America The Uneducated; They Found Their Way in San Jose
State demographer Steve H. Murdock is telling anyone who will listen that Texas public schools will be 80% minority by 2040, up from 57% in 2000. If the education gap persists, he warns, the income of the average Texas household will fall by $6,500 by 2040, after inflation adjustments -- potentially fueling a spike in poverty, the prison population, and other social problems. "We've been very hard hit," says Murdock.
-------------------Charter schools almost always take a few years to refine their efforts, and not all succeed at doing so. But Downtown College Prep and schools like it adapt more quickly than traditional schools -- because they can. It's not merely a matter of their being free from various rules and regulations. The bigger difference is attitude. As Ms. Jacobs observes, principals and teachers at noncharter public schools have trouble learning from their mistakes because nobody is willing to admit to any -- the inertia of the status quo is paralyzing. But at charter schools like Downtown College Prep admitting mistakes is part of the culture. What is more, the teachers who work there are young, open to new ideas and usually hostile to unions or anything else that gets in the way of a fresh approach to teaching. (That doesn't mean that they are all good teachers; charter schools are subject to the normal variations of human ability.)
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NOVEMBER 21, 2005
SOCIAL ISSUES
America The Uneducated |
| A new study warns of a slide for the U.S. as the share of lower achievers grows |
How did the U.S. become the world's largest economy? A key part of the answer is education. Some 85% of adult Americans have at least a high school degree today, up from just 25% in 1940. Similarly, 28% have a college degree, a fivefold gain over this period. Today's U.S. workforce is the most educated in the world.
But now, for the first time ever, America's educational gains are poised to stall because of growing demographic trends. If these trends continue, the share of the U.S. workforce with high school and college degrees may not only fail to keep rising over the next 15 years but could actually decline slightly, warns a report released on Nov. 9 by the National Center for Public Policy & Higher Education, a nonprofit group based in San Jose, Calif. The key reason: As highly educated baby boomers retire, they'll be replaced by mounting numbers of young Hispanics and African Americans, who are far less likely to earn degrees.
Because workers with fewer years of education earn so much less, U.S. living standards could take a dive unless something is done, the report argues. It calculates that lower educational levels could slice inflation-adjusted per capita incomes in the U.S. by 2% by 2020. They surged over 40% from 1980 to 2000.
Not everyone is so pessimistic. Education Secretary Margaret Spelling argues that President Bush's 2001 education reform law, the No Child Left Behind Act, is working to lift minority education levels. "It makes me bristle when I hear people say, 'There's no way in hell we can have our children reach grade-level proficiency,"' she says.
Still, the Center's projections are especially alarming in light of the startling educational gains so many other countries are achieving. U.S. high school math and reading scores already rank below those of most of the advanced economies in Europe and Asia. Now education is exploding in countries such as China and India. There are nearly as many college students in China as in the U.S. Within a decade, the Conference Board projects, students in such countries will be just as likely as those in the U.S. and Europe to get a high school education. Given their much larger populations, that should enable them to churn out far more college graduates as well. More U.S. white-collar jobs will then be likely to move offshore, warns National Center President Patrick M. Callan. "For the U.S. economy, the implication of these trends is really stark," he says.
Callan's projections are based on the growing diversity of the U.S. population. As recently as 1980, the U.S. workforce was 82% white. By 2020, it will be just 63% white. Over this 40-year span, the share of minorities will double, to 37%, as that of Hispanic workers nearly triples, to 17%. The problem is, both Hispanics and African Americans are far less likely to earn degrees than their white counterparts. If those gaps persist, the number of Americans age 26 to 64 who don't even have a high school degree could soar by 7 million, to 31 million, by 2020. Meanwhile, although the actual number of adults with at least a college degree would grow, their share of the workforce could fall by a percentage point, to 25.5%.
These trends aren't carved in stone, of course. Bush's No Child law is helping to lift minority kids' test scores, says Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington think tank that studies No Child. But the gaps are still enormous. On the recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, 39% of white eighth graders were proficient in reading, vs. just 15% of Hispanics and only 12% of blacks. "Given these scores, there's no way the country will reach the 100% proficiency goal" of the No Child law, predicts Jennings.
