A curriculum controversy is roiling schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.  In the past few months, parents in the San Mateo-Foster City School District, located just south of San Francisco International Airport, voiced concerns over changes to the middle school math program. The changes were brought about by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).  Under previous policies, most eighth graders in the district took algebra I.  Some very sharp math students, who had already completed algebra I in seventh grade, took geometry in eighth grade. The new CCSS-aligned math program will reduce eighth grade enrollments in algebra I and eliminate geometry altogether as a middle school course. 

A little background information will clarify the controversy.  Eighth grade mathematics may be the single grade-subject combination most profoundly affected by the CCSS.  In California, the push for most students to complete algebra I by the end of eighth grade has been a centerpiece of state policy, as it has been in several states influenced by the “Algebra for All” movement that began in the 1990s.  Nationwide, in 1990, about 16 percent of all eighth graders reported that they were taking an algebra or geometry course.  In 2013, the number was three times larger, and nearly half of all eighth graders (48 percent) were taking algebra or geometry.^[i]  When that percentage goes down, as it is sure to under the CCSS, what happens to high achieving math students?

The parents who are expressing the most concern have kids who excel at math.  One parent in San Mateo-Foster City told The San Mateo Daily Journal, “This is really holding the advanced kids back.”^[ii] The CCSS math standards recommend a single math course for seventh grade, integrating several math topics, followed by a similarly integrated math course in eighth grade.  Algebra I won’t be offered until ninth grade.  The San Mateo-Foster City School District decided to adopt a “three years into two” accelerated option.  This strategy is suggested on the Common Core website as an option that districts may consider for advanced students.  It combines the curriculum from grades seven through nine (including algebra I) into a two year offering that students can take in seventh and eighth grades.^[iii]  The district will also provide—at one school site—a sequence beginning in sixth grade that compacts four years of math into three.  Both accelerated options culminate in the completion of algebra I in eighth grade.

The San Mateo-Foster City School District is home to many well-educated, high-powered professionals who work in Silicon Valley.  They are unrelentingly liberal in their politics.  Equity is a value they hold dear.^[iv]  They also know that completing at least one high school math course in middle school is essential for students who wish to take AP Calculus in their senior year of high school.  As CCSS is implemented across the nation, administrators in districts with demographic profiles similar to San Mateo-Foster City will face parents of mathematically precocious kids asking whether the “common” in Common Core mandates that all students take the same math course.  Many of those districts will respond to their constituents and provide accelerated pathways (“pathway” is CCSS jargon for course sequence). 

But other districts will not.  Data show that urban schools, schools with large numbers of black and Hispanic students, and schools located in impoverished neighborhoods are reluctant to differentiate curriculum.  It is unlikely that gifted math students in those districts will be offered an accelerated option under CCSS.  The reason why can be summed up in one word: tracking.

Tracking in eighth grade math means providing different courses to students based on their prior math achievement.  The term “tracking” has been stigmatized, coming under fire for being inequitable.  Historically, where tracking existed, black, Hispanic, and disadvantaged students were often underrepresented in high-level math classes; white, Asian, and middle-class students were often over-represented.  An anti-tracking movement gained a full head of steam in the 1980s.  Tracking reformers knew that persuading high schools to de-track was hopeless.  Consequently, tracking’s critics focused reform efforts on middle schools, urging that they group students heterogeneously with all students studying a common curriculum.  That approach took hold in urban districts, but not in the suburbs.

Now the Common Core and de-tracking are linked.  Providing an accelerated math track for high achievers has become a flashpoint throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.  An October 2014 article in The San Jose Mercury News named Palo Alto, Saratoga, Cupertino, Pleasanton, and Los Gatos as districts that have announced, in response to parent pressure, that they are maintaining an accelerated math track in middle schools.  These are high-achieving, suburban districts.  Los Gatos parents took to the internet with a petition drive when a rumor spread that advanced courses would end.  Ed Source reports that 900 parents signed a petition opposing the move and board meetings on the issue were packed with opponents. The accelerated track was kept.  Piedmont established a single track for everyone, but allowed parents to apply for an accelerated option.  About twenty five percent did so.  The Mercury News story underscores the demographic pattern that is unfolding and asks whether CCSS “could cement a two-tier system, with accelerated math being the norm in wealthy areas and the exception elsewhere.”

What is CCSS’s real role here?  Does the Common Core take an explicit stand on tracking?  Not really.  But de-tracking advocates can interpret the “common” in Common Core as license to eliminate accelerated tracks for high achievers.  As a noted CCSS supporter (and tracking critic), William H. Schmidt, has stated, “By insisting on common content for all students at each grade level and in every community, the Common Core mathematics standards are in direct conflict with the concept of tracking.”^[v]  Thus, tracking joins other controversial curricular ideas—e.g., integrated math courses instead of courses organized by content domains such as algebra and geometry; an emphasis on “deep,” conceptual mathematics over learning procedures and basic skills—as “dog whistles” embedded in the Common Core.  Controversial positions aren’t explicitly stated, but they can be heard by those who want to hear them.    

