- A recent cover story in the Economist called the highly educated “America’s new aristocracy.” Basically, education (and the greater earnings with which it is correlated) has become increasingly heritable. Educated, clever people tend to marry other such people and raise their kids to emulate that model. This is all well and good for those people, but it’s widening the income gap and leaving behind children born into educationally (and financially) impoverished homes. So what’s to be done? The article has some suggestions, such as early intervention. We have a bunch of ideas of our own. To be sure, it’s a very complicated problem with myriad causes. Nevertheless, it’s a nut we need to crack.
- In a time of broad national attacks on testing, the George W. Bush Institute has published an important essay that shows how much achievement has increased in the age of NCLB testing. Beginning around the turn on the century, the federal government began tying annual tests to school accountability, complete with sanctions for inadequate performance. Since that time, significant achievement gains have been made in math and reading, especially among minority children at age nine; scores for white students in 2008 were the highest ever in both reading and math for nine- and thirteen-year olds. “What was good for poor and minority students was good for all students,” they note. Meanwhile the achievement gap between white kids and their black and Hispanic peers has shrunk. Testing is surely overdone in lots of places, and the federal government is too involved, but the Bush Institute reminds us that we ought to remember testing’s strengths when we attempt to remedy its weaknesses.
- This week, the Broad Foundation announced that it would suspend the $1 million prize that it’s given to promising school districts for thirteen years. Billionaire Eli Broad and company are concerned that recipients have failed to adequately and speedily improve their outcomes. Some commenters question whether the eighty-one-year-old’s expectations are realistic. Others, such as Andy Smarick, have long wondered what the foundation was thinking when it chose its winners. To Broad’s credit, he’s now giving a $250,000 prize to charter organizations—which is unaffected by this change. Kudos to Mr. Broad for telling it like it is.
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Correction: February 12, 2015
A previous version of this stated that the Broad Foundation was giving a $500,000 prize to charter organizations. That information came from the Los Angeles Times and is incorrect.
