Dana Goldstein

How College Contributes to Inequality

Check out my Atlantic interview with political scientist Suzanne Mettler, who is doing some of the best thinking on exploding college tuition, student debt, and for-profit colleges. 

Should we pay attention to those studies about how little money liberal arts grads earn in their first year out of college?

With the liberal arts, there’s long-term payoff. By the time you are 40, you are doing much better. As a college professor, I could ruminate on that. There’s been a reframing of higher education in the media in the last few years. The media looks at higher unemployment among college grads and says, ‘Maybe a college degree is not worth it.’ That’s wrong. You’re always better off to try and get more four-year college degree recipients. But then of course, we have to look at what sector of education are people attending? Is it a valuable degree?

Your book suggests that in many cases, people are better off not going to college at all than attending a for-profit college. 13 percent of college students are now enrolled at for-profits, yet they make up nearly 50 percent of student loan defaults. The industry says this is because they take a risk on less well-prepared students. They blame the students themselves when they drop out or fail to get decent jobs. What did your research turn up?

No. That’s an inadequate explanation. To the contrary, there are various scholars who’ve looked at this. As I show in my book, students who grow up high income and have low test scores are about as likely as students who are low income with high test scores to graduate college. What I’m trying to emphasize is the financial part of it. The major reason why students drop out and don’t complete college has to do with finances and with their varied ability to stay enrolled and afford it. That’s true across the board, whatever kind of institution the student is attending.

At the for-profits, the graduation rates are 22 percent. We know schools with more low-income students are going to have lower graduation rates. Studies control for that factor and still find particularly low graduation rates at the for-profits. They don’t have student support services and they don’t emphasize learning. They charge very high tuition. You could get the same kind of degree at a community college or four-year public for a much lower cost.

Read the whole thing. 

New Work and Media Appearances

My latest article, "Don't Help Your Kids With Their Homework," is featured on the cover of the April Atlantic.

Yep -- the headline is clickbait. But this is also a data-driven piece reporting on a 30-year study of American parenting partices, which can help us figure out which parental interventions do and don't help children succeed in school. My article is about the fascinating work of Keith Robinson and Angel Harris, sociologists and authors of The Broken Compass.  

To learn more, check out my radio segments on the Brian Lehrer Show/WNYC, To The Point/PRI, and Slate's Mom and Dad are Fighting.

Is School Desegregation a Failed Movement?

I turned in the revisions of my book to my publisher yesterday (!), so my plan for the next few weeks is to get back into the swing of daily journalism. So. 

Over at Slate, Tanner Colby is writing a series on "The Massive Liberal Failure on Race." His first entry was "how the left’s embrace of busing hurt the cause of integration." 

Colby is right to point out that the progressive meme of "resegregation" of the nation's schools is flawed, because controversies over busing in the 1960s and 1970s meant the nation never fully implemented desegregation in the first place. He then concludes, "So far, nobody seems to have a solution that works" in terms of educating children of different races and classes together. That, however, is not really true. Here are some of the things that have worked: 

Recognizing that housing policy is schools policy. When neighborhoods integrate with mixed-income housing, schools integrate and test scores go up. Because more and more Americans in their 30s are choosing to put down roots in diverse urban neighborhoods, this presents an amazing policy opportunity to foster integrated schools. Charter schools like the Larchmont network in Los Angeles, Community Roots in Brooklyn, and Charles Drew in Atlanta are embracing integration as part of their missions, and are popular with families across lines of race and class. Last month President Obama  signed an executive order to allow charter schools that receive federal funding to weight their admissions lotteries in order to create diverse student bodies. 

Where busing is used, make it a matter of choice. Colby writes about an urban-suburban busing program that didn't work in Kansas City. But such programs are often quite popular: In Boston, Hartford, Milwaukee, and other regions, there are tens of thousands of children on waiting lists for voluntary inter-district transfers. 

When I began reporting on education in 2006, desegregation was seen as hopelessly outdated. Today there is actually growing consensus around the wisdom of integrating schools at the classroom level. (That means not using "gifted" or AP tracks as de facto tracking programs for affluent kids). So while it's important to acknowledge busing's flawed history, we need to bring this conversation into the present, too, and explore creative policy solutions to the problem of American children growing up without enough meaningful contact with children from backgrounds different than their own. 

