Brookings: Topics - Education

What Should the Supreme Court Do About Affirmative Action?

Henry J. Aaron — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:42:00 -0400

Author's note: the following review of the book Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students Its Intended to Help and Why Universities Won’t Admit It by Richard H Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. was commissioned by Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic on September 10, 2012. It was submitted on January 30, 2013. No editorial comment having been received to date, I am posting it on the Brookings web site.

The Supreme Court decision in Brown versus Board of Education was a watershed event in several respects. It crowned a lengthy legal campaign to overthrow segregation in public schools. It rapidly widened into a multi-front campaign to assure that African Americans, other minorities, and women would not be excluded from any important aspect of American life. And it invoked social science in support of a fundamental reinterpretation of the Constitution.

Following Brown, it soon became clear that removing legal barriers was not enough to end the legacy of discrimination. Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 speech at Howard University stated bluntly that “We seek not just freedom of opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

To counter the effects of past discrimination, Johnson said, it is necessary not just to remove barriers but also to offer help. Some assistance was procedural. Selective colleges, universities, and graduate schools began for the first time to recruit minorities actively and to mentor them. Other assistance was substantive, such as making race, sex, or national origin a ‘plus factor’ for jobs, contracts, and college admission. Programs of this sort immediately raised knotty conundrums for law, ethics, and social science. Were they constitutional? Were they fair? Did they work?

The legal problem was obvious. The 14^th amendment states: “No State shall...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act flatly bars consideration of race in hiring and promotion decisions. Many universities are state chartered and supported. Private and public institutions of higher learning receive federal contracts. The constitution and civil rights laws make no exception for discrimination practiced to redress past injustices.

Ethical issues are also inescapable. Giving African Americans or Hispanics a special break does not increase the number of jobs or slots in university classes. Giving them an edge means pushing others back in the queue. Many of those ‘others’ never personally did anything wrong. If giving such edges to past or present victims of discrimination was accepted, how large an edge was it fair to give and for how long?

In its earliest phases, affirmative action clearly helped its intended beneficiaries. In 1933 when Harold Ickes and his two lieutenants, Clark Foreman and Robert Weaver—later the first black cabinet officer under president Johnson—required that blacks be hired to help build public housing, there could be little doubt that African Americans benefitted from their action. When Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Labor, George Shultz, commented about discrimination in the building industry: “We found a quota system; it was there; it was zero,” there could be no doubt that moving from zero would help those who had been excluded. The nation was so far from the goal of fair treatment of minorities and women that possible conflicts with other objectives seemed remote. But when selective colleges and universities began to admit minority students with comparatively weak academic credentials, many of whom got poor grades and dropped out at distressing rates, a new question arose...did race preferences, at least in higher education, really help those they were intended to help?

Research on the impact of preferential admissions in higher education and litigation over its constitutionality ran on parallel tracks.

The policy of boosting enrollments at selective universities and colleges from what came to be called ‘under-represented minorities’ developed rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s. It coincided with efforts by those institutions to become genuine meritocracies. Although prestigious undergraduate and graduate programs had always favored the academically talented, they also held many slots for the offspring of previous graduates and generous donors. Athletic or artistic skills helped too, of course. Discrimination in admissions was routine, primarily to hold down the numbers of bright kids with the “wrong” religion or cultural background.

Then in the 1960s and 1970s, the weight attached to good grades and high test scores on entrance exams soared. Bragging rights came to those colleges whose entering classes had the highest scores on college entrance examinations. Some slots were still held for the progeny of previous graduates, the well-connected, the financially generous, and the artistically talented or athletically skilled. But academic standards for admission rose at both the undergraduate and graduate level. In simple terms, the ‘good’ schools, more than ever before, became academically excellent.

As far back as the 1970s concern grew that the policy of giving an edge to African Americans, Hispanics, and other members of under-represented minorities, however well-intentioned, might be doing more harm than good. Giving applicants from these groups an edge in admissions necessarily meant that, on the average, they came with weaker academic credentials than did whites. To be sure, selective schools offered matriculants big advantages—enriched environments, good connections, and, to those who graduated, a valued credential. On the other hand, students without adequate preparation might find the work just too difficult. As a result, they might even learn less than they would at less selective institutions. They might suffer stigma or be marked as second-raters or shamed as beneficiaries of unearned advantages, as many critics of affirmative action claim and some supporters fear. The result would be low-academic performance, high drop-out rates, wasted time and money, and, in extreme cases, blighted lives. The risk of these adverse effects would be larger the greater the gap between the student’s preparation and the norm at the institution they attended. This, in brief, was known as the mismatch hypothesis.

Determining whether a mismatch effect actually exists is extremely difficult. Even if admissions were race blind and even if there were no mismatch effect whatsoever, African Americans and Hispanics admitted to selective colleges and universities would predictably have lower grades and graduate a lower rates than do whites. This expectation is in no manner racist. It follows directly from two indisputable facts. African Americans and Hispanics applying to college have lower test scores and high-school grades on the average than do whites; and test scores and grades both are predictive of academic performance.

A hypothetical example illustrates how these two facts will produce different success rates for various groups. Imagine that colleges use an academic index for selecting students. The index can take on three values: 1 (high), 2 (medium), or 3 (low). Those with a higher academic index do better on the average in college than those with a lower score. Imagine also that out of every 100 whites, 35 score 1, and 35 score 2, and that out of every 100 African Americans and Hispanics 10 score 1 and 50 score 2. Selective schools admit only those who score 1 or 2, and they do so in a race-blind manner. Half of whites but only one-sixth of African Americans and Hispanics score 1. Those who score 1 do better in college than those who score 2. It follows that whites will do better in college on the average than will African Americans or Hispanics. This conclusion would not follow if tests and grades under-predicted performance of minorities relative to that of whites. But repeated studies have shown that tests and grades do not under-predict performance of African Americans and Hispanics.

The observation that African Americans and Hispanics who enroll at selective universities have lower qualifications for admission than do whites should therefore come as no surprise. Affirmative action adds to the difference between test scores and grades of entering students. But gaps would exist even if there were no affirmative action, and whether or not mismatch exists.

So, the challenge...how can one tell from the observation that African Americans and Hispanics do less well in college than do whites at selective schools whether this gap results from mechanical reasons of the sort just described or from harm inflicted through mismatch?

Simply comparing grades and graduation rates of various groups is not enough. The undeniable fact that students from under-represented minorities get poorer grades and drop out more often than white students do proves nothing about whether affirmative action helps or hurts its intended beneficiaries. One could go further and measure whether students at selective institutions do better or worse than do students with similar test scores and grades at other colleges and universities.

That is just what Derek Bok and William Bowen, former presidents of Harvard and Princeton, respectively, did in their evocatively titled book, The Shape of the River. This study, published in 1998, drew on a rich data set developed with the support of the Mellon Foundation, which Bowen then headed. The survey reported on a large data set—College and Beyond—reporting the college experiences, graduation rates, and subsequent earnings of 93,660 students who graduated from thirty-four select universities and colleges in 1951, 1976, and 1989. Using statistical techniques that controlled for the expected influence of high-school grades, pre-college admission tests, race, and certain other characteristics, the authors found that African-American students who attended elite universities did as well as or better than African-American student who attended less elite institutions. The authors reported that they found no evidence to support the mismatch hypothesis.

The Bok-Bowen study was highly influential. The authors are highly respected. The survey was large. The information it contained was broad and detailed. Even so, the survey data were not ideally suited to test the effects of affirmative action. The earliest surveyed cohort attended college before affirmative action was much practiced and it is not clear to what extent that cohort drove the results. The data came mostly from highly selective institutions. Furthermore, because the data have not been freely available, few scholars could check the Bok-Bowen findings or do additional analysis. The importance of making data available so that other scholars may try to replicate results and identify errors hardly needs emphasis in light of recent controversies regarding the impact of government debt on economic growth.

Bowen and other co-authors revisited the question of how college affects students in 2009 with a new study, Crossing the Finish Line, based on an even larger survey. This study reported on the experiences of 124,522 freshmen who began college in 1999 at one of fifty-seven four-year public universities. These institutions were generally less selective than those included in the College and Beyond survey. Bowen reported some startling results. Regardless of the quality of the high schools that students attended, their grades predicted college performance far better than did standardized tests. The 2009 study also confirmed the major finding of The Shape of the River—that after controlling for high-school grades, test scores, race, and socio-economic status, students were more likely to graduate from more selective than from less selective universities. Once again, Bowen and his co-authors found no evidence to support the mismatch—what they called the ‘over-match’—hypothesis. Students are well-advised, they said, to enroll in the most selective institution that will accept them.

Critics questioned whether the Bok-Bowen studies provided support for affirmative action. Invoking considerations of fairness, Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom noted that high graduation rates from elite institutions reflected not only the high qualifications of enrollees, but the high expectations for graduation at them. Besides, they emphasized, giving a race- or ethnicity-based edge to some necessarily involves a race- or ethnicity-based handicap for others. One of those groups with a race-based handicap, they noted, are Asians, whose academic credentials on the average outshine those of whites and who suffered much discrimination in American history.

Others argued that ordinary survey data are inherently inadequate to test the mismatch hypothesis. No survey can measure all educationally-relevant student characteristics. Specifically, surveys cannot measure aspirations or mental toughness, which are relevant to educational outcome and may be correlated with the schools students attend. Many social scientists argue that the best way, and sometimes the only adequate way, to test the effect of an intervention is the randomized experiment. Such methods are routine in medical and agricultural research, but they are not normally available to those testing the effects of affirmative action. Students cannot be randomly assigned to colleges. And, even if they could be, the very act would color the results. Normally, analysts are stuck with survey data. They can do no more than control statistically for every influence they can measure and hope that omitted factors are not very important.

