The Education Gadfly Weekly: Opting out of the selective-college craziness is always an option
The Education Gadfly Weekly: Opting out of the selective-college craziness is always an option
Opting out of the selective-college craziness is always an option
If the academic Olympics aren’t working for some stressed-out teens and their families, they should consider downshifting in their courses and activities and forgetting about gaining admission to a highly-selected college. Focus instead on finding one that’s a great fit for you personally. Be assured that, given enrollment trends, plenty will be glad to receive you.
Opting out of the selective-college craziness is always an option
Does more money matter to teachers? It’s not a simple yes or no question
What Kamala Harris should do on education and training
Repeating history: Long-term economic impact of disrupted school years
#938: The disappointing results of high-dosage tutoring, with Michael Goldstein
Cheers and Jeers: September 19, 2024
What we're reading this week: September 19, 2024
Does more money matter to teachers? It’s not a simple yes or no question
What Kamala Harris should do on education and training
Repeating history: Long-term economic impact of disrupted school years
#938: The disappointing results of high-dosage tutoring, with Michael Goldstein
Cheers and Jeers: September 19, 2024
What we're reading this week: September 19, 2024
Opting out of the selective-college craziness is always an option
The New York Times ran a guest column last week by a prep school English teacher calling for high school students to “do less so they can do better”:
We have pushed high school students into maximizing every part of their days and nights. Those who take the bait are remarkably compliant, diluting themselves between their internships and Canva presentations. We condition students to do a so-so job and then move on to the next thing. We need to let them slow down. Critical cognition, by definition, takes time.
The essay is well-written, well-intended, and in line with similar articles over the years, all of them concerned about stressed-out teenagers attending high-octane “hothouse” public and private high schools.
But I hope America’s school leaders think twice before easing academic expectations at their schools.
The first reason is that campuses where the pressure on kids is arguably too high are by far the exception, not the rule. The much bigger problem for most American high schools is the lack of rigor and low academic expectations—a zombie-like approach to schooling marked by boredom, easy A’s, and going through the motions.
It’s been this way for decades, certainly as far back as the 1980s, when the nation was deemed “at risk” and Ted Sizer described what he called “Horace’s Compromise.” His archetypical teacher, dubbed Horace, wouldn’t make his students work very hard as long as they agreed not to give him much grief in class. There are lots of Horaces out there today.
We can glimpse this reality by reviewing recent studies asking teenagers how they spend their time. According to a 2023 Gallup survey, for example, teens waste almost five hours a day on social media. And a 2019 Pew Research study found that teens spend just an hour a day doing homework. That’s not a portrait of a country stressing out its teenagers with academic demands.
But what about the high schools where lots of students are gunning for selective colleges? Should these institutions take it down a notch or two?
This is personal for me, as my oldest son attends one such campus, Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland. It’s not uncommon for students at Whitman to rack up ten or even fifteen Advanced Placement courses on their transcripts, on top of participating in sports and extracurriculars. At least a handful of them gain admission to Ivy League and similar universities every year, sending the signal that the effort might just be worth it if you scramble hard enough to near the top of the heap.
Parents understandably worry about the mental health implications. Whitman has even been a subject of a bestselling book-length treatment of stressed-out “Overachievers.”
Here’s the thing: Even at the Whitmans of the world, not everyone is playing the highly-selective-college-admissions game. In fact, the majority of Whitman students opt out of the rat race, more than happy to attend one of Maryland’s minimally selective public colleges or other public or private schools in the mid-Atlantic or beyond. (SEC schools are increasingly popular, too.)
And this is what teenagers and their parents should keep in mind: It’s up to you to decide whether to opt in or opt out of the selective-admissions insanity. It’s often said, but also turns out to be true, that this country contains hundreds of solid colleges and universities, and students can get a great education even if they don’t attend a super-selective brand-name school.
It’s akin to the phenomenon of travel sports teams. Here, too, there’s pressure in some communities to have kids pick one sport at an early age and spend enormous amounts of time and money traveling to tournaments every weekend in order to gain a shot at a spot on a varsity high school team and maybe a college scholarship.
