories of the heroes of this epic struggle for equality, opportunity and justice—from Martin Luther to Lyndon Johnson, as well as the brave everyday warriors depicted in the award-winning PBS series, “Eyes on the Prize.”

Explanations for the astonishing and swift ascendancy of Barack Obama abound. His diagnosis that vast swaths of voters are totally fed up with the crippling dysfunction in American politics has obviously struck a chord. His youthful zest and his message have energized Gen Xers and younger constituents in unprecedented numbers thus far. While the jury remains out on whether they will vote in November, the historic crowd of 85,000 at the closing proceedings Thursday night suggests that younger people may stay engaged to the finish this time. The fund-raising and community organizing machine that he and his team created has set new high water marks in efficiency and effectiveness.

Then there’s a final point that I noted in an op-ed last June. Support it or not, there’s no doubt that affirmative action greatly accelerated integration on college campuses and in the workplace, thus fueling the expansion of the black middle class and increasing the harmonious exposure of blacks and whites to one another. As Jonathan Kaufman acknowledged in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, “the growth of the middle class and integration of the workplace didn’t only reshape the black community, it transformed the attitudes of many whites as well.” Two generations of Americans have grown up studying together and working together, many of whom are now less inclined to judge political leaders, co-workers and friends based on race, gender or sexual orientation. Barack Obama clearly is the beneficiary of this spirit of open-mindedness.

Notwithstanding the acclamation of Barack Obama and even if he becomes president, the inequities and injustices that continue to afflict black folk will not evaporate. When it comes to race relations, America remains imperfect although ours is unquestionably a more perfect union than any other on earth. To paraphrase Neil Armstrong, Senator Obama’s triumph is one mammoth step for African Americans and America alike.

On the eve of January 1, 2000, it was commonplace to herald the dawn the new era of harmony, opportunity and inclusion in this, the most diverse nation on earth. The terrorists attack on 9/11 put the euphoria on hold. Albeit eight years late, the New Millennium finally arrived this week.

Authors

Hugh B. Price

Mobilizing the Community to Help Students Succeed

Hugh B. Price — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:41:04 -0400

INTRODUCTION

In the spring of 1994, a lifelong professional dream came true when I was selected as president and CEO of the National Urban League. Founded in 1910 and composed of more than 100 local affiliates across the United States, the Urban League is the oldest and largest community-based movement devoted to empowering black Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream.

Convinced throughout my career that education is key to reaching and remaining in the American mainstream, I was determined to make the promotion of academic achievement the centerpiece of my tenure at the Urban League. I knew that far too many black kids, not to mention other minority and low-income students, were lagging behind academically. And I knew that this so-called achievement gap threatened to hold these children back in school and throughout their lives. But to be truthful, beyond zeroing in on this achievement issue, I didn’t yet have a game plan for how the Urban League might leverage its distinctive history and organizational strength to do something about the problem.

When I was in law school, my professors frequently invoked the phrase caveat emptor, which means “buyer beware.” In the spirit of that phrase, I should alert readers of this book that I am not a professional educator. Although I have dabbled over the years in teaching seminars at the undergraduate and law school levels, I have never taught in a K–12 classroom, let alone run a school. So my perspectives and recommendations should be read and weighed with that point in mind.

Nevertheless, I am not a stranger to the issues and imperatives facing K–12 education in the United States. As a senior city administrator in New Haven, Connecticut, I spearheaded the substantial expansion of after-school programs in schools and youth services agencies. I once covered education as an editorial writer with the New York Times. From 1988 through 1994, I served as vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, where I helped conceive and launch the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future and the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Corps, a five-month, quasi-military program aimed at turning around the lives of teenagers who have dropped out of school. On a more personal side, my wife and I are the parents of three daughters, and we interacted extensively with the public schools that educated them. While in law school, I served as a social group worker and mentor for a half-dozen adolescent boys who had frequently been in trouble with the law. Finally, as I’m fond of telling young people in audiences where I’m speaking, I am a “retired kid” with vivid memories of what it was like growing up. Thus, as I embarked on setting the agenda for my administration at the National Urban League, I approached the task, if not as a seasoned educator, from the multiple vantage points of a parent, mentor, journalist, philanthropist, advocate, and (I would like to think) innovator who passionately wants children to succeed in school and schools to succeed by children.

On the eve of my taking office as CEO, a startling article in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye. The author, Ron Suskind (1994), describes how high achievers like Cedric Jennings at Ballou High School in Washington, D.C., were so intimidated by their peers that they refrained from attending a school assembly to receive the scholastic honors awards they had earned. Suskind subsequently received a Pulitzer Prize for this riveting story, which he transformed into the acclaimed book A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League. Here is a look at how Suskind describes Cedric’s experience:

On a recent afternoon, a raucous crowd of students fills the gymnasium for an assembly. Administrators here are often forced into bizarre games of cat and mouse with their students, and today is no exception: To lure everyone here, the school has brought in former Washington Mayor Marion Barry, several disc jockeys from a black radio station and a rhythm-and-blues singer.

A major reason for the assembly, though, has been kept a secret: To hand out academic awards to top students. Few of the winners would show up voluntarily to endure the sneers of classmates. When one hapless teen’s name is called, a teacher must run to the bleachers and order him down as some in the crowd jeer “Nerd.”

The announcer moves on to the next honoree: “Cedric Jennings! Cedric Jennings!” Heads turn expectantly, but Cedric is nowhere to be seen. Someone must have tipped him off, worries Mr. Ballard (the assistant principal). “It sends a terrible message,” he says, “that doing well here means you better not show your face.”

Cedric, at that moment, is holed up in a chemistry classroom. He often retreats here. It is his private sanctuary, the one place at Ballou where he feels completely safe, and where he spends hours talking with his mentor. . . . Cedric later will insist he simply didn’t know about the assembly—but he readily admits he hid out during a similar assembly last year even though he was supposed to get a $100 prize: “I just couldn’t take it, the abuse.” (1994, paras. 11–14)

As I read the article, I kept muttering to myself, “This is utterly unacceptable. We just can’t have this. We must not let our children turn their backs on academic achievement.” Suskind’s article was an epiphany because it helped crystallize for me where the Urban League movement might fit into this picture and what it potentially could do about that so-called achievement gap.

Harking back to the famous opening of the hit TV show Mission: Impossible, the Urban League’s assignment—which I believed we had no choice but to accept—was to mobilize communities to help students succeed. I increasingly became convinced that our job was to galvanize communities to create a pervasive culture of achievement that celebrates and, yes, provides protective cover to achievers, that neutralizes negative peer pressures, and that endeavors to motivate youngsters who scorn academic achievement.

Most of the energy in the contemporary push to improve K–12 schools, boost scholastic performance, and close stubborn achievement gaps is concentrated on accountability and testing, governance and management, curriculum and instruction, strengthened teaching, and school redesign. This is true from the classroom to city hall, from state capitols to the White House. These initiatives unquestionably have merit and appear to be making a positive difference. Yet the persistently poor scholastic performance of far too many youngsters confirms that these measures are not sufficient.

Many a thoughtful article and book has been written about the best ways to improve education and public schools in particular. Numerous experts and observers have weighed in about the obvious importance of parents and caregivers, and I certainly said my piece on this subject in my book Achievement Matters: Getting Your Child the Best Education Possible (Price, 2002). What’s surprising, though, is how little attention has been paid to the responsibility and potential role of the community in fostering academic achievement. Instinct, experience, observation, and research all convince me that these wider social structures can play an indispensable part in promoting literacy and achievement.

This book is written for educators who wish to mobilize their own communities to support student success. It addresses an important gap in the multifaceted strategy that school superintendents, principals, education leaders, and practitioners should pursue in partnership with community groups to maximize their chance of boosting student achievement, especially among those young people who tend to be the hardest to reach and teach. My aim is to provide vivid illustrations of what can be done based on what has actually been done and to share other promising ideas worth trying. I also hope to pass on concrete, real-world tips for implementing a community mobilization effort.

Because my own professional expertise and the examples I cite are rooted in the U.S. experience and, even more specifically, in the experience of minority-majority urban schools, this book will resonate most obviously with U.S. audiences. Yet the fundamental message is not confined by ethnicity or economic status, much less by oceans or national boundaries. Nations around the world contain cities and rural regions with high concentrations of underachieving and unmotivated young people who are at risk of losing hope. It is my hope that this book will prove helpful to educators and community leaders who are determined to boost these youngsters’ academic performance and life prospects.

During 2006–2007, I proudly served as cochair of the Commission on the Whole Child. It was established by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) out of the firm conviction that the success of each learner can be achieved only through a whole child approach, and that teachers, schools, and communities need to forge a new compact based on shared responsibility for the effective education and healthy development of children. The Commission’s report, The Learning Compact Redefined (ASCD, 2007), calls on communities to provide

• Family support and involvement;
• Government, civic, and business support and resources;
• Volunteers and advocates; and
• Support for their districts’ coordinated school health councils or other collaborative structures (p. 3).

With this book I want, in poker parlance, to call and raise the Commission’s recommendations. The real-world experiences captured in this book convince me that well-organized communities working in sync with schools and educators can do even more to stoke students’ desire for achievement. A thoughtfully designed and faithfully executed campaign to motivate youngsters to succeed in school creates a “win–win–win,” for educators, for students, and for entire nations— present and future.

To purchase a copy of Mobilizing the Community to Help Students Succeed please visit the ASCD website.