From the earliest years of affirmative action, those denied admission to schools that gave minorities a race-based or ethnicity-based edge have challenged the practice in court. In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in The Regents of the University of California v. Bakke that the constitution barred the university from setting aside a fixed number of slots in its medical school class for under-represented minorities. But, universities could use race as a ‘plus’ factor in pursuit of ‘diversity,’ which, the Court said, is a legitimate educational goal. To this day, however, the Court has not defined exactly what diversity is or how one would know if it had been achieved.

Breaking with Bakke, the federal Circuit Court serving Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi ruled in 1995 in Hopwood v. Texas that the University of Texas Law School could not use race as a factor in admissions. The case never got to the Supreme Court, however, because Texas dropped the challenged admissions practices.

Seven years later, the Supreme Court heard a pair of challenges to admission practices at the University of Michigan. For undergraduate admissions, Michigan used a point scale based on grades, test scores, and other factors. One hundred points assured admission. Under-represented minorities received 20 points automatically. In Gratz v. Bollinger, by a 5-4 margin, the Court reaffirmed that the pursuit of diversity is a legitimate goal, but it ruled that Michigan’s procedure was not ‘narrowly tailored,’ did not in general treat each applicant individually, resembled a quota system, which the Court had disallowed in Bakke, and was therefore unacceptable.

At the same time, also by a 5-4 vote, the Court upheld a race-conscious admission policy by the Michigan Law School. In Grutter v. Bollinger, the court said that the use of race was acceptable because the law school considered many factors and did so on an individual basis. The swing vote in both cases and author of the opinion of the Court was the now-retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who has been succeeded by Justice Samuel Alito, widely thought to be less sympathetic than O’Connor to affirmative action.

The legal history is marked by chaotic disagreement. Not only has the court been divided, but the majorities have disagreed in the reasoning that has led to their judgments. For strong minded, independent jurists to reach a common position by different reasoning is not unusual. But the opinions reflect unresolvable internal conflicts. The Constitution guarantees equal protection, irrespective of race, national origin, sex, and age. Yet, American history is redolent of despicable violations of those principles. When, at last, Congress and private groups began to take steps to counter the legacy of discrimination, the highest court has been willing to curb, but not bar, these measures—at least, not yet.

While the idea that the best qualified people should get jobs, the best proposal should win the contract, and the best students should be admitted to selective colleges commands widespread support, few people adhere rigidly to the principles of meritocracy. They understand that in many cases no clear or reliable metrics exist for measuring merit. Furthermore, once one acknowledges that colleges and universities may legitimately consider factors other than test scores and grades in determining which applicants should be admitted, it is inevitable that some students refused admission will be better qualified on academic grounds than those admitted.

The point made in virtually every legal brief by a litigant complaining of discrimination because an African American or Hispanic with lower test scores or a weaker academic record was admitted reflects a profound confusion—such a result is inescapable once other criteria for admission are allowed to influence results. And because race, musical talent, athletic skills, and other non-academic characteristics predict academic performance less well than do grades and test scores, it is likely that those admitted because of such ‘non-academic’ qualifications will perform less well, on the average, than those admitted for purely academic reasons. Their grades are likely to be lower and they are likely to graduate at lower rates than those with stronger grades and test scores. Other influences, such as compensatory programs for the ill-prepared, easy grading (for athletes), or enrollment in ‘gut’ courses can partly or fully offset such tendencies. But the tendency is basic.

The issue of whether affirmative action in education is constitutional has returned to the Supreme Court docket. On February 21, 2012 the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in the case of Fisher v. Texas. Oral arguments took place on October 10, 2012. Outside interest in the case has been intense. The court received 90 ‘friend of the court’ (amicus curiae) briefs from interested parties, including social scientists.

Following the Hopwood decision, Texas adopted a simple policy of admitting applicants in the top 10 percent of Texas high-school graduating classes. Although the top-10-percent formula sacrifices some academic selectivity, it is a transparently reasonable admissions policy for a state-chartered institution dependent on state funds for part of its budget. It does not explicitly involve race or ethnic origin, but de facto residential segregation guarantees that this formula will result in the admission of more African Americans and Latinos than if admissions were based on test scores. Since its adoption, this formula has accounted for 60 to 80 percent of undergraduate admissions to the University of Texas. Following the Grutter decision, which sanctioned admission policies that considered race in a narrowly targeted, individual manner, Texas instituted what it called a “holistic” process to govern other admissions. The holistic admissions procedure uses both an academic index, based on test scores and grades, and a personal achievement index based on a wide range of other factors including two essays, family background, activities in the community and elsewhere, and race.

Ms. Fisher, a white Texas high school graduate, was in the 12^th percent of her class and therefore was not admitted on the 10 percent plan. Nor was she admitted through the alternative selection process. She was offered a place on a waiting list, which she refused. She challenged the constitutionality of the Texas admission policy, claiming that but for her race she would have been admitted and was thereby unconstitutionally denied equal protection under the law.

The briefs of the parties to the case focus on whether the use of race in the Texas formula does or does not qualify as ‘limited and individualized,’ as specified by Justice O’Connor in Grutter v. Bollinger. But the court may go further by limiting or overturning Grutter, and at least four justices are thought to be disposed to do so. Persuasive evidence that affirmative action harms those it is intended to help would buttress the ethical foundation for such a position. One of the amicus briefs, by UCLA law professor Richard Sander and legal journalist Stuart Taylor, argues just that. Their book, Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It, is a lengthy and rich argument in support of this position. So significant is this indictment of affirmative action that another amicus brief, by a veritable Who’s Who of empirical social scientists is devoted to rebutting the Sander/Taylor brief. Social scientists submitted several other amicus briefs, some in support of Ms. Fisher’s appeal, some opposed.

Mismatch extends and elaborates an indictment of affirmative action first presented by Sander in 2004 in a Stanford Law Review article. That article provoked intense controversy, personal invective, and allegations of data suppression. Mismatch recounts this controversy in score-settling detail and is, thus, also a personal memoir and an expose of intellectual politics in the academy, as well as a layman’s guide to social science research on a tricky subject. Co-author Stuart Taylor comes to this tale with the background of having written Until Proven Innocent, a chilling and devastating expose of the way a rogue—and subsequently disbarred—district attorney railroaded Duke lacrosse players after a stripper falsely accused them of rape, and tells how Duke faculty members and administrators rushed to condemn the players despite abundant warning signs of prosecutorial abuse.

Sander and Taylor do not argue that affirmative action is inherently harmful to its intended beneficiaries, but rather that it is pushed to a damaging extreme. To make their case, they lay out a theory of how affirmative action, as practiced by the most select universities and colleges, ramifies through much of higher education. A few top universities are able to attract most of the academically able African Americans and Hispanics. Although the academic credentials of these students, on the average, are not as strong as those of their white or Asian classmates, these African-Americans and Hispanic students are mostly able to handle the academic challenges they face at these top schools. Sander and Taylor argue that is why Bok and Bowen found that most of the minority students they surveyed graduate and do well professionally.

But that is just part of the story. The selective institutions, Sander and Taylor argue, so seriously deplete the limited pool of academically well-qualified minorities that lower tier schools, also trying to meet affirmative action goals, admit applicants with credentials so weak that these students do less well than they would at still less selective institutions. Mismatch can be inferred as well, Sander and Taylor argue, from the finding that a larger proportion of students with a given SAT score major in the difficult STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math) at less-selective than at more selective schools.

The reasoning is straightforward. First-level courses in these fields that serve as pre-requisites for upper division study weed out students who are comparatively weak at the institutions they are attending. Because affirmative action allows minority students to attend colleges where their academic preparation is comparatively weak, such students are more likely to get weeded out than they would be had they attended less-selective colleges and universities, where their academic preparation would have been more competitive.

The strongest evidence for the mismatch hypothesis comes not from data on undergraduate admissions but from information on law school graduates. The American Bar Association compiled data on thousands of law school graduates from a wide range of law schools—the Bar Passage Study (BPS). Because student grades and class rank depend, in part, on the average academic strength of classmates, students with a given academic index are more likely to get better grades at lower ranked law schools than they would at higher ranked law schools. Furthermore, African American and Hispanic students covered in the BPS were the beneficiaries of sizeable race- and ethnicity-based admission preferences at most law schools.

Based on data from the BPS, Sander and Taylor report two findings that, they argue, suggest mismatch. First, African American and Hispanic law school graduates with similar academic index scores (based on undergraduate performance) to those of whites passed the bar at lower rates than did whites. But if one controlled for both academic index and law school grade point average, there was no significant difference in passage rates of African Americans, Hispanics, and Whites. The reason why relative class standing influences bar passage, they argue, is that instruction and grading are geared to the median student in each school. Students who are weaker than average at a given school will find it hard to keep up, will learn less than they would if instruction was geared to their level of preparation, and will therefore pass the bar exam at lower rates than they would had they attended a school better tailored to for their academic skills. This finding implies that law school students should not follow the advice from Bok and Bowen gave to undergraduates—go to the most selective school that will admit you—but should instead be very careful not to over-reach.

Could both Bok/Bowen and Sander/Taylor be correct? The curricula at professional and graduate schools are notoriously austere. The environment in law school is ruthlessly meritocratic to an extent true of few undergraduate programs. If the conditions between undergraduate and graduate schools and among undergraduate programs are sufficiently different, affirmative action might help in some cases and hurt in others.