Some of these travel sports kids and their families must be enjoying the experience. But for those of us who look at this way of life and want to throw up, there’s good news: Just don’t do it. It’s a free country. Spend your time, energy, and money on something else.
So here’s the message to stressed-out teens and their families: Ask yourself whether you have made a conscious decision to engage in the academic Olympics or whether you have fallen into that lifestyle by accident. If it’s not working for you, take the next exit. Downshift to on-level courses, at least in some subjects. Only sign up for clubs or activities you actually enjoy. Forget about gaining admission to a highly-selected college and focus instead on finding one that’s a great fit for you personally. Be assured that, given enrollment trends, plenty will be glad to receive you.
Alternatively, decide to make an affirmative choice to play the selective-admissions game and give it your best shot.
And for school administrators, let’s be sure that all kids have the opportunity to choose whichever path makes sense for them.
Editor’s note: This was first published on Forbes.
Does more money matter to teachers? It’s not a simple yes or no question
As a candidate for president in 2020, Kamala Harris introduced a plan to raise teacher salaries by $13,500.
Why that specific dollar amount? Harris was thinking along economic lines, and she sold the policy as one that would erase the teacher wage gap, as documented over the years by the Economic Policy Institute. As of the most recent report, with data through 2022, the institute estimated that educators earn 26 percent less in weekly wages than other workers with similar academic credentials.
Never mind some of the flaws with the institute’s calculations, like the fact that it uses weekly wages and teachers don’t work the same number of weeks as other employees. Is the economic argument for raising teacher salaries a good one?
It’s not as iron-clad as you might think.
Consider a recent policy change in Arkansas. In 2023, the state raised the minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000 and guaranteed raises of at least $2,000.
According to a preliminary analysis from researchers at the University of Arkansas, the average teacher saw a salary increase of 6.5 percent. This cost the state $183 million, and much of the money flowed to poor, rural parts of the state that previously offered the lowest pay.
What happened to teacher behavior? The researchers found decidedly mixed results. They found that the additional money reduced the rate at which teachers left the profession overall—but those who got bigger raises became more likely to leave. There were also no clear patterns by experience level and no statistically significant changes in movement toward places with teacher shortages, despite the large financial investment in those areas.
The researchers offered several potential explanations for the negative results. It’s possible the law, which was passed in March, took effect too late in the academic calendar to influence teacher behavior in the subsequent school year, and that the money will have a bigger impact going forward. Or perhaps the salary increases just weren’t large enough.
But maybe the Arkansas results shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, when the National Center for Education Statistics asked teachers their most important reason for leaving, only 9 percent said they wanted or needed a higher salary. Pay trailed retirement, other life reasons (such as personal health or caring for a loved one), and the pursuit of other career options (many of which were other roles within education).
In other words, the economic argument around the teacher pay gap has some holes. It also assumes that teachers could close the financial gap if they left the classroom and pursued another job, but that’s not the choice most educators actually face.
In fact, two recent studies looked into this question and concluded that most former teachers don’t earn as much as they did while they were in the classroom. Some do, especially the most highly rated educators and those working in STEM subjects, so there’s an economic argument for paying more money to the best teachers to get them to stay, and to help fill particular shortage areas. But the majority of people who leave teaching end up doing worse, financially speaking.
On the flip side, people who enter teaching tend to see salary increases over whatever they were earning the year before—think of teaching assistants or substitutes moving into full-time positions, or the large number of people who return to the profession after some time away. For them, a full-time teaching job offers a big step up in pay.
Salary is perhaps the easiest lever for policymakers to pull to influence teacher recruitment and retention decisions, but there are others. For example, educators are also looking for opportunities for professional advancement, autonomy, control over their work, and the ability to balance their work and personal lives. A recent study out of Illinois found that teachers there continue to report problems with working conditions, defined in terms of classroom disruptions, student responsibility, and safety; improving such non-financial aspects of the job could be another way to make teaching more attractive.
Ironically, the political and media attention focused on teacher wage gaps may also be contributing to a sense that teachers are paid less than they actually are. People tend to underestimate how much teachers actually earn, and that could discourage would-be educators from considering the profession in the first place. Simple, clear messages about the financial benefits of teaching may help recruit more people, as it did in the case of a recent experiment around tutors.
