The Great Debate

In the late 1960s, a Stanford University psychologist began conducting his now famous “marshmallow test” to understand “delayed gratification” – the ability to wait.

He would place a 4-year-old alone in a room with a single delicious marshmallow, promising to give him two marshmallows after a short wait. Some children succumbed to temptation, while others held out for the bigger reward. The children who could control their impulses went on to become better, higher-achieving students.

Why do we bring up this iconic experiment now, in the midst of the 2012 election season?

We believe that helping American children get access to a great education is a two-marshmallow political test. In contrast to relatively quick fixes like even more quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve or temporary deficit spending fiscal policies, addressing the challenges facing U.S. schools and students cannot be achieved over the course of a quarter (or even an election cycle). But underperforming labor markets and the alarmingly high 8.1 percent unemployment rate make the goal of improving our public schools even more obviously critical to America’s future. Making smart fixes to the public education system now, as outlined in our recent Council on Foreign Relations report, will pay off later.

Consider the context: America’s gross domestic product today is at its highest level ever – but we are accomplishing this level of output with about 4.6 million fewer workers than at the top of our last economic expansion. Today, the unemployment rate of people with a college degree or higher is 4.1 percent, compared with 12.7 percent for people with less than a high school degree. Demand at home and globally for low-skilled workers is falling, and the only way to address this long-term trend is through education.

There’s a national security crisis in U.S. education. I’m no history sleuth, but it must have come on fast just after February 2010. That’s when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates sent the last Quadrennial Defense Review up to Capitol Hill, with no mention of U.S. education at all. Two years later, in March 2012, Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice issued a report from the Council on Foreign Relations that declared American education to be so failed as to put U.S. national security at risk.

National security crises can arise suddenly. But education crises? Schooling kids is much as Max Weber once described politics – “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” You can lose a school building or a teacher overnight, but you don’t fall into a national-security-like crisis by mid-morning recess. You don’t get out of it by homeroom the next day, either.

American education today does feel like it’s in crisis. But not the one Rice and Klein would have us believe. Klein and Rice say the problem is: “Johnny still can’t read, ‘rite or ‘rithmetic.” They say tests and standards are the fix. And like George Bush did down at Ground Zero after 9/11, they’ve gone to “The Pile,” megaphone in hand, shouting the alarm. This time, though, it’s not Saddam and WMD. It’s China, Finland, Singapore and our schools.

In an election year, many issues vie for our attention. Complex matters like healthcare, social security, and taxes — that inspire endless opinions but have no easy solutions — are debated daily. One issue that we should all agree on without any debate: the need for financial education in schools. As a country we are failing in financial literacy. We owe it to our children to provide them with the best opportunity for a brighter financial future. By giving them a stronger grasp of the basic principles that can help them achieve their dreams — and avoid financial nightmares — we can help our nation as well.

Americans, on average, were able to correctly answer just three of five questions about fundamental financial concepts, according to a FINRA capability study. And less than 25 percent of students say they are prepared to deal with the financial challenges that await them in the real world. Yet while Treasury Department research shows that high school graduates in states that mandate financial education have higher savings rates and a greater net worth than graduates from states without financial education, only 12 states require that students take a personal finance course to graduate.

It’s up to all of us — parents, schools, government, private sector, and public sector — to give students the tools they need to succeed. We must take steps to ensure that our kids remain competitive and prepared for the future.

By David Callahan
The views expressed are his own.

Nearly every day, if not every hour, some politician proclaims that taming America’s budget deficit requires “hard choices.” Strangely, though, few talk about perhaps the toughest dilemma facing the supercommittee, and the rest of Congress: How to reconcile the needs of old and young Americans.

Both groups have urgent and growing claims on the public purse. Four million seniors live below the official poverty line and millions more hover just above that line – contrary to the popular image of well-heeled retirees. And because the Baby Boom generation hasn’t saved nearly enough for retirement, such hardship is likely to get worse. Deficit hawks talk about cutting Social Security benefits and limiting Medicaid payments for nursing homes, but the truth is that seniors will need a more generous safety net in coming decades than what the U.S. now has.

Meanwhile, a new report on the “State of Young America” by Demos (where I work), argues that America is way under-investing in the next generation. Too many young people who graduate from our under-funded public schools aren’t ready for college and can’t earn a living in today’s low-wage economy. Those who do go to college often can’t afford to finish their degrees, and debt among college graduates has soared to record levels. Young adults trying to start a family also struggle with sky high costs for childcare, housing, and healthcare. At the same time, median earnings for young adult men with college degrees have barely budged since 1980.

By Thomas Cooley
The views expressed are his own.

The European debt crisis has put the banking system in peril and is threatening to end the grand European experiment. It is a test of whether European governments can find enough political common ground to find a solution to the problems created by sovereign fiscal policies in the periphery countries. Severe as the fiscal issues are, there are other problems that are likely to divide Europe into prosperous and stagnant zones for a very long time to come. The periphery countries have underinvested in human capital since the Euro was created and this will continue to exacerbate the economic division of Europe. Persistent inequality cannot be good for the stability of the union.

For all of the Eurozone countries faced with unsustainable fiscal policies the solution will involve considerable pain in the form of budget cuts, shrinking public sectors and increases in tax collections. Because draconian fiscal remedies impose a substantial drag on the economies concerned there is now the worry that Europe will become a two-speed continent with the healthier economies like German, France, and the Nordic countries experiencing strong growth and the periphery countries like Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain growing more slowly.

Fiscal drag is not the only problem facing the periphery economies. These countries struggled to get their inflation rates in line before joining the EMU but when they did they surrendered the ability to alter the terms of trade for their exports. In many of these countries it meant surrendering a weak currency for a strong one.