An intense intellectual battle followed Sander’s 2004 article and continues to this day. One exchange illustrates how hard the issues are analytically and how difficult it is to reach consensus. Two members of the Yale Law School faculty, Ian Ayres and Richard Brooks, noted that not all African Americans surveyed in the BPS accepted admission letters from the schools they had listed as their first choices. Some went to lower choice schools that were mostly less selective than the first choice schools. The students in the two groups were otherwise similar. If mismatch were a problem, they reasoned, students who went to first choice schools would be more likely to get low grades and less likely to pass the bar than those who went to less select schools. In an initial draft, Ayres and Brooks found no such differences and stated that the evidence provided no support for the mismatch hypothesis.

Sander reports that Ayres and Brooks shared their analysis with him and that he pointed out errors, which they then corrected. After the corrections were made, Sander and Taylor claim that the corrected results closely match what the mismatch hypothesis suggests—those students who did not go to their first-choice, relatively select law schools got better grades, graduated at a higher rate, and were more likely to pass the bar on their first try. But, they assert, Ayres and Brooks refused to modify the text of their initial draft. In addition, Ayres and Brooks are among the signers of the amicus brief by quantitative social scientists which is highly critical of the methods that Sander and Taylor use. This brief states flatly: “Sander’s research has major methodological flaws—misapplying basic principles of causal inference—that call into doubt his controversial conclusions about affirmative action....Sander’s research does not constitute credible evidence that affirmative action practices are harmful to minorities....”

Quite apart from the analytical case that Sander and Taylor make against affirmative action, Mismatch is an expose of politics and back-biting in the academy. It charges that those controlling what should be publicly available data refuse access to people who it is feared will come up with politically objectionable answers. It charges critics with refusals to admit demonstrable mistakes. Both Taylor’s earlier book on the Duke rape case and Mismatch report enough unreasoned and unreasonable behavior in the name of political correctness to make one gag. Most importantly, Mismatch charges universities and colleges with a stunning lack of candor regarding the extent of affirmative action and refusal to provide data with which analysts could evaluate its effects.

Although Mismatch indicts affirmative action in its current form, Sander and Taylor recommend that affirmative action be modified not ended. They note that minorities who are favored by affirmative action disproportionately come from favored socio-economic groups, children of professionals and others with higher education. They recommend that racial preferences be no larger than preferences based on financial need and socioeconomic status. The emergence of growing economic inequality heightens the appeal of class-based affirmative action. Precisely how such balancing of racial, socio-economic, and needs-based factors might be achieved is not explained in the book. Others have also urged class-based affirmative action as both fairer and politically more acceptable than race-based affirmative action—notably, Richard Kahlenberg who has taken that position for nearly two decades. Unfortunately, Sander and Taylor leave a key question unanswered—if current race-based affirmative action harms intended beneficiaries, why wouldn’t a mix of some race-based and some class-based affirmative action also do so?

Particularly troubling for a technically minded reader/reviewer is the absence from a book running to nearly 300 pages of any clear, technical presentation of the mismatch hypothesis. The authors say at the outset that in order to keep the book to a reasonable length, they are omitting ‘technical or elaborating material’ but that such details can be found at their website. At various other points in the book, readers are also advised that they can find further detail at the same web site. As I write this review and after personal contact with both authors, the website remains without such supporting material.

What conclusions should the Court and the public take from Mismatch and the cacophony of conflicting research on the effects of affirmative action? First, universities and colleges should provide qualified analysts access to data on admission practices. It is not credible that universities would suffer irreparable damage if their admission practices were publicized. Nor is it believable that minorities who benefit from racial preferences would wilt from the stigma if these practices were spelled out. The failure of colleges and universities to divulge data on the way affirmative action operates should not be tolerated. The best way to correct any over-use or misuse of affirmative action is not to ban it but to insist that its operation be illuminated with hard data and further analysis.

Second, on the major theme—the charge that affirmative action hurts its intended beneficiaries—I believe that judgment must still be withheld. Sander and Taylor present a powerful case that it does so in particular instances. But the character of college and university programs and their objectives is enormously varied. It is much more important to make sure that African Americans and Hispanics are well-represented among tomorrow’s public officials and business leaders and that they are well trained than it is to assure racial or ethnic diversity among tomorrow’s mathematicians and biomedical researchers. Meritocratic values have their place. So too do the values of inclusiveness. If there was ever a place where one size does not fit all, it is in the treatment of affirmative action within the academy.

Authors

Henry J. Aaron

Image Source: © Jose Luis Magaua / Reuters

Post-2015 Focus on Sustainable Development: How Education and Learning Can Play a Role

Allison Anderson — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:12:00 -0400

While the theme of the third meeting of the High-Level Panel on Post-2015 in Bali was on global partnerships, the meeting’s communiqué set up the handover from the high-level panel to the intergovernmental Open Working Group on the Sustainable Development Goals (OWG). The communiqué calls for “a single and coherent post-2015 development agenda that integrates economic growth, social inclusion and environmental sustainability”, and with good reason since the two development frameworks for post-2015—poverty alleviation and sustainable development—are not separate. Rather, they are interlinked challenges that need to inform each other and ultimately must be addressed together in one framework.

Moreover, the role of education and equitable learning in achieving sustainable development needs to figure prominently in these discussions. Sustainable development cannot be attained without education that provides learners with 21st century skills that equip them for healthy, safe, and productive lives, while also safeguarding the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

During the first three OWG meetings in March and April, participants shared their initial views on the relationship between the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the key lessons from the MDGs. While it is still unclear how the OWG process relates to the post-MDG process, Co-Chair Macharia Kamau, the permanent representative of Kenya, did in fact say that the two processes are linked. According to Kamau, “The MDGs are the point of departure, while the SDGs are the destination.” It is critical that OWG members connect these two processes together, not only to avoid fragmentation of efforts at national and global levels, but also because long-term sustained poverty eradication is only possible in the context of sustainable development. As such, Paula Caballero, advisor to Colombian foreign affairs minister, told the OWG that the new agenda must reflect the deep inter-linkages between issues like education and productive lives, and have measureable targets that allow for differentiation between national contexts. This statement is significant as it mirrors discussions that are currently going on within the global education community. These discussions and ideas will also likely continue in the June OWG meeting on employment and decent work for all, social protection, youth and education.

Learning for Sustainable Development

UNESCO and UNICEF have an opportunity to make clear the linkages between education, poverty reduction and sustainable development since they are UN agencies responsible for providing an issues brief on education to the OWG. Education will also be discussed at the June meeting and at upcoming OWG sessions on sustainable and inclusive economic growth (November 25-27), sustainable consumption and production, climate change, disaster risk reduction, conflict peace and security (January 6-10, 2014), and promoting equality, including social equality and women’s empowerment (February 3-7, 2014).

In fact, education can assist in the process of shifting the global demand away from resource- and energy-intensive commodities and toward greener products and technologies, sustainable lifestyles and less pollution. Restructuring toward a green economy will require transferable skills, ones that are not necessary linked to specific occupations. Thinking critically, solving problems, collaborating and managing risks and uncertainty are core competencies that are critical for employment in a green economy and living together peacefully in a sustainable society. Moreover, since the effects of climate change are already being felt, the education sector can also play a critical role in teaching relevant skills for successful climate change adaptation and mitigation. Teaching and learning these 21st century skills should integrate environmental education, climate change and scientific literacy, disaster risk reduction and preparedness, and education for sustainable lifestyles and consumption.

In tandem with efforts to build 21st century skills, including skills related to sustainable development, the education community is working to develop measures that benchmark and motivate student learning. While currently there is no one global measure for 21st century skills, the Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF) is working to fill this gap by making recommendations for metrics around an adaptable, flexible skill set, such as collaborative problem solving, environmental awareness and social responsibility.

In addition to the discussions within the OWG, there is a current opportunity to input into the draft report of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network: An Action Agenda for Sustainable Development. This draft report puts forward 10 proposals for future Sustainable Development Goals, one of which is on education. The document will feed into the UN Secretary General’s report on the SDGs later this year. The draft is open for comments and consultation until May 22.

Authors

Allison Anderson

Image Source: © Stringer . / Reuters

Crafting an Education Goal in the Post-2015 Development Framework: Having Our Cake and Eating It Too

Luis Crouch, Jenny Perlman Robinson and Lauren Greubel — Fri, 17 May 2013 15:54:00 -0400

In the ongoing debate over learning outcomes and measurement in the lead up to the post-2015 framework, the education community risks falling victim to the old English proverb, “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” We want global education goals but local adaptation, if not local origination. We want goals that are practical and can be measured realistically while also sufficiently ambitious and forward-looking. However, we may indeed be able to “have our cake and eat it too” if we use very precise language and realize the need to put into place goal-seeking rather than goal-setting processes. This is the spirit behind an upcoming report from the Methods and Measures Working Group of the Learning Metrics Task Force scheduled for release in June 2013.

Crafting a Goal That is Both Global and Local

One key distinction needed is between goals versus metrics. Goals motivate while metrics measure. What is often overlooked is that goals can be lofty, long-term and universally applicable yet still be locally adaptable. An example of such a goal is: All children should be able to read at proficiency, by the end of the primary cycle in their country, according to their national curriculum. The metrics for this goal could be robust assessments of reading administered at the end of primary through a national assessment. Countries could then report on the percentage of children achieving proficiency based on their national curricula or, to use Keith Lewin’s concept of “yield,” they could report on the percentage of children completing primary school and achieving a certain level of proficiency.

Risks do exist, however, in defining a goal relative to national curricula. These same national curricula have been failing children in many countries for the last decade. Measuring a goal based on national targets may risk stagnating progress in learning outcomes and disincentize governments to make real improvements to education quality.

But this problem can also be addressed. In addition to a goal that measures outcomes relative to national curricula, countries can also measure their students’ achievement based on an international metric, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), or a regional one such as the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ). Utilizing a robust metric and publishing the outcomes are good ways for national governments to make explicit their commitment to education quality and garner support from the global education and development community.

