Eight months out from a midterm election cycle that is shaping up to be a bloodbath for Democrats, Republican Senator Rick Scott recently released an “eleven-point plan to rescue America” that speaks volumes about the GOP’s posture on education. What’s most telling is what’s missing from Scott’s plan: a serious and good faith discussion of the most pressing issues facing our Covid-constrained education system.
Eight months out from a midterm election cycle that is shaping up to be a bloodbath for Democrats, Republican Senator Rick Scott recently released an “eleven-point plan to rescue America” that speaks volumes about the GOP’s posture on education. Indeed, the document’s very first point is education, in which Scott calls for all students to “say the pledge of allegiance, salute the Flag, learn that America is a great country, and choose the school that best fits them.” From there, his education plan outlines twelve sub-bullets that check off all of the right’s grievances, ranging from the fashionable (e.g., curriculum transparency) to the fusty (killing the federal Department of Education).
Liberals will mostly bristle at the culture war content of the document, but Scott’s pitch shows a party attempting to craft an education message that marries pre-Trump conservatism with Trumpian braggadocio (“SCHOOL CHOICE NOW!”). They may also underestimate the strength of the political ground that Republicans stand on with many of Scott’s ideas. Chief among these are how schools teach race, racism, and their roles in American history in ways that many parents simply don’t like. But before getting lost in that minefield and the motives behind today’s tug of war on schooling, let’s examine what’s missing from Scott’s plan: a serious and good faith discussion and debate of the most pressing issues facing our Covid-constrained education system.
Indeed, Scott’s latest education proposal is a dramatic departure from the one he laid out ten years ago while he was governor of Florida. I should know. At the time, I was living in Tallahassee and actively working to help him implement it. Governor Scott’s “College and Career First” plan underscored three key priorities: (1) transitioning successfully to the Common Core, (2) improving teacher quality, and (3) promoting innovation and choice. These three areas seem rather quaint when looked at through the lens of today’s overheated politics, but they reflect an outlook towards education that was not only more bipartisan, but also more concerned about installing sound policies that lived beyond any single administration.
What we have today is a smash-and-grab version of education reform that features a maximalist approach to securing legislative victories. The ethos seems to be: Throw the current bums out of office and get as much as we can until we eventually get tossed to the curb ourselves. Lather, rinse, repeat. Neither side has a common-ground agenda. Each tries to burn the other down. All of the incentives are organized around fealty to the “national brand,” which in the case of Scott and his role as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee is to use an uncharacteristically inflammatory and hardline rhetoric when it comes to talking about schools.
At the same time, Republicans have won converts with less strident faces, like Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who has surrounded himself with some highly-respected voices in our field. One has to hope that these more pragmatic figures within today’s GOP can eventually steer the party away from its angry and resentful fringes and towards an education agenda that offers something for conservatives, progressives, moderates, and others to unite around. While this should certainly include school choice, a serious discussion must also extend to raising standards and improving teacher salaries—all of which are part of Youngkin’s platform and were in Scott’s too a decade ago.
With Republicans widely expected to regain control of the House in November, and having a decent shot of taking back the Senate, as well, Scott may get a chance to follow through on his attempt to do populism on education issues. “I’ll warn you; this plan is not for the faint of heart,” he writes in the plan’s introduction. That may very well be the case, but even if Republicans regain their grip on both chambers of Congress, most of the education debate will remain state business, not federal. What’s more, neither national Republicans nor national Democrats seem to show any interest in being a majority party when it comes to getting our kids back on track. Instead, both sides have cynically employed conflict engineers to dictate the strength and direction of our education fights, resulting in today’s zero-sum playing field.
The best way out of this mess is through the states, where thirty-six are electing governors this year, and local communities. It’s here that new moderate political factions must be organized to begin shifting the power center of education policy and politics. For starters, the silent majority has to speak up about the need for schools to focus their limited bandwidth on education recovery. These intra-party coalitions should be motivated by the calamity of 80 percent of Black and Native American students scoring below proficient on national reading tests, and 77 percent of Hispanic students mired under that same threshold. But this will demand a significant time horizon to effectuate, and we should be under no illusion of how much drive and discipline will be required.
