Mobility and Inertia
Mobility and Inertia
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently produced a sobering op ed piece titled, “The American Dream is Leaving America,” in which he bemoans the demise of education as the key “escalator” to upward social mobility. “Among young Americans whose parents didn’t graduate from high school,” he writes, “only 5 percent make it through college themselves. In other rich countries, the figure is 23 percent.” Alluding to comparative educational attainment figures appearing in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s most recent Annual Survey of Education, Mr. Kristof concludes that, “the American dream seems to have emigrated because many countries do better than the United States in educational mobility.” Utilizing college graduation as his key metric for assessing educational mobility, Mr. Kristof notes: “As recently as 2000, the United States still ranked second in the share of the population with a college degree. Now we have dropped to fifth.”
Mr. Kristof assigns blame for the decline to three factors: a bifurcated system that offers “superb education for elites,” while short-changing the majority, failure to provide universal early education, and low teacher salaries.
Just two days prior to the publication of Mr. Kristof’s article, an op ed column titled, “Getting more poor kids into college won’t fix income inequality,” appeared in the Washington Post. As did Kristof, authors James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley acknowledged: “The fact that relatively few students from low-income backgrounds attend college is responsible in large part for the lack of upward mobility in the United States today.” To which they added: “But [colleges] aren’t the real problem; K-12 education is.”
The authors cite current research conducted by economists Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University and Harvard University’s Christopher Avery which found that the overwhelming majority of high achieving high school students from low-income backgrounds fail to apply to any selective colleges or universities, “despite the fact that selective institutions typically cost them less (owing to the availability of generous financial aid) than the two-year and nonselective four-year institutions to which they actually apply.” For students admitted to Harvard whose familial income is less than $65,000, the family pays nothing. Yale University bills itself as “one of the most affordable colleges in the country for families making less than $200,000 in annual income – significantly less expensive than attending a top public university, even as an in-state student.” As is true of rival Harvard, those whose families earn less than $65,000 pay nothing.
Why do so few high-achieving low-income students seek admission to top U.S. colleges and universities? In part, suggest authors Piereson and Schaefer Riley, the answer involves the observation that, “teachers have more school choice than students do. Rather than sending the most qualified and experienced teachers to educate the kids who need them the most, we do the reverse.” The upshot is that relatively fewer high-achieving students from low-income households have contact with teachers and counselors who encourage them to apply to leading colleges and universities and advise them of the generous financial aid opportunities they offer. And, as the authors note: “All you have to do is look at a high-performing charter school or private school in a poor neighborhood to realize that there is nothing about low-income kids that makes them incapable of doing well in school.”
The crux of the problem, however, is that the educational achievement gap dividing children from low-income families from their more-affluent counterparts is growing rather than shrinking. Citing research conducted by Stanford University’s Sean Reardon, the authors note:
“The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier. In fact, it appears that the income achievement gap has been growing for at least fifty years.”
This, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on programs such as Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and Head Start, whose express purpose is to close the achievement gap. Indeed, while the U.S. was falling behind other nations with respect to proportionate numbers of college graduates during the years following 2000, federal investment in education skyrocketed. President Bush committed more federal dollars to K-12 education during the first two years of his presidency than his predecessor did in the preceding eight. And in President Obama’s American Recovery and Investment Act, an extra sum of nearly $100 billion was allocated for education, with most targeted for K-12 schooling.
Both articles acknowledge that education continues to hold the key to upward socio-economic mobility, and both concur that our education system is distancing the “American Dream” from the grasp of the economically disadvantaged. With global competition accelerating and the stakes higher than ever, maybe it’s time to abandon a “more of the same” approach in favor of real systemic reform.
