Expert task force calls for broader, bolder approach to education policy
A task force of national policy experts with diverse religious and political affiliations, in public policy fields including education, social welfare, health, housing, and civil rights have launched a campaign to break a decades-long cycle of reform efforts that promised much and have achieved far too little. In ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post, the task force — convened by EPI's president and education policy director, Lawrence Mishel — calls for a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education" to raise achievement levels for disadvantaged children. Read the statement of the task force and to add your name to the list of signers.
Graduation rate measure is "exceedingly inaccurate"
A substantial and influential body of literature understates U.S. graduation rates, including Education Week's new "Diploma Counts" annual report, which argues that the high school graduation rate in the United States is just 71% overall, 55% for blacks, and 58% for Hispanics. EPI President Lawrence Mishel and economist Joydeep Roy argue in a new paper [PDF] published at the Education Policy Analysis Archives that these estimates are substantially below actual graduation rates, especially for minorities. In fact, Mishel and Roy were joined by Nobel-prize winner James J. Heckman and Paul A. LaFontaine in issuing a statement today warning researchers and policy makers to remain cautious in relying on the "exceedingly inaccurate" data used in the Education Week report.
The corruption of school accountability
In this article in the June 2008 issue of The School Administrator, EPI Research Associate Richard Rothstein reviews reasons why accountability measures, like NCLB, that rely exclusively on quantitative measures like test scores, have been found wanting in other public sectors and in the private sector. This article summarizes the longer paper Rothstein prepared for the National Center on Performance Incentives.
"A Nation at Risk" — Twenty-Five Years Later
The Cato Institute recently invited EPI Research Associate Richard Rothstein to assess the Reagan Administration's influential report, A Nation at Risk, on the 25th anniversary of its issue. Rothstein's essay appears here.
Whose problem is poverty?
EPI's 2004 book, Class and Schools, argued that the achievement gap between black and white students could not be closed unless school improvement was supplemented by improvements in the social and economic conditions of the lives of black children. In the April issue of Educational Leadership (the monthly magazine of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), Class and Schools author Richard Rothstein contributes the article, "Whose Problem is Poverty?," which responds to his book's detractors and underscores why its analysis continues to hold up against fierce criticism.
EPI scholar honored
EPI research associate Richard Rothstein was honored by the American Education Finance Association (AEFA) for his writings on education in books, a New York Times column, and elsewhere. In selecting Rothstein for the prestigious annual award, AEFA officials praised his work for its "accuracy, objectivity, and insight."
Accountability and performance incentive plans in education
Accountability and performance incentive plans in education are compromised by goal distortion, gaming, and corruption. Education policy makers who design such plans have paid insufficient attention to similar experiences in other fields. This paper by EPI research associate Richard Rothstein describes the perverse consequences that result from incentive systems in institutions in health care, job training, and welfare administration and in the private sector. Because of such consequences, private sector performance incentives rely primarily on subjective evaluations, not easily corrupted quantitative measurements. In the public sector and service professions (like teaching), performance incentives run the risk of subverting the intrinsic motivation of agents. The paper notes, however, that despite goal distortion, gaming, and corruption, performance incentive plans may nonetheless improve average performance on measured dimensions.
The "achievement gap": beyond basic skills
The "achievement gap" usually refers to the difference between black and white students' basic skills test scores. But education and youth development consists of more than basic skills—it also includes critical thinking, social skills, work ethic, citizenship, community responsibility, physical health, emotional health, appreciation of the arts and literature, and preparation for skilled work. Greater equity in outcomes requires narrowing the achievement gap in each of these areas. Read Report Card on Comprehensive Equity, co-authored by EPI research associate Richard Rothstein, for more information.
