The Education Gadfly Weekly

This article is part of a new Education Next series on the state of the American family that marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 release of the Moynihan Report. We are reprinting it here in two installments; the first was published in last week’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

Last week, I argued that single parenthood is a major impediment to upward mobility for low-income youth, especially when parenthood starts in one’s teens or early twenties. Furthermore, I concluded that the most important “intervention” is hope: a realistic plan for a life trajectory that is more compelling than early motherhood and fatherhood. This means, among other things, having meaningful opportunities for higher education and interesting, decently paid work. How, then, can schools boost the education and employment prospects of disadvantaged children?

One way is to get many more young people—especially those from challenging backgrounds—“to and through” four-year college degrees. This well-meaning strategy is the primary focus of education reform. There’s little doubt that, when it’s successful, this will encourage many more young people to delay childbearing, which increases their odds of getting married before starting a family.

But it need not be our only strategy for helping adolescents find their way to a rewarding, middle class career and stable family life. High-quality career and technical education (CTE) is another solid pathway to postsecondary education and remunerative and satisfying work—jobs that are worth working toward, and which can thus motivate delayed childbearing.

As scholars such as Harvard’s Robert Schwartz and Georgetown’s Anthony Carnevale have shown, “middle skills” jobs remain plentiful and pay well in the U.S. economy, accounting for roughly 30 percent of the jobs likely to be available over the next decade. These are positions that generally require a postsecondary certificate, but not a four-year degree, in fields such as health care and information technology. Employers regularly struggle to fill these roles, in large part because of America’s underdeveloped—and often ignored—technical training system. European countries such as Germany, Norway, and the Netherlands prepare between 40 and 70 percent of their young people for technical jobs by the age of twenty. Yet in the United States, we remain obsessed with the four-year college degree; fewer students are concentrating in career and technical education at the high school level in America than they were twenty years ago.

That’s a huge lost opportunity, as gold-standard studies of career academy programs have shown. In this model, students in grades 9–12 enroll in “smaller learning communities,” generally within large comprehensive high schools, which combine academic and technical training. The academies are organized around career clusters and partner directly with local employers. A randomized evaluation by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) found significant positive outcomes for academies’ participants, most of whom were low-income, African American, and/or Hispanic. Among the program’s long-term benefits—which were strongest for minority men—were higher earnings, greater hours worked, and stronger attachment to the labor market.

Perhaps most intriguingly, MDRC found that the young men who years earlier had graduated from a career academy were 33 percent more likely to be married and living with their spouse than their peers in a control group. Whether that was because the graduates developed skills that helped them form more stable relationships or became more “marriageable” because of their stronger career prospects, the lesson is clear: Work works, as does high-quality CTE.

Of course, it’s not as simple as creating more career academies. Students entering these programs must possess strong math, reading, and writing skills. They also need to be well-behaved and willing to work hard. That means that our elementary and middle schools need to help many more students get academically and socially ready for rigorous programs in high school. It’s not any easier to prepare students for great CTE programs than it is to prepare them for great college-prep programs. Thus the larger education reform agenda—higher standards, greater accountability, stronger teachers, and solid curricula, especially in grades pre-K–8—remains essential.

Schools can also help their students develop “performance character”—drive and prudence in particular. Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves explains why these attributes are so essential:

People with drive are able to stick with a task, even when it gets boring or difficult; they work hard and don’t leave a job unfinished. Drive includes not just the ability to work hard (industriousness) but also the ability to overcome setbacks and to keep going (resilience).

Prudent people are able to defer gratification and plan for the future; they can make sacrifices today in order to ensure a better tomorrow. The better developed a person’s character strength of prudence, the less they suffer from what economists call “present bias,” the tendency to underweight future utility. They can both plan for the future and exert self-control in the moment to reach their long-term goals.

Reeves and others point to evidence indicating the importance of drive. For example, the fact that students’ high school grade-point averages predict college completion better than SAT scores may be one indication that hard work and resilience pay off even more than talent. The evidence for “prudence” is even stronger, ranging from Walter Mischel’s work on delayed gratification to Angela Duckworth’s findings about the importance of grit and self-control for long-term success.

It stands to reason that young people with the drive to work hard at school and on the job, as well as the prudence to delay childbirth—either by eschewing sex or by making good birth control decisions—are going to be more likely to climb the ladder to upward mobility, and potentially to marry.