Practicality versus Long-term Ambition

In distinguishing between goals and metrics, there is also a tension between practicality versus long-term ambition that needs to be addressed. While we may want to have a goal to ensure that all children possess civic values and are prepared to be global citizens, we are confronted with a very practical reality that there are currently no widely agreed-upon metrics for these goals.

However, to propose that we not measure anything because we lack such measures is like throwing the baby out with the bath water (apologies for all the idioms). In fact, there are areas of learning where measurement is quite far along at the global level, such as reading and math. Therefore, there is a need for international bodies, like the International Bureau of Education, as well as civil society organizations, academia and other groups to have the resources to implement rigorous data collection for measurement and developing metrics.

In other cases, there are other competencies that are equally important but the metrics are not as well developed. However, not including these competencies would be setting our sights short, much like we limited ourselves a decade ago by only including access, and not learning, in the MDGs. In fact, research is currently underway to define and measure so-called “global competencies”, such as civic values, critical thinking and problem solving by the Learning Metrics Task Force and others. Choosing not to include these critical non-cognitive skills in an education goal that will span the next decade or two – when the metrics for measuring them may be available within the next few years – does a real detriment to the ultimate well-being of millions of children and young people worldwide.

Progress Needs to Be Measured

We also need to distinguish between metrics and setting benchmarks on those metrics. Goals should remain ambitious and long-term, and may use a both national metric and an internationally comparable metric. But countries may also wish to set intermediate benchmarks of progress on metrics as a way to set and chart progress. For example, if only 10 percent of a country’s children are currently proficient in reading, having a lofty, long-term goal of getting 100 percent of children to be proficient is daunting. An ambitious goal can depress more than motivate if taken seriously or, given its distant timeline, could simply not be taken seriously at all. Having intermediate benchmarks, with shorter timeframes and more realistic targets can motivate by setting attainable milestones and provide guide posts to reach the ultimate goal.

Finally, a distinction needs to be made between top-line reporting and sub-line tracking of indicators. For example, if the top-line reporting is on the percent of children who achieve proficiency in literacy and numeracy after nine years of education according to national curricula, there can still be multiple sub-line indicators that are essential to monitor. Participation in a common international or national assessment is one. Even if a country’s performance on an assessment is not its main metric, its outcomes on an assessment can still help explain and anchor the ultimate goal. It is also important to monitor measures that are pedagogical precursors: are children learning the basics of reading early on, so they can go on to become lifelong learners? Similarly, input indicators, such as teacher training and financing, are also important since they relate to and influence the ultimate goal.

What is Still Needed

What is clear from these debates is more work, and more coordinated work, is needed. Setting a simple top-down “requirement” that uses only one global curricular objective and only one metric is relatively easy but risks repeating mistakes from the past. Creating distinctions between goals, metrics, and benchmarks, and encouraging a subtle interplay between the global and the local, is harder but can ultimately lead to greater impact. This is something the Learning Metrics Task Force is grappling with in their global deliberations. A recommendation from the task force’s latest meeting is the need for an international multi-stakeholder advisory group that promotes collaboration among the different measurement processes and leverages financial and technical resources on measurement within the education sector. Such a body could help countries develop their own measurement systems, report learning outcomes, and stimulate work on measurement in areas where it currently does not exist. In other words, it could facilitate a goal-seeking rather than goal-setting process.

Authors

Luis Crouch
Jenny Perlman Robinson
Lauren Greubel

Image Source: © Stringer Afghanistan / Reuters

Does Expanding School Choice Increase Segregation?

Matthew M. Chingos — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:00:00 -0400

Advocates of expanding the educational options available to students from low-income families raise not only social justice arguments—pointing to the choices made by families that can afford to live close to a good public school or pay private-school tuition—but also the theory that competition induced by expanded school choice will be “the proverbial rising tide that lifts all boats.” Breaking the ironclad link between residence and school attended will, proponents argue, force schools to compete for students and resources in ways that increase the quality of education provided.

But critics of school choice policies argue that these reforms will lead to increased segregation by race and class as more motivated families move to better schools, leaving the most disadvantaged students behind in the worst public schools. Criticism has often focused on charter schools given the growth in the charter sector in recent years. Nationwide, charter enrollment grew from 1 to 3 percent of all students between 1999-2000 and 2009-10. Charters make up a much larger share of the market in several places, including 11 percent of Arizona students and 37 percent in the District of Columbia.

Charter critics point to reports showing differences in the demographic characteristics of charter school students and their counterparts in traditional public schools as evidence that choice leads to segregation. For example, a 2010 report by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project found that black charter school students were twice as likely to attend schools that enrolled fewer than 10 percent non-minority students as their counterparts in traditional public schools. This type of analysis says little about segregation because it compares charter schools to all schools nationwide, when charter schools tend to be located in areas with large concentrations of minority students. A reanalysis of the data used in the UCLA report found much smaller differences between charter and traditional public schools once more appropriate comparisons were made between the two groups of schools.

But any comparison of the demographics of students in charter and traditional public schools provides at best an incomplete picture of segregation because segregation resulting from school choice policies would occur primarily across schools, not within schools.^[1] The existence of charter schools could alter the composition of traditional public schools (by drawing students away from them), thereby compromising comparisons between the two sectors as a source of information about the effect of choice on segregation. However, a RAND study found that, in most states, students tend to transfer between traditional public and charter schools with similar racial compositions.

I provide new evidence on this question based on an analysis of nine years of data from the Common Core of Data, the federal government’s annual census of all public schools. For each of the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S., I calculate an “exposure index” that measures the share of non-minority students at the schools attended by the average under-represented minority student.^[2] The average minority student in the U.S. attends a school that is 33 percent non-minority. In other words, the typical minority student attends a majority-minority school. Likewise, the typical student eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (a proxy for economic disadvantage) attends a school where almost two-thirds of students are also eligible for a subsidized lunch.

A naïve examination of the relationship between this measure of (de)segregation and the percentage of students enrolled in charter schools appears to show that the critics are right: more choice is associated with minority students attending less diverse schools. For the 2010-11 school year, a 10-percentage-point increase in charter enrollment is associated with a decline of 16 percentage points in minority students’ exposure to non-minority students. A similar but weaker relationship exists along class lines (as measured by free lunch eligibility).

Of course, this relationship ignores the fact that charters tend to locate in areas that serve large shares of disadvantaged students and members of minority groups. As a result, this simple correlation tells us nothing about whether charters increase segregation or just tend to locate in areas where the schools are already segregated. This is the same methodological flaw that compromised the findings of the UCLA study.

A better approach to the question of whether choice increases segregation is to look at changes over time. Did areas that saw large increases in choice experience larger increases in segregation than areas that saw smaller increases in choice? This kind of analysis does not conclusively measure the causal effect of choice on segregation, but by examining the same locales over time it represents a clear improvement over the cruder approach of comparing different locales at the same point in time. For example, it takes into account any unmeasured factors, such as the degree of residential segregation, to the extent that those factors remain constant over time.

Figure 1 shows the relationship between the change in charter enrollment and the change in minority exposure to non-minority students between 2002-03 and 2010-11.^[3] The cloud of points suggests little relationship between these two factors, and a regression analysis confirms that this is the case.^[4] There is actually a slight positive (and statistically significant) relationship between choice and diversity, but it is very weak and is not also found in the free-lunch data.

Figure 1. Change in Minority Exposure to Non-Minority Students vs. Change in Charter Enrollment, U.S. Counties, 2002-03 to 2010-11

I also used an alternative measure of segregation called a “dissimilarity index” and obtained similar findings: no consistent relationship between changes in charter enrollment and changes in segregation. Finally, I conducted a more sophisticated panel data analysis that uses all nine years of data to estimate the relationship between charter enrollment and segregation using only the changes within counties over time^.^[5] Once again, using both the exposure and dissimilarity indices, the results consistently indicated no meaningful relationship between choice and segregation.

The lack of any consistent relationship between charter enrollment and segregation does not eliminate the possibility that such a relationship exists, but suggests that it is unlikely. For there to be a relationship, it would have to be the case that counties where charter enrollment increased experienced an increase in segregation as a result but then adopted policies (or experienced other changes) that counteracted the increase in segregation. In my view, that is not a very plausible explanation for these results.

There is no doubt that the high level of segregation in American society, including in our schools, is an important problem in its own right. The findings reported here indicate that it is unlikely that charter schools—a prominent effort to increase school choice, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds—are making the problem worse. But school choice policies come in a variety of flavors which may have different effects on the demographic makeup of schools. There may be examples of poorly designed choice programs that have increased segregation. For example, a choice system that is complicated and difficult to navigate may advantage affluent, educated parents at the expense of other parents.

Conversely, perhaps carefully designed choice policies can play a role in lessening the segregation of schools by race and class. For example, a simple, streamlined process that allows families to choose any school in a large urban district—and uses a fair method for allocating spaces at oversubscribed schools—could be a way to weaken the link between residential and school segregation that has plagued our school system since the end of legally mandated segregation more than 50 years ago.

[1] Of course students can also be segregated within schools, such as through the classrooms to which they are assigned or courses they decide to take, but that type of segregation is not usually the focus of critics of school choice policies.

[2] I define under-represented minority to include American Indian, black, and Hispanic students.

[3] The average county experienced an increase of charter enrollment of 1 percentage point, with a standard deviation of 4 percentage points. Weighted by student enrollment, the average increase is 2 percentage points with a standard deviation of 4 percentage points.

[4] The regression analysis and line in Figure 1 are both weighted by the number of minority students in each county (using the average of 2002-03 and 2010-11)

[5] This analysis pooled data from all years and included both year and county fixed effects.