Authors

Hugh B. Price

Publication: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development

The Obama Victory: Giving Affirmative Action Its Due

Hugh B. Price — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:00:00 -0400

Voters of varying ethnic and economic backgrounds have put an African-American one election away from smashing the loftiest glass ceiling in American society. Predictably, Barack Obama's capture of the Democratic Party nomination for president has triggered a flurry of post-mortems about why this point of inflexion in our nation's history has occurred.

Pundits and pollsters have explanations aplenty. Some say the decline in urban violence has tamped down white anxiety about black people. More and more young voters these days judge candidates on their merits, it's said, instead of their race, gender or sexual preference, for that matter. Racially incendiary political campaigns and ads supposedly are passe.

There is much to be said for these theories. But another explanation rings out that politicians and experts ignore, or perhaps hesitate to utter, because the phrase is as so radioactive politically and legally. I refer, of course, to affirmative action.

I recently attended my 45th reunion at Amherst College in Massachusetts . Four other black classmates entered with me in September 1963 (three of us graduated). In that pre-affirmative action era, we comprised a scant 2 percent of the freshman class. The make-up of the other classes was about the same. As a leading bastion of male education, Amherst accepted no women back then. I vividly recall from prospecting for dates that the women's colleges in the Pioneer Valley weren't any more diverse ethnically.

In those days, the majority of fraternities at my college refused to accept black students. Since the frats served as the hub of most campus social life, I hardly got to know most of my classmates. Last month's reunion made up for a half century of lost opportunity as we discovered the vast commonalities among us in terms of professional aspirations and setbacks, family experiences and joys, physical ailments and laments over deceased classmates.

Two generations of American voters have come of age since I stood with roughly 200,000 people on the Washington Mall on August 28, 1963, straining to hear Rev. Martin Luther King's soul-stirring speech that punctuated the March on Washington . If anything, his words that day resonate even more today in light of the Obama victory. As King intoned, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Since 1963, millions of Americans have studied together and lived together on college and university campuses that are vastly more integrated than they were in my day. We have worked alongside one another in teams in large companies, small businesses, municipal agencies, hospitals and community organizations. As members of the military, we have fought side-by-side in battles and served in close synchronization onboard aircraft carriers. Our colleagues, co-workers and bosses now come in all races, genders and sexual persuasions. We've grown accustomed to seeing someone in addition to white males get elected, pilot spacecraft and smash glass ceilings in every realm of American life.

The growing acceptance of diversity that fueled Senator Obama's victory did not occur by accident or osmosis. It wasn't the result of immaculate reconciliation. No, it took years of conscious and conscientious affirmative action by the gatekeepers of opportunity-in college admissions, in hiring and promotion, in the allocation of business opportunity-to systematically expose two generations of Americans to one another and gradually teach a gratifyingly large proportion of the population to understand and trust, respect and rely upon one another.

As we strive this election season to rise above ethnicity, let us give this powerful-and patently successful-engine of social and racial progress its due. Affirmative action unquestionably has made our robustly diverse nation a more perfect union.

Authors

Hugh B. Price

Publication: Real Clear Politics

About-Face! A Case for Quasi-military Public High Schools

Hugh B. Price — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:00:00 -0400

Quasi-military public high schools offer a safe environment, academic excellence—and a surprising focus on the whole child.

Introduction

Last fall, the Washington Post ran a dispiriting set of articles about Coolidge High School in Washington, D.C. The articles caught my eye because Coolidge is my alma mater, circa 1959. The stories featured a student who was bright but unmotivated and perpetually skating on thin ice academically, well-intentioned parents who were clueless about the fact that their son frequently skipped class, teachers who struggled to capture the attention of their students and maintain order in the classroom, and a central school administration so inept that it routinely registered students in courses that they had already passed. According to one 12th grader,

Coolidge is just like a zombie zone. You see these kids walking in the hallway; that's because they have no other choice. Because they feel like when they're in class, the teachers don't connect, and you don't want to feel dumb. (Parker, 2007).A Coolidge social sciences teacher offered a similarly downbeat appraisal: "The classes are not going anywhere, and the students are not going anywhere" (Parker, 2007).

Federal and state reform efforts have yet to change the Coolidge High Schools of America. Far from leaving no child behind, the mantra of these deeply flawed schools seems to be survival of the most resilient.

It does little good to point the finger of blame at students, parents, communities, educators, or schools. But it also makes no sense to perpetuate the mismatch between what these schools offer and what their students need. For the millions of youngsters who are faring miserably in public schools as we know them, we urgently need new approaches.

Military Alternatives

The U.S. military is one promising place to look for insights and ideas. After all, the military enjoys a well-deserved reputation for reaching, teaching, and training young people who were rudderless. What's more, for many years various branches of the military have either operated or collaborated with public schools in operating alternative schools, schools within schools, extracurricular programs, and youth corps for dropouts.

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Hugh B. Price

Publication: Educational Leadership

Wright Defends Sermons as Debate Over Race Continues

Hugh B. Price — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:00:00 -0400

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama's longtime pastor, defended the fiery sermons that have become an issue on the campaign trail and criticized what he called an "attack on the black church." Hugh Price, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, discusses Wright's impact on the presidential race.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Asked late today about Wright's speech, Senator Obama told reporters in Wilmington, North Carolina, quote, "I have said before and I will say again that some of the comments Reverend Wright has made offend me, and I understand why they have offended the American people. Certainly what the last three days indicates is we are not coordinating with him." Hugh Price, do you agree he's saying what needs to be said?

HUGH PRICE: Well, I think it's certainly understandable that he would feel the need to defend his viewpoint, his church and the black church. And it's not surprising that it would happen. So I think we have to push past that. Senator Obama is his own man. He's running for president on a very different platform, obviously. And I think that the key is for him to move on with his campaign and the reason why he's running and to not get caught up in what Reverend Wright has to say.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we heard Obama, a quote, a statement from Obama late today. And I'll turn back to you, Hugh Price. He said, "Some of his comments offend me. I know they offend many Americans. I understand that. And we're not coordinating with each other." Is there more he could say at this point?

HUGH PRICE: I don't think there's any more he can say or do. He does not have control over Reverend Wright's speaking schedule, much less what comes out of his mouth. So I think he's got to move on and remind people of why he's running in the first place, remind people of the priority issues that they need to be worrying about, the economy, security, et cetera, and talk about why he will make a difference as president and why he should be elected. He has no control over what Reverend Wright says, nor does he have much control over the extent of media coverage that he gets, not to mention how much coverage he gets on YouTube. Barack Obama has no control over that.

Watch the full show or read the interview »

Authors

Hugh B. Price

Publication: Newshour with Jim Lehrer

Economic Mobility in America

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:00:00 -0400

Event Information

March 20, 2008
9:00 AM - 11:45 AM EDT

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

A comprehensive look at the trends and issues that drive economic opportunity in America was released last month in a new volume by Brookings experts, "Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America." On March 20, the Center on Children and Families at Brookings and the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project held a forum to discuss the findings on gender, race, immigration, and families in addition to new findings on education, international comparisons, trends, and wealth.

Americans have long believed that those who work hard can achieve success and that each generation will be better off than the last one. This belief has made Americans more tolerant of growing inequality than the citizens of other advanced nations. But how much opportunity to get ahead actually exists in America? Brookings experts Julia Isaacs, Isabel Sawhill, and Ron Haskins provide new evidence on both the extent of intergenerational mobility in America and the factors that influence who succeeds and who does not.

After a review of findings by the authors, the forum featured other scholars, advocates, journalists, and campaign advisors who responded to the findings. With the slowing economy being foremost in voters’ minds today, participants examined the findings in the context of challenges that will confront the new administration.

Speakers and panelists took questions from the audience.

Video

Transcript

Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

20080320_mobility

Participants

ModeratorPanelists

John Morton

Director, Economic Mobility Project, The Pew Charitable Trusts

Stuart Butler

Vice President for Domestic and Economic Policy Studies, The Heritage Foundation

Ronald Mincy

Professor of Social Policy and Social Work Practice, Columbia University

Timothy Smeeding

Professor and Director of the Center for Poverty Research, Syracuse University

James Bognet

Former Policy Development Director, Romney for President, Inc.

Ian Solomon

Legislative Counsel, Office of Senator Barack Obama

Leo Hindery

Managing Partner, InterMedia Partners, and former Senior Economic Advisor, John Edwards for President

Doug Holtz-Eakin

Senior Policy Advisor, John McCain 2008

Gene Sperling

Chief Economic Advisor, Hillary Clinton for President

Mobilizing to Fight Childhood Obesity

Hugh B. Price and Oliver W. Sloman — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:00:00 -0500

The escalating campaign against childhood obesity gained a resourceful new ally this month when the national YMCA proclaimed that it intends to become America’s leading anti-obesity crusader. With their pervasive local presence and their fitness facilities, YMCA branches will bring many welcome assets to the effort. The challenge now is to link community agencies like the Y, as well as local schools, with health care professionals who can help children and their families ward off obesity and curtail the accompanying chronic illnesses.

Childhood obesity is one of the most urgent and serious health threats confronting our nation. During the last four decades, obesity rates have soared nearly fivefold among children between the ages of 6 and 11. More than one-third of children and adolescents are overweight or obese. As the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation warns, if our nation fails to reverse this ominous trend, we’re in danger of raising the first generation of American children who will live sicker and die younger than the generation before them.