By RiShawn Biddle
The opinions expressed are his own.

Reuters invited leaders in education to reply to Steven Brill’s op-ed on the school reform deniers. Below is Biddle’s reply. Here are responses from Joel Klein, Randi Weingarten, Diane Ravitch and others.

The vitriol over Steven Brill’s piece this week from Randi Weingarten, Diane Ravitch, Alex Kotlowitz and other defenders of the status quo isn’t surprising. After all, they are especially good at ignoring reality – especially when it comes to the role of the nation’s education crisis in fostering poverty in a knowledge-based economy in which what you know is more important than what you can do with your hands. And they are particularly willing to ignore the reality that school reform – including making sure that all kids are taught by high-quality teachers – is the long-term solution for saving 1.2 million children a year from poverty and prison.

One of the biggest reasons why America’s economic malaise may last for decades is because high school dropouts among the nation’s long term unemployed are essentially shut out of the jobs market. Fifteen percent of American high school dropouts age 25 and older were unemployed on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s nearly double the rate for high school graduates with some amount of college education and three times higher than that of collegians with bachelor’s degrees. The problem is even worse with the new generation of dropouts who have fewer prospects for employment; nearly a third of dropouts age 16-to-24 are out of work on a not seasonally-adjusted basis. These young men and women can’t get into high-paying white-collar jobs, or even get into apprenticeships for blue-collar jobs such as welding, which can provide them with middle-class incomes.

By Jenny Sedlis
The opinions expressed are her own.

I note that Michael Winerip has chosen to use data about Harlem Success Academy’s student body as the central piece of factual evidence in his reply to Steven Brill.  Harlem Success Academy had 9.5% English Language Learners in 2009-10, not the 1.5% that Michael Winerip reported.  The statistics are publicly available (as a ZIP file) in the section NYSESLAT Annual Results*: Source: NYSED School Report Card Database 2009-10 URL: http://www.nystart.gov/publicweb-external/SRC2010.zip

Even if there were vast differences in the demographics (which there are not) Harlem Success Academy 3rd graders scored in the top 1% in New York State on the ELA in 2009-10, while PS 149 3rd graders scored in the bottom 2%, a difference that cannot be attributed to demographics.  Winerip is correct that Harlem Success Academy has advantages over PS 149 that makes comparisons less valuable.  We can hire and fire. We can provide 8 weeks a year of professional development. Our principals are instructional leaders who are there to support and develop teachers. The composition of our student body is not the determining factor in our success. It’s the quality, training, passion, effort, and drive of our teachers, leaders and network staff.

*All English Language Learners take the NYSESLAT test.  The number of test-takers in a school reflects the number of English Language Learners.  The demographics section in the database is incorrect.  It pulls data from the City’s ATS database before the NYSESLAT results were included.

The debate around Steven Brill’s new book “Class Warfare” continues to swirl. A review/essay in Monday’s New York Times by Michael Winerip accused Brill of largely ignoring the views and experiences of teachers. Like some other Brill critics, Winerip accused the book of overstating the success of charter schools, and overallocating blame for failed schools to teachers’ unions where other factors–such as poverty–may be at work.

Brill felt Winerip’s criticism was misguided and had a bit of a personal attack in it. He attempted to post a response Sunday night to the Times‘s Web site. When, Monday morning, that response remained unposted (despite more than a dozen later comments going up), Reuters.com published it. He said it felt “almost as if [Winerip had] been waiting to unload on me for years,” and in turn accused Winerip of not using proper data to understand charter school performance in Harlem.

Then, later Monday morning, the Times site, got around to publishing Brill’s response, and about an hour later, Winerip replied to the reply. You can read that exchange in full here.

This is a response to Michael Winerip’s review of “Class Warfare” in Monday’s New York Times.

I appreciate that Mr. Winerip thinks I have “seen the light” at the end of the book. What he doesn’t realize, though not for lack of my trying to explain it to him, is that I was simply reporting what I found over two years. I was not trying to render, let alone reconcile, a verdict for or against his (anti-reform) point of view.

However, despite his distinguished prior career as a reporter, I am not surprised by the apparent anger in Mr. Winerip’s opinion column, let alone his decision to distort my book by ignoring all in it that describes teachers (and even teachers’ union leaders) in a positive light and strains to explain, and depict from the classroom, how difficult efffective teaching is. When he talked with me, it was almost as if he’d been waiting to unload on me for years. He freely cast epithets, some profane, at many of the men and women portrayed in the book, and refused to consider that his reporting about alleged “skimming” of the best students at the Harlem Success charter network might be based on faulty data. (Though he did, I guess in attempt to humor me, chuckle when I tweaked him for ignoring in a prior article that I was the product of Queens, New York elementary and middle public schools, before winning a full scholarship to go to a prep school – whereupon he repeated this revelation in this article.)

By Shantanu Sinha
The opinions expressed are his own.

Reuters invited leaders in education to reply to Steven Brill’s op-ed on the school reform deniers. Below is Sinha’s reply. Here are responses from Joel Klein, Randi Weingarten, Diane Ravitch and others.

Steve Brill makes a compelling case that many issues in the educational debate are not actually debatable, but rather easily known facts.  Too many people are simply denying the obvious.

Clearly, public education in America is failing.  While the vitriolic debate rages on, millions of children are the undeniable victims.  Steve pointedly demonstrates how common sense is not sufficiently applied in many hotly contested topics like rubber rooms, teacher merit pay, or tenure rules.  However, while these are all issues worthy of discussion, solving them still won’t necessarily move the dial in a meaningful way.