As a reminder, the most recent data shows that the average public school teacher earned $66,397, and those in California, Massachusetts, and New York routinely made $90,000 or more.
There might be moral or political reasons to support raising salaries for all teachers, but in strictly economic terms, the strongest arguments revolve around raising pay for highly effective teachers in STEM subjects, and as an incentive to fill particular shortage areas.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.
What Kamala Harris should do on education and training
Kamala Harris’s presidential acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention promised Americans “an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and the chance to succeed.” But working-class Americans are glum about their economic position today and what this promise means for them. For example, two out of three say the working class is worse off today than it was forty years ago, while only one out of five say the working class is better off.
That information comes from YouGov surveys of working-class voters—those without college degrees—conducted for the Progressive Policy Institute’s (PPI) Project on Center Left Renewal. They include a focus on seven Presidential or Senate battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.
Working-class voters are divided on which political party will advance their interests. Asked who will “put the interests of working-class people first,” 38 percent said Democrats and 37 percent said Republicans. When asked which party would be best at “creating economic opportunities for working Americans,” 38 percent said Republicans and 33 percent said Democrats. Nearly one out of five said neither party.
Moreover, less than half of working-class voters said the federal government is responsive to their needs, compared to seven out of ten who said the government is responsive to the needs of the college-educated. No doubt this response reflects the fact that 62 percent of U.S. adults have no bachelor’s degree, rising to 72 percent for Black adults and 79 percent for Hispanic adults.
Harris must persuade working-class voters that her proposal for an opportunity economy responds to their concerns.
Opportunity pluralism
PPI’s Campaign for Working Americans suggests a key part of the opportunity economy is a career pathways system for young people and working adults without degrees. This system offers them more education and training options than current K–12 school-to-college-to-job pathway or workforce training programs. This career pathways approach can be called opportunity pluralism and has five elements.
1. Expand apprenticeship programs. Apprenticeships are jobs where individuals earn a paycheck and learn an occupation. Today, there are around 600,000 US registered apprenticeships, mostly in building trades and heavy industry. Countries like Great Britain, Germany, and Australia have many times more in countless occupations. Around 74 percent of working Americans believe that apprenticeships will help them acquire skills and advance in today’s economy. This earn-and-learn model can grow by changing the way federal apprenticeships are registered, increasing financial support for them, and tying support to pay for performance, which means apprentices get credentials and good jobs.
2. Recruit more organizations to offer work-based learning. An all-hands-on-deck partnership approach can create a larger system of career pathways programs. It should include coordinating or intermediary organizations like K–12 schools, community and four-year colleges, workforce boards, unions, industry and employer associations, and other nonprofit and for-profit ventures. In addition to apprenticeships, other work-based learning approaches like internships and cooperative programs should expand.
3. Allow the Pell Grant to support education and workforce development. Current federal (and state) policies favor subsidies to those who get a degree. For example, in 2018 the federal government spent around $149 billion on higher education versus $58 billion for workforce education and training. When the latter figure deducts Pell Grants and veteran’s programs, spending drops to around $16 billion for seventeen federal workforce-related programs. Pell Grants should include support for quality short-term workforce programs not now eligible for support.
4. Base hiring on skills not degrees. Many employers use the four-year degree as a quick way to judge a person’s job readiness, creating a bottleneck or paper ceiling that limits opportunities for those without degrees. Opportunity@Work research shows that not having a degree does not mean individuals are low-skilled. Rather, about half of the workforce—70 million individuals—are STARs or Skilled Through Alternative Routes like military service, training programs, or on-the-job experience. This is leading employers and government at all levels to drop degree requirements for jobs that do not need them and use skill-based hiring for these jobs. Reforming hiring practices will promote upward mobility in an opportunity economy.