The well-documented culprits include poor diet, insufficient exercise and genetics. Researchers are focusing increasingly on other social and physiological influences that exacerbate these familiar explanations. Evidently the odds of becoming obese are much higher among people with obese friends. One hunch is that those pervasive images of obese hip-hop performers bedecked in "bling" in rap videos reinforce the message to impressionable young people that obesity is cool.

Prevention, promotion of healthy lifestyles, and management of chronic disease have been second-class citizens under the health care finance system. The good news is that a survey released last fall by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the nation’s schools have made considerable improvements in nutrition, fitness and health over the last six years. The federal government as well as insurers and employers are beginning to flex their muscle by prodding Medicaid patients and employees to take better care of their health.

These initiatives move us in the right direction. Yet the staggering scale of the epidemic means all-out combat against childhood obesity. We need, in military terms, more boots on the ground. In other words, we should deploy vastly more health care professionals, namely doctors, nurses and nurses’ aides, physical fitness specialists and more to help children and their families cope with and overcome obesity.

Our idea is to mobilize retired physicians and health care workers to serve their country by joining in a crusade to combat childhood obesity, especially in those communities and among the children where the problem is most acute. They could serve in schools, YWCAs, Boys and Girls Clubs, community centers, neighborhood clinics, childcare centers, churches and other venues where they can establish and sustain regular contact with children and their families.

Health care professionals who have retired, or are on the cusp of retiring, constitute a potentially vast resource that could be tapped. According to the National Association of Retired Physicians, 250,000 doctors are age 55 or over. As these baby boomers wind down their practices, many undoubtedly will have the interest, energy and public spiritedness to contribute their time and expertise to a pressing cause like combating childhood obesity.

Several approaches to mobilizing retirees come to mind. One way is to emulate and expand the many local efforts already under way. Another is to call upon states to take the initiative.

There arguably is a more logical, convenient and potentially scalable option. The Corporation for National and Community Service is the independent federal agency created in 1994 to oversee domestic community service programs like AmeriCorps, VISTA and the Senior Corps. The latter connects 500,000 volunteers age 55 and older with people and organizations that need support.

We could create a Retired Health Care Professionals Corps under the aegis of the Senior Corps, with volunteers deployed to keep kids from becoming overweight and obese, to assist helping overweight and obese children to lose weight and adopt healthier lifestyles and to help overweight and obese youngsters manage the chronic illnesses that may develop as a result of their condition.

As with any novel endeavor, a number of thorny issues must be addressed and resolved. For instance, besides tapping pediatricians and family practitioners, could a former cardiologist be of service? Would volunteers be obliged to carry malpractice insurance? And, to what extent could these physician-volunteers function from home?

A careful feasibility analysis to answer these questions is a logical next step. Aligning an underutilized asset with an urgent societal need, the Retired Health Care Professional Corps could prove to be an invaluable weapon in America’s fight against childhood obesity.

Authors

Hugh B. Price
Oliver W. Sloman

Publication: McClatchy-Tribune

Mobilizing Retired Physicians to Fight Childhood Obesity

Hugh B. Price and Oliver Sloman — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Hardly a month goes by without a new headline bemoaning the phenomenon of childhood obesity or touting new signs of progress in combating the epidemic. "Obese kids face higher risk of heart disease in adulthood," reported the Wall Street Journal as recently as December.² "Schools found improving on nutrition and fitness," according to the New York Times last October. ³

The authoritative Robert Wood Johnson Foundation argues that childhood obesity is one of the most urgent and serious health threats confronting our nation. The epidemic afflicts and endangers members of every race and ethnic group, as well as all income levels and in every region of the country. During the past four decades, obesity rates have soared nearly fivefold among children between the ages of 6 and 11.⁴ More than one-third of children and adolescents are overweight or obese. In raw numbers, that’s nearly 25 million kids and teenagers. As the Foundation warns, if our nation fails to reverse this ominous trend, we’re in danger of raising the first generation of American children who will live sicker and die younger than the generation before them.

Childhood obesity demonstrably increases the risk of coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, kidney disease and related serious illnesses. The damage doesn’t even wait until the overweight youngsters reach adulthood. Diagnoses of early hypertension and full-blown high blood pressure started creeping up among children and adolescents beginning in late 1980s, rising among American children for the first time in decades.⁵ As Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, observed:

"Typically in the past we didn’t begin to see high blood pressure until someone was in their 30s or 40s. This is another piece of evidence suggesting that the obesity epidemic will likely turn into a heart disease epidemic." ⁶

The well-documented culprits include poor diet, insufficient exercise and genetics.⁷ Researchers are focusing increasingly on other social and physiological influences that exacerbate these familiar explanations. For instance, they are examining why it’s difficult to maintain diets over time and why dieters recidivate so frequently. Also, obesity can be socially contagious, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.⁸ In other words, the odds of becoming obese are much higher among people with obese friends. I also hunch that those pervasive images of obese hip hop performers bedecked in “bling” in rap videos on MTV and BET reinforce the message to impressionable young people that obesity is cool.

The way the healthcare system by and large works hardly helps. Prevention, promotion of healthy lifestyles, and management of chronic disease are second class citizens under the healthcare finance system. As Jeanne Lambrew, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, observes, delivering preventive services is time-consuming. It would be a challenge even for dedicated primary care physicians to devote the desired amount of time to prevention.⁹ To make matters worse, insurers often decline to cover these services and the supply of physicians who are trained to emphasize prevention is shrinking. Although prevention has long been considered a cornerstone of pediatrics, it appears that pediatricians focus less than they should and could on preventing their young patients from becoming overweight.¹⁰ As Sonia Caprio observes in the Future of Children:

“Most pediatric primary care providers are not trained to provide the extensive counseling on nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle changes that is required to treat obesity, and most a pessimistic that treatment can be successful. Most also have insufficient time and attention to dedicate to the obese child, a problem compounded by lack of reimbursement by their-party payers. Pediatricians also lack support services, especially access to mental health professionals, nutritionists, or exercise physiologists. And they are frustrated by insufficient patient motivation and a lack of parental concern.” ¹¹

Thus is it comes as no surprise, for instance, that in conjunction with a study conducted by Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, researchers observed that doctors actually calculated a child’s body mass index in only one out of 55 pediatric visits. ¹²

Two of the most promising opportunities for breakthroughs in healthcare in the 21st century lie at opposite ends of the treatment continuum. At one end, genomics will bring dramatic advances in the identification, diagnosis, treatment and cure of illness and disease. At the opposite end of the continuum, a heightened emphasis on education, prevention, detection, monitoring, and management could forestall the onset of chronic illnesses and keep them from escalating into costly, debilitating and life-threatening diseases.

Given the causes and consequences of childhood obesity, the challenge is to rally the nation’s policymakers, families, schools and healthcare providers to contain and reverse this ominous epidemic. Happily, much encouraging work is well underway. A survey released last fall by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the nation’s schools have made considerable improvements in nutrition, fitness and health over the last six years. ¹³More schools require physical fitness and fewer sell French fries. More states insist that elementary schools schedule recess and school districts like Miami are issuing personalized fitness reports for students that list their abdominal crunches and the pace of their one-mile runs along with their body mass index scores.

Increasing numbers of schools offer salads and vegetables and fewer of them allow bake sales. The CDC reports that 30 percent of school districts have banned junk food from school vending machines, up from 4 percent in 2000. What’s also encouraging is that according to a recent study by the University of Minnesota, school lunch sales don’t decline when healthier meals are served, and more nutritious lunches don’t necessarily cost schools more to produce.¹⁴ The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in New York City has gotten into the act by launching a “Healthy Bodegas” initiative which aims at encouraging neighborhood convenience stores to sell more nutritious food.

The federal government contemplated weighing in with national guidelines that would forbid the sale of candy, sugary soda and salty fatty food in school snack bars, vending machines and cafeteria lines. Not surprisingly, the potential federal guidelines generated intense lobbying and amusing anomalies about what is considered nutritional. Food manufacturers wanted exemptions for chocolate milk, sports drinks and diet soda.¹⁵ Jelly beans and Popsicles would be verboten because of their minimal nutritional value.¹⁶ But Snickers candy and Dove bars would be acceptable because they contain some nutrients. Some parents complained that the feds are killjoys for frowning on cupcakes even for Halloween and birthday parties. However, the guidelines failed to gain sufficient political traction to be incorporated in the major farm bill destined for Congressional action at the end of last year.¹⁷

The campaign to combat childhood obesity extends beyond promoting or legislating healthier eating habits. A legal settlement reached in California construes childhood diabetes as a disability that requires the schools to have trained personnel on site who can assist diabetic children.¹⁸ Several other states have enacted legislation that allows non-medical staff in schools to be trained to administer insulin and help students monitor their blood sugar levels. The American Academy of Pediatrics has called on pediatricians to make obesity screening and counseling routine parts of children’s checkups.