Authors

Matthew M. Chingos

The Impact of School Feeding Programs in Senegal

Jessica Elaine Smith and Brandon Routman — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:36:00 -0400

Access to universal primary school education has been a key policy priority for many nations trying to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). However, learning outcomes of students in sub-Saharan African, particularly those in rural areas, remain disappointing. Of the continent’s approximately 128 million school aged children, only half will attend school and learn basic skills (see the Africa Learning Barometer). Researchers from the Consortium for Social Economic Research are examining efforts in Senegal to improve the quality of education. On March 28th, the organization’s director, Diagne Abdoulaye, gave a seminar to the Brookings’ Africa Growth Initiative on a recent study on the impact of school feeding programs on the cognitive acquisitions in rural primary schools in Senegal.

Hunger, malnutrition, and chronic fatigue are huge hurdles to learning in sub-Saharan Africa. One proposed intervention is the implementation of school feeding programs, or cantines as they are called in Senegal. Abdoulaye’s research seeks to determine whether cantines in Senegal have a significant impact on learning outcomes in the areas of reasoning, memory, comprehension and knowledge. Additionally, the study analyzes the impact of governance (in this case the presence of a parent teacher association) on student achievement.

The research sample spanned 120 schools that had no prior cantine programs in four Senegalese provinces that featured a high incidence of poverty. In half of these schools (the treatment group) feeding programs were administered and the other half (the control) received no feeding programs. Over the course of one academic year, students were given cognitive tests in two subjects, French and math.

The results showed that the feeding program contributed to the cognitive development of the students and produced positive outcomes that were more pronounced in math than in French. The school feeding program did not have a significant impact on grade repetition or the dropout rate. Also noteworthy was the finding that the program contributed to an increase in the nutritional well-being of both students and children who co-habitat with the students, such as siblings, but who do not attend school themselves. Abdoulaye also found heterogeneous impacts of the treatment on different groups of students. For instance, the treatment had a greater impact on boys compared to girls, and was especially beneficial to students who had delayed entry into school and were over 10 years old.

Abdoulaye concluded his presentation by noting that the cantine program in Senegal was effective in raising learning and nutritional outcomes among students. However, the cost of school feedings was a concern expressed by schools during the study. Abdoulaye suggests that if the school feeding programs were administered in conjunction with other health-based programs such as de-worming, the results might have been even more notable. In light of Abdoulaye’s study, programs such as cantines could be considered as a critical intervention that helps holistically address the learning needs of the poorest, most marginalized children.

Dr. Diagne Abdoulaye is the director of the Brookings Africa Growth Initiative’s partner think tank the Consortium for Social Economic Research or CRES. He visited Brookings for the meetings surrounding the visits of President Macky Sall and the presidents from Cape Verde, Malawi and Sierra Leone. For more information about his study, please contact Dr. Diagne at adiagne@cres-sn.org.

Authors

Jessica Elaine Smith
Brandon Routman

Image Source: © Finbarr O'Reilly / Reuters

Why We Still Think College Isn't for Everyone

Isabel V. Sawhill and Stephanie Owen — Mon, 13 May 2013 15:41:00 -0400

Is a college degree worth it? Not for everyone, according to our newly-released Center on Children and Families policy brief. The value of a college degree can vary dramatically, depending on factors such as field of study, type of college, graduation rate and future occupation. Here’s our final follow-up blog post, where we take a closer look at the conclusions we come to in the brief. (Read the first, second, and third parts here.)

Last week, the Center on Children and Families released a policy brief on making smarter decisions about higher education. We have welcomed the ensuing spirited debate from policymakers, students, colleges, and fellow researchers. The title of our policy brief, “Should Everyone Go To College,” is intentionally provocative and was chosen to start a conversation around the question. In favor of simplicity, we used the blanket term “college” to argue that a traditional four-year bachelor’s degree is not for everyone. We do think that some sort of postsecondary training is a good idea for almost everyone. This includes associate’s degrees, technical and vocational certification, apprenticeships, and worker training programs.

Some suggest that encouraging marginal students to pursue some of these non-academic paths creates a tracked system that keeps low-income and minority kids out of the upper echelons of our society. For that reason, vocational education has largely fallen out of favor in the United States, but gaps in academic performance between rich and poor and blacks and whites have persisted or, in the case of income, even grown. Closing these gaps has been one goal of the research done by the Center on Children and Families at Brookings, and we agree strongly that more needs to be done to prepare students to be college ready at the end of secondary school. But for the students we focus on in our brief—teenagers and young adults planning their educational and career paths—it is often too late to make up this lost ground.

The goal should be to help them make the choices that will turn out best for them given their individual strengths at the end of high school. For a student who has performed poorly in the classroom, the most bang-for-the-buck may come from a vocationally-oriented associate’s degree or career-specific technical training or from a period of work before returning to school with stronger motivation to learn what academic institutions teach. Think of the alternative: this student’s poor grades and possible ambivalence about classroom learning means he is likely to never finish his degree, and will have wasted time and money that could have been spent learning an employable skill. On the other hand, there are plenty of low-income students who are smart enough to succeed in college but who tend to choose schools that are beneath their ability and are more likely to drop out. The correlations of family background with college entry, persistence, and graduation have been rising, meaning it is especially important to help low-income students with the requisite abilities and preparation to enroll in a high-quality institution. Those individuals could benefit from better information about financial aid, graduation rates, and expected earnings.

Unfortunately, that information is not currently available: no one single comprehensive dataset containing information on earnings by school (let alone by major or program) exists. The Student Right to Know Before You Go Act, which we mention in our brief, has bipartisan support and would be an improvement on the status quo. The PayScale dataset we used for our brief has significant limitations, including questions about the reliability of its calculations and its representativeness.

Finally, some have rightly pointed out that our findings are descriptive, and should not necessarily be interpreted causally. It is likely true that smarter students self-select into engineering majors, so not every student will do better if she studies engineering rather than English. The same logic applies to more selective schools: part of why students at elite schools do better later on is that they are more talented before they ever enter college. Even so, careful economic research suggests that students do best when they attend the best school they can get in to, and that certain majors have real benefits.

Ultimately, higher education decisions are made by individual students and their families, and are based on their unique interests, strengths, and personal values, not only income and career prospects. Students need to have realistic expectations about what they’re likely to get out of pursuing higher education. Rigorous economic research has found that there is a sizeable proportion of people who experience a negative return to their education. That doesn’t mean they may not excel at other pursuits. It just means that one size doesn’t fit all high school students.

Authors

Isabel V. Sawhill
Stephanie Owen

Image Source: © Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters

Helping Young People Make Better Higher Education Choices

Isabel V. Sawhill and Stephanie Owen — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:00:00 -0400

Is a college degree worth it? Not for everyone, according to our newly-released Center on Children and Families policy brief. The value of a college degree can vary dramatically, depending on factors such as field of study, type of college, graduation rate and future occupation. Here’s the last in a three-part blog post series, where we take a closer look at findings from the policy brief. (Read the first part and second part here.)

Even though we often talk about college as a monolith, the truth is that not all college degrees are created equal. There is huge variation in the return to a bachelor’s degree, depending on choice of major and occupation; school type and selectivity level; and likelihood of graduating. All of this suggests that it is a mistake to unilaterally tell young Americans that going to college—any college—is the best decision they can make. If they choose wisely and attend a school with high graduation rates, generous financial aid, and high expected earnings, they can greatly improve their lifetime prospects. The information needed to make a wise decision, however, can be difficult to find and hard to interpret.

We lay out a three-pronged approach that would help every young person make a smart investment in their future: better information, performance-based scholarships, and better alternatives to a traditional four-year degree.

Authors

Isabel V. Sawhill
Stephanie Owen

Image Source: Mike Segar / Reuters

Policymakers Get Serious About Student Loan Interest Rates

Matthew M. Chingos and Beth Akers — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:25:00 -0400

At about this time last year, we saw President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney engage in a pandering contest on student loan interest rates. Cheap political theater produced a shortsighted political solution—a one-year extension of the 3.4% interest rate on subsidized federal student loans.

That one-year “fix” is due to expire on July 1, setting up another round of debate about whether to extend the lower rate once again or come up with a permanent solution. Under current law, Congress sets the interest rates on loans (which are then fixed for the life of the loan). This leads to political fights over the interest rate on a regular basis, especially when market rates become out-of-sync with the rate set by Congress.

This time around, the Obama administration and several members of Congress have produced serious proposals, most of which propose allowing the interest rates on federal student loans to vary with market conditions rather than having a fixed rate that is set by Congress. An excellent summary of these proposals appears in today’s Inside Higher Ed. The key elements of each of the proposals (and current law) regarding the federal Stafford loan program are:

1) Obama administration proposal: interest rate varies with market rates (10-year Treasury rate plus 0.93% for subsidized loans and 2.93% for unsubsidized loans) but is fixed for the life of the loan. There is no cap on interest rates.

2) House Republican proposal: interest rate varies with market rates (10-year Treasury plus 2.5% for subsidized and unsubsidized loans) and varies over the life of the loan (as the Treasury rate increases or decreases). Interest rates are capped at 8.5%.

3) Sens. Reed and Durbin proposal: same as House Republican proposal, except market rate is defined as the 91-day Treasury rate plus a percentage determined by the Education Secretary to cover administrative costs, and the cap is 6.8%.

4) Sen. Warren proposal: one-year fix in which the rate on subsidized loans is set at the rate the Federal Reserve changes to banks (currently 0.75%).