In the past decade, the role of the teacher in schools has slowly shifted from pedagogue to therapist. Perhaps the most glaring example of this shift is the practice called “circle conversations.” These circles are cousins of the non-punitive approach to discipline called restorative justice, and are intended to be community-building prophylactics.
While the ritual—I mean classroom practice—can vary from school to school, it has a few common characteristics: students sit in a circle, pass around a talking piece, and discuss open-ended questions, often deeply personal ones. The NEA wrote positively of a school that incorporates them into classrooms weekly.
Take a step back, however, and these circles closely resemble group therapy. Consider a few example questions that one author at Edutopia suggests:
And now compare those to a few recommended questions at a counseling center:
The questions grow increasingly personal with time. One guide in San Francisco encourages teachers to ask questions that are “edgy” and “controversial.” My graduate training incorporated them, during which our instructors encouraged us to share personal stories about any trauma that we’d faced. Needless to say, being compelled to disclose such intimate details of my life with complete strangers was an uncomfortable experience.
We should all want mental health care and structured, emotional support for students who need it. But deputizing teachers into a role far beyond their expertise runs into several problems that violate the American Psychological Association’s “Code of Ethics.” And it could lead to disastrous outcomes.
The code begins with the exhortation that psychologists only “provide services, teach, and conduct research...within the boundaries of their competence.” Counselors generally need at minimum a master’s degree and hundreds of hours of supervised experience before they take on individual, group, or family therapy. While teachers have more background in child psychology than the average citizen, it pales in comparison to that of a trained, licensed psychologist.
While student teaching, at the behest of my teacher prep program, I made such circle conversations a semi-regular part of the classroom. One day, a student shared in the presence of his bullies that he had considered suicide. It was a dangerously volatile scenario, one that my handful of professional development sessions did not come close to preparing me for.
Second, counselors are strongly advised against “multiple relationships,” which means being both a therapist and then something else to a patient. The San Francisco guide implicitly acknowledges the dual role implied in these circles when it reminds teachers to “switch roles” when class progresses. However, one cannot simply undo the power imbalance and intimacy that comes with a therapeutic relationship.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, psychologists must acquire “informed consent” from any patient before administering services. Be it medicine or therapy, a patient must understand what services they are to receive and to what end. Yet the guidance from San Francisco encourages teachers to allow students “little or no passing” in response to prompts. In other words, participation is mandatory.
Much of these practices amount to psychological dabbling, to which neither parents nor students consent. In the guidance from San Francisco, teachers are to choose “prompts that invite more intimate exposure” and “self-disclosure,” as well as “personal thoughts and feelings.” Yet in the mental health world, only in rare circumstances—when a patient shows a high risk of danger to themselves or others—can professionals foist care upon a patient without consent. Why should our students be exempt from such a right?
It’s important to note that I am not against any sort of therapy in a school. If a student requires mental health services and wants to receive them from a trained counselor in the building, access is imperative. Also, some highly successful charter schools use “restorative conversations” whenever a teacher disciplines a student. But this usually amounts to a quick chat between teacher and student at lunch, not a restorative circle as advocates conceive of them.
What’s not appropriate—indeed, what may cause great psychological harm, while crossing several ethical lines—is to ask teachers to lead group therapy sessions with their students. It’s a terrible, patently unethical idea that should be abandoned, the sooner the better.
The media have been full of reports of college students, almost a million strong, who have gone missing during the pandemic. Virtually every article quotes experts expressing alarm and dismay.
“A sharp and persistent decline in the number of Americans going to college…could alter American society for the worse, even as economic rival nations such as China vastly increase university enrollment,” wrote Jon Marcus in the Washington Post.
“It is a crisis, and I don’t think it’s widely recognized yet that it is,” Jason Lane, dean of Miami University’s College of Education, told Marcus. “Society is going to be less healthy,” he continued. “It’s going to be less economically successful. It’s going to be harder to find folks to fill the jobs of the future, and there will be lower tax revenues because there won’t be as many people in high-paying jobs.”