CCSS doesn’t have to take an outright stand on these debates in order to have an effect on policy.  For the practical questions that local grouping policies resolve—who takes what courses and when do they take them—CCSS wipes the slate clean.  There are plenty of people ready to write on that blank slate, particularly administrators frustrated by unsuccessful efforts to de-track in the past

Suburban parents are mobilized in defense of accelerated options for advantaged students.  What about kids who are outstanding math students but also happen to be poor, black, or Hispanic?  What happens to them, especially if they attend schools in which the top institutional concern is meeting the needs of kids functioning several years below grade level?  I presented a paper on this question at a December 2014 conference held by the Fordham Institute in Washington, DC.  I proposed a pilot program of “tracking for equity.”  By that term, I mean offering black, Hispanic, and poor high achievers the same opportunity that the suburban districts in the Bay Area are offering.  High achieving middle school students in poor neighborhoods would be able to take three years of math in two years and proceed on a path toward AP Calculus as high school seniors.

It is true that tracking must be done carefully.  Tracking can be conducted unfairly and has been used unjustly in the past.  One of the worst consequences of earlier forms of tracking was that low-skilled students were tracked into dead end courses that did nothing to help them academically.  These low-skilled students were disproportionately from disadvantaged communities or communities of color.  That’s not a danger in the proposal I am making.  The default curriculum, the one every student would take if not taking the advanced track, would be the Common Core.  If that’s a dead end for low achievers, Common Core supporters need to start being more honest in how they are selling the CCSS.  Moreover, to ensure that the policy gets to the students for whom it is intended, I have proposed running the pilot program in schools predominantly populated by poor, black, or Hispanic students.  The pilot won’t promote segregation within schools because the sad reality is that participating schools are already segregated.

Since I presented the paper, I have privately received negative feedback from both Algebra for All advocates and Common Core supporters.  That’s disappointing.  Because of their animus toward tracking, some critics seem to support a severe policy swing from Algebra for All, which was pursued for equity, to Algebra for None, which will be pursued for equity.  It’s as if either everyone or no one should be allowed to take algebra in eighth grade.  The argument is that allowing only some eighth graders to enroll in algebra is elitist, even if the students in question are poor students of color who are prepared for the course and likely to benefit from taking it.

The controversy raises crucial questions about the Common Core.  What’s common in the common core?  Is it the curriculum?  And does that mean the same curriculum for all?  Will CCSS serve as a curricular floor, ensuring all students are exposed to a common body of knowledge and skills?  Or will it serve as a ceiling, limiting the progress of bright students so that their achievement looks more like that of their peers?  These questions will be answered differently in different communities, and as they are, the inequities that Common Core supporters think they’re addressing may surface again in a profound form.   

Editor's Note: The introduction to the 2015 Brown Center Report on American Education appears below. Use the Table of Contents to navigate through the report online, or download a PDF of the full report.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I: Girls, Boys, and Reading

Part II: Measuring Effects of the Common Core

Part III: Student Engagement

INTRODUCTION

The 2015 Brown Center Report (BCR) represents the 14^th edition of the series since the first issue was published in 2000.  It includes three studies.  Like all previous BCRs, the studies explore independent topics but share two characteristics: they are empirical and based on the best evidence available.  The studies in this edition are on the gender gap in reading, the impact of the Common Core State Standards -- English Language Arts on reading achievement, and student engagement.

Part one examines the gender gap in reading.  Girls outscore boys on practically every reading test given to a large population.  And they have for a long time.  A 1942 Iowa study found girls performing better than boys on tests of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and basic language skills.  Girls have outscored boys on every reading test ever given by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the first long term trend test was administered in 1971—at ages nine, 13, and 17.  The gap is not confined to the U.S.  Reading tests administered as part of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reveal that the gender gap is a worldwide phenomenon.  In more than sixty countries participating in the two assessments, girls are better readers than boys. 

Perhaps the most surprising finding is that Finland, celebrated for its extraordinary performance on PISA for over a decade, can take pride in its high standing on the PISA reading test solely because of the performance of that nation’s young women.  With its 62 point gap, Finland has the largest gender gap of any PISA participant, with girls scoring 556 and boys scoring 494 points (the OECD average is 496, with a standard deviation of 94).   If Finland were only a nation of young men, its PISA ranking would be mediocre.

Part two is about reading achievement, too. More specifically, it’s about reading and the English Language Arts standards of the Common Core (CCSS-ELA).  It’s also about an important decision that policy analysts must make when evaluating public policies—the determination of when a policy begins. How can CCSS be properly evaluated? 

Two different indexes of CCSS-ELA implementation are presented, one based on 2011 data and the other on data collected in 2013.  In both years, state education officials were surveyed about their Common Core implementation efforts.  Because forty-six states originally signed on to the CCSS-ELA—and with at least forty still on track for full implementation by 2016—little variability exists among the states in terms of standards policy.  Of course, the four states that never adopted CCSS-ELA can serve as a small control group.  But variation is also found in how the states are implementing CCSS.  Some states are pursuing an array of activities and aiming for full implementation earlier rather than later.  Others have a narrow, targeted implementation strategy and are proceeding more slowly. 