So how can schools teach these skills and habits? The old fashioned way is, of course, through religion. Catholic schools in particular have long been singled out by social scientists for their strong results in terms of graduation and college-going rates. These strong long-term outcomes—which tend to be much more significant than any short-term test score gains—likely reflect Catholic schools’ focus on discipline and character as much as their excellent academics. In the early 1980s, James Coleman and his colleagues found that Catholic school students were significantly more likely to report that their schools’ approach to discipline was “excellent or good” than their public school peers. Later research by Anthony Bryk confirmed this view with Catholic school administrators, who were much less likely to report student behavior problems than their public school colleagues.

A 2012 study by David Figlio and Jens Ludwig found that Catholic high school students were less likely to participate in risky behaviors, including teen sexual activity, arrests, and the use of cocaine. They speculated why this might be so. One possibility is the most obvious: Catholic schools put the fear of God into their students. Religious instruction “could affect students’ ‘tastes’ for misbehavior, or increase the perceived costs of misbehavior by defining a number of activities as sins that have eternal consequences.” And of course, positive peer pressure plays a role—by “exposing them to more pro-social peer groups,” particularly by selecting out and/or expelling students more likely to engage in risky behaviors.

The secular, New Age way to teach character is best illustrated by KIPP, which has placed character education at the heart of its “no excuses” ethos. As made famous by Paul Tough’s bestselling book How Children Succeed, many KIPP schools use a “character growth card” to help teachers, students, and parents work together to develop specific character strengths, such as grit, optimism, and curiosity. Some KIPP schools are incorporating mindfulness training and even yoga to help their students build self-control so they can make better choices toward their long-term success.

Don’t Forget the Extracurriculars

There’s one more way schools can help students develop important character strengths while keeping them off the streets: provide an excellent suite of extracurricular offerings. This might be one secret to Catholic schools’ success; Figlio and Ludwig report that students in Catholic schools “spend more time on homework and extracurricular activities than those in public schools….Private schools may thus reduce delinquency if only because of an ‘incapacitation effect’—teens who are doing homework or running track are not out looking for trouble.”

Extracurricular activities, including athletics, appear to be important for public school students, too; as June Kronholz reported in Education Next, studies have long found that disadvantaged students who participate in extracurriculars are less likely to drop out of high school, use tobacco or alcohol, or get pregnant, and are more likely to score well on tests, attend college, and complete college. Granted, it’s hard to tease out the selection bias of these studies; it’s tough to know whether participating in these activities caused teenagers to make better choices or whether teenagers who made good life choices also chose to participate in sports and other extracurriculars.

But as Kronholz explains, some studies attempt to correct for such bias and still find compelling outcomes. For instance, research by Columbia University scientist Margo Gardner examined the issue using “propensity scoring,” finding that the odds of attending college were almost twice as high for students who participated in school-related activities for at least two years; such students were also dramatically more likely to complete college and significantly more likely to vote as adults.

It is therefore counterproductive, if not tragic, that schools serving high concentrations of poor students are less likely to offer extracurricular activities. In an innovative 2009 study, researchers Elizabeth Stearns and Elizabeth J. Glennie at the University of North Carolina scoured yearbooks and state administrative data to determine the number of activities offered, and the percentage of students participating, in each high school in North Carolina. High-poverty schools offered fewer activities and showed lower participation rates than their low-poverty peers. It’s hard to know whether that’s due to lack of funding or an obsession with more academic, college-oriented pursuits, but it’s clearly a lost opportunity that could and should be remedied.

Where There Is Hope

So maybe schools should try to address America’s marriage crisis. At the very least, they can help to instill a sense of hope and optimism in their students—by getting them ready for college and/or a satisfying career, by embracing high-quality technical education, and by developing in them character traits like drive and prudence, both via classroom instruction and through extracurricular activities. All of these actions, done well, are almost certain to help push back the average age of childbearing, which will help the next generation do better academically and economically.

Not all of these actions are easy to implement within our traditional public school system, though, which clearly cannot teach religion but also struggles to enforce high expectations around student behavior. School choice, then, must be an important part of this strategy because it allows parents and their children to opt into schools, including religious schools, that share their values. Importantly, school choice also avoids the specter of “the system” tracking certain students into certain programs (like technical training). A much better approach is to allow students and families to select schools and programs that they themselves find compelling.

