- Getting teenagers to think ahead is basically impossible—just try to persuade your favorite adolescent to file his college applications before the night they’re due, or to quit doing donuts in the school parking lot before he gets a free trip to the ER. So we should be immensely encouraged by the fact that 1.4 million high school students took college courses for credit in 2014–2015. To promote this development, the Department of Education has helpfully pledged to offer some $20 million in Pell grants for low-income students to enroll in college courses while still attending high school. Dual enrollment programs like these are probably the best possible use of Pell grants; right now, as Fordham’s own Checker Finn has observed, such funds are too often used to subsidize remedial education in college for kids who didn’t learn everything they needed to in the thirteen years of K–12. Isn’t it smarter to pay for academically gifted sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to take college courses early, rather than picking up the bill for undereducated college freshmen to finally learn the stuff they were supposed to be taught in high school?
- Nevada’s move this year to establish $5,000 education savings accounts has certainly caused a stir. (You might remember a certain education think tank having a lot to say about it a few months back.) Reformers would—and should—always cheer the broadening of school options for families, but the idea of using public funds to underwrite private school tuition needs to be sold carefully to the public. The young initiative got a taste of bad press last week, when the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that most of the 3,100 ESA applications came from ZIP codes with incomes among the top 40 percent in the state. That includes ninety-nine applications just from the tony, master-planned Summerlin community, as opposed to just nine from students in Nevada’s poorest neighborhoods. In part, this is a necessary risk of establishing new public benefits: If they’re made available only to those who need them most, they’ll never attract a big enough constituency to keep going when times are tight. But before we wheel out the tumbrils and take back ESAs for the proletariat, some patience is in order. The program needs time to be rolled out, both for outreach to low-income families and for a meaningful expansion of private school seats into urban areas. Let’s wait a while before rendering a verdict on the earliest of early adopters.
