Education / Youth – Page 48

Double Whammy

A friend from Wisconsin often shares news reported in that state’s media. Most recently, he sent me an article reporting on the troubling results of research into poverty and public health.

Malia Jones is an assistant scientist and social epidemiologist working in Wisconsin. As she notes, her conclusions about increases in poverty despite the economic recovery are consistent with those reached by other scholars.

We didn’t look at explanations for that but other people have, and I think what’s happening is that people at the low end of the economic spectrum are not benefiting from recovery. They’re really being left behind. So inequality is increasing in the face of an expanding economy.

Jones’ work is one more confirmation that, as she says, low-income Americans are being left behind. But her analysis didn’t stop there, and her discussion of both the immediate and long-term implications requires attention.

In short, poor children in America are getting a “double whammy.”

Jones notes that the number of children living in poverty has increased since the Great Recession, and that the existence of children living in poverty is not only a humanitarian issue, but also a critical public health issue. As she points out, exposure to the myriad problems that accompany an impoverished childhood can lead to a lifetime of disability.

It’s those kinds of stressors like housing insecurity, not being sure if there’s going to be food for dinner, living in a crummy neighborhood with violence, those stressors can impair normal brain development.

Impaired brain development often leads to behavioral outcomes; as anyone who has taught in a low-income area can attest, it affects school performance in a variety of ways. Children of poverty often lack the opportunity or means to develop the sorts of skill sets common among middle and higher income students. That, in turn, affects later access to jobs, trapping such children in a cycle of poverty.

Living in poverty also increases the likelihood of poor health. Living in poverty is a major risk factor for obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and even premature death.

It seems unconscionable that the United States would ignore the lifetime health effects of poverty on poor children who are already living in sub-optimal and stressful conditions. Even the self-satisfied and clueless scolds who insist that poor people just need to work harder can’t hold children responsible for their impoverished situations. Surely, even the adamant opponents of Obamacare, Medicaid and other efforts to make health care affordable can’t believe that it is either moral or economically reasonable to deprive children of adequate medical attention.

And surely, even self-described fiscal conservatives must realize that the long-term costs of neglecting the most basic needs of poor children are far higher than the costs of timely intervention.

Why is it that American public policy choices so often make me think of the adage: penny wise, pound foolish?

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Dispatch from the Front

Testing….123 testing….

The Washington Post recently reprinted an article originally written for Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. It was a warning from a recently retired high school government teacher to college professors who would soon face classrooms filled with the products of reform efforts focused on high-stakes testing.

The article, while lengthy, is worth reading in its entirety. The author–a highly regarded teacher and scholar of education–made a number of observations that should be taken seriously by legislators (most of whom have no background in teaching) intent upon “improving” public education. A few of the high (or low) points:

In many cases, students would arrive in our high school without having had meaningful social studies instruction, because even in states that tested social studies or science, the tests did not count for “adequate yearly progress” under No Child Left Behind. With test scores serving as the primary if not the sole measure of student performance and, increasingly, teacher evaluation, anything not being tested was given short shrift.

Further, most of the tests being used consist primarily or solely of multiple-choice items, which are cheaper to develop, administer, and score than are tests that include constructed responses such as essays. Even when a state has tests that include writing, the level of writing required for such tests often does not demand that higher-level thinking be demonstrated, nor does it require proper grammar, usage, syntax, and structure. Thus, students arriving in our high school lacked experience and knowledge about how to do the kinds of writing that are expected at higher levels of education….

The structure of testing has led to students arriving at our school without what previously would have been considered requisite background knowledge in social studies, but the problem is not limited to this field. Students often do not get exposure to art or music or other nontested subjects. In high-need schools, resources not directly related to testing are eliminated: at the time of the teachers’ strike last fall, 160 Chicago public schools had no libraries. Class sizes exceeded forty students—in elementary school.

I have posted many times about the deficits I see in civic literacy–especially knowledge of American government and history. At the Center for Civic Literacy, one of our first inquiries was into the reasons for that deficit; after all, most schools have government or civics courses, and most states have standards including such content. What we found was that the required tests did not include that material, and that teachers’ time and effort was devoted primarily to subjects that would be tested.