The analysis investigates whether CCSS-ELA implementation is related to 2009-2013 gains on the fourth grade NAEP reading test.  The analysis cannot verify causal relationships between the two variables, only correlations.  States that have aggressively implemented CCSS-ELA (referred to as “strong” implementers in the study) evidence a one to one and one-half point larger gain on the NAEP scale compared to non-adopters of the standards.  This association is similar in magnitude to an advantage found in a study of eighth grade math achievement in last year’s BCR.  Although positive, these effects are quite small.  When the 2015 NAEP results are released this winter, it will be important for the fate of the Common Core project to see if strong implementers of the CCSS-ELA can maintain their momentum.

Part three is on student engagement.  PISA tests fifteen-year-olds on three subjects—reading, math, and science—every three years.  It also collects a wealth of background information from students, including their attitudes toward school and learning.  When the 2012 PISA results were released, PISA analysts published an accompanying volume, Ready to Learn: Students’ Engagement, Drive, and Self-Beliefs, exploring topics related to student engagement.

Part three provides secondary analysis of several dimensions of engagement found in the PISA report.  Intrinsic motivation, the internal rewards that encourage students to learn, is an important component of student engagement.  National scores on PISA’s index of intrinsic motivation to learn mathematics are compared to national PISA math scores.  Surprisingly, the relationship is negative.  Countries with highly motivated kids tend to score lower on the math test; conversely, higher-scoring nations tend to have less-motivated kids. 

The same is true for responses to the statements, “I do mathematics because I enjoy it,” and “I look forward to my mathematics lessons.”  Countries with students who say that they enjoy math or look forward to their math lessons tend to score lower on the PISA math test compared to countries where students respond negatively to the statements.  These counterintuitive finding may be influenced by how terms such as “enjoy” and “looking forward” are interpreted in different cultures.  Within-country analyses address that problem.  The correlation coefficients for within-country, student-level associations of achievement and other components of engagement run in the anticipated direction—they are positive.  But they are also modest in size, with correlation coefficients of 0.20 or less. 

Policymakers are interested in questions requiring analysis of aggregated data—at the national level, that means between-country data.  When countries increase their students’ intrinsic motivation to learn math, is there a concomitant increase in PISA math scores?  Data from 2003 to 2012 are examined.  Seventeen countries managed to increase student motivation, but their PISA math scores fell an average of 3.7 scale score points.  Fourteen countries showed no change on the index of intrinsic motivation—and their PISA scores also evidenced little change.  Eight countries witnessed a decline in intrinsic motivation.  Inexplicably, their PISA math scores increased by an average of 10.3 scale score points.  Motivation down, achievement up.

Correlation is not causation.  Moreover, the absence of a positive correlation—or in this case, the presence of a negative correlation—is not refutation of a possible positive relationship.  The lesson here is not that policymakers should adopt the most effective way of stamping out student motivation.  The lesson is that the level of analysis matters when analyzing achievement data.  Policy reports must be read warily—especially those freely offering policy recommendations.  Beware of analyses that exclusively rely on within- or between-country test data without making any attempt to reconcile discrepancies at other levels of analysis.  Those analysts could be cherry-picking the data.  Also, consumers of education research should grant more credence to approaches modeling change over time (as in difference in difference models) than to cross-sectional analyses that only explore statistical relationships at a single point in time. 

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Part II of the 2015 Brown Center Report on American Education

Over the next several years, policy analysts will evaluate the impact of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on U.S. education.  The task promises to be challenging.  The question most analysts will focus on is whether the CCSS is good or bad policy.  This section of the Brown Center Report (BCR) tackles a set of seemingly innocuous questions compared to the hot-button question of whether Common Core is wise or foolish.  The questions all have to do with when Common Core actually started, or more precisely, when the Common Core started having an effect on student learning.  And if it hasn’t yet had an effect, how will we know that CCSS has started to influence student achievement? 

The analysis below probes this issue empirically, hopefully persuading readers that deciding when a policy begins is elemental to evaluating its effects.  The question of a policy’s starting point is not always easy to answer.  Yet the answer has consequences.  You can’t figure out whether a policy worked or not unless you know when it began.^[i] 

The analysis uses surveys of state implementation to model different CCSS starting points for states and produces a second early report card on how CCSS is doing.  The first report card, focusing on math, was presented in last year’s BCR.  The current study updates state implementation ratings that were presented in that report and extends the analysis to achievement in reading.  The goal is not only to estimate CCSS’s early impact, but also to lay out a fair approach for establishing when the Common Core’s impact began—and to do it now before data are generated that either critics or supporters can use to bolster their arguments.  The experience of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) illustrates this necessity.