5. Support a new high school movement. K–12 schools’ focus on the college-for-all model means many young people cannot access quality career counseling and education, including career and technical education or CTE. Roughly 1 out of 4 public high schools do not offer CTE. Only around one out of ifve high schoolers complete at least three CTE courses. High schoolers should have access to CTE, including work-based learning. The current inspiration for doing this is found in the early twentieth century when America faced new workforce challenges. A grassroots high school movement emerged and led to what Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz call America’s “spectacular educational transformation.” Today’s new movement can create “faster and cheaper” pathways to jobs.
Knowledge and networks
An important part of an opportunity economy is what Harvard economist David Deming calls the economics of skill development, especially the relationship between acquiring knowledge and developing social networks. He finds that the importance of cognitive skills has declined as a predictor of wage success.
On the other hand, the importance of relationships, networking, and social skills has increased, especially skills like communication, cooperation, collaboration, social intelligence, and conflict resolution. After age thirty-five, wage growth is greater in jobs requiring social skills.
This means that the building blocks of an opportunity economy are knowledge, skills, relationships, and networks, summarized in a simple equation: Knowledge + Networks = Opportunity. As the adage goes: It is not only what you know but whom you know.
The opportunity economy for working-class Americans is built on acquiring knowledge and networks and is an example of opportunity pluralism—ensuring that working-class families have multiple education and training pathways to prepare them for good jobs, satisfying careers, and flourishing lives.
If Harris offers working-class voters a positive opportunity pluralism agenda she can reap the rewards.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearEducation and made available via RealClearWire.
Repeating history: Long-term economic impact of disrupted school years
As school systems around the world continue trying to recover from learning losses caused by the pandemic, a new paper out of Germany gives us some historic context on what to look for and what to be wary of.
Researcher Kamila Cygan-Rehm from the Dresden University of Technology exploits a natural experiment that occurred when two school years were shortened in several West German states in the late 1960s. These were the result of a realignment of school start dates following several previous shifts during and immediately after World War II. Specifically, the two school years that ran from April to November 1966 and from December 1966 to July 1967 were each truncated by about one-third in order to ultimately move all schools’ starting dates from spring to fall. This shortened the amount of schooling received by all children attending school in ten states—excluding Bavaria, Hamburg, and Lower Saxony, which made the switch in other ways.
Although accommodations for the decreased instructional time varied from state to state, Cygan-Rehm notes important similarities. Emphasis was placed on maintaining the core curriculum, with priority given to mathematics, German, and modern foreign languages (mainly English). The weekly hours of instruction in these subjects increased when compared to a typical school year, as did the homework load. Consequently, instructional hours in non-core subjects like music, arts, and physical education were reduced. Extracurricular activities were not traditionally part of the school day, but certain annual school-based events like Christmas pageants and school trips—all of which took time away from instruction—were canceled until the new start dates were achieved. Many states also reduced the number of in-class tests and the requirements for final examinations to make up for the loss of instructional time. This effort, we are told, resulted at the time in massive outpourings of concern from academics, families, government, and media over the potential loss of student learning. However, short-term outcomes for students were not seen to be substantially negative, and thus no other remediation was taken when school years returned to the normal length. Yet students who graduated in either of those years did so having lost up to two-thirds of a year of instructional time.
This recent analysis, like those conducted in the 1960s, sees minimal short-term impact. Graduation and university enrollment did not change significantly in affected states from pre-1966/67 rates. Long-term outcomes, however, are a different story. Cygan-Rehm uses data from the Sample of Integrated Labor Market Biographies, a rich database of German employment data, as well as pension records, to identify over 278,000 individuals who were of compulsory school age during the 1966–1967 timeframe in the various states and whose work and earnings history are complete through 2017. While she cannot definitively state that her sample includes only workers who experienced shortened school years, she uses the same data from two of the unaffected states as a comparison and robustness check. As a result, she is satisfied that she has captured a large swath of impacted former students.