As for the written word…my undergraduate students are abysmal. That, I must admit, is nothing new, but neither is it improving. Grammar, syntax, punctuation, word choice, organization….often, my class is their first introduction to those terms and concepts. I was a high school English teacher in a former life, and one thing I know: the only way to teach written communication skills is to have students write. A lot.

It’s ironic that the people who focus on job training to the exclusion of education, who thus favor ignoring “frills” like English literature and the humanities, fail to recognize that the ability to communicate clearly is an essential job skill. (I would argue it is an essential life skill.)

When a student tells me “I know what I mean, I just can’t say it,” my immediate reaction is “Then you don’t know what you mean.” If you can’t express it, you don’t really know it. That is certainly the reaction students can expect from their eventual employers.

There is copious research supporting the value of art and music education–and not just for the sake of creating well-rounded human beings. Art and music instruction have been shown to increase student performance in STEM and similar subjects near and dear to job trainers’ hearts.

And don’t get me started on the numerous important characteristics that tests can’t measure.

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Back to School….

Well, according to the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, Indiana’s devotion to public education leaves a lot to be desired.

Indiana school reformers love letter grades, but they won’t like the grade assigned to their own work. The Network for Public Education gives the state a failing mark for its commitment to public education, based on measures controlled in recent years by a General Assembly beholden to privatization interests.

Indiana earned a grade of F, placing itself among some historically low achievers and states at the forefront of untested reforms: Idaho, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Texas and Arizona.

The low grades were based upon deficits in teacher professionalism, levels of privatization, and the investment of school funding resources.

Although the newspaper article didn’t mention it, Indiana Governor Mike Pence has been an ardent supporter of vouchers. Indiana’s voucher program is the largest in the nation, and the money redirected to private and parochial schools in the state comes out of funds that would otherwise go to the public school system. This is despite the fact that public school enrollment this fall was 1,046,146 students, compared to 84,030 non-public students.

Pence cannot distance himself from the poor grades earned by Indiana schools; ever since his election, he has moved aggressively to neuter and block the authority of Glenda Ritz, who was actually elected to run the state’s schools (with more votes, incidentally, than Pence garnered). As Politico reported at the time,

Pence and state Republicans have quickly moved to change state law to boot state Superintendent Glenda Ritz from her post as board of education chairwoman and allow other board members — most of whom Pence appointed — to elect a new leader. Ritz could still run the state education department but would have much less say in setting the policy that governs the agency.

More recently, media has reported that a state administrator hired by Pence altered language in a supposedly “independent” analysis that reflected poorly on the decision to substitute a new ISTEP exam for a previous one based on national Common Core academic standards.

Whatever “grades” Indiana schools receive, Pence owns them. As he heads into a much tougher re-election campaign than he originally contemplated, his power play against the elected Superintendent of Schools will be part of the political baggage that includes RFRA, his refusal to apply for federal funds for preschool, the state’s crumbling infrastructure, a “war on women”( a war that includes recently jettisoning the only high-ranking woman in his administration), his much-derided “news bureau” and a variety of other unforced errors.

The 2016 election will give Hoosiers the opportunity to grade Governor Pence. Right now, he isn’t passing.

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The Continuing Attack on Public Education

And Indiana’s legislative session continues…..

In the Fort Wayne Journel-Gazette, Vic Smith has accused the Indiana legislature of a frontal assault on public education.

Two bills have been filed that would create the biggest expansion of private school vouchers Indiana has ever seen. They would advance the privatization of our educational system in line with the plans of voucher-inventor Milton Friedman, who supported the abolishment of public education.

I didn’t think that the Republican supermajority would make a direct attack on public education in an election year, but it appears the Republican leadership is poised to push forward a radical new private school voucher plan. It would be the biggest voucher expansion since Gov. Mike Pence’s voucher plan costing taxpayers $40 million in new dollars and diverting $120 million from public schools was enacted in 2013.