After the 2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores were released, former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings claimed that the new scores showed “we are on the right track.”^[ii] She pointed out that NAEP gains in the previous decade, 1999-2009, were much larger than in prior decades.  Mark Schneider of the American Institutes of Research (and a former Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics [NCES]) reached a different conclusion. He compared NAEP gains from 1996-2003 to 2003-2009 and declared NCLB’s impact disappointing.  “The pre-NCLB gains were greater than the post-NCLB gains.”^[iii]  It is important to highlight that Schneider used the 2003 NAEP scores as the starting point for assessing NCLB.  A report from FairTest on the tenth anniversary of NCLB used the same demarcation for pre- and post-NCLB time frames.^[iv]  FairTest is an advocacy group critical of high stakes testing—and harshly critical of NCLB—but if the 2003 starting point for NAEP is accepted, its conclusion is indisputable, “NAEP score improvement slowed or stopped in both reading and math after NCLB was implemented.” 

Choosing 2003 as NCLB’s starting date is intuitively appealing.  The law was introduced, debated, and passed by Congress in 2001.  President Bush signed NCLB into law on January 8, 2002.  It takes time to implement any law.  The 2003 NAEP is arguably the first chance that the assessment had to register NCLB’s effects. 

Selecting 2003 is consequential, however.  Some of the largest gains in NAEP’s history were registered between 2000 and 2003.  Once 2003 is established as a starting point (or baseline), pre-2003 gains become “pre-NCLB.”  But what if the 2003 NAEP scores were influenced by NCLB? Experiments evaluating the effects of new drugs collect baseline data from subjects before treatment, not after the treatment has begun.   Similarly, evaluating the effects of public policies require that baseline data are not influenced by the policies under evaluation.   

Avoiding such problems is particularly difficult when state or local policies are adopted nationally.  The federal effort to establish a speed limit of 55 miles per hour in the 1970s is a good example.  Several states already had speed limits of 55 mph or lower prior to the federal law’s enactment.  Moreover, a few states lowered speed limits in anticipation of the federal limit while the bill was debated in Congress.  On the day President Nixon signed the bill into law—January 2, 1974—the Associated Press reported that only 29 states would be required to lower speed limits.  Evaluating the effects of the 1974 law with national data but neglecting to adjust for what states were already doing would obviously yield tainted baseline data.

There are comparable reasons for questioning 2003 as a good baseline for evaluating NCLB’s effects.  The key components of NCLB’s accountability provisions—testing students, publicizing the results, and holding schools accountable for results—were already in place in nearly half the states.  In some states they had been in place for several years.  The 1999 iteration of Quality Counts, Education Week’s annual report on state-level efforts to improve public education, entitled Rewarding Results, Punishing Failure, was devoted to state accountability systems and the assessments underpinning them. Testing and accountability are especially important because they have drawn fire from critics of NCLB, a law that wasn’t passed until years later.

The Congressional debate of NCLB legislation took all of 2001, allowing states to pass anticipatory policies.  Derek Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach reported that “with the passage of NCLB lurking on the horizon,” Illinois placed hundreds of schools on a watch list and declared that future state testing would be high stakes.^[v] In the summer and fall of 2002, with NCLB now the law of the land, state after state released lists of schools falling short of NCLB’s requirements.  Then the 2002-2003 school year began, during which the 2003 NAEP was administered.  Using 2003 as a NAEP baseline assumes that none of these activities—previous accountability systems, public lists of schools in need of improvement, anticipatory policy shifts—influenced achievement.  That is unlikely.^[vi]

Unlike NCLB, there was no “pre-CCSS” state version of Common Core.  States vary in how quickly and aggressively they have implemented CCSS.  For the BCR analyses, two indexes were constructed to model CCSS implementation.  They are based on surveys of state education agencies and named for the two years that the surveys were conducted.  The 2011 survey reported the number of programs (e.g., professional development, new materials) on which states reported spending federal funds to implement CCSS.  Strong implementers spent money on more activities.  The 2011 index was used to investigate eighth grade math achievement in the 2014 BCR.  A new implementation index was created for this year’s study of reading achievement.  The 2013 index is based on a survey asking states when they planned to complete full implementation of CCSS in classrooms.  Strong states aimed for full implementation by 2012-2013 or earlier.      

Fourth grade NAEP reading scores serve as the achievement measure.  Why fourth grade and not eighth?  Reading instruction is a key activity of elementary classrooms but by eighth grade has all but disappeared.  What remains of “reading” as an independent subject, which has typically morphed into the study of literature, is subsumed under the English-Language Arts curriculum, a catchall term that also includes writing, vocabulary, listening, and public speaking.  Most students in fourth grade are in self-contained classes; they receive instruction in all subjects from one teacher.  The impact of CCSS on reading instruction—the recommendation that non-fiction take a larger role in reading materials is a good example—will be concentrated in the activities of a single teacher in elementary schools. The burden for meeting CCSS’s press for non-fiction, on the other hand, is expected to be shared by all middle and high school teachers.^[vii] 

Table 2-1 displays NAEP gains using the 2011 implementation index.  The four year period between 2009 and 2013 is broken down into two parts: 2009-2011 and 2011-2013.  Nineteen states are categorized as “strong” implementers of CCSS on the 2011 index, and from 2009-2013, they outscored the four states that did not adopt CCSS by a little more than one scale score point (0.87 vs. -0.24 for a 1.11 difference).  The non-adopters are the logical control group for CCSS, but with only four states in that category—Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia—it is sensitive to big changes in one or two states.  Alaska and Texas both experienced a decline in fourth grade reading scores from 2009-2013.