The Teaching Penalty
The ability to effectively educate the nation's children hinges on the quality of our teachers. And to recruit and retain quality teachers requires that they receive pay commensurate with that offered in other career opportunities available to them. Unfortunately, teachers' pay increasingly lags significantly behind that found in comparable occupations or those requiring similar levels of education and experience. When all college graduates' inflation-adjusted wages began to stagnate in the 2000s, teachers seemed to be hit harder, widening the pay gap even more. A new EPI study, The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground, expands upon the research published in How Does Teacher Pay Compare? (2004) by providing new insights and updated data on the erosion of relative teacher pay, including new analysis that takes into account seniority levels for the first time. (News release [PDF])
Leaving behind "No Child Left Behind"
EPI education research associate Richard Rothstein writes in the latest issue of The American Prospect about how our No. 1 education program is incoherent, unworkable, and doomed. Visit EPI Viewpoints to read why Rothstein believes that the next president still can have a huge impact on improving American schooling.
Vouchers and Public School Performance
School choice and vouchers have become an increasingly important part of that educational reform policy debate. The debate is rooted in ideological differences between market proponents, who attach greater importance to individual choice, and supporters of a publicly run educational system, who place greater importance on equity, commonality, and public accountability. In a new book, Vouchers and Public School Performance, authors Martin Carnoy, Frank Adamson, Amita Chudgar, Thomas Luschei, and John Witte ask whether there is evidence that increased competition among schools introduced by a large-scale voucher plan in an urban school district, Milwaukee, resulted in improved student performance in public elementary schools. The study uses data from an extensive choice reform in Milwaukee's Public School District, a district with the typical educational problems of an American urban center, but unusual in that it has had a voucher plan targeted at low-income students since 1990—the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
Pre-K investment pays off for every state
New fact sheets for all 50 states and the District of Columbia serve as an addendum to EPI's recently released book Enriching Children, Enriching the Nation by Robert G. Lynch. He examines the costs and benefits of pre-K programs and their positive impact over time on federal and state budgets, crime costs, and the earnings of participating children and adults. (News release [PDF])
A response to Tucker
In December, 2006, the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce issued a report, Tough Choices or Tough Times, written by the commission's director, Marc Tucker. In the June issue of Phi Delta Kappan, Tucker summarized his Tough Choices report, and Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein (president and research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, respectively) critiqued it. Their critique here includes additional material not included in the Kappan article.
Enriching Children, Enriching the Nation
Research is increasingly demonstrating that the policy of investing in high-quality prekindergarten programs provides a wide array of significant benefits to children, families, and society as a whole, including job creation, inequality reduction, education and health care improvement, and reduced crime rates. In a new EPI book, Enriching Children, Enriching the Nation: Public Investment in High-Quality Prekindergarten, Robert G. Lynch examines the costs and benefits of both a targeted and a universal prekindergarten program and shows the positive impact of these programs on the economy, federal and state budgets, crime, and the educational achievement and earnings of children and adults.
Jay Greene’s persistent misuse of data for teacher pay comparisons
Read Economic Policy Institute's president Lawrence Mishel's reply to Jay Greene's of Manhattan Institute research on teachers pay.
'Proficiency for All' — An Oxymoron
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requires that all students be proficient by 2014. But some policy makers think that this goal can be achievable if only schools had more time to improve. This new paper by Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen and Tamara Wilder concludes that there is no date by which all (or even nearly all) students in any subgroup can achieve the NCLB requirement of proficiency on "challenging" standards, because no goal can simultaneously be challenging to and achievable by all students across the entire achievement distribution. The authors show that even the highest scoring countries in the world cannot meet this standard, nor could they meet a standard that required only basic skills of all students. The paper concludes by showing how policy makers could formulate expectations of realistic improvement across the entire distribution of student ability.
The Need For Adequate Resources For At-Risk Children
In this working paper, Whitney C. Allgood analyzes the multiple risk factors that predict greater rates of school failure for disadvantaged children, and summarizes the research on the additional resources needed if disadvantaged children are to receive an adequate education. Included in these additional resources are smaller schools, reduced class size, one-on-one tutoring in the context of before- and after-school programming, early childhood intervention and education, efforts to increase the supply and retention of high-quality teachers to high-poverty schools, summer school, and school-based access to health services for students and their immediate families.