Smith asserts that these measures are part of a longer and more ambitious effort to replace public schools with a “marketplace” of private schools funded by government, but without government oversight. He points out that although 94% of Indiana’s children still attend public schools, those public schools are being systematically starved of resources that are being redirected to private schools.

Smith sees this assault as intentional, but let’s give voucher proponents the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say they genuinely believe that privatized schools will offer better educational results. (Put aside, for the moment, important questions about what we believe constitutes a good education, and how we measure that.)

To date, research has provided no evidence that vouchers improve anything other than parental satisfaction and the bottom lines of struggling parochial schools.

A recent study of Louisiana voucher schools by the Brookings Institution found student achievement actually declined, and fairly substantially.

When comparing school performance, researchers struggle to distinguish differences in schools’ effectiveness from variation in the types of students who choose those schools.

A voucher lottery provides an unusual opportunity to measure the effectiveness of private schools. The lottery serves as a randomized trial, which is the gold standard of research methods. Random selection means that lottery winners and losers are identical, on average, when they apply for the voucher. Any differences that emerge after the lottery can therefore be attributed to the private-school attendance of the winners.

The results were startling. The researchers, a team of economists from Berkeley, Duke, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that the scores of the lottery winners dropped precipitously in their first year of attending private school, compared to the performance of the lottery losers. The effects were very large: roughly a quarter of a standard deviation in math, social studies, and science. There were no effects on reading scores.

In previous posts, I have argued that the tragedy in Flint, Michigan, can be attributed in large part to people who did not understand the government they were elected to manage, and who substituted ideology for competence. The voucher movement displays the same hubris.

In both cases, children are the victims.

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Education and Student Debt

A few days ago, I wrote about the increasing tendency to rank colleges on the basis of alumni earnings, as if higher education is simply another venue for job training.

In the comments, people pointed out the importance of earning power, especially in light of the staggering expense of a college education.

Believe me, I get that.

Nothing I wrote was intended to justify the increasing costs of a university education and the resulting sky-high levels of student debt. Indeed, to the extent that we are pricing education out of the reach of many, we are sabotaging the educational mission I was defending.

Student debt is not only a huge problem for recent graduates; it is dragging down the economy. As Matt Impink and I wrote in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education,

Student debt constrains individual decision-making in a number of ways, and its growth affects the entire economy. For example, people paying back student loans are less likely to start businesses. Considering that 60 percent of new private-sector jobs are created by small businesses, diminishing the ability to create businesses does considerable harm to the economy.

Debt loads also affect overall consumption. According to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, fewer 30-year-olds in general have bought homes since the recession, but the decline has been steeper for people with a history of student-loan debt and has continued even as the housing market has recovered. In an economy that depends upon the ability and willingness of consumers to purchase homes, furniture, automobiles, and other goods, a debt load that effectively precludes such purchases poses a real problem.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has found that three-quarters of the overall shortfall in household formation can be attributed to younger adults, ages 18 to 34. In 2011, 1.3 million more Americans in this age group lived with their parents than in 2007. Although it is impossible to determine the relative contribution of student-loan debt and the economic downturn to that phenomenon, student debt is clearly implicated. Any program that reduces the need to borrow can only improve the situation.

According to a report from Zillow, the relatively few millennials who are thriving economically are the ones whose parents are able to subsidize college tuition or a down payment on a home. Help with education and buying a home were the two primary ways in which the original GI Bill created upward social mobility. Estimates are that each new household leads to $145,000 of economic impact. If student debt is keeping just a third of those two million young Americans from living on their own — a reasonable, if undocumented, assumption — that adds up to a $100-billion loss or delay in economic activity.

Student debt is an enormous issue for the country. The Democratic presidential candidates have all addressed it; Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed measures to ameliorate it.

If any of the Republican presidential candidates have paused their attacks on immigrants, reproductive choice and various kinds of “losers” in order to address student debt levels and their impact on either young people or the economy, I’ve missed it.

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