Even with No Child, backsliding already has happened in Texas, the laboratory President George W. Bush used for the law when he was governor of the state. Why? The Lone Star State's Hispanic population is exploding. Because minority students are far more likely to drop out of high school, Texas now ranks dead last among the 50 states in the percentage of adults who have a high school degree. That's down from 39th in 1990.
Similarly, Texas ranks 35th among the states in the percentage of adults who have a college degree, down from 23rd in 1990. State demographer Steve H. Murdock is telling anyone who will listen that Texas public schools will be 80% minority by 2040, up from 57% in 2000. If the education gap persists, he warns, the income of the average Texas household will fall by $6,500 by 2040, after inflation adjustments -- potentially fueling a spike in poverty, the prison population, and other social problems. "We've been very hard hit," says Murdock.
In Texas and across the country, No Child's focus on test results skirts the biggest Achilles' heel of the public schools: the growing dropout rate. Nationally, the on-time high school graduation rate is lower now than it was in 1983, when the report A Nation at Risk first sounded the alarm about the nation's failing schools, says Michael Cohen, president of Achieve Inc., a nonprofit school standards group created by governors and business leaders.
In 2002 just 68% of high school students graduated four years after they started ninth grade. That's down from 75% in the early 1980s. True, many later earn a general educational development degree. But the GED has never been the same as a high school diploma. Once students quit school, it's difficult for them to make it into college, says Thomas G. Mortenson, head of Postsecondary Education Opportunity, a higher education newsletter.
Minority students who do get through high school face even greater obstacles in earning a bachelor's degree. Because many come from low-income families, they have been hit especially hard by the shift in student financial aid policy away from need-based grants toward loans and merit scholarships that favor the middle class. So just 10% of students from the bottom quartile of family income brackets earn a BA by the time they're 24, figures Mortenson, vs. 81% of those from the top quartile. "We are not dealing with the changing demography of the country," he says.
How can the trends be reversed? Jennings argues that the U.S. must push harder to get better teachers into poorer schools. States must also work far harder to keep students from dropping out of high school even as they raise graduation requirements. Today, only about a third of high school grads are prepared for college, estimates Achieve's Cohen. Many need remedial courses, a key reason why fewer than half of those who begin college earn a BA, says Cohen, whose group is working with 22 states to raise their high school graduation requirements. And more generous financial aid could make it easier for low-income students to go to college.
The prospects for U.S. education levels are a lot like global warming. Since erosion occurs gradually, it's easy to ignore. But if the U.S. doesn't pay more attention, everything from its competitiveness to its standard of living could sink.
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Charter schools almost always take a few years to refine their efforts, and not all succeed at doing so. But Downtown College Prep and schools like it adapt more quickly than traditional schools -- because they can. It's not merely a matter of their being free from various rules and regulations. The bigger difference is attitude. As Ms. Jacobs observes, principals and teachers at noncharter public schools have trouble learning from their mistakes because nobody is willing to admit to any -- the inertia of the status quo is paralyzing. But at charter schools like Downtown College Prep admitting mistakes is part of the culture. What is more, the teachers who work there are young, open to new ideas and usually hostile to unions or anything else that gets in the way of a fresh approach to teaching. (That doesn't mean that they are all good teachers; charter schools are subject to the normal variations of human ability.)
They Found Their Way in San Jose
November 17, 2005; Page D8
Life really can imitate art. The art I have in mind is the kind of tear-jerker movie in which, say, a beleaguered small-town basketball team beats the odds and makes it to the state finals. Or in which someone -- imagine Sally Field in a faded gingham dress -- struggles to bring in the harvest and save a farm.
![[The story of a charter school that learned from its mistakes -- and thrived.]](outbind://1832-00000000173BA48009FBB743BA7E37D1BDFCFA40E4483200/http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/ED-AD624_brscho_20051116195505.jpg) The story of a charter school that learned from its mistakes -- and thrived. |
Joanne Jacobs's "Our School," a vivid account of the creation and first years of a charter high school in San Jose, Calif., has that kind of drama. It reads like a novel whose characters are both stereotypical and improbable. The founders of Downtown College Prep -- as the school is called -- are a Jewish guy from an affluent family educated at Princeton and Stanford and a woman who had been raised by a working-class single mother and had sleepwalked through her own high-school experience until a year in Spain as an exchange student persuaded her to become a teacher.