Social Class, Schooling and Achievement...Again
On August 9th, 2006 New York Times reporter Diana Jean Schemo wrote a column, It Takes More Than Schools to Close Achievement Gap [PDF], which raised the issue of how much non-school factors determine student educational success. In her column she reflected on EPI Research Associate Richard Rothstein's work in Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black–White Achievement Gap. Schemo's article generated many responses, including an important one by Chester E. Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in its publication, Gadfly. Rothstein has in turn written a response to Finn (a shorter version is being published in Gadfly, but his full response [PDF] is available online). Other research relevant to this debate includes the book, The Charter School Dust-up, co-written by Rothstein, and a re-analysis of the Education Trust’s data on 'high flyers' [PDF] by Florida State University professor Doug Harris.
Should we repair "No Child Left Behind" or trade it in?
Read this conversation between EPI research associate Richard Rothstein and Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP) Robert Gordon on the impact of NCLB and how it ought to be changed.
Rethinking high school graduation rates and trends
Scholars and educators disagree on the rate of graduation in U.S. high schools, and some new, widely reported statistics seriously understate minority graduation rates, failing to reflect the tremendous progress in the last few decades in closing the black-white and the Hispanic-white graduation gaps. Rethinking High School Graduation Rates and Trends analyzes the current sources of available data on high school completion and dropout rates and finds that, while graduation rates need much improvement, they are higher than in the past and getting better. Also to be found on EPI.org: a statement
from Paul E. Barton, senior associate and former director of the Policy Information Center at Educational Testing Service; audio from a recent debate on high school completion featuring author Lawrence Mishel; and answers to some of the questions
that have arisen in the public discussion of the issues raised in the book.
Should the federal government be involved in school accountability?
Read this debate between EPI research associate Richard Rothstein and Hoover Institution economist Eric Hanushek on the role of the federal government in education in EPI's Viewpoints.
Worker Skills and Job Requirements
There is a widespread belief that U.S. workers' education and skills are not adequate for the demands of jobs in the modern economy. Many believe that this presumed mismatch between the skills workers possess and the skills that jobs require will become even more serious as the workplace becomes increasingly high-tech and service-oriented. But many simple assumptions regarding skills mismatch in the U.S. labor market do not stand up well to closer examination. The latest EPI book, Worker Skills and Job Requirements, provides an overview of the skills mismatch debate, reviews research on skill levels, and scrutinizes trends in the skills workers possess, the skills employers demand, and the evidence for a mismatch between the two.
Losing ground in early childhood education
There is growing concern across the United States about the increasing difficulty of recruiting and retaining experienced and educated workers in the field of early childhood education (ECE). Using new data covering a quarter century, Losing Ground in Early Childhood Education, a new study co-published by EPI and the Keystone Research Center, shows a substantial decline in workforce qualifications in center-based ECE and the even lower qualifications in home-based ECE. Both areas of ECE today have workforce education levels well-below those needed to improve long-term academic outcomes for children. In addition to the full-length study that examines trends on the national level, seven companion Issue Briefs explore the ECE situation in seven specific states and a supplementary set of downloadable tables makes general comparisons across 39 states.
Re-examining the charter school debate
Widely acknowledged past research on charter schools reported that these students were more likely to be proficient on their state's reading and math exams when compared to students in the nearest public school with a similar racial composition. But this past research citing a "charter advantage" inadequately controlled for differences in racial composition and socioeconomic status. When one directly takes into account racial composition and poverty, the perceived advantage of charter schools vanishes completely. For a more thorough analysis of this important education issue, read the Briefing Paper, Advantage None—Re-Examining Hoxby's Finding of Charter School Benefits.
Charter schools: the evidence on enrollment and achievement
When federal statistics showed test scores lower in charter than in regular schools, some charter school supporters insisted this must result from charter schools enrolling harder-to-teach minority students. Data show, however, that typical charter school students are not more disadvantaged, yet their average achievement is not higher. EPI's latest book, The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the evidence on enrollment and achievement, reviews the existing research on charter schools and suggests how such debates could be improved: by carefully accounting for the difficulty of educating particular groups of students before interpreting test scores, and by focusing on student gains, not their level of achievement at any particular time.