In some locales, integrated chronic care models show promise of improving health care delivery and outcomes for families and thus for children. For instance, Inter-Mountain Healthcare in Utah and Idaho operates a cost-efficient, high touch, high tech diabetes prevention/management program that enables endocrinologists to read charts and lab reports at home, supplemented by nurses in clinics who maintain personal contact with patients and stay on their case. On the theory that patients and healthcare professionals need to understand the critical role of lifestyle in preventing and treating disease, there is even a fledgling effort to make so-called “lifestyle medicine” a credentialed clinical specialty and part of basic medical training. ¹⁹

Another intriguing approach envisions cadres of community healthcare workers whose backgrounds resemble those of the people they serve and who come from similar neighborhoods.²⁰ The rationale is that socioeconomic compatibility will enable these workers to better reach residents who face cultural, economic or linguistic barriers to accessing and navigating the healthcare system. These community health workers would provide people with information about common diseases and the importance of primary care, help them sign up for Medicaid, supply information on where they can go for medical care, promote continuity of care by helping them keep appointments, receive lab results and make referrals, monitor compliance with prescribed regimens, and communicate with healthcare providers about the needs and circumstances of neighborhood residents

Finally, the federal government as well as insurers and employers are beginning to flex their muscle by prodding Medicaid patients and employees to take better care of their health. For example, the State of West Virginia plans to reward responsible patients with significant extra benefits and punish those who do not join weight loss programs where indicated.²¹ Medicaid recipients who sign and abide by the agreement with the state would be eligible to receive enhanced benefits, including mental health counseling, long-term diabetes management and cardiac rehab, prescription drugs, and home health visits as needed, as well as antismoking and anti-obesity classes. Those who do not sign up will get the federally required basic services, but they would be limited to four prescriptions a month and be denied other enhanced benefits.

The specter of denying recipients needed medical services raises nettlesome issues about medical ethics and fundamental fairness.²² The concern extends especially to children, who should be assured of receiving necessary medicines and treatment even if their parents do not adhere to these agreements.

Initiatives such as these move in the right direction and they evidently have begun making a difference. Even so, it’s important to be mindful of the staggering scale of the epidemic – 25 million American children are overweight or obese -- and the horrific consequences of failing to overcome it. America needs a sense of urgency about this pernicious epidemic because the danger and eventual damage tick away like an unobtrusive time bomb, with the near-term and long-term health of obese children gradually deteriorating from one year to the next. As Jennifer Baker, an epidemiologist who was the lead author of a study that substantiated the strong link between children’s weight and their risk of developing coronary heart disease in adulthood, noted:

"In our study, at age 7, the risks were moderate, but by the age of 13, the risks had increased dramatically. This suggests that even in the short period of childhood, there’s a possibility of intervention to help these children reduce their future risk,"²³

This arresting combination of scale and urgency, coupled with the truncated window of opportunity to favorably impact children’s health prospects, means that society must not be content with the current level of effort or arsenal of weapons to combat childhood obesity. Given the highly personal nature of lifestyle choices, the complex human dynamics involved, and the impact of social networks and cultural signals, I submit that we need, in military terms, more “boots on the ground.” The prevention, monitoring and management of chronic illness is people-intensive because it must take account of the social and psychological forces that impact patient behavior, i.e., disinclination, disinterest, denial, lethargy, naiveté, anxiety, ignorance, and inclination to procrastinate until a scary health crisis grabs their attention.

As Christina Paxson et al observe in the issue of The Future of Children devoted to childhood obesity, a review of the evidence suggests several promising interventions, one of which is “to implement obesity-prevention initiatives that involve and benefit both children and their parents.”²⁴ The answer, in my view, is to deploy vastly more healthcare professionals, namely doctors, nurses and nurses’ aides, physical fitness specialists and so forth to help children and their families cope with and overcome obesity. The self-evident way to do this is to train, employ and pay them to play this critical role. That would be a costly proposition, however, and perhaps not the option of first resort, especially given the severely strapped fiscal climate at the federal, state and local levels.

There may in fact be a less costly alternative that could help enlist more healthcare professionals in this cause. My idea is to mobilize retired physicians and healthcare workers to serve their country by joining in a crusade to combat childhood obesity, especially in those communities and among the children where the problem is most acute. They could be deployed to schools, YWCAs, Boys and Girls Clubs, community centers, neighborhood clinics, childcare centers, churches and other venues where they can establish and sustain regular contact with children and, equally important, their families. The YMCA, which recently unveiled a new strategic plan which envisions it as America’s paramount fitness and anti-obesity crusader, would be a natural partner for a national/local initiative like this because of its institutional commitment, its presence in communities across the country and its fitness facilities on site.²⁵

Our nation's healthcare professionals who have retired or are on the cusp of retiring constitute a potentially vast resource that could be tapped. According to the National Association of Retired Physicians, 250,000 doctors are age 55 or over. As these baby boomers wind down their practices, many undoubtedly will have the interest, energy and public spiritedness to contribute their time and expertise to a pressing cause like combating childhood obesity.

There are plenty of precedents for mobilizing retirees to help under-served patients. In Boston, a program known as Bedside Advocates recruits retired doctors, nurses, physicians’ assistants, and even lay people to help patients stay on their medications and navigate the healthcare system. Retired doctors, nurses, social workers and dieticians in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, staff a so-called MediVan for the elderly on a rotating basis. In Sarasota, FL, retired doctors and nurses operate a 24-hour clinic called the Senior Friendship Centers Health Service. Retired physicians also started a free health clinic, aptly known as Volunteers in Medicine (VIM), in Hilton Head, SC. As Dr. Jack McConnell, the founder of VIM, observed:

"I feel strongly that volunteerism is the wave of the future for retired physicians. They are a priceless commodity waiting to be tapped. The group of physicians I initially approached about the clinic, the ones who didn’t think we could ever achieve our goal, are nearly all on board our staff now."²⁶

Several approaches to mobilizing retirees come to mind. One way is to encourage inspired local efforts that train their resources on overweight and obese children. Another is to call upon states to take the initiative.

Yet there arguably is a more logical, convenient and potentially scalable option. The Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) is the independent federal agency created in 1994 to bring the full panoply of domestic community service programs under the umbrella of one central organization. CNCS oversees AmeriCorps, VISTA and the Senior Corps. The latter connects roughly 500,000 volunteers aged 55 and older with people and organizations that need support. They serve as companions to senior citizens, mentors to youngsters, and supplemental staff and advisors to nonprofit groups. In addition to its established programs, CNCS’s assets include its federal standing and funding, programmatic credibility, history and tradition, administrative infrastructure, and state and local affiliations.

What about creating a Retired Healthcare Professionals Corps under the aegis of the Senior Corps? Its sole mission would be to combat childhood obesity at the community level. What would these volunteers do? I envision them focusing on: (1) keeping kids from becoming overweight and obese; (2) helping overweight and obese children lose weight and adopt healthier lifestyles; and (3) helping overweight and obese youngsters manage the chronic illnesses that may develop as a result of their condition. Accordingly, the services they provide might include: advising about fitness and wellness training; monitoring healthy eating habits, weight control, and stress management; maintaining appropriate cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure levels; providing screening and risk identification; regularly tracking of key health indicators; and referring youngsters for medical treatment, tests and prescriptions as need be.

As with any novel endeavor, a number of thorny issues must be addressed and resolved, among them:

What categories of specialists should be eligible to serve? Obvious candidates given their training include pediatricians, family practitioners, and primary care and internal medicine physicians. It’s worth figuring out whether physicians from other disciplines, such as cardiology, obstetrics and gynecology, pulmonary medicine and orthopedics, could handle a prevention oriented caseload as well.
Should competition with active healthcare providers be avoided, and if so how? The whole point of this corps is to supplement not supplant the existing healthcare system. Perhaps the volunteers should be classified as non-practitioners and be obliged to refrain from offering diagnoses, ordering prescriptions or lab tests. Some of the volunteer clinics require that active physicians oversee the retirees.
Should members of this corps be required to carry medical malpractice insurance? A number of states have enacted charitable immunity laws that protect volunteer physicians by making them employees of the state with liability protection. If the corps operates under CNCS, perhaps the agency could provide blanket coverage for the volunteers.
Should initial certification and continuing education be required? Volunteers at VIM stay abreast of emerging medical issues, knowledge and methods by being required to take 20 hours of medical courses each year. The clinic also sponsors weekly lunch-time meetings and seminars for the staff. Could web-based continuing education courses serve this purpose?
What are the desired staffing requirements and ratios on site, say, in schools or community centers? Can nurses and allied health people serve as the primary point of contact with children and families? Is it essential to the credibility and effectiveness of this corps that physicians actually appear on site and to what extent? To what degree can they function from home using technology to read patients’ charts and track their progress?
What is the most reliable way to determine up front whether sufficient numbers of physicians would enlist in order to justify creating the corps? Ditto whether volunteers would accept assignments in the communities where childhood obesity is most acute?
Will enough retired nurses and other allied health workers, whose financial circumstances differ from doctors, enlist in order to staff the local sites? Is it necessary to provide modest compensation?
Will sufficient numbers of community-based institutions, such as schools, churches and neighborhood centers, be willing to host the corps in order to make this program work?
What administrative mechanisms should be installed in order to ensure that volunteers honor their time commitments and that patients can count on receiving the promised services?
What provision should be made for monitoring the local operation and quality of assistance provided to ensure that beneficiaries are well-served?
The ultimate question, which can only be answered once this corps is operational, is whether volunteer doctors, nurses and allied health workers manage to establish a presence in the lives of imperiled children that is robust, persuasive and trusted enough to overcome the impact of bad habits, inertia, ignorance, social influences and pop culture?

To help answer these and others questions that may arise, the logical next step, as former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher suggests, is to conduct a careful feasibility analysis. If the concept clears the initial plausibility threshold, then the follow-up task is to flesh out the operational design, namely how it would work, whether and how it should be aligned with and administered by the Corporation for National and Community Service, how much it will cost, how can be funded, and so forth.

The Retired Healthcare Professionals Corps envisioned here constitutes a unique opportunity to align a sizable yet underutilized asset with an urgent societal need. The corps could well become an invaluable weapon in America’s fight against childhood obesity.