But will these steps actually lead to a renaissance in marriage? That’s harder to know, and the honest answer is “maybe at the margins.” We may have a better shot at turning around our marriage trends if young people are waiting longer to have children, picking up important skills and work experiences along the way. And those individuals will, on average, be better parents than if they had children as teenagers or early twenty-somethings, with few skills under their belts or job prospects on their horizons.

Fixing our marriage problem isn’t a job for schools alone, of course. If we’re serious about getting more people to tie the knot, we’ll also tackle prison reform (to help make more men “marriageable”), wage supports (ditto), and tax reform (to remove marriage penalties). But in the meantime, our schools can help give their graduates a reason to wait to become parents—and possibly put them on a path to saying “I do.”

photo credit: World Bank via Flickr

“A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards....When society reaches this stage, and there is no standard of right and wrong outside of the individual himself, then the individual is defenseless against the onslaught of cruder and more violent men who proclaim their own subjective sense of values. Once my idea of morality is just as good as your idea of morality, then the morality that is going to prevail is the morality that is stronger.”

—Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

Have all the possible arguments about the Common Core been exhausted? Up until a week ago I would have said yes, but that was before we started talking about moral facts.

First, a little background on the idea of “moral facts.” One aim of a liberal arts or classical education is the search for objective truth. That search is based on the presumption that moral facts (e.g., “all men are created equal,” “murder is wrong”) do exist and that education should focus in large part on imparting the knowledge students need to reason and understand the difference between fact, opinion, and moral facts that are derived from reasoned judgment.

This belief lies in stark contrast to the moral relativism we see far too often today, in schools and beyond. Moral relativism suggests that there are no moral facts. There are facts (i.e., things that can be proven or that exist) and there are opinions (things that you believe). And the distinction between fact and opinion is that facts can be proven. Everything else is an opinion. If opinions are not facts, then they cannot or should not be imposed on others. In other words, “To each his own.” Perhaps I’m against [insert controversial issue], but who am I to impose that personal belief on others?

In a piece penned for the New York Times’s Opinionator blog, philosophy professor James P. McBrayer laments that, according to his informal survey of fellow college professors, “the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.”

While popular opinion might suggest that this is a fault of academe, McBrayer argues that students are indoctrinated with moral relativism beginning with the way they are taught about fact and opinion in grade school. In short, he argues that the way schools teach fact and opinion ensures that a morally relativistic view prevails. “Our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions,” McBrayer argues, “and that all value claims fall into the latter category.”

If moral facts exist, then saying that murder is wrong isn’t merely an opinion. Most Americans accept that “murder is wrong” is a moral fact. Therefore, we have no problem imposing that moral law on society and holding all people, regardless of their personal beliefs and opinions, to that moral standard.

Of course, moral facts aren’t provable the same way objective facts are. They are arrived at through reasoned judgment. I can “prove” the table is hard. I can “prove” that vaccines prevent disease. But I can’t “prove” murder is wrong, or that it’s wrong to steal. I accept that murder is wrong and that stealing is wrong through reasoned judgment.

McBrayer’s piece has gotten a lot of attention, both because it raises an important question about moral relativism and because he makes an (unnecessary and unfair) dig at the Common Core. (Always a good way to draw increased attention to your argument!)

Specifically, McBrayer says:

As it turns out, the Common Core standards used by a majority of K–12 programs in the country require that students be able to “distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.” And the Common Core institute provides a helpful page full of links to definitions, lesson plans and quizzes to ensure that students can tell the difference between facts and opinions.

There are several problems with McBrayer’s invocation of the CCSS here. The biggest is that, while railing against the idea that the distinction between fact and opinion is binary, he ignores that the Common Core specifically articulates a third choice. A quick glance at pre-CCSS state standards reveals that fewer than five states asked students to distinguish between fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment (or something similar). All other state standards—including Massachusetts’s—only made distinctions between fact, opinion, bias, propaganda, hype, etc.

The Common Core, by contrast, acknowledges that there exists a third possibility: reasoned judgment. Far, then, from reinforcing the idea that either statements are objective facts or de facto opinions, the Common Core leaves the door open for precisely the discussion that McBrayer hopes to see. (McBrayer’s oversight is made worse by the fact that he falls victim to the classic blunder of ascribing to the standards anything that happens in the name of standards implementation. In this case, the curriculum resources to which McBrayer points as evidence of the limitations of the Common Core are developed by an independent group, unaffiliated with the CCSS, and not even part of a complete, CCSS-aligned curriculum.)