The 1.11 point advantage in reading gains for strong CCSS implementers is similar to the 1.27 point advantage reported last year for eighth grade math.  Both are small.  The reading difference in favor of CCSS is equal to approximately 0.03 standard deviations of the 2009 baseline reading score.  Also note that the differences were greater in 2009-2011 than in 2011-2013 and that the “medium” implementers performed as well as or better than the strong implementers over the entire four year period (gain of 0.99).

Table 2-2 displays calculations using the 2013 implementation index.  Twelve states are rated as strong CCSS implementers, seven fewer than on the 2011 index.^[viii]  Data for the non-adopters are the same as in the previous table.  In 2009-2013, the strong implementers gained 1.27 NAEP points compared to -0.24 among the non-adopters, a difference of 1.51 points.  The thirty-four states rated as medium implementers gained 0.82.  The strong implementers on this index are states that reported full implementation of CCSS-ELA by 2013.  Their larger gain in 2011-2013 (1.08 points) distinguishes them from the strong implementers in the previous table.  The overall advantage of 1.51 points over non-adopters represents about 0.04 standard deviations of the 2009 NAEP reading score, not a difference with real world significance.  Taken together, the 2011 and 2013 indexes estimate that NAEP reading gains from 2009-2013 were one to one and one-half scale score points larger in the strong CCSS implementation states compared to the states that did not adopt CCSS.

As noted above, the 2013 implementation index is based on when states scheduled full implementation of CCSS in classrooms.  Other than reading achievement, does the index seem to reflect changes in any other classroom variable believed to be related to CCSS implementation?  If the answer is “yes,” that would bolster confidence that the index is measuring changes related to CCSS implementation. 

Let’s examine the types of literature that students encounter during instruction.  Perhaps the most controversial recommendation in the CCSS-ELA standards is the call for teachers to shift the content of reading materials away from stories and other fictional forms of literature in favor of more non-fiction.  NAEP asks fourth grade teachers the extent to which they teach fiction and non-fiction over the course of the school year (see Figure 2-1). 

Historically, fiction dominates fourth grade reading instruction.  It still does.  The percentage of teachers reporting that they teach fiction to a “large extent” exceeded the percentage answering “large extent” for non-fiction by 23 points in 2009 and 25 points in 2011.  In 2013, the difference narrowed to only 15 percentage points, primarily because of non-fiction’s increased use.  Fiction still dominated in 2013, but not by as much as in 2009.

The differences reported in Table 2-3 are national indicators of fiction’s declining prominence in fourth grade reading instruction.  What about the states?  We know that they were involved to varying degrees with the implementation of Common Core from 2009-2013.  Is there evidence that fiction’s prominence was more likely to weaken in states most aggressively pursuing CCSS implementation? 

Table 2-3 displays the data tackling that question.  Fourth grade teachers in strong implementation states decisively favored the use of fiction over non-fiction in 2009 and 2011.  But the prominence of fiction in those states experienced a large decline in 2013 (-12.4 percentage points).  The decline for the entire four year period, 2009-2013, was larger in the strong implementation states (-10.8) than in the medium implementation (-7.5) or non-adoption states (-9.8).  

This section of the Brown Center Report analyzed NAEP data and two indexes of CCSS implementation, one based on data collected in 2011, the second from data collected in 2013.  NAEP scores for 2009-2013 were examined.  Fourth grade reading scores improved by 1.11 scale score points in states with strong implementation of CCSS compared to states that did not adopt CCSS.  A similar comparison in last year’s BCR found a 1.27 point difference on NAEP’s eighth grade math test, also in favor of states with strong implementation of CCSS.  These differences, although certainly encouraging to CCSS supporters, are quite small, amounting to (at most) 0.04 standard deviations (SD) on the NAEP scale.  A threshold of 0.20 SD—five times larger—is often invoked as the minimum size for a test score change to be regarded as noticeable.  The current study’s findings are also merely statistical associations and cannot be used to make causal claims.  Perhaps other factors are driving test score changes, unmeasured by NAEP or the other sources of data analyzed here. 

The analysis also found that fourth grade teachers in strong implementation states are more likely to be shifting reading instruction from fiction to non-fiction texts.  That trend should be monitored closely to see if it continues.  Other events to keep an eye on as the Common Core unfolds include the following:

1.  The 2015 NAEP scores, typically released in the late fall, will be important for the Common Core.  In most states, the first CCSS-aligned state tests will be given in the spring of 2015.  Based on the earlier experiences of Kentucky and New York, results are expected to be disappointing.  Common Core supporters can respond by explaining that assessments given for the first time often produce disappointing results.  They will also claim that the tests are more rigorous than previous state assessments.  But it will be difficult to explain stagnant or falling NAEP scores in an era when implementing CCSS commands so much attention.   