1. Hugh B. Price is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He previously served as President and CEO of the National Urban League and as Vice President of the Rockefeller Foundation. The author wishes to thank Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins, Co-Directors of the Center for Children and Families at Brookings. The author is immensely grateful as well to Oliver Sloman for invaluable research assistance and input into this paper.
2. Rachel Zimmerman, "Obese Kids Face Higher Risk of Heart Disease in Adulthood," Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2007, p. D6.
3. Kevin Sack, “Schools Found Improving on Nutrition and Fitness,” New York Times, October 20, 2007, p. A10.
4. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, "RWFJ – Program Areas – Childhood Obesity -- What We Fund"(http://www.rwjf.org/programareas/approach.jsp?pid=1138 [January 2008]).
5. Rob Stein, "More Kids Developing High Blood Pressure,” Washington Post, September 11, 2007, p. A01.
6.Ibid.
7. Patricia M. Anderson and Kristin F. Butcher, “Childhood Obesity: Trends and Potential Causes,” in The Future of Children, published by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Brookings Institution, vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 2006), p. 24.
8. Carol Graham, Ross Haymond and Peyton Young, “Obesity and the Influence of Others,” Washingtonpost.com’s Think Tank Town, August 21, 2007 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/20/AR2007082001454.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 [January 2008]).
9. Jeanne M. Lambrew, “A Wellness Trust to Prioritize Disease Prevention,” Discussion paper prepared for The Hamilton Project (Brookings, April 2007), p. 10.
10. Nancy Wartik, "Rising Obesity in Children Prompts Call to Action," New York Times, August 26, 2003, p. 5.
11.Sonia Caprio, "Treating Child Obesity and Associated Medical Conditions," in The Future of Children, vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 2006), p. 210.
12. Wartik, "Rising Obesity in Children," p. 5.
13. Sack, “Schools Found Improving,” p. A10.
14. Steve Karnowski, “Study: Kids Will Eat Healthy School Food,” The Associated Press, November 26, 2007 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/25/AR2007112500860.html?tid=informbox [January 2008]). 15.Kim Severson, "Effort to Limit Junk Food in Schools Faces Hurdles," New York Times, December 2, 2007, p. 32.
16. Andrew Martin, "The School Cafeteria, on a Diet," New York Times, September 5, 2007, p. C1.
17. Christina Samuels, “School Nutrition Measure is Dropped from Farm Bill,” Education Week, January 9, 2008, p. 18.
18.Anita Manning, “California Schools Required to Give Medical Help to Kids with Diabetes,” USA Today, August 9, 2007, p. 1.
19. Kate Murphy, "Teaching Doctors to Teach Patients about Lifestyle," New York Times, April 17, 2007, p. 6.
20. Martha Ross and Kathy Patrick, “Leaders Among Us: Developing a Community Health Worker Program in Washington, DC,” Policy brief prepared for the Medical Homes DC Area Health Education Center (Brookings Greater Washington Research Program, October 2006).
21. Erik Eckhom, “Medicaid Plan Prods Patients Toward Health,” New York Times, December 1, 2006, p. 1.
22. Ibid.
23. Zimmerman, "Obese Kids Face Higher Risk," p. D6.
24. Christina Paxson, Elisabeth Donahue, C. Tracy Orleans, and Jeanne Ann Grisso, “Introducing the Issue,” in The Future of Children, vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 2006), p. 12.
25. David Crary, "YMCA Tackles America’s Health Crisis," The Associated Press, January 11, 2008 (http://cbs3.com/health/YMCA.Health.Fat.2.628341.html [January 2008]).
26. Tom Graves, "Open Arms, Healing Hands," Tennessee Alumnus, Spring 1996 (http://pr.tennessee.edu/alumnus/spring96/openarms.html [January 2008]).

Authors

Hugh B. Price
Oliver Sloman

Quasi-Military Approaches to Educating Students Who Are Struggling in School and in Life

Hugh B. Price — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Opening Remarks by Hugh Price

On behalf of the Center for Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, I want to welcome you to our policy forum on the topic of quasi-military approaches to educating students who are struggling in school and in life.

We are focusing today an interesting new set of ideas that address what I consider to be the paramount domestic challenge of our time, which is education.

Several factoids illustrate my point. The academic skills needed in the work place are beginning to converge with the skills required for success in the first year of college. The academic preparedness of the recruitment pool is one key to the quality of the all- volunteer military force. Therefore, it's a national defense issue.

The U.S. economy will rely increasingly upon Latino, African-American, and low-income young people in the labor force. Minority students have surged to 42 percent of public school enrollment in this country. That's up from 22 percent merely three decades ago. Yet these economically indispensable young people, along with low-income youngsters, consistently lag farthest behind academically.

We've made gratifying progress in some respects. Even so, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it is still the case that as recently as this year, 50 percent of Latino fourth graders read below basic, and 30 percent perform below basic in math. Fifty-four percent of African-American fourth graders read below basic, and 36 percent perform below basic in math. Also, 50 percent of youngsters who are eligible for free and reduced lunch performed below basic in reading.

The imperative to boost youngsters from below basic to basic and beyond transcends ethnicity. White students comprise roughly one third of all youngsters who are scoring in the lowest quintile, according to NAEP.

We also know that alarming numbers of Latino and African-American youngsters are dropping out of high school. Only about 50 percent of black students and roughly 55 percent of Latinos graduate from high school. Recently there has been a spate of articles about so-called drop-out factories, namely high schools that perform very poorly when it comes to graduating youngsters. Less documented, but no less ominous is the phenomenon of student disengagement.

This is why I embarked on a search for new ways to help young people who are not performing well in school and who have struggles in their lives get up to speed academically. We prepared a paper at Brookings that focuses on what can be learned from the military about educating and developing young people who are struggling in school and in life.

Why am I, as someone who never served in the military, interested in this issue? My curiosity dates back to when I was growing up here in Washington, D.C. I remember how some of my classmates in my middle school and high school, fellows we quaintly called knuckleheads and thugs, would drop out of school. A few years later, I'd encounter them. They had either enlisted in the Army or else been drafted. They were ramrod straight in their uniforms, full of purpose. I didn't know what had transformed them, but I knew something in that two-year period, in that experience in the military, had transformed them.

I've heard it said that the military invests more in understanding human development than any other institution on earth. The military arguably has the best track record in our society when it comes to training and advancing minorities.

In conjunction with the paper that we prepared for Brookings, we looked at basic training, JROTC and the JROTC academies, and public military schools. We also learned about a fascinating program that ran for a while in Mississippi called the Pre-Military Development Program. It was for young people trying to get into the Army who couldn't pass the qualifying test. So they enrolled in this intense program. In a matter of five or six weeks on average, they gained a grade and a half or two grades in reading and math. We also looked at the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program. This is a quasi-military residential youth corps for youngsters who have actually dropped out of school.

In the course of looking at these programs, we identified certain generic and common attributes across many of them. These include an emphasis on belonging, a strong focus on motivation and self-discipline, emphasis on academic preparation, close mentoring and monitoring of how youngsters are doing, accountability and consequences, demanding schedules, teamwork, valuing and believing in the young people, believing that they can succeed, structure and routine, frequent rewards and recognition, and of course, an emphasis on safe and secure environments.

Over the last couple of years I have been co-chairing a Commission on the Whole Child for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum and Development. The entire thrust of the commission is that for kids who are not functioning well in school, it isn't enough to focus strictly on academic preparation. These youngsters have a lot of issues and needs in their lives that have to be addressed as well if they're going to become successful students and successful adults. The Commission is convinced that we must concentrate on academic and emotional and social development. In addition to what must happen in schools, we need to create communities that support the development of young people.

Ironically enough, when you examine the core components of the ChalleNGe program, you see that the National Guard understands the philosophy of the whole adolescent. The core components of ChalleNGe are academic excellence, job skills, life-coping skills, responsible citizenship, health and hygiene, leadership and followership, physical fitness, and service to the community.

As part of our analysis, we thought about the potential programmatic implications of these military-like models and methods. One idea we came up with was that, given the fact that some of these programs have managed to generate very significant gains in achievement in a relatively short period of time, perhaps there could be so-called immersion programs, namely very intense summer programs, for youngsters in middle school and high school who are a grade or two behind in reading and math. The goal would be to get them up to speed very rapidly by using one of these quasi-military approaches that is different from conventional summer school.

Secondly, we felt there could be an expansion of the quasi-military public high schools, and perhaps even middle schools, for youngsters who are struggling in school and in life. Also, more public schools could embrace at least some of the generic attributes that we saw in the quasi-military approaches. We pushed beyond this to recommend that for youngsters who need to get out of their communities entirely, there should be quasi-military public boarding schools for young people.

Lastly, for kids who are caught up in the corrections system and who really want a second chance at going straight, we suggested creating quasi-military residential programs for those youngsters.

In our research, we didn't seek to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that these programs work. That level of proof doesn’t exist yet. Instead, we were looking for signs of significant promise. Based on the encouraging academic and developmental gains that we learned about, we decided that these programs offer that kind of potential for youngsters. In fact, instead of calling them the antidote for dropout factories, I prefer to think of these quasi-military programs as graduation factories.

Today we're going to delve into how these programs work. I'm delighted that we have two presenters who have deep experience, as well as a number of panelists who have thought about these issues and actually have hands-on experience working with young people and with these kinds of programs. As for the format, there will two consecutive presentations, followed by a discussion among the panelists, and followed then by Q and A with the audience.