Monty Sullivan, president of Louisiana’s community college system, piled on: “We have a million adults in this country that have stepped off the path to the middle class. That’s the real headline.”
But these sky-is-falling arguments, intuitive though they may be, are entirely too pessimistic. In fact, we should see these enrollment trends as encouraging, for three reasons. First, there’s a good chance that the young men and women making the decision not to go to college right now are doing what’s in their own best interest, rather than making a mistake they will come to regret. Second, these trends may indicate that America’s education culture is changing in positive ways—most notably, that the “college-for-all” fever is breaking. And third, if these trends continue, they will force the higher education establishment, and especially community colleges, to make long overdue changes that will benefit students and taxpayers alike.
Let’s start with the most important question, which is whether these young people’s decisions are smart or misguided. Yes, it’s true that college educated workers make more money on average than their degree-less peers. There are also many correlations between higher education and positive life outcomes, from higher marriage rates to lower divorce rates, better health, and so on.
But it’s essential to note that these benefits generally only accrue to people who complete degrees. We call it the “college wage premium,” but we should really call it the “college completion premium.” There doesn’t appear to be much of a “going to college but dropping out without a degree premium,” and that’s an incredibly important distinction.
Maybe it wouldn’t matter so much if most young people who went to college finished a degree. But in today’s America that’s not what’s happening. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the six-year completion rate for any degree or certificate is currently 62.2 percent. That means that 37.8 percent of college students drop out with no credential to their name. Considering that, pre-pandemic, between 65 and 70 percent of high school graduates matriculated straight to college, that’s a lot of kids giving higher ed the old college try yet leaving with nothing but debt and regret. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, it works out to about 900,000 young adults leaving college with no degree or certificate—each and every year.
And why is that? Overwhelmingly, the evidence indicates that most students fail to complete college because they were not prepared to succeed in the first place. They lacked the reading, writing, and/or math skills to do college-level academic work, and they probably struggled with other related skills and attributes, too, like knowing how to take notes or study for a test, or the perseverance required to read a book that frankly isn’t all that interesting.
To put it succinctly, many young people don’t do well in college because they aren’t very good students in an academic setting, they haven’t done very well in school, and they don’t like it all that much. Which may make us wonder why we encouraged them to go to college in the first place.
So here’s the question: are the nearly one million students who today are not enrolling in college the same million or so students that likely would not have completed a degree anyway? If so, we should be celebrating the fact that they are choosing to do something else with their time and money.
Especially in a hot labor market, choosing to work means they are contributing to our society and their families, and almost surely gaining real-world skills as well. After all, a classroom is not the only place to learn how to do new things. The workplace can be a great venue for “postsecondary education,” too.
No doubt, there may be some students opting out of college who would have done well there and may someday regret not getting a degree. But one good thing about the American education system is that it allows for second, third, and fourth chances. It’s never too late to head back to school, and individuals who are committed to education will surely find a way to make it happen.
Hence, the second positive development, which is our society’s attitudes toward college. In recent years, as American Compass has demonstrated, boosting college-going and college-completion rates has become something of an obsession among many within the education system and beyond. These impulses are understandable, given education’s potential to raise incomes and reduce inequality, and given our concerns about stagnating upward mobility. But there’s little doubt that it has gone too far. The message many Americans were receiving was that college was not just a ticket to the middle class, but the only ticket. And furthermore, they were told that the only people who deserve full respect in our society, economy, and democracy are those holding college degrees.
This was clearly one factor that contributed to the past decade’s populist backlash, culminating with the election of Donald Trump, a man who famously once declared his love for “the uneducated.”
Thankfully, and partly because of these events, even cultural elites have started to acknowledge that college is not the be-all and end-all and that we should celebrate the dignity of work, including work that does not require a fancy piece of paper.
If today’s young people are getting the message the college is just one option among many (and recent surveys indicate that they are), we should celebrate that. Perhaps this is one culture war with an end in sight.