More than that, the CCSS standard McBrayer cites—“distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text”—appears in the standards for grades 6–12, not in the standards for grades K–5. That is because, as classical educators have long understood, the focus of education in the early grades should be on knowledge acquisition. Then, when students reach what is considered the “age of reason” (usually around middle school), they are asked to use that knowledge to reason and to make and analyze claims.

So what would a reasoned judgment conclude about McBrayer’s attack on Common Core? Rather than reinforcing the prevailing moral relativism in our schools, Common Core actually provides a path forward for students themselves to find their way back to moral facts.

• In the wake of the Jeb Bush not-quite-announcement and the Scott Walker boomlet, it should now be clear to all that we’ve entered the wonderful season of presidential politics. In that spirit, AEI scholars and Friends of Fordham Andrew P. Kelly and Frederick Hess have logged some important commentary on G.O.P. hopefuls and education policy. It’s all well and good, they write, for governors like Bush, Walker, Bobby Jindal, and John Kasich to list the ambitious policies they enacted back home, but they also have to square their reform instincts with a commitment to a sensibly limited federal role in schooling. It’s a paradox that conservative reformers especially are familiar with: How do you embrace a bold agenda for change without falling into the trap of top-down edicts and federal overreach?
• Politico has an informative look at higher education’s “wait-and-see” attitude toward the Common Core, at least when it comes to using its associated assessments for placement decisions. While many reformers (Gadfly among them) hope that tests such as the PARCC and Smarter Balanced might one day be used to determine whether students are ready for credit-bearing courses, waiting for more data is a responsible position for now.
• Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention President Obama’s address in Selma, Alabama, which commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the historic civil rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Both the setting and the language of the speech—one of the best of his career—succeeded in stoking that elusive feeling the president seized upon during his first national campaign: hope. Ticking off a litany of disadvantaged and minority populations who have seen their lives improve over the past five decades, he raised a vital point about how far we’ve come. “We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America....To deny this progress—our progress—would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.” The most stubborn gaps in education and opportunity remain to be fully closed, but it’s important to occasionally take stock, and be inspired by, what we’ve already accomplished.

The language of standards—even relatively straightforward ones like Common Core—can easily flummox the layperson (and more than a handful of professionals). What does it mean if a third grader is supposed to “use multiplication and division within 100 to solve word problems in situations involving equal groups, arrays, and measurement quantities?” Common Core might say a fifth grader should be expected to “write opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting a point of view with reasons and information.” But—on a good day at least—so should a columnist for the New York Times. What’s the difference?

Parents cannot be faulted if they look at the standards, find them less than helpful, and want to know simply, “What should my child be able to do at this age?” That’s the goal of an interesting new project from GreatSchools, the school information megasite for parents. “Milestones” seeks to demystify the standards with a free and engaging collection of short videos in English and Spanish showing what grade-level work looks like in grades K–5. Each short clip shows students with their teachers “demonstrating what success looks like in reading, writing and math, grade by grade.”

Created in collaboration with Student Achievement Partners and the Vermont Writing Collaborative, the videos aren't comprehensive—not every single standard is represented (the audience is parents, not teachers). But each segment is tightly focused, clear, and explicit: “Does your second grader read smoothly like this?” asks one. “Does your fourth grader understand how to compare fractions?” And so on.

A few of the videos seem advanced well beyond what Common Core expects. For example, one segment shows a kindergartener independently decoding the words “nectar” and “liquid,” even though the standards expect children to read only simple “emergent reader” books by the end of the year (if your child can only read Hop on Pop by the end of kindergarten, don’t freak out; she’s not behind). Other videos might create the impression that group work is essential to writing (third grade) or that discussing a topic is integral to the writing process (fifth grade). But let’s not quibble too much. The videos are equally likely to quiet some of the misunderstandings about Common Core, such as in a video of a third grader demonstrating her clear command of memorized math facts.

Writing is especially tricky. It is one thing to say that, by the end of the year, your child’s writing will have an introduction with a simple thesis statement, examples that support the thesis, a conclusion, and improved spelling and punctuation. Adding some samples of student writing might give parents a feel for the level of sophistication, clarity, and coherence the standards expect at any given moment.