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Authors

Hugh B. Price

Publication: Presentations at the Center for Children and Families Policy Forum

Demilitarizing What the Pentagon Knows About Educating Young People

Hugh B. Price — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 12:00:00 -0400

Craig R. Barrett, the chairman of the board of Intel, once said that "the biggest ticking time bomb in the U.S. is the sorry state of our K-12 education system." He invoked that dire metaphor to awaken Americans to the fact that the educational quality of the nation’s workforce will determine our global competitiveness. Yet, the collateral damage from this time bomb, as it slowly detonates, could extend as well to America’s standard of living and civil society. Even the nation's military readiness is at risk because of the diminished pool of academically qualified potential recruits for the all-volunteer armed forces.

Several realities drive home the severity of the underachievement problem. According to ACT Inc., the nonprofit testing organization, the academic skills needed for success in the workplace are converging with those required for success in the first year of college. Further, the U.S. economy will rely increasingly upon minorities, because they, and especially Latinos, will make up a steadily growing proportion of the adult workforce. Minority students have surged to 42 percent of public school enrollment nationally, up from 22 percent a mere three decades ago.

The challenge for the nation's schools lies in the fact that these economically indispensable population groups consistently lag farthest behind academically. According to the National Assessment of Educatonal Progress results released last week, 50 percent of Latino and 54 percent of African-American 4th graders registered "below basic" in reading. Of all 4th graders tested in reading and scoring "below basic," the proportion eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches was 50 percent. But underachievement transcends ethnicity: White students far outnumber those from other ethnic groups and constitute the bulk of all youngsters scoring in the lowest quintile.

Compounding these academic gaps, alarming numbers of Latino and black youngsters drop out of high school. Less documented but no less ominous is the phenomenon of student disengagement-youngsters who lose interest in school and give up trying to achieve.

The enormity and urgency, the gravity and, yes, the persistence of this challenge demand out-of- the-box thinking and creative interventions. My exposure over the years to the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program, a quasi-military youth corps aimed at turning around the lives of dropouts, persuades me that the "military way" of education and training holds considerable promise.

The U.S. military enjoys a well-deserved reputation for its ability to reach, teach, and develop young people who are rudderless, and for setting the pace among American institutions in advancing minorities. Young people receive military-style education and training in an array of settings, most typically after enlisting in a branch of the military. Various branches partner with local school districts to operate Junior ROTC programs, career academies, and military-like public schools.

These programs share many attributes that seemingly contribute to participants' success. Some of the salient characteristics include their emphases on the following:

Belonging. Research indicates that belonging to positive youth groups can boost self-confidence and curb risky behaviors.

Teamwork. In the real world, mutual reliance is commonplace, since workers routinely function in units with supervisors, peers, and subordinates. Absorbing this lesson is one of the keys to growing up and getting ahead.

Motivation and self-discipline. Many researchers have identified persuasive linkages between lack of motivation and low achievement. The legendary discipline long associated with military training helps instill the motivation that may be in short supply among some young people.

Valuing and believing in students. Many young people who struggle in school yearn for adults who genuinely value them and believe they can be successful.

Educating the whole child. Dismayed by the predominant focus on testing and accountability, education groups such as the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development have begun insisting that focusing on the "whole child" will produce better outcomes for youngsters who struggle in school. The ChalleNGe program probably gets the "whole child" philosophy more than most schools do. Its eight core components reflect a commitment to educating the whole adolescent: academic excellence, leadership and followership, responsible citizenship, service to the community, life coping skills, job skills, physical fitness, and health and human hygiene.

Stressing literacy in curriculum and instruction. The military approach to cultivating functional literacy is germane to the problem of students who read poorly. Of course, functional literacy is not the endgame for young people served by quasi-military programs. By focusing literacy training on the content and learning demands of relevant tasks, it is possible in a relatively short amount of time to develop reading competence not only in the tasks at hand, but also in general reading.

Rewards and recognition. In education, the prevailing practice is to recognize and reward the top achievers in any given category. The trouble is that students who are struggling academically or disenchanted with school may perceive these traditional forms of recognition as hopelessly out of reach. The military long ago mastered the art of frequent recognition. Ceremonies and rituals affirm that society values the contributions and accomplishments, be they monumental or modest, of those who are celebrated.

Safety and security. Since the chaos and violence of dangerous communities can spill onto school grounds and even inside the classroom, quasi-military schools stress safety and security. This enables educators to teach and students to learn without fear of disruption or danger.

Some schools already embrace combinations or variations of these attributes. This fact and the foregoing lessons gleaned from the military approach to training suggest several potentially important interventions that should be considered:

What will we do for the millions of America's children who are marginalized academically and destined for social, civic, and economic oblivion in the 21st century?

• Offer reading- and math-immersion programs patterned after the military's fast-track instructional methods and focused on students who are performing below grade level, or the equivalent of "below basic" on NAEP.

• Establish quasi-military public middle schools and high schools that emulate those attributes and methods of military education and training that are appropriate for schools serving civilian youngsters.

• Create quasi-military public boarding schools that provide safe havens and more intensive, comprehensive, and sustained educational and developmental supports for young people whose home and community environments are especially destructive.

• Establish quasi-military alternatives to incarceration, patterned perhaps after ChalleNGe's Bravo Company in Oklahoma, for adolescents who have run afoul of the law but genuinely want to straighten out their lives. Those who squandered this second chance would be remanded to reform school or jail.

These promising concepts are too controversial, untested, and potentially costly to take to scale on the fly. That is why each one should be launched in several locales as a demonstration project and be subjected to rigorous evaluation. If the pilot programs produce compelling results in turning around young people teetering on the brink of academic and personal failure, the stage will be set to take the successful models to scale.

Millions of America's children are marginalized academically and destined for social, civic, and economic oblivion in the 21st century. Their plight stems from many underlying factors: family and economic circumstances beyond their control; their own indifference to achievement and disenchantment with formal education as they've known it; and the continuing difficulty that schools face in meeting these young people halfway, and then shepherding them to the doorstep of successful adulthood.

The U.S. military figured out how to nurture and unleash the potential of aimless young people like these generations ago. By demilitarizing and deploying what the Pentagon knows, we can transform this troubled and troublesome cohort of America's youths into solid citizens and valued societal assets.

Vol. 27, Issue 06, Pages 32,40

Authors

Hugh B. Price

Publication: Education Week

50-Year Anniversary of Little Rock Nine

Hugh B. Price — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 12:00:00 -0400

It was a seminal event and it's a reminder that, in many cities, even though we've had legal desegregation, we haven't seen integration in our schools and in some respects the demographics have overwhelmed the public will to try to promote integration.

Which has led to a conversation about how do we strengthen the schools as we know them, because a lot of the school systems are demographically land-locked. So, the anniversary of Little Rock Nine is a reminder of the work still to be done in our society to promote opportunity and inclusion.

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Advancing Economic Success for All Americans

Amy Liu and Hugh B. Price — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

The recent Supreme Court decision to strike down the use of race as a factor for assigning children to public schools has reignited the debate about the progress of race and opportunity in the U.S. The decision took center stage the next day at the Democratic Party's presidential debate hosted by PBS's Tavis Smiley, and will likely animate future debates and venues as presidential hopefuls come before African American voters. As they do, presidential candidates should speak to the most basic aspirations of many African Americans, and Americans as a whole—the opportunity for themselves and their children to climb the ladder to the middle class and beyond.

To be sure, the Supreme Court's landmark decision comes at a time when overall opportunity in America has been under scrutiny.

As a whole, real economic progress among most American households is slim relative to the wealthiest among us. The gap between the rich and poor has reached the widest point in the last half century, primarily due to one phenomenon: the incomes of the superrich are pulling ahead from the rest of ours at an exponential rate relative to everyone else.

Meanwhile, low-income workers and the middle class, despite working longer hours and being more productive, seem to be stuck in place: wages for the average worker have been stagnant since the early 1970s, and wealth accumulation for all but the very well-off has flat-lined.

And worse, the path to upward mobility for many people of color remains strewn with speed bumps at best.

We argue that there are four critical "pathways" to the middle class that need to be fortified and expanded if we want to see real economic gains for families seeking access to and security in the middle class: (1) increasing the number of low-income students enrolled in and completing postsecondary programs; (2) improving access to good jobs that pay middle-class wages and offer benefits and opportunities for advancement; (3) fostering economically viable and diverse neighborhoods that facilitate wealth building; and (4) promoting personal financial security through financial literacy and access to fair and well-priced financial services and products.

For people of color, these important pathways to economic mobility are especially tenuous. Nonwhites, and particularly African Americans and Hispanics, earn less, receive less education, and accumulate less wealth than whites. In 2002, the high school drop out rates for African American and Hispanic students were 44 and 46 percent, respectively, well below white students' rate of around 22 percent. African Americans and Hispanics are less likely than whites to be employed in jobs that offer health care coverage. And middle-class minorities are less likely than white middle-class households to own their own homes and to invest in stocks.

The public's frustration with the sense of uneven opportunity is real. A recent poll conducted by the University of Connecticut found that seven in 10 respondents believe the income disparities in the U.S. are too stark.

Americans by and large do not crave solutions that take from the rich and give to the poor. Instead, they want political leaders to enact policies that will help the typical working American to reap the benefits of his or her labor.