Investing in children yields exceptional returns
The problems for children and society that result from childhood poverty cry out for effective policy solutions. There is a strong consensus among the experts who have studied high-quality early childhood development (ECD) programs that these programs have significant payoffs. EPI's latest study—Exceptional Returns: Economic, Fiscal, and Social Benefits of Investment in Early Childhood Development, by EPI research associate Robert G. Lynch—demonstrates, for the first time, that providing all 20% of the nations three- and four-year-old children who live in poverty with a high-quality ECD program would have a substantial payoff for governments and taxpayers in the future.
How does teacher pay compare?
Recent claims have suggested that teachers are well compensated when work hours, weeks of work, or benefits packages are taken into account. In fact, teacher compensation lags that of workers with similar education and experience, as well as that of workers with comparable skill requirements. Incorporating benefits into the analysis does not alter the general picture—teachers remain at a substantial wage/pay disadvantage that has eroded considerably in the last 10 years. EPI’s education book, How does teacher pay compare? Methodological challenges and answers, reviews recent analyses of relative teacher compensation and provides a detailed analysis of trends in the relative weekly pay of elementary and secondary school teachers.
Education and economic development
Strong economies compete on the basis of high value, not solely low cost. The most forward-thinking approach to increasing U.S. competitiveness is to equip today’s and tomorrow’s citizens with the skills and attitudes needed for economic and civic success in an increasingly knowledge-based economy. Existing research shows that a nation that invests in education generates real, quantifiable results. For a better understanding of why money spent wisely on education pays off not only for workers, but for communities and businesses, read EPI’s book, Smart Money—Education and Economic Development.
Education columns archived
EPI launches a searchable archive of over 120 columns written by education scholar Richard Rothstein for The New York Times.
New education book: Class and Schools
At the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the stubborn achievement gap between black and white students is a key measure of our country’s failure to achieve true equality. Federal and state officials are currently pursuing tougher accountability and other reforms at the school level to address this problem. In making schools their sole focus, however, these policy makers are neglecting an area that is vital to narrowing the achievement gap: social class differences that affect learning. The book Class and Schools — co-published by the Economic Policy Institute and Teachers College, Columbia University — shows that social class differences in health care quality and access, nutrition, childrearing styles, housing quality and stability, parental occupation and aspirations, and even exposure to environmental toxins, play a significant part in how well children learn and ultimately succeed.
We are not ready to assess history performance
Visit EPI Viewpoints to read EPI research associate Richard Rothstein's article on the challenges of assessing students' history performance written for The Journal of American History and presented online in association with The History Cooperative.
Teacher quality
Teacher quality is the single most important school-related factor influencing student success. In Teacher Quality: Understanding the Effects of Teacher Attributes, author Jennifer King Rice examines the body of research on the subject of teacher quality to draw conclusions about which attributes makes teachers most effective, with a focus on aspects of teacher quality that can be translated into policy recommendations and incorporated into teaching practice. The transcript of an August 20 conference call about the importance teacher quality is available here.
A conversation on school vouchers
Check out Viewpoints to read a transcript from an EPI-convened press conference with several of the nation's top education researchers on the effectiveness of school vouchers and the quality of recent research on the topic.
Inequality at the starting gate
EPI's book, Inequality at the Starting Gate, which analyzes new national data on kindergartners, shows that the inequalities in children's cognitive ability are substantial right from the starting gate. Disadvantaged children start kindergarten with significantly lower cognitive skills than their more advantaged counterparts, and these same disadvantaged children are often placed in low-resource schools, only exacerbating the problem. As a result, disadvantaged children fall behind at a very early age, before they ever enter a classroom. For an analysis of the differences in young children's achievement scores by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status-as well as by social background, family type, and home activity-read the Executive Summary, introduction, or press release for Inequality at the Starting Gate online. A recording of the Sept. 30 press conference can be heard in EPI's Audio Archive.