Many of the other characters are right out of central casting. The Rev. Mateo Sheedy is the patron saint of Downtown College Prep; while dying of cancer he helps to open doors to the philanthropic and business communities of San Jose and to a nearby university. Florina Gallegos, a local education activist and organizer, becomes the school's godmother, overseeing a thousand small details. There's also Florina's daughter, Alicia, who just happens to be earning a master's degree in education -- at Harvard -- and who reluctantly returns to San Jose to teach at the school "because Padre Mateo wanted me to be here." (Pass the tissues, please.)
But this isn't fiction. The challenges are real, the stakes high, the lessons important -- and the achievements extraordinary. The entering ninth-grade class at Downtown College Prep was a challenge, to say the least. "Most students had earned D's and F's in middle school," writes Ms. Jacobs. "Some were repeating ninth grade. Some had been labeled learning disabled, hyperactive, or emotionally disordered." In addition, "most students read at the fourth- through sixth-grade level; some students had made it to high school with second- or third-grade reading skills."
One ninth-grader stumbled over the phrase "ride the carousel" on a language test, reading it as "ride the carrot salad." The school's informal motto thus became: "Downtown College Purgatory: Ride the Carrot Salad." A sense of humor was badly needed, for the first few years were grueling. Homework loads, required classes, teaching techniques -- everything was a moving target, subject to adjustment or radical change. Eventually the basic verities of the school -- discipline, hard work, an atmosphere of community, the involvement of parents -- asserted themselves to good effect.
From scratch, teachers created innovative courses, such as College Readiness, in which kids were taught to take notes, organize their time and study for tests, as well as to formulate arguments and support them with facts. Classes were kept small, teachers and students worked long days, and more and more kids "crossed over," that is, metamorphosed from (barely) warm bodies to committed students. Grades on standardized tests and the number of students on the honor roll gradually crept up. Downtown College Prep has sent all the graduates from its first two classes to four-year colleges and now ranks among the top third of public high schools in California.
![[Details]](outbind://1832-00000000173BA48009FBB743BA7E37D1BDFCFA40E4483200/http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/it_books09142004171604.gif){kind=small}
By Joanne Jacobs
(Palgrave Macmillan, 240 pages, $24.95)
In "Our School," Ms. Jacobs brings to life the experience of particular kids and teachers but also, rightly, raises the big questions about charter schools: Do they work? Do they divert resources from conventional public schools?
Charter schools almost always take a few years to refine their efforts, and not all succeed at doing so. But Downtown College Prep and schools like it adapt more quickly than traditional schools -- because they can. It's not merely a matter of their being free from various rules and regulations. The bigger difference is attitude. As Ms. Jacobs observes, principals and teachers at noncharter public schools have trouble learning from their mistakes because nobody is willing to admit to any -- the inertia of the status quo is paralyzing. But at charter schools like Downtown College Prep admitting mistakes is part of the culture. What is more, the teachers who work there are young, open to new ideas and usually hostile to unions or anything else that gets in the way of a fresh approach to teaching. (That doesn't mean that they are all good teachers; charter schools are subject to the normal variations of human ability.)
Do charter schools take money from the traditional public school system? Of course they do, because they take students. And school districts with a lot of infrastructure and rising costs will get hurt if their enrollments are static or declining. As it happens, Downtown College Prep siphons off many difficult, underperforming students. They are the least likely to attend public schools regularly or to graduate -- and require expensive extra services from traditional schools. So the financial burden on the district, in this case and some others, is minimal.
Will charter schools force traditional schools to change? Let's hope so, if only by embarrassing them with success. Certainly if noncharter public schools are forced to compete for students, they will have to improve simply to survive. But Ms. Jacobs makes no grand claims. Her task is mainly one of fidelity to the case at hand -- a success story worthy of Hollywood.
Dr. Miller, a physician, is a fellow at the Hoover Institution.
posted by Whitney Tilson at 10:46 PM
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