Sen. Warren’s proposal should be quickly dismissed as a cheap political gimmick. It proposes only a one-year change to the rate on one kind of federal student loan, confuses market interest rates on long-term loans (such as the 10-year Treasury rate) with the Federal Reserve’s Discount Window (used to make short-term loans to banks), and does not reflect the administrative costs and default risk that increase the costs of the federal student loan program.

Setting aside this one embarrassingly bad proposal, the remaining proposals raise a set of questions that need to be answered in order to select the ideal policy:

First, should the interest rate on federal student loans be set by Congress or allowed to fluctuate with the market? Market rates reflect the cost of borrowing to the government. Consequently, rates below-market rates indicate a subsidy to students. In our view, subsidies of college-going should be administered through programs that bring about the greatest changes in enrollment behavior, such as grant programs, and not through subsidies to interest rates that are much less transparent. Indexing the interest rate to the market also has the advantage of lessening the role of politics in student loan programs.

Second, should the interest rate be fixed for the life of the loan or allowed to vary with the market? In the market for other kinds of loans, such as home mortgages, consumers can choose between fixed- and variable-rate loans. But many students are not sophisticated consumers of financial products. In our view, the federal program is best operated with a fixed-rate model because it shields the student from the risk that the rate will increase in the future (usually at the cost of a higher interest rate to make up for that risk). Although the actual risk associated with a variable rate loan may be small, fear of this uncertainty might discourage some students from taking the loans that they need to enroll in postsecondary education.

Third, should there be a cap on student loan interest rates? One of the criticisms of a move to market-based interest rates is that times of extraordinarily high market rates will make college inaccessible to many students (by making it prohibitively expensive to borrow). In our view, a cap on interest rates is a reasonable approach to ensure student access to college and to make a market-based system politically feasible.

Where does that leave us? It turns out the ideal policy is also a political compromise: it takes the market-based proposal of both President Obama and the House Republicans, the fixed-rate proposal of the President, and the interest rate cap of the House Republicans and Senate Democrats. Of course there are still details to be worked out, such as how much should be added to market interest rates to finance the administrative costs and default risk of the federal student loan program. But this is a rare example where proposals from our two political parties seem close enough that compromise on a good policy should be possible.

Authors

Image Source: © Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

For Some, College May Not Be a Smart Investment

Isabel V. Sawhill and Stephanie Owen — Thu, 09 May 2013 09:00:00 -0400

Is a college degree worth it? Not for everyone, according to our newly-released Center on Children and Families policy brief. The value of a college degree can vary dramatically, depending on factors such as field of study, type of college, graduation rate and future occupation. Here’s the second in a three-part blog post series, where we take a closer look at findings from the policy brief. (Read the first part here.)

For a young adult shopping for a college, the choices can be overwhelming. That shiny brochure can make College X look like a great place to spend four years. But what do you really get out of choosing one school over another? As it turns out, quite a bit. The return on investment (ROI) of a bachelor’s degree varies widely at different types of schools. For certain schools, according to the online salary information company PayScale, the ROI is actually negative.

But getting into college and choosing a school is only the beginning. College isn’t worth much unless you graduate. Part of what sets certain schools apart is how many of their incoming students actually come out with a degree.

Notice that there is a wide range of completion rates within each school selectivity category, particularly for the less selective colleges. Not every student can get into Harvard, where the likelihood of graduating is 97 percent, but students can choose to attend a school with a better track record within their ability level.

Authors

Isabel V. Sawhill
Stephanie Owen

Image Source: © Rebecca Cook / Reuters

Should Everyone Go To College?

Stephanie Owen and Isabel V. Sawhill — Wed, 08 May 2013 09:00:00 -0400

Summary

For the past few decades, it has been widely argued that a college degree is a prerequisite to entering the middle class in the United States. Study after study reminds us that higher education is one of the best investments we can make, and President Obama has called it “an economic imperative.” We all know that, on average, college graduates make significantly more money over their lifetimes than those with only a high school education. What gets less attention is the fact that not all college degrees or college graduates are equal. There is enormous variation in the so-called return to education depending on factors such as institution attended, field of study, whether a student graduates, and post-graduation occupation. While the average return to obtaining a college degree is clearly positive, we emphasize that it is not universally so. For certain schools, majors, occupations, and individuals, college may not be a smart investment. By telling all young people that they should go to college no matter what, we are actually doing some of them a disservice.

The Rate of Return on Education

One way to estimate the value of education is to look at the increase in earnings associated with an additional year of schooling. However, correlation is not causation, and getting at the true causal effect of education on earnings is not so easy. The main problem is one of selection: if the smartest, most motivated people are both more likely to go to college and more likely to be financially successful, then the observed difference in earnings by years of education doesn’t measure the true effect of college.

Researchers have attempted to get around this problem of causality by employing a number of clever techniques, including, for example, comparing identical twins with different levels of education. The best studies suggest that the return to an additional year of school is around 10 percent. If we apply this 10 percent rate to the median earnings of about $30,000 for a 25- to 34-year-old high school graduate working full time in 2010, this implies that a year of college increases earnings by $3,000, and four years increases them by $12,000. Notice that this amount is less than the raw differences in earnings between high school graduates and bachelor’s degree holders of $15,000, but it is in the same ballpark. Similarly, the raw difference between high school graduates and associate’s degree holders is about $7,000, but a return of 10% would predict the causal effect of those additional two years to be $6,000.

There are other factors to consider. The cost of college matters as well: the more someone has to pay to attend, the lower the net benefit of attending. Furthermore, we have to factor in the opportunity cost of college, measured as the foregone earnings a student gives up when he or she leaves or delays entering the workforce in order to attend school. Using average earnings for 18- and 19-year-olds and 20- and 21-year-olds with high school degrees (including those working part-time or not at all), Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of Brookings’ Hamilton Project calculate an opportunity cost of $54,000 for a four-year degree. In this brief, we take a rather narrow view of the value of a college degree, focusing on the earnings premium. However, there are many non-monetary benefits of schooling which are harder to measure but no less important. Research suggests that additional education improves overall wellbeing by affecting things like job satisfaction, health, marriage, parenting, trust, and social interaction. Additionally, there are social benefits to education, such as reduced crime rates and higher political participation. We also do not want to dismiss personal preferences, and we acknowledge that many people derive value from their careers in ways that have nothing to do with money. While beyond the scope of this piece, we do want to point out that these noneconomic factors can change the cost-benefit calculus.

As noted above, the gap in annual earnings between young high school graduates and bachelor’s degree holders working full time is $15,000. What’s more, the earnings premium associated with a college degree grows over a lifetime. Hamilton Project research shows that 23- to 25-year-olds with bachelor’s degrees make $12,000 more than high school graduates but by age 50, the gap has grown to $46,500 (Figure 1). When we look at lifetime earnings—the sum of earnings over a career—the total premium is $570,000 for a bachelor’s degree and $170,000 for an associate’s degree. Compared to the average up-front cost of four years of college (tuition plus opportunity cost) of $102,000, the Hamilton Project is not alone in arguing that investing in college provides “a tremendous return.”

It is always possible to quibble over specific calculations, but it is hard to deny that, on average, the benefits of a college degree far outweigh the costs. The key phrase here is “on average.” The purpose of this brief is to highlight the reasons why, for a given individual, the benefits may not outweigh the costs. We emphasize that a 17- or 18-year-old deciding whether and where to go to college should carefully consider his or her own likely path of education and career before committing a considerable amount of time and money to that degree. With tuitions rising faster than family incomes, the typical college student is now more dependent than in the past on loans, creating serious risks for the individual student and perhaps for the system as a whole, should widespread defaults occur in the future. Federal student loans now total close to $1 trillion, larger than credit card debt or auto loans and second only to mortgage debt on household balance sheets.

Downloads

Should Everyone Go To College?

Authors

Stephanie Owen
Isabel V. Sawhill

Image Source: © Brian Snyder / Reuters

Obama’s Early Education Proposals Leave Federal Efforts Fragmented and Incoherent

Chris Herbst — Wed, 08 May 2013 11:00:00 -0400

The release of President Obama’s budget reignited the debate over the potential benefits of public investment in early childhood education. The centerpiece of his proposal is a $75 billion federal-state partnership to provide all low- and moderate-income four-year-olds with high-quality, full-day pre-K.^[i] But equally important is what the President proposed—or, rather, didn’t propose—for the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), a vital child care subsidy program serving 1.7 million low-income children each month at a cost of $10 billion per annum.^[ii] By comparison, Head Start spends about $7 billion on 900,000 children each year.^[iii]

As I will explain below, the President’s budget is disappointing because it misses an opportunity to fix two structural flaws with the CCDF: its lack of integration with the larger early care and education system and its disproportionate emphasis on supporting parental employment.

When it was created in 1996, the CCDF was intended to help low-skilled mothers transition from welfare to work. In practice, this is accomplished in two ways. First, eligibility for child care assistance is conditioned on fulfilling a state-defined work requirement, which typically includes participation in paid employment, job training, or education. Second, the CCDF invokes the principle of “parental choice,” in which subsidized parents are allowed to purchase child care from most legally-operating providers, including those not subject to states’ child care regulations. Together, these design features underscore a longstanding tension between the dual goals of U.S. child care policy: to support parental employment and promote child development.