2.  Assessment will become an important implementation variable in 2015 and subsequent years.  For analysts, the strategy employed here, modeling different indicators based on information collected at different stages of implementation, should become even more useful.  Some states are planning to use Smarter Balanced Assessments, others are using the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), and still others are using their own homegrown tests.   To capture variation among the states on this important dimension of implementation, analysts will need to use indicators that are up-to-date.

3.  The politics of Common Core injects a dynamic element into implementation.  The status of implementation is constantly changing.  States may choose to suspend, to delay, or to abandon CCSS.  That will require analysts to regularly re-configure which states are considered “in” Common Core and which states are “out.”  To further complicate matters, states may be “in” some years and “out” in others.

A final word.  When the 2014 BCR was released, many CCSS supporters commented that it is too early to tell the effects of Common Core.  The point that states may need more time operating under CCSS to realize its full effects certainly has merit.  But that does not discount everything states have done so far—including professional development, purchasing new textbooks and other instructional materials, designing new assessments, buying and installing computer systems, and conducting hearings and public outreach—as part of implementing the standards.  Some states are in their fifth year of implementation.  It could be that states need more time, but innovations can also produce their biggest “pop” earlier in implementation rather than later.  Kentucky was one of the earliest states to adopt and implement CCSS.  That state’s NAEP fourth grade reading score declined in both 2009-2011 and 2011-2013.  The optimism of CCSS supporters is understandable, but a one and a half point NAEP gain might be as good as it gets for CCSS.

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This post continues a series begun in 2014 on implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).  The first installment introduced an analytical scheme investigating CCSS implementation along four dimensions:  curriculum, instruction, assessment, and accountability.  Three posts focused on curriculum.  This post turns to instruction.  Although the impact of CCSS on how teachers teach is discussed, the post is also concerned with the inverse relationship, how decisions that teachers make about instruction shape the implementation of CCSS.

A couple of points before we get started.  The previous posts on curriculum led readers from the upper levels of the educational system—federal and state policies—down to curricular decisions made “in the trenches”—in districts, schools, and classrooms.  Standards emanate from the top of the system and are produced by politicians, policymakers, and experts.  Curricular decisions are shared across education’s systemic levels.  Instruction, on the other hand, is dominated by practitioners.  The daily decisions that teachers make about how to teach under CCSS—and not the idealizations of instruction embraced by upper-level authorities—will ultimately determine what “CCSS instruction” really means.

I ended the last post on CCSS by describing how curriculum and instruction can be so closely intertwined that the boundary between them is blurred.  Sometimes stating a precise curricular objective dictates, or at least constrains, the range of instructional strategies that teachers may consider.  That post focused on English-Language Arts.  The current post focuses on mathematics in the elementary grades and describes examples of how CCSS will shape math instruction.  As a former elementary school teacher, I offer my own personal opinion on these effects.

Certain aspects of the Common Core, when implemented, are likely to have a positive impact on the instruction of mathematics. For example, Common Core stresses that students recognize fractions as numbers on a number line.  The emphasis begins in third grade:

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.3.NF.A.2
Understand a fraction as a number on the number line; represent fractions on a number line diagram.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.3.NF.A.2.A
Represent a fraction 1/b on a number line diagram by defining the interval from 0 to 1 as the whole and partitioning it into b equal parts. Recognize that each part has size 1/b and that the endpoint of the part based at 0 locates the number 1/b on the number line.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.3.NF.A.2.B
Represent a fraction a/b on a number line diagram by marking off a lengths 1/b from 0. Recognize that the resulting interval has size a/b and that its endpoint locates the number a/b on the number line.

When I first read this section of the Common Core standards, I stood up and cheered.  Berkeley mathematician Hung-Hsi Wu has been working with teachers for years to get them to understand the importance of using number lines in teaching fractions.^[1] American textbooks rely heavily on part-whole representations to introduce fractions.  Typically, students see pizzas and apples and other objects—typically other foods or money—that are divided up into equal parts.  Such models are limited.  They work okay with simple addition and subtraction.  Common denominators present a bit of a challenge, but ½ pizza can be shown to be also 2/4, a half dollar equal to two quarters, and so on. 

With multiplication and division, all the little tricks students learned with whole number arithmetic suddenly go haywire.  Students are accustomed to the fact that multiplying two whole numbers yields a product that is larger than either number being multiplied: 4 X 5 = 20 and 20 is larger than both 4 and 5.^[2]  How in the world can ¼ X 1/5 = 1/20, a number much smaller than either 1/4or 1/5?  The part-whole representation has convinced many students that fractions are not numbers.  Instead, they are seen as strange expressions comprising two numbers with a small horizontal bar separating them. 

I taught sixth grade but occasionally visited my colleagues’ classes in the lower grades.  I recall one exchange with second or third graders that went something like this:

“Give me a number between seven and nine.”  Giggles. 

“Eight!” they shouted. 

“Give me a number between two and three.”  Giggles.

“There isn’t one!” they shouted. 

“Really?” I’d ask and draw a number line.  After spending some time placing whole numbers on the number line, I’d observe,  “There’s a lot of space between two and three.  Is it just empty?” 