The class size debate
In the EPI Book, The Class Size Debate, two eminent economists debate the merits of smaller class size and the research methods used to gauge the efficacy of this education reform measure. Visit EPI's Audio Archive to listen to a panel discussion by the authors, or read a press release online.
Putting school renovation on a fast track
As Congress debated ways to stimulate growth in the slumping economy, long-standing spending needs in education should have been seen as a perfect candidate for increased public investment. In 1995, the General Accounting Office conducted an audit of the state of local public school infrastructure and determined that the nation's schools needed over $100 billion in repairs. To learn more about the specific deficiencies plaguing the school system and how increased federal spending can help address them, read EPI's Issue Brief, Putting School Renovation on a Fast Track.
Market-based education reform
In the debate over reforming urban education, the issues surrounding market-based approaches-charter schools, vouchers, public school choice-are complex. The latest EPI book, Market-based Reforms in Urban Education, examines the extensive but disparate evidence to help determine whether these reforms promote the public interest and translate well into the provision of compulsory education.
Examining the evidence on school vouchers
Does a voucher threat make schools try harder? A recent Florida study said yes, but three analyses that replicate its methods show there's no basis for that claim. Read the executive summary and introduction of the book, School Vouchers: Examining the evidence by Martin Carnoy.
Failing the test to improve schools
Read EPI economist Doug Harris' op-ed from the April 28 Vancouver Columbian on President Bush's school testing proposal.
The blame game
Are public schools holding back the nation's economy? Find out what EPI research associate Richard Rothstein thinks in his article, The Blame Game, from the March 2001 edition of The School Administrator.
EPI privatization conference 
Visit the Audio Archive to listen to recordings of various sessions from EPI's January 11 conference, Privatization: Trends, evidence, and alternatives. Also available is a copy of the conference's agenda, short biographies of the presenters and panelists, and a collection of relevant research papers for easy downloading.
Papering over the school voucher problem
Read EPI research associate Martin Carnoy's recent op-ed, Vouchers are no cure-all for short-changed schools, which appeared in the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel and several other newspapers nationwide in November.
Show me the money
Where's the Money Gone? Changes in the Level and Composition of Education Spending addresses the widespread perception that there has been a "school productivity collapse." The study's detailed comparisons of spending by nine school districts in 1967 and 1991 show that increases in spending have been substantially smaller than generally believed, and that what is generally thought of as "regular education" consumed only a small portion of that increase. A companion study, Where's the Money Going?, updates the findings to 1996. A revised edition, combining these two studies and adding a new introduction by the author, Richard Rothstein, will be available in Winter 2001.
Can public schools learn from private schools?
EPI's book, Can
Public Schools Learn From Private Schools? (co-published with The Aspen
Institute's Nonprofit Sector Research Fund), reports on case studies of eight
public and eight private schools, conducted to determine whether there are any
identifiable and transferable private school practices that public schools can
adopt in order to improve student outcomes. The evidence from interviews with
teachers, administrators, and parents yields a surprising answer, one that should
inform our policy debates about school choice, vouchers, public school funding,
and other education issues. Check out the press
release, table of contents, executive summary, and introduction online.
The Myths and Realities of America's
Student Achievement
According to conventional wisdom, American public schools have suffered
a terrible decline and are in need of dramatic reform. In The
Way We Were? The Myths and Realities of America's Student Achievement, Richard
Rothstein analyzes the statistical and anecdotal evidence and shows that public
schools, by and large, are not falling down on the job of educating our children.
To the contrary, by many measures they are doing better than in the past.
Risky Business
Doubts about government efficiency have spread to public education, which in today's global environment is viewed as a critical matter for the nation's youth. Risky Business: Private management of public schools examines one idea for education reform that has attracted the attention of local officials: hiring business firms to manage public schools and public school systems.