How has the CCDF performed in relation to these goals? There is little doubt that the child care subsidy system has been effective at increasing employment among disadvantaged mothers. Recent studies provide consistent evidence that mothers receiving subsidies are more likely to be employed, to be working without receiving welfare, and to be engaged in standard work (i.e., work performed between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday through Friday) than their unsubsidized counterparts.^[iv] Importantly, the CCDF has also allowed low-skilled mothers to invest in their own human capital. A recent study finds that subsidized mothers are more likely to enroll in college-level courses and participate in job training programs.^[v]

But on the second goal—enhancing child well-being—the evidence is less positive. Over the past few years, my colleague, Erdal Tekin, and I have studied the impact of CCDF-funded child care subsidies on preschool-aged children’s health and development. Our research examines over 10 dimensions of child well-being using several nationally representative datasets and a variety of methodological techniques. The results are strikingly consistent: receipt of CCDF child care subsidies is associated with worse health and developmental outcomes for low-income children. In particular, we find that children receiving subsidized care in the year before kindergarten score lower on tests of reading and math ability and display more behavior problems when they enter kindergarten than their unsubsidized counterparts.^[vi] Subsidized children are also more likely to be overweight and obese.^[vii] Equally troubling is that the negative effects do not stop with the child: subsidized mothers engage in lower-quality interactions with their children and are more likely to show symptoms consistent with clinical anxiety and depression.^[viii]

Our results beg the obvious—and important—question: why does the CCDF fail to promote child and family well-being? Admittedly, our research is not well-equipped to provide definitive answers, but there is scattered evidence from a variety of sources that may allow policymakers to pinpoint the culprits. The three most plausible explanations are:

1. The challenges of parental choice and low-quality child care. By maximizing flexibility in the selection of child care providers, the CCDF allows low-skilled parents to move quickly into paid work or education and job training programs. But there is a downside to parental choice: parents—regardless of education or income level—often do not have enough information to distinguish between low- and high-quality providers.^[ix] When parents cannot make informed decisions, child care providers have little incentive to make costly quality investments. This ultimately forces high-quality, high-cost providers out of the market, leaving only those willing to offer mediocre services. This is one explanation for the widespread quality problems plaguing the U.S. child care market,^[x] and it provides context for the growing number of studies finding that non-parental child care settings are detrimental to child development.^[xi] Parents receiving CCDF-funded subsidies are therefore victims of and unwitting accomplices to the information gap in the child care market: their choices are restricted primarily to low- to mediocre-quality providers, and the inability to make informed decisions only exacerbates the quality problem.

2. An overemphasis on parental employment. For all intents and purposes, the CCDF is a labor market policy. It was created in service of welfare reform legislation aimed at solving the “problem” of low employment rates among single mothers. The law’s solution was to make eligibility for cash and child care assistance conditional on fulfilling a work requirement. In my view, child care policy should not be used to fix a labor market problem. At best, the CCDF is a blunt instrument with which to boost mothers’ employment, especially in comparison to the alternatives available to policymakers (e.g., the Earned Income Tax Credit). At worst, the CCDF may have unintended effects on the child care market that are harmful to child well-being. For example, if parents lose eligibility for subsidies whenever they become separated from a job, such instability could undermine child development by severing productive child-teacher relationships and exposing children to comparatively low-quality care while the parent is looking for work. The work requirement is also problematic for child care providers: those relying heavily on subsidized children may experience revenue shortfalls when parents lose eligibility, thereby reducing the incentive to make costly quality improvements.^[xii]

3. Low reimbursement rates. The final explanation focuses on the subsidy reimbursement rate, or the maximum amount a state or local agency pays child care providers to serve subsidized children. The CCDF attempts to provide low-income families with “equal access” to high-quality care by recommending that reimbursement rates be set at the 75^th percentile of the local child care price distribution. As such, the CCDF gives states substantial flexibility to establish lower rates. In fact, only one state—New York—now sets its reimbursement rate at the 75^th percentile, and 18 states have not updated their reimbursement structure in at least five years.^[xiii] This abysmal record not only prevents families from purchasing high-quality child care; it also reduces the resources available to child care providers to make costly quality enhancements.

Enter the President’s budget. In my view, it fails to harmonize a highly fragmented early care and education system. In fact, the proposal may ultimately exacerbate fragmentation by creating what amounts to a two-tiered system for low-income children. On the one hand, there will be a set of heavily subsidized, high-quality programs for 3- and 4-year-olds (through Head Start and the new pre-K initiative). For children ages 0 to 3, on the other hand, we will continue to have a system of low-quality child care propped up in part by an underfunded CCDF.

One of the potential implications of this bifurcated system is the following: as 4-year-olds flock to pre-K, the CCDF will serve growing numbers of children ages 0 to 3. My research (with Erdal Tekin) suggests that the young children served by the subsidy program will already be behind developmentally as they move to pre-K. So rather than preparing children for kindergarten, the new pre-K program will expend valuable resources trying to undo the effects of the low-quality care to which subsidized children were exposed during the first three years of life.

What can policymakers do to improve the child care subsidy system? I will outline a few broad principles that should be incorporated into a redesign of the CCDF. In my view, the primary problem with child care in the U.S. is the low average quality available to parents. Thus, child care policy should shift away from its current focus on increasing parental employment to one that enhances child development. It can do so in the following ways:

Divorce the child care subsidy system from the welfare system. Employment-based child care subsidies represent a misguided approach to child care policy. By necessity, such a system places few restrictions on the quality of care that parents may purchase. And the mandated work requirement is clearly the wrong policy tool for solving the quality problem. The decoupling of child care and welfare policy will signal that the goal of the former is to neither promote nor inhibit parental employment. Doing so may also increase the odds of reform, as the subsidy program will no longer be seen as an appendage of an unpopular welfare system.
Provide parents with strong incentives to purchase high-quality care. One way to accomplish this is through a means-tested voucher—available to working and non-working parents—whose value is increasing in the quality of care purchased. This is already happening to some extent: 32 states have higher reimbursement rates for providers meeting higher-quality standards. But even the states with the highest tiered benefit levels often do not reach the 75^th percentile recommendation.^[xiv] Therefore, subsidy benefits need to be increased substantially. In addition, eligibility should be expanded to reach families up to at least 200 percent of the federal poverty line.
Inform parents about the potential benefits of high-quality care. Part of the quality problem originates with parents. Given that they are often unable to discern levels of child care quality or are unwilling to pay more high-quality services, states and the federal government should engage in an aggressive public information campaign to inform parents about the importance of early child care. The campaign should target families inside and outside the subsidy system so that the shift in demand is large enough to compel providers to invest sufficient resources into quality enhancement. Parents also need a better understanding of the accreditation system, and they should have easy access to the local child care resource and referral database.

Enacting these proposals will certainly increase the price tag of the President’s early education plan. But the U.S. has already tried to do child care policy on the cheap, and the results are not positive. It is time to get the CCDF on the right track by focusing on quality.

[i] The projected 10-year cost of the President’s Preschool for All proposal is $75 billion. It would begin in FY 2014 with a bit more than a $2 billion expenditure.

[ii] http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/occ/2009_final.pdf

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/occ/final_overview_allyears11508_compliant.pdf

[iii] http://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc/mr/factsheets.

[iv] Herbst, C.M. (2010). The Labor Supply Effects of Child Care Costs and Wages in the Presence of Subsidies and the Earned Income Tax Credit. Review of Economics of the Household, 8(2), 199-230. Available here.

Herbst, C.M. (2008). Do Social Policy Reforms Have Different Impacts on Employment and Welfare Use As Economic Conditions Change? Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 27(4), 867-894. Available here.

Tekin, E. (2007). Single Mothers Working at Night: Child Care Subsidies and Standard Employment with Implications for Welfare Reform. Economic Inquiry, 45(2), 233-250. Available here.

[v] Herbst, C.M. & Tekin, Erdal. (2011). Do Child Care Subsidies Influence Single Mothers’ Decision to Invest in Human Capital? Economics of Education Review, 30(5), 901-912. Available here.

[vi] Herbst, C.M. & Tekin, E. (2010). Child Care Subsidies and Child Development. (2010). Economics of Education Review, 29(4), 618-638. Available here.

Herbst, C.M. & Tekin, E. (2010). The Impact of Child Care Subsidies on Child Well-Being: Evidence from
Geographic Variation in the Distance to Social Service Agencies. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 16250. Available here.

[vii] Herbst, C.M. & Tekin, E. (2011). Child Care Subsidies and Childhood Obesity. Review of Economics of the Household, 9(3), 349-378. Available here.

Herbst, C.M. & Tekin, E. (2012). The Geographic Accessibility of Child Care Subsidies and Evidence on the Impact of Subsidy Receipt on Childhood Obesity. Journal of Urban Economics, 71(1), 37-52. Available here.

[viii] Herbst, C.M. & Tekin, E. (2012). Child Care Subsidies, Maternal Well-Being, and Child-Parent Interactions: Evidence from Three Nationally Representative Datasets. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 17774. Available here.

[ix] Mocan, N. (2007). Can Consumers Detect Lemons? An Empirical analysis of Information Asymmetry in the Market for Child Care. Journal of Population Economics, 20, 743-780. Available here.

[x] National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. (2000). From neurons to neighborhoods:

the science of early child development. Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development. Jack P. Shonkoff and Deborah A. Phillips (Eds.). Washington, DC. National Academies Press.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). (2000). Characteristics and quality of child

care for toddlers and preschoolers. Applied Developmental Science, 4, 116-141.

National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies. (2013). We Can Do Better: NACCRRA’s

Ranking of State Child Care Center Regulations and Oversight. Available here.

[xi] Bernal, R. & Keane, M. (2011). Child care choices and children’s cognitive achievement: The case of single mothers. Journal of Labor Economics, 29, 459-512. Available here.

Herbst, C.M. (2012). The Impact of Non-Parental Child Care on Child Development: Evidence from the Summer Participation “Dip.” Discussion Paper No. 7039. Bonn, Germany: Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). Available here.

[xii] This article from The Washington Post describes the financial pressure child care providers face when they locate in low-income communities and serve subsidized children.