Her analysis finds that exposure to the shortened school years led to adverse labor market effects over almost the entirety of an individual’s working life. She estimates that one year of lost classroom instruction reduced lifetime earnings by almost 3 percent on average. The earnings losses were partly driven by higher rates of unemployment among affected individuals during the prime working ages (a 2 percent reduction in days worked) and partly by lower intelligence levels (yes, cognitive test scores were included in the data!) for individuals who ultimately received less instruction than their peers before and after the calendar changes. All this despite the fact that many students who experienced the shortened school years ended up graduating earlier in the year than they would have normally and actually experienced an initial earnings bump based on early entry into the workforce. The negative impacts of lost learning on lifetime income took hold shortly after that bump and persisted until retirement. The youngest and oldest students were impacted more strongly than those in the middle of the grade-level distribution. The largest earnings losses occurred at the bottom of the earnings distribution, suggesting that academically-disadvantaged students, already struggling while receiving a full year’s worth of instruction, fell even further behind in the shortened years.
What should we take from these historical data? Despite clear differences in context and setting, the West German example shares some obvious similarities to our current Covid-disrupted era: closed schools being replaced with a form of “remote learning” (extra homework), loss of instructional time being compensated for by narrowing the curriculum, and impacted students being given dispensation on work completion and assessment. All of these combined to lower the academic bar for students who moved on through the system with no accountability beyond the dates on the calendar. However, it is important to note one vital distinction: No remediation was provided for West German students in the 1960s. We know better now—and these new data show the dangers clearly—and we should expect better results. For those impacted students who remain in school today, we know what needs to be done to help avoid a repeat of history. And our schools still have time to do it.
SOURCE: Kamila Cygan-Rehm, “Lifetime Consequences of Lost Instructional Time in the Classroom: Evidence from Shortened School Years,” IZA Institute of Labor Economics (August 2024).
#938: The disappointing results of high-dosage tutoring, with Michael Goldstein
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Michael Goldstein, co-founder of the Math Learning Lab in Boston, joins Mike and David to discuss the track record of high-dosage tutoring in mitigating pandemic learning loss. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber shares a study on the long-term effects of the METCO program, which aims to increase diversity and reduce racial isolation by busing students from Boston to surrounding suburbs.
Recommended content:
- Mike Goldstein and Bowen Paulle, The narrow path to do it right: Lessons from vaccine making for high-dosage tutoring, Thomas B. Fordham Institute (March 2021)
- “Students aren’t benefiting much from tutoring, one new study shows” —Jill Barshay
- Matthew A. Kraft, Danielle Sanderson Edwards, and Marisa Cannata, The Scaling Dynamics and Causal Effects of a District-Operated Tutoring Program, Annenberg Institute at Brown University (August 2024)
- Elizabeth Setren, Busing to Opportunity? The Impacts of the METCO Voluntary School Desegregation Program on Urban Students of Color, NBER (2024)
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Stephanie Distler at [email protected].
Cheers and Jeers: September 19, 2024
Cheers
- More high school students are participating in school-sponsored sports than ever before, driven in part by the increasing popularity of girls’ flag football. —K–12 Dive
- “Parents should ignore their children more often.” —Darby Saxbe, New York Times
- District leaders backed off of policy changes that would have altered admissions criteria and funding for selective enrollment, magnet, and charter schools in their five-year plan for Chicago Public Schools. —WBEZ
- “State superintendent doesn’t want Alabama students forced down one diploma path.” —The 74
Jeers
- A divided South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that the state’s voucher program violates its constitution. —The State
- Test scores reveal that middle schoolers are still lagging months behind pre-pandemic achievement levels in science. —The 74
- Fewer teachers are assigning full-length novels to their students, likely due to “perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests, and a sense that short-form content will prepare students for the modern, digital world.” —The Washington Post
What we're reading this week: September 19, 2024
- In general, wealthier schools have higher reading proficiency rates—but the focus should be on districts like Steubenville, Ohio, that are exceeding expectations despite their high rates of poverty. —Chad Aldeman, The 74
- Would a second-term Trump presidency mean major cuts in education? Would he focus only on popular policies? Or would he ignore education entirely? No one knows for sure. —Rick Hess, Education Next
- Private school choice programs like vouchers and ESAs are making the school budgeting process uncertain and challenging, according to some district officials and education experts. —Mark Lieberman, EducationWeek
- Following New York’s decision to make firing underperforming teachers more difficult, an author shares some concerns about public education today. —The 74