Milestones remains a work in progress (grades 6–12 are coming), and a promising one. The impulse to show, not tell, what grade-level competence looks and sounds like in a layperson’s terms is the right one—and badly needed to reassure parents concerned about Common Core. It’s not hard to imagine parents all across America clicking their way through this collection—first to assure themselves that there’s nothing unholy about what’s in Common Core, and a second time to ask, “Wait. Can my kid do that?”

SOURCE: “GreatKids Milestones,” GreatSchools.org, accessed March 10, 2015.

Across the nation, the monopoly of traditional school districts over public education is slowly eroding. Trust-busting policies like public charter schools and vouchers have given parents and students more options than ever before. But how vibrant are school marketplaces in America’s largest districts?

Now in its fourth year, the Education Choice and Competition Index is one of the best examinations of educational markets, rating the hundred most populous districts along four key dimensions: (1) access to school options; (2) processes that align student preferences with schools (e.g., common applications, clear information on schools); (3) policies that favor the growth of popular schools, such as funds following students; and (4) subsidies for poor families.

The top-rated district, you ask? The Recovery School District in New Orleans won top marks in 2014, as it has in the two prior years. New York City and Newark, New Jersey, are close behind the Big Easy. The study commends these cities for their ample supply of school options—and just as importantly, for policies that support quality choice. For instance, this trio of cities (along with Denver) has adopted an algorithm that optimally matches student preferences with school assignments. Impressive stuff from which other states and districts can learn.

As fine as this study is, however, there’s at least one way in which authors could sharpen it. The list of rated cities appears to tilt toward states with countywide districts, while states where district lines are tightly drawn seem to have too few cities included. So why not rank the most densely populated cities—over a certain population threshold—in addition to ranking the top one hundred districts by absolute student counts? This is a small bone to pick, of course, as Brookings is doing policymakers and choice advocates a great favor in outlining the key components of a robust school marketplace, while also keeping tabs on which cities lead and lag behind.

SOURCE: Grover J. Whitehurst and Ellie Klein, The 2014 Education Choice and Competition Index, Brookings Institution (February 2015).

Nearly five years into Common Core implementation, educators across the country continue to struggle to identify and access high-quality instructional materials aligned to the new academic standards, often relying on outdated textbooks or cobbling together multiple sets of materials to get by.

A valuable resource is now available for educators. Edreports.org, a new nonprofit organization reviewing materials for alignment to the Common Core, last week released findings from its initial round of evaluations. The consumer reports-style reviews (conducted by experienced educators, including classroom teachers, principals, and instructional coaches) evaluate curricular materials against three sequential categories, or "gateways"—“focus and coherence,” “rigor and the mathematical practices,” and “instructional supports and other usability indicators”—with only those meeting the first gateway advancing to the second and third. On the whole, findings are not promising. Of the twenty K–8 mathematics instructional series reviewed to date, only one met EdReport.org's criteria for alignment at all grade levels (Eureka, grades K–8), with a second series meeting the alignment criteria in two grades (My Math, grades 4–5). Eureka’s strong showing is particularly impressive, as it didn’t exist five years ago—it was originally created from scratch for the EngageNY website, whose combined math and ELA curriculum modules have been downloaded nearly eighteen million times. Take that, commercial publishers!

Michigan State University’s Dr. William Schmidt comes to similar conclusions in his reviews of thirty-four commonly used math textbook series for alignment to the Common Core math standards, also released last week. While overall alignment results are disheartening, the Textbook Navigator Journal helps teachers identify lessons in their existing textbooks that cover specific Common Core standards, as well as locate lessons in other grade levels within the same series that address certain standards.

Although efforts have been frustratingly slow to provide teachers the materials they need to implement Common Core in classrooms, these recent initiatives represent an important step in the right direction towards helping teachers better evaluate materials’ quality and alignment and make more informed choices about instructional materials.

In the coming months, Fordham will add to this body of work by releasing our own content-expert reviews of curriculum that is supposedly aligned to the Common Core. EdReports.org also plans to begin reviewing high school math and English language arts materials, as well as additional K–8 math materials, later this year.

SOURCE: EdReports.org, accessed March 10, 2015.