In short, presidential aspirants must set forth a clear agenda to open up the pathways to economic success for all hardworking Americans, including people of color who work and play by the rules. By doing so, they will ensure better opportunities for the children of working parents. And they will restore the upward and intergenerational opportunities that have historically set the United States apart from all other nations.

The authors wish to thank Oliver Sloman, Brookings research assistant, for his substantive contributions.

Related Content from Opportunity 08
Opportunity 08

Opportunity 08 is a project of the Brookings Institution in partnership with ABC News. To help broaden the discussion of America's policy challenges, policy forums and information will be featured on the ABC News website and on ABC News Now, which provides live 24/7 news coverage online, on television and on mobile devices. The material will also be featured on the project website, www.opportunity08.org.

Authors

Publication: Opportunity 08

Preserving America's Compelling Interest in School Integration

Hugh B. Price — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

This week's ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in the school integration cases involving Seattle and Louisville was disappointing but not devastating to the cause of promoting integration in public schools. Nor was it surprising given the increasingly conservative bent of the majority of justices on the bench.

This decision will prevent school districts from promoting integration and diversity among students using the kinds of mechanisms that were employed by the school districts involved in the lawsuit. In the case before the court, Seattle and Louisville occasionally based student assignments on race when voluntary choices by parents threatened the district's desired range of racial balance in their schools. In Louisville, for instance, the district encouraged white parents to send their youngsters to academically attractive magnet programs in predominantly minority schools, while enabling black parents to enroll their children in academically strong schools outside their neighborhoods. But if the proportion of black pupils threatened to exceed 50 percent or dip below 15 percent, then youngsters could be turned down in order to keep enrollment within the desired range racially.

Nevertheless, there was a welcome silver lining in Thursday's ruling. The decision was issued by four justices who opposed the consideration of race in student assignments under any circumstances. They were joined in the opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who opposed what the school districts in this case were doing, but who also signaled that he would find other more generalized methods of promoting integration and diversity constitutionally acceptable.

More specifically, Justice Kennedy indicated that districts can locate new schools with an eye toward increasing diversity, consider neighborhood demographics when they draw attendance lines, and engage in targeted recruiting of students and teachers. He went on to opine that school districts "are free to devise race-conscious measures to address the problem in a general way and without treating each student in different fashion solely on the basis of a systematic, individual typing by race."

Justice Kennedy's consenting opinion clearly implies that when presented with the kinds of circumstances that he deems acceptable, he would vote to uphold these practices. Presumably he would be joined by the four justices who dissented from the ruling, thus creating a five-vote majority in support of the consideration of race in a generalized way.

For those of us who believe strongly that school districts should advance diversity and that appropriate consideration of race is one of the ways to do that, this ruling, while a setback, provides rather clear signals about how to promote school integration and diversity in a way that a majority of Supreme Court justices probably would find acceptable if challenged in the future.

Justice Kennedy's posture is a relief because it preserves the cherished notion that fostering integration constitutes a compelling state interest that justifies the consideration of race. The Supreme Court faced virtually the same question several years ago in determining whether racial diversity constitutes a similarly compelling state interest in public higher education.

Writing then for the court in the Grutter case, now-retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor declared that it does. Among the many justifications she cited that satisfied the criteria for a compelling state interest, diversity promotes cross-racial understanding, helps to break down racial stereotypes, and enables students to better understand persons of different races. She referenced numerous studies showing that student body diversity promotes learning outcomes and better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society.

Justice O'Connor further emphasized that these benefits are not theoretical. They are real. She cited the supportive briefs filed by major American businesses arguing that "the skills needed in today's increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas and viewpoints."

Diversity and integration are flip sides of the same coin. The ruling in Grutter applied to public universities. Yet virtually all of the justifications cited there apply with equal force to public schools that prepare and funnel future citizens into higher education, the workforce and American society.

If anything, the argument that integration and diversity comprise a compelling state interest is even more convincing in the case of public schools because a vastly broader swath of future citizens would experience the advantages of diversity. Looking to the future, the U.S. economy will rely increasingly on minority workers, entrepreneurs and taxpayers who represent a growing segment of the population. Yet black and Latino pupils in particular are concentrated in the nation's lowest performing schools with the least able teachers and most inadequate facilities. The kinds of measures endorsed by Justice Kennedy that foster integration and diversity will enable minority youngsters attend good schools where they can maximize their talent and potential.

Back when I was in law school in the mid-1960s, a maverick professor named Fred Rodell used to preach that the ideology of Supreme Court justices mattered as much and possibly more than their respect for precedent. Traditionalists among legal scholars dismissed Rodell's views as borderline heresy. But given the unmistakable philosophical swing of the high court in the aftermath of President Bush's appointments, Fred Rodell clearly was one prescient law professor.

Years ago, A. Bartlett Giamatti, the late president of Yale University, observed that universities should be tributaries to society, not sanctuaries from it. Happily, Justice Kennedy, who holds the pivotal swing vote on the high court, believes the very same is true of America's public schools.

Authors

Hugh B. Price

Demilitarizing What the Pentagon Knows About Developing Young People: A New Paradigm for Educating Students Who Are Struggling in School and in Life

Hugh B. Price — Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Executive Summary

A decade ago, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future issued a prescient warning in its report, entitled What Matters Most:

"There has been no previous time in history when the success, indeed the survival, of nations and people has been tied so tightly to their ability to learn. Today's society has little room for those who cannot read, write and compute proficiently; find and use resources; frame and solve problems; and continually learn new technologies, skills, and occupations. . . . In contrast to 20 years ago, individuals who do not succeed in school have little chance of finding a job or contributing to society—and societies that do not succeed at education have little chance of success in a global economy."

Demographic trends indicate that the U.S. economy will rely increasingly upon Latinos and African Americans because together they, and especially the former, will comprise a steadily growing proportion of the adult workforce. By 2020, roughly 30 percent of the working-age population in the United States will be Latino and African American. Yet these economically indispensable population groups, along with low-income youngsters, consistently lag farthest behind academically.

As recently as 2005, roughly half of fourth and eighth grade black and Latino students performed Below Basic in reading and math according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Actually, the imperative of boosting achievement transcends ethnicity. White students far outnumber those from other ethnic groups and constitute over one-third of all youngsters scoring in the lowest quintile. Compounding these academic gaps, distressingly large numbers of Latino and African-American youngsters drop out of high school.

Given the enormous stakes for our society and economy, our communities, and the young people themselves, the nation's educators and policymakers should focus with laser-like precision, intensity, and ingenuity on equipping these endangered young people for self-sufficiency and citizenship in the twenty-first century. The enormity, gravity, and stubbornness of this challenge demand out-of-the-box thinking and interventions that are implemented on a scale commensurate with the scope of the underachievement problem. Focusing obsessively on standards and tests, tweaking what already has not worked, or instituting modest reforms with all deliberate speed fail to serve society's best interests because they fall far short of meeting the educational and developmental needs of youngsters who are struggling in school and in life.

The effusive comments featured earlier by parents of teenagers who joined the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program attest to the capacity of this quasi-military program, established in 1993, to turn around the lives of thousands of school dropouts. These disconnected young people, along with those who have lost interest in school even though technically they remain enrolled, represent a vast untapped reservoir of human capital that, if left uneducated and underdeveloped, will become an enormous drain on society for generations to come.

This working paper examines the approaches, wisdom, and experience generated by the ChalleNGe program as well as the vast storehouse of knowledge and research, models and systems possessed by the military services that are potentially applicable to educating and developing youngsters who are at greatest risk of academic failure, economic marginality, and outright poverty.

The modest purpose of this paper is to ascertain whether these approaches show sufficient promise that they might work for these young people, not whether there is solid proof that they actually do work, The evidence gathered during our reconnaissance, which runs the gamut from sketchy statistics and partial studies to anecdotes and journalistic observations, is not yet robust enough to qualify as conclusive proof.

Why focus on the military? The United States military enjoys a well-deserved reputation for its ability to reach, teach, and develop young people who are rudderless, and for setting the pace among American institutions in advancing minorities. Young people receive military-style education and training in an array of settings, most typically in a branch of the military. Various branches also partner with public schools to operate programs that emulate the military atmosphere and methods.

These military and quasi-military programs exhibit many attributes that appear to contribute to the young people's success and therefore might be appropriate to incorporate in a new approach to educating youngsters who are performing way below par, disengaged from school, or dropping out. Patterning the education of civilian youngsters after the military does raise legitimate anxieties and worrisome issues. The key is to embrace and customize those attributes that strengthen the education and development of adolescents, while eschewing the characteristics and methods that do not belong in a civilian enterprise.

School districts may continue to adopt those attributes that help them educate youngsters who heretofore have been difficult to reach and teach. This ad hoc approach to taking promising practices to scale characterizes the way progress often occurs in schools these days.

The preferable scenario in my view is to devise a strategy for testing several ideas that emerge from this analysis and then taking them to scale if they produce compelling results. The five concepts worth piloting are: (1) fast-track immersion programs to help low achievers catch up quickly; (2) quasi-military public high schools that adhere to a standardized format across and within school districts; (3) quasi-military public boarding schools for youngsters who need sustained and near total insulation from destructive family or community influences; (4) residential programs for incarcerated juvenile off enders who earnestly want a second chance; and (5) purposeful and faithful introduction of these promising attributes into regular schools.

The feasibility and effectiveness of these quasi-military program concepts should be tested via demonstration projects that are subjected to rigorous evaluation. If any of these produce strongly positive results, then they should be taken to scale.