Third, these trends might put pressure on the higher education system to change. No doubt the dramatic drop in enrollment is causing pain for institutions of higher education, especially community colleges, where most of the students have gone missing. But—frankly—these institutions had it coming. These are the very places that for years have gladly taken students’ tuition checks and Pell Grants, only to watch them fail courses and drift away. And the main reason is that they were admitting students who were not well prepared to succeed in the first place.
When for-profit colleges engaged in this type of behavior, folks on the left were outraged, calling for them to be shut down and dismembered. But because community colleges hide behind their so-called “open access mission,” everyone looks the other way.
Here’s hoping that, in the aftermath of the pandemic and its associated enrollment declines, community colleges might finally get honest with students about their chances of success, as well as the value that their training will add to career prospects.
Perhaps they will stop admitting students who lack basic reading, writing, and math skills, or who demonstrated in their high school years that they simply don’t like school and aren’t very good at it.
The next time you see a news story about the lamentable drop in college enrollment, don’t feel the need to reach for a box of Kleenex. The higher education industry might like to see some crocodile tears, but there are reasons to believe that, during a very dark time, these declining college enrollment trends might actually have a silver lining.
Editor’s note: This essay was first published by American Compass.
Efforts to match Black and Hispanic students with teachers of their same race or ethnicity have shown positive outcomes for students. Less is known about the underlying mechanisms that may be driving these favorable results. A recent analysis by David Blazar from the University of Maryland College Park is only the second randomized experimental study to examine the effects of teachers of color on student outcomes (the first was conducted by Tom Dee in 2004).
Blazar’s sample includes four anonymous school districts on the east coast where seventy-one fourth and fifth grade teachers were randomly assigned to class rosters within schools, along with extensive student and teacher survey and classroom observation data from 2010 through 2019. The sample matched the characteristics of teachers and students across the participating districts, as well as those of urban districts in the U.S. more broadly. Thirty-percent of the experimental sample comprised teachers of color, including 23 percent Black teachers, 4 percent Asian, and 3 percent Hispanic. The random assignment of teachers to classes in upper-elementary schools is used to examine both short- and longer-run outcomes, including social-emotional development (such as self-efficacy and self-regulation), test scores, absences, and suspensions well into students’ high school years.
Blazar’s topline findings echo previous studies: Compared to their White colleagues, teachers of color have large and lasting effects on the social-emotional, academic, and behavioral outcomes of their students. More specifically, random assignment to a teacher of color results in improved self-efficacy and classroom engagement (upwards of 0.45 standard deviation), end-of-year math and English language arts test scores (upwards of 0.26 SD), and school attendance (reductions in chronic absenteeism of 4 percentage points, representing a 60 percent decrease) while students are in elementary school. These effects accrued to all students, regardless of their race or ethnicity.
Short-term effects on test scores and chronic absenteeism persist at similar magnitudes up to six years later when students are in high school (roughly 0.2 SD on test scores, and a 42 percent decrease in chronic absenteeism). Even more interesting, the effects of teachers of color on self-efficacy extend not just to students of color, but also to their White peers. This finding differs from other literature indicating that teachers of color generally have no impact—either positive or negative—on the test scores and school behaviors of White students, compared to having a White teacher.
Specifically for behavioral outcomes, the study finds that random assignment to a teacher of color versus a White teacher in the fourth or fifth grade results in an 8-percentage-point decrease in the probability of being chronically absent in high school. Suspension rates, though, tend to be higher both for White students and students of color assigned to a teacher of color, at least in the later elementary years. So White students are suspended more frequently when their randomly-assigned teacher is a teacher of color versus a White teacher. But equally interesting, teachers of color improve the self-efficacy of White students relative to White students who have a White teacher.
Looking at mechanisms, the study finds that the average effects of teachers of color on student outcomes are explained in part by specific mindsets and practices of teachers of color versus White teachers. According to the teacher survey and observation results, teachers of color are more likely than their White colleagues to view student intelligence as malleable versus fixed, to build interpersonal relationships with students and their families, to spend more time planning for instruction and differentiating pedagogical approaches to individual students’ needs, and to lead well-organized classrooms. Differences are as large as 0.7 SD. Blazar takes all this to mean that teachers of color are more “culturally responsive teachers,” even though culturally responsive teaching is usually understood to mean that students’ cultures, languages, and life experiences are connected with what they learn in school. So the survey responses don’t align well with that definition. However, his statement that “these patterns indicate that much of the effect of teachers of color on student outcomes runs through the intra- and interpersonal skills that teachers of color possess” resonates as truer.