Jacob Riis, School Reformer

Essex Market School, the East Side. By Jacob Riis, ca. 1888-1895.

I just caught this poignant essay at the New York Times about How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis' 1890 exposé of day-to-day life in New York City tenements. Bill de Blasio mentioned Riis during his inaugural address, and the book -- which depicted urban squalor through vivid, flash photography (a new technology at the time) -- is credited with sparking the movement toward modern sanitation laws and housing regulations. 

What's less well known is that Riis' exploration of poverty in New York City turned him into an education reformer -- one who sounded a whole lot like today's teacher accountability hawks. His follow-up to How the Other Half Lives was a volume called The Children of the Poor. Here's a litte excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Teacher Wars (Doubleday, Sept. 2014), about the familiar arguent Riis made in that book:

Riis acknowledged the systemic constraints on immigrant children’s lives. The United States lacked strong anti-child labor laws and relied mostly on overextended local charities, many with a proselytizing religious mission, to provide the poor with health care and jobs training. There was no public support for sanitary affordable housing and far too little government funding for truant officers who were supposed to encourage child workers to enroll in school. (In New York City, Riis found that a paltry 12 officers were responsible for tracking 50,000 absent children between the ages of 5 and 14, many of them homeless.) Nevertheless, like today’s accountably reformers, Riis considered teachers the determining factor in whether a child escaped poverty. He wrote that schools are “our chief defense against the tenement and the flood of ignorance with which it would swamp us. … it is the personal influence of the teacher that counts for most in dealing with the child. It follows it into the home, and often through life to the second and third generation, smoothing the way of sorrow and hardship with counsel and aid in a hundred ways.” 

Checking in on Bill de Blasio's Universal Pre-K Ambitions

The signature proposal of Bill de Blasio's mayoral campaign was a promise to raise the wealthy's income taxes to fund universal, free, full-day pre-K for all the city's four-year olds. 

In the new issue of The Nation I report on the political prospects for this abitious plan, and also describe what a gold standard pre-K education looks like. 

Check it out!

The PISA Puzzle

Check out my piece at Slate, on the big international education rankings that get so much attention. I review what's actually on the test, what the results tell us about American poverty, and explain why academic ability tracking might have something to do with our bad PISA scores. 

Read it!

Does Class Size Matter?

The latest episode of my Slate podcast, Schooled, tackles what the research really tells us about class sizes, and how teachers experience class size every day: 

Polls show that smaller class sizes are incredibly popular with parents and teachers. But when the Great Recession forced school budget cuts, class size once again became a matter of debate, with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, megaphilanthropist Bill Gates, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg all suggesting that larger class sizes could be a good idea.

What do we really know about how class size affects student learning? Is there an ideal class size? In this episode, I talk to Larry Ferlazzo, a public school teacher and blogger, and Matthew Chingos, a class-size researcher at the Brookings Institution.

 Listen here!

Is Giftedness Real?

Check out the latest episode of Schooled, my Slate podcast:

Is your child “gifted”? What does that even mean? Some schools use old-fashioned IQ tests to identify gifted students. Others use teacher recommendations. A few schools are ending gifted programs altogether and are trying to implement gifted-level instruction for all kids. Which of these methods is fair? What should schools do to make sure that gifted tracks aren’t an option only for socio-economically advantaged children? In this episode, I talk to Sandy Darity, a researcher on giftedness at Duke, and Jeff Danielian, a Rhode Island teacher and giftedness advocate.

 Listen here!

What Happens When You Pay a Great Teacher $20,000 to Work in a High-Poverty School?

Some good stuff! Over at Slate, I report on a big, important new randomized control trial, the Teacher Transfer Initiative. Read it!

Schooled Podcast: How to Choose a School

Check out the latest episdoe of my Slate podcast. This week: 

With more charter schools, magnet schools, and school choice than ever before, many parents face an intimidating set of options when enrolling their kids in kindergarten and beyond, especially in urban areas. What does the "good school" look like, in terms of teaching, curriculum, and student engagement? Why do one-third of all children struggle to learn to read? What should you do if your kid’s teacher is terrible? And are middle-class or affluent kids hurt academically when they attend schools with peers who come from less educationally privileged backgrounds? In this episode, I talk to Peg Tyre, author of The Good School, and Heather Harding, an education researcher at George Washington University. Both guests have enrolled their own children in urban public schools, in New York and Washington, D.C.

 Listen!