The most logical and straightforward way to do so is for governors to give the National Guard units in their states this assignment. To insulate this vitally important domestic role from any national defense obligations imposed by the President or the Pentagon, these new education initiatives undertaken by the National Guard in their respective states should be financed by state and local appropriations, possibly augmented by grants from federal domestic agencies, but definitely not through the U.S. Department of Defense.

Millions of adolescents are marginalized academically and destined for oblivion in the twenty-first century economy. They barely, if at all, will be able to uphold their obligations as citizens and providers. The U.S. military figured out how to nurture and unleash the potential of young people like these generations ago. By demilitarizing and deploying what the Pentagon knows about educating and developing aimless young people, these troubled and troublesome young Americans can be transformed into a valued social and economic asset to our nation.

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Authors

Hugh B. Price

Publication: CCF Working Paper

Assuring Student Achievement: Strengthen America through Education Reforms

Hugh B. Price — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

As America relies more on minority workers, African-American and Latino students are lagging behind their white peers and dropping out of school at higher rates. This loss of human capital takes a toll on the entire country. The achievement gaps of today will become the competitiveness gap for America in tomorrow’s global economy.

Recommendations
For elementary and secondary education, the next President should mount a determined effort, in concert with states and local school districts, to boost the academic performance of low achievers by:

requiring underperforming public schools that receive federal aid to improve the academic performance of chronic low achievers
insisting that individual school improvement strategies be derived from sound evidence and best practice about what actually works
joining with states in providing grants for schools to improve the academic performance of low achievers

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Opportunity 08 aims to help 2008 presidential candidates and the public focus on critical issues facing the nation, presenting policy ideas on a wide array of domestic and foreign policy questions. The project is committed to providing both independent policy solutions and background material on issues of concern to voters.

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Hugh B. Price

Publication: Opportunity 08

Pathways to the Middle Class: Ensuring Greater Upward Mobility for All Americans

Amy Liu, Hugh B. Price and Rebecca Sohmer — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Is the American Dream fading? Income inequality, inadequate savings and difficulty climbing the ladder to success are hurting many middle-income families—especially minority households.

Recommendations
The next President should support measures focused on:

increasing the number of students who complete postsecondary education in our nation’s community colleges, four-year colleges and universities, or specialized training programs geared to specific occupations
increasing the quantity and quality of academic and social support services available to low-income students who are struggling in college or postsecondary training programs
reforming the nation’s largest affordable housing production programs, Home Investment Partnerships (HOME) and the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, so that they foster economically integrated communities
encouraging mainstream financial services to locate in low-income neighborhoods

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Authors

Amy Liu
Hugh B. Price
Rebecca Sohmer

Publication: Opportunity 08

Diversity Goals Help Kids in School -- and Later in Life

Hugh B. Price — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500

No sooner had the ink dried on the 2003 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in the contentious affirmative action case known as Grutter v. Bollinger than yet another legal ruckus over the use of race to help determine who gets into what school began wending its way toward the court.

As argued before the justices recently, the issue this time is whether two public school systems, namely in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., can base student assignments on race when voluntary choices by parents threaten the district's desired range of racial balance.

To foster integration, the Louisville district, for example, encourages white parents to send their youngsters to academically attractive magnet programs in predominantly minority schools, while enabling black parents to enroll their children in academically strong schools outside their neighborhoods. But if the proportion of black pupils threatens to exceed 50 percent or dip below 15 percent, then youngsters may be turned down in order to keep enrollment within the desired range racially.

Some white and black parents whose children would have tipped the balance one way or the other took issue with being denied their choice of schools and sued to prevent the districts from invoking race in order to maintain racial balance in the schools.

Whatever the court ultimately decides in these cases potentially will apply to more than neighborhood schools and magnet programs. The decision could impact the burgeoning array of innovative schools, such as charter schools and academically rigorous flagship schools, which frequently are selective and highly coveted.

If precedent does not carry the day, then the justices must determine whether fostering integration constitutes a compelling state interest that justifies the consideration of race.

The Supreme Court faced virtually the same issue barely three years ago in determining whether racial diversity constitutes a similarly compelling state interest in public higher education. Writing for the court in Grutter, now-retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor declared that it does.

Among the many justifications she cited that satisfied the criteria for a compelling state interest was that diversity promotes cross-racial understanding, helps to break down racial stereotypes and enables students to better understand people of different races.

The ruling in Grutter applied to public universities. Yet virtually all of the justifications cited in that case apply with equal force to public schools that prepare and funnel future citizens into higher education, the work force and American society.

If anything, the argument that integration and diversity constitute a compelling state interest is even more convincing in the case of public schools because a vastly broader swath of future citizens would experience the advantages of diversity.

Looking to the future, the U.S. economy will rely increasingly on minority workers, entrepreneurs and taxpayers who represent a growing segment of the population. Yet black and Latino pupils in particular are concentrated in the nation's lowest-performing schools, with the least able teachers and the most inadequate facilities.

Surely, student assignment policies that enable them to attend good schools where they can maximize their talent and potential easily meet the test for a compelling state interest.

The court forbids quotas, outright racial balancing and fixed percentages or numbers. But as the court ruled in Grutter, race can be considered "if the rules are not applied in a mechanical way." If the way school districts weigh race is now objectionable to justices, it is only fair for the high court to approve the fundamental objective of fostering integration and diversity, while directing the districts to devise mechanisms that do not resemble quotas. In other words, the court should resist throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Authors

Hugh B. Price

Publication: The Press-Enterprise (California)

Transitioning Ex-Offenders into Jobs and Society

Hugh B. Price — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

These days many governors face a conundrum that is taxing their cost-cutting creativity. State revenues are climbing steadily, but the top line growth is eclipsed by soaring Medicaid outlays, surging retirement obligations, declining state pension fund assets and, in some states, court-mandated increases in public school funding. The pressure is so acute that state officials are now thinking the previously unthinkable — releasing inmates early to trim their prison and jail population.

The war on crime launched two decades ago spawned a wave of tougher sentencing laws. This in turn triggered a steep surge in expenditures on prisons to accommodate the influx of offenders, even including nonviolent drug offenders and recidivists snared for minor crimes by the likes of California's "Three Strikes and You're Out" law. As a result, the nation's prisons are overflowing with nonviolent felons who languish behind bars many years longer than are necessary to see the error of their ways and pay their debt to society. And state expenditures on corrections have climbed by 24 percent alone in the past five years

Excessive incarceration saddles taxpayers and government with housing, feeding and guarding prisoners well beyond the point when there's any point at all. Once they've done their time, many inmates emerge from incarceration bereft of jobs, housing, money and hope. This marks them from the outset as prime candidates for recidivism. Ironically, the pressure to curb corrections expenditures has spurred state and federal officials to embrace prisoner re-entry programs, such as family assistance, housing aid, mental health services, education services and, of course, job training.

These welcome initiatives beg the question, though, of whether ex-offenders actually will be able to land jobs. To be realistic, they rarely leap to the head of the applicant queue in the eyes of employers. When the labor market is very tight, some venturesome employers take a chance on ex-inmates as a last resort. But they're the laudable exception, seldom the rule.

The travails of ex-offenders trying to find jobs ricochet all over society. They're in a miserable position upon release to support themselves and fulfill any child support obligations. Unable to secure jobs, they cannot burnish their credentials as trustworthy workers. Idle except for the shadowy underground economy, many eventually revert to criminality because there's little where else for them to fit.

A soundly conceived transitional jobs program could help steer motivated ex-offenders down a constructive path and better position them to persuade employers that they're a safe bet. But where on earth, would the money to finance it come from?

The answer may lie right under government's nose, namely in the massive appropriations for the corrections system. The wages and supervisory costs for a minimum wage public service job total considerably less than the per inmate cost of incarceration. Voila! Releasing carefully screened inmates several years early to participate in a well-run transitional employment program could get them back on track and plow savings back to the government in the bargain.

As with many new ideas, there are many knotty issues to be resolved, preferably by launching this on a pilot basis. For instance, how would inmates qualify? For a year or more prior to their expected release, they might be required to demonstrate exemplary behavior, plus perform admirably in rehabilitation and training programs inside prison.

Who would they work for? I envision the corrections department contracting with other government agencies, like the highway, public works and environmental protection departments, and with reputable nonprofit groups that can provide credible training and supervision.

What kind of work would they do? To minimize static from unions understandably protective of their jobs, the ex-offenders could perform tasks that government clearly cannot afford, as evidenced by the fact that the work goes undone for years on end. Clearing, grooming and maintaining unsightly mass transit rights of way, viaducts and waterfronts are visible examples of unattended public work. The higher profile the assignments, the more taxpayers will value the debt to society being paid by the ex-offenders via their work and see the payoff from early release employment programs.

The jobs might last for up to one year. After all, the aim is to ease their transition to the labor market, not shelter them forever from reality. Supervision, to fine tune work habits and skills, and support, with resume preparation and job search, are indispensable program ingredients.

And what if they regress? Tiny infractions like occasional tardiness ought not to trigger severe punishment. But if workers fail to participate conscientiously or commit crimes, they should be remanded to prison to serve out their terms. Early release with guaranteed employment isn't an opportunity to be trifled with.

Policymakers must think out of the box in order for ex-offenders to avert the trap of perpetual unemployment. Converting otherwise wasted years behind bars into transitional jobs based on good behavior will transform the debt they've paid to society into a dividend for society.

Authors

Hugh B. Price

Publication: washingtonpost.com