Still, in none of Blazar’s models is the average effect of teachers of color on student outcomes fully explained by the factors that he’s able to test. So other unmeasured mechanisms are at play. A popular theory—untested here—is that seeing role models who look like students of color in positions of power helps explain the beneficial effects. That makes sense, too. Whatever the additional mechanisms at play, the sooner that they can be found and validated, the better for all students.
SOURCE: David Blazar, “Teachers of Color, Culturally Responsive Teaching, and Student Outcomes: Experimental Evidence from the Random Assignment of Teachers to Classes,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (December 2021).
Is college worth it? How we answer that question depends on how we measure the impact of attending college. Ranking 4,500 Colleges by ROI (2022), a new project from the Center for Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, provides us with a novel tool of measurement: return on investment, or ROI. The project is an update to a 2019 report by the CEW, A First Try at ROI: Ranking 4,500 Colleges.
ROI measures the costs to attend an institution of higher education versus the future earnings of its students. The most important component of ROI is Net Present Value (NPV). NPV is an economic concept that assumes money today is valued more than money tomorrow. A potential student might spend $50,000 on a college education, or she might invest it in a savings account. In twenty years, would that student be better off with the interest earned from the savings account or would she be better rewarded with the higher salary possible with a college degree? College is “worth it” if the latter is true.
The new project from the CEW is a searchable online database rather than a traditional report. It ranks universities using the ROI metric described above, as well as a new metric: the share of an institution’s students that earn more than workers with a high school diploma ten years after enrolling. We might assume enrolling in college nearly guarantees a higher salary than not doing so, but that is not always the case.
The CEW finds that at 30 percent of colleges, more than half of students earn less than high school graduates ten years after enrolling. This particular statistic appears to be based on comparative salaries, and the study does not explicitly state that other factors, such as wages lost from enrolling in college instead of entering the job market immediately, are considered. However, when combined with other metrics that do take into account opportunity costs, it helps to paint a fuller picture of financial outcomes. In short, simply going to college does not always translate into higher earnings.
So what’s driving these results? The project’s researchers hypothesize that the low earnings may be “related to low college graduation rates and disparities in earnings by gender and by race and ethnicity.” Furthermore, the ROI “varies by credential, program of study, and institution.” In other words, and as my colleague Michael Petrilli writes elsewhere, there’s no “going to college but dropping out without a degree premium.” So it’s not surprising that programs that admit marginally prepared students, only to see many of them drop out, do not get much return on investment. That’s a sentiment shared by Martin Van Der Werf, the director of editorial and education policy at the CEW, who states simply, “In general, going to college pays off. But it only pays off if you finish. It doesn’t pay off if you don’t.”
And the loans that many students take on only add insult to injury. With the rising cost of college, these loans can be substantial. One study estimates that graduates from the class of 2020 carried almost $30,000 in student loan debt. That’s an increase of 20 percent from the debt incurred by graduates of 2010. In 2019–20, student loan debt became a hot-button issue during the Democratic presidential primary race. Even now, President Biden is facing pressure from his left flank to cancel student loans.
However, the debate surrounding the cancellation of student loans misses an important point. In many cases, this crushing debt could have been mitigated had students chosen a different, more financially sound path. Not every high school graduate should be collegebound, and not every student interested in post-secondary education should attend a four-year liberal arts program. Educators should inform their students of these risks, as well as the various career options available to them. The ROI research by the CEW provides a useful tool to do so.
SOURCE: Anthony P. Carnevale, Ban Cheah, and Martin Van Der Werf. Ranking 4,500 Colleges by ROI (2022). Georgetown University Center for Education and the Workforce, 2022.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Fordham’s editorial director, Brandon Wright, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to talk about the shifting landscape of highly-selective high schools. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern discusses a study on teacher morale during the pandemic.
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