Silence.  Puzzled little faces.  Then a quiet voice.  “Two and a half?”

You have no idea how many children do not make the transition to understanding fractions as numbers and because of stumbling at this crucial stage, spend the rest of their careers as students of mathematics convinced that fractions are an impenetrable mystery.   And  that’s not true of just students.  California adopted a test for teachers in the 1980s, the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST).  Beginning in 1982, even teachers already in the classroom had to pass it.   I made a nice after-school and summer income tutoring colleagues who didn’t know fractions from Fermat’s Last Theorem.  To be fair, primary teachers, teaching kindergarten or grades 1-2, would not teach fractions as part of their math curriculum and probably hadn’t worked with a fraction in decades.  So they are no different than non-literary types who think Hamlet is just a play about a young guy who can’t make up his mind, has a weird relationship with his mother, and winds up dying at the end.

Division is the most difficult operation to grasp for those arrested at the part-whole stage of understanding fractions.  A problem that Liping Ma posed to teachers is now legendary.^[3]

She asked small groups of American and Chinese elementary teachers to divide 1 ¾ by ½ and to create a word problem that illustrates the calculation.  All 72 Chinese teachers gave the correct answer and 65 developed an appropriate word problem.  Only nine of the 23 American teachers solved the problem correctly.  A single American teacher was able to devise an appropriate word problem.  Granted, the American sample was not selected to be representative of American teachers as a whole, but the stark findings of the exercise did not shock anyone who has worked closely with elementary teachers in the U.S.  They are often weak at math.  Many of the teachers in Ma’s study had vague ideas of an “invert and multiply” rule but lacked a conceptual understanding of why it worked.

A linguistic convention exacerbates the difficulty.  Students may cling to the mistaken notion that “dividing in half” means “dividing by one-half.”  It does not.  Dividing in half means dividing by two.  The number line can help clear up such confusion.  Consider a basic, whole-number division problem for which third graders will already know the answer:  8 divided by 2 equals 4.   It is evident that a segment 8 units in length (measured from 0 to 8) is divided by a segment 2 units in length (measured from 0 to 2) exactly 4 times.  Modeling 12 divided by 2 and other basic facts with 2 as a divisor will convince students that whole number division works quite well on a number line. 

Now consider the number ½ as a divisor.  It will become clear to students that 8 divided by ½ equals 16, and they can illustrate that fact on a number line by showing how a segment ½ units in length divides a segment 8 units in length exactly 16 times; it divides a segment 12 units in length 24 times; and so on.  Students will be relieved to discover that on a number line division with fractions works the same as division with whole numbers.

Now, let’s return to Liping Ma’s problem: 1 ¾ divided by ½.   This problem would not be presented in third grade, but it might be in fifth or sixth grades.  Students who have been working with fractions on a number line for two or three years will have little trouble solving it.  They will see that the problem simply asks them to divide a line segment of 1 3/4 units by a segment of ½ units.  The answer is 3 ½ .  Some students might estimate that the solution is between 3 and 4 because 1 ¾ lies between 1 ½ and 2, which on the number line are the points at which the ½ unit segment, laid end on end, falls exactly three and four times.  Other students will have learned about reciprocals and that multiplication and division are inverse operations.  They will immediately grasp that dividing by ½ is the same as multiplying by 2—and since 1 ¾ x 2 = 3 ½, that is the answer.  Creating a word problem involving string or rope or some other linearly measured object is also surely within their grasp.

I applaud the CCSS for introducing number lines and fractions in third grade.  I believe it will instill in children an important idea: fractions are numbers.  That foundational understanding will aid them as they work with more abstract representations of fractions in later grades.   Fractions are a monumental barrier for kids who struggle with math, so the significance of this contribution should not be underestimated.

I mentioned above that instruction and curriculum are often intertwined.  I began this series of posts by defining curriculum as the “stuff” of learning—the content of what is taught in school, especially as embodied in the materials used in instruction.  Instruction refers to the “how” of teaching—how teachers organize, present, and explain those materials.  It’s each teacher’s repertoire of instructional strategies and techniques that differentiates one teacher from another even as they teach the same content.  Choosing to use a number line to teach fractions is obviously an instructional decision, but it also involves curriculum.  The number line is mathematical content, not just a teaching tool.

Guiding third grade teachers towards using a number line does not guarantee effective instruction.  In fact, it is reasonable to expect variation in how teachers will implement the CCSS standards listed above.  A small body of research exists to guide practice. One of the best resources for teachers to consult is a practice guide published by the What Works Clearinghouse: Developing Effective Fractions Instruction for Kindergarten Through Eighth Grade (see full disclosure below).^[4]  The guide recommends the use of number lines as its second recommendation, but it also states that the evidence supporting the effectiveness of number lines in teaching fractions is inferred from studies involving whole numbers and decimals.  We need much more research on how and when number lines should be used in teaching fractions.

Professor Wu states the following, “The shift of emphasis from models of a fraction in the initial stage to an almost exclusive model of a fraction as a point on the number line can be done gradually and gracefully beginning somewhere in grade four. This shift is implicit in the Common Core Standards.”^[5]  I agree, but the shift is also subtle.  CCSS standards include the use of other representations—fraction strips, fraction bars, rectangles (which are excellent for showing multiplication of two fractions) and other graphical means of modeling fractions.  Some teachers will manage the shift to number lines adroitly—and others will not.  As a consequence, the quality of implementation will vary from classroom to classroom based on the instructional decisions that teachers make.  

The current post has focused on what I believe to be a positive aspect of CCSS based on the implementation of the standards through instruction.  Future posts in the series—covering the “bad” and the “ugly”—will describe aspects of instruction on which I am less optimistic.

This is part two of my analysis of instruction and Common Core’s implementation.  I dubbed the three-part examination of instruction “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.”  Having discussed “the “good” in part one, I now turn to “the bad.”  One particular aspect of the Common Core math standards—the treatment of standard algorithms in whole number arithmetic—will lead some teachers to waste instructional time.

In 1963, psychologist John B. Carroll published a short essay, “A Model of School Learning” in Teachers College Record.  Carroll proposed a parsimonious model of learning that expressed the degree of learning (or what today is commonly called achievement) as a function of the ratio of time spent on learning to the time needed to learn.     

The numerator, time spent learning, has also been given the term opportunity to learn.  The denominator, time needed to learn, is synonymous with student aptitude.  By expressing aptitude as time needed to learn, Carroll refreshingly broke through his era’s debate about the origins of intelligence (nature vs. nurture) and the vocabulary that labels students as having more or less intelligence. He also spoke directly to a primary challenge of teaching: how to effectively produce learning in classrooms populated by students needing vastly different amounts of time to learn the exact same content.^[i] 

The source of that variation is largely irrelevant to the constraints placed on instructional decisions.  Teachers obviously have limited control over the denominator of the ratio (they must take kids as they are) and less than one might think over the numerator.  Teachers allot time to instruction only after educational authorities have decided the number of hours in the school day, the number of days in the school year, the number of minutes in class periods in middle and high schools, and the amount of time set aside for lunch, recess, passing periods, various pull-out programs, pep rallies, and the like.  There are also announcements over the PA system, stray dogs that may wander into the classroom, and other unscheduled encroachments on instructional time.

The model has had a profound influence on educational thought.  As of July 5, 2015, Google Scholar reported 2,931 citations of Carroll’s article.  Benjamin Bloom’s “mastery learning” was deeply influenced by Carroll.  It is predicated on the idea that optimal learning occurs when time spent on learning—rather than content—is allowed to vary, providing to each student the individual amount of time he or she needs to learn a common curriculum.  This is often referred to as “students working at their own pace,” and progress is measured by mastery of content rather than seat time. David C. Berliner’s 1990 discussion of time includes an analysis of mediating variables in the numerator of Carroll’s model, including the amount of time students are willing to spend on learning.  Carroll called this persistence, and Berliner links the construct to student engagement and time on task—topics of keen interest to researchers today.  Berliner notes that although both are typically described in terms of motivation, they can be measured empirically in increments of time.     

Most applications of Carroll’s model have been interested in what happens when insufficient time is provided for learning—in other words, when the numerator of the ratio is significantly less than the denominator.  When that happens, students don’t have an adequate opportunity to learn.  They need more time. 

As applied to Common Core and instruction, one should also be aware of problems that arise from the inefficient distribution of time.  Time is a limited resource that teachers deploy in the production of learning.  Below I discuss instances when the CCSS-M may lead to the numerator in Carroll’s model being significantly larger than the denominator—when teachers spend more time teaching a concept or skill than is necessary.  Because time is limited and fixed, wasted time on one topic will shorten the amount of time available to teach other topics.  Excessive instructional time may also negatively affect student engagement.  Students who have fully learned content that continues to be taught may become bored; they must endure instruction that they do not need.

Jason Zimba, one of the lead authors of the Common Core Math standards, and Barry Garelick, a critic of the standards, had a recent, interesting exchange about when standard algorithms are called for in the CCSS-M.  A standard algorithm is a series of steps designed to compute accurately and quickly.  In the U.S., students are typically taught the standard algorithms of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division with whole numbers.  Most readers of this post will recognize the standard algorithm for addition.  It involves lining up two or more multi-digit numbers according to place-value, with one number written over the other, and adding the columns from right to left with “carrying” (or regrouping) as needed.

The standard algorithm is the only algorithm required for students to learn, although others are mentioned beginning with the first grade standards.  Curiously, though, CCSS-M doesn’t require students to know the standard algorithms for addition and subtraction until fourth grade.  This opens the door for a lot of wasted time.  Garelick questioned the wisdom of teaching several alternative strategies for addition.  He asked whether, under the Common Core, only the standard algorithm could be taught—or at least, could it be taught first. As he explains:

Delaying teaching of the standard algorithm until fourth grade and relying on place value “strategies” and drawings to add numbers is thought to provide students with the conceptual understanding of adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers. What happens, instead, is that the means to help learn, explain or memorize the procedure become a procedure unto