[xiii] Schulman, K. & Blank, H. (2012). Downward Slide: State Child Care Assistance Policies 2012. Washington, DC: National Women’s Law Center. Available here.

[xiv] Ibid.

Authors

Chris Herbst

Going to College? Think Hard About Your Major and Your Career After You Graduate

Isabel V. Sawhill and Stephanie Owen — Wed, 08 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Is a college degree worth it? Not for everyone, according to our newly-released Center on Children and Families policy brief. The value of a college degree can vary dramatically, depending on factors such as field of study, type of college, graduation rate and future occupation. Here’s the first in a three-part blog post series, where we take a closer look at findings from the policy brief.

For the past few decades, it has been widely argued that a college degree is a prerequisite to entering the middle class in the United States. We all know that, on average, college graduates earn significantly more money over their lifetimes than those with only a high school education. Brookings’ Hamilton project has estimated that the average bachelor’s degree holder makes $570,000 more over a lifetime than the average high school graduate. What gets much less attention is that the college premium varies widely by the choices students make.

For example, the value of a bachelor’s degree depends heavily on choice of major and later occupation. No surprise here: the highest paid major is engineering. If on the other hand you studied education (but didn’t go on to get a master’s degree), you can only expect to make half of what those engineering majors do. (Stagnant teacher compensation is a whole other topic that we won’t go into here.)

Not everyone ends up working in the field they studied in college, so it’s also useful to look at earnings by occupation. The highest-earning occupation category is architecture and engineering, with computers, math, and management in second place. The lowest-earning occupation for college graduates is service.

Of course, plenty of people choose to study art or become teachers because they derive intrinsic value from those fields that can’t be measured by a paycheck. Personal preferences and noneconomic benefits are important, too. Few among us would want to live in a world with all programmers and no artists, or all investment bankers and no philanthropists.

Authors

Isabel V. Sawhill
Stephanie Owen

College Is The Holy Grail, But Should Everyone Go?

Isabel V. Sawhill — Wed, 08 May 2013 09:30:00 -0400

The new Holy Grail in American life appears to be a four-year college degree. Almost all high school students and their parents aspire to go to college, and high school graduates are enrolling in much higher numbers than in the past. The problem is that too few of them are graduating. Dropout rates from four-year schools are over 40 percent and from community colleges they are closer to 70 percent. The need for remedial courses to compensate for what kids are not learning in high school is distressingly high and not all that effective.

For those who actually graduate, a college degree can pay off handsomely in the labor market. After adjusting for other confounding variables, the extra lifetime income associated with a bachelor’s degree is $570,000, and the rate of return is high – somewhere around 10 percent. However, those figures are averages. The benefits of a college degree vary widely depending on the quality of the school and a student’s choice of major. Not all college degrees are created equal: there is a huge variation in the return to a bachelor’s degree, depending on choice of major and occupation; school type and selectivity level; as well as the likelihood of graduating. The details are spelled out in a newly released Brookings brief that notes that 170 of 853 unique schools, or 1 in 5 of those schools analyzed, have negative returns on investment.

With college costs at record highs, many students are incurring debilitating debt. Student loans are the second largest item on household balance sheets after mortgage debt. It may actually be irresponsible to tell young people that college is always the best choice, and that they will be able to find jobs that make these debt levels affordable. If a student is able to get into a school with high graduation rates, generous financial aid, and he or she chooses a major with high expected earnings – such as engineering or science -- they can greatly improve their lifetime prospects. But an expensive degree at a non-selective four-year school with a low graduation rate may not be a wise decision.

How can we help students make smarter investments in their postsecondary years? First, we need to make sure they have better information on financial aid, graduation rates, earnings levels, and other relevant information about the institutions they are considering. Some of this data exists, such as the PayScale college rankings and the Obama Administration’s College Scorecard, but should be more broadly publicized. Second, we should encourage more students to consider less traditional postsecondary alternatives such as job training programs, apprenticeships, vocational certificates, and associate degrees that train students in skills that are in high demand by employers. Finally, financial aid should be tied to academic performance: research suggests that students with financial aid that has strings attached are more likely to complete their degrees.

Authors

Isabel V. Sawhill

Publication: Real Clear Markets

Infographic: Should Everyone Go to College?

Isabel V. Sawhill and Stephanie Owen — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:33:00 -0400

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Should Everyone Go To College?

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Isabel V. Sawhill
Stephanie Owen

Subsidizing Higher Education May Not Be Paying Off

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

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

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Subsidizing Higher Education May Not Be Paying Off

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Five Ways Teachers Can Use Technology to Help Students

Darrell M. West and Joshua Bleiberg — Tue, 07 May 2013 08:59:00 -0400

Thomas Edison once said, "Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools...our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years." Amazingly enough, however, one of our nation's most important inventors was proven quite wrong. The American education system has a remarkable resistance to innovation and the classroom experience has changed very little in the 100 years since Edison's prediction.

Advances in information technology have revolutionized how people communicate and learn in nearly every aspect of modern life except for education. The education system operates under the antiquated needs of an agrarian and industrial America. The short school day and the break in the summer were meant to allow children to work on family farms. Schools have an enduring industrial mentality placing students in arbitrary groups based on their age regardless of their competencies.

Technology has failed to transform our schools because the education governance system insulates them from the disruptions that technology creates in other organizations. The government regulates schools perhaps more than any other organization. Rules govern where students study, how they will learn, and who will teach them. Education regulation governs the relationships of actors in the system and stymies the impact of innovative technologies. Furthermore the diffuse system of governance creates numerous veto points to limit innovation.

To overcome these obstacles, we must persuade teachers that technology will empower them and help their students learn. We argue that there are five strategies for successful teacher adoption of education technology and that these principles will help fulfill the potential that Edison saw a century ago:

Schools must use technology that empowers teachers. Teachers rightly reject education technologies that divert their attention from instruction. The best education technologies enable teachers to do more with fewer resources. Communication platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr enable dynamic communication with students. Teacher-empowering technologies include mobile apps that grade written student work and provide lesson plan databases. School systems need to aggressively track what works for their teachers and put all other unworkable technologies aside.

Teachers should treat the adoption of technology as part of lesson planning. One of the major drivers of bad policy is policy churn. New district leaders want to make their mark adopting new policies and jettisoning the old. This constant changing of priorities makes beneficial reforms difficult to implement. Teachers can incorporate technology directly into their practice and insulate their students from the deleterious effects of policy churn. For example teachers can use Khan Academy or other online resources to improve remediation. Systematic adoption of technology at the classroom levels limits the damage of shifting policy maker priorities.

Teachers should not fear open-source technologies. Many mistakenly believe that education technologies are expensive and complicated to use. Open-source technologies are stable, secure, and compatible with other platforms. Organizations both small and large use open source devices every day. Many businesses use open-source servers for their efficiency and costs savings. They often have large communities that provide high quality customer support. Best of all, open-source technologies often cost less than proprietary products.

Use online education portfolios to evaluate students. Educators have known about the benefits of paper based portfolios for generations. Portfolios allow students to express creativity for difficult to assess subjects. Teachers can choose from a variety of online portfolio providers tailored to the needs of their classroom. They also serve as a platform for students to demonstrate growth. Online portfolios have many advantages over paper based options because they cost less and allow for more robust outreach. Online portfolios are also amenable to a wider variety of formats including video, music or other interactive features.

Teachers should embrace the Common Core State Standards. Common standards make teaching simpler. Teachers have to write lessons that comply with district, state, and national standards (e.g. NCTM or NCTE). Having a single set of standards eliminates redundancy and conflicting guidelines. Furthermore universal adoption of common standards will support future technological innovations that aid teachers. From a technical perspective, standards facilitate the development of new technologies. Innovators can focus on developing tools that better serve students rather than solving technical challenges of interoperability created by multiple sets of standards.

Undoubtedly weak financial support inhibits the adoption of education technology. Despite this obstacle, teachers working together have tremendous potential to reform education. Every day teachers face choices about how to implement the curriculum and instruct students. Those moments are opportunities for teachers to engage in education reform that has a real impact on students. Teachers should use education technologies that are inexpensive, easy to use, and improve student learning.

Authors

Darrell M. West
Joshua Bleiberg

Publication: The Huffington Post

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

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

Abstract

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

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

Authors

Ron Haskins
Cecilia Elena Rouse

Publication: The Future of Children

Improving College Prep. for Low-Income Students

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

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

Authors

Ron Haskins
Cecilia Elena Rouse

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

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

Event Information

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

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

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

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

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Brookings: Topics - Education

What Should the Supreme Court Do About Affirmative Action?

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Post-2015 Focus on Sustainable Development: How Education and Learning Can Play a Role

Learning for Sustainable Development

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Crafting an Education Goal in the Post-2015 Development Framework: Having Our Cake and Eating It Too

Crafting a Goal That is Both Global and Local

Practicality versus Long-term Ambition

Progress Needs to Be Measured

What is Still Needed

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Does Expanding School Choice Increase Segregation?

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The Impact of School Feeding Programs in Senegal

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Why We Still Think College Isn't for Everyone

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Helping Young People Make Better Higher Education Choices

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Policymakers Get Serious About Student Loan Interest Rates

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For Some, College May Not Be a Smart Investment

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Should Everyone Go To College?

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Obama’s Early Education Proposals Leave Federal Efforts Fragmented and Incoherent

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Going to College? Think Hard About Your Major and Your Career After You Graduate

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College Is The Holy Grail, But Should Everyone Go?

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Infographic: Should Everyone Go to College?

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Subsidizing Higher Education May Not Be Paying Off

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Five Ways Teachers Can Use Technology to Help Students

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

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Authors

Improving College Prep. for Low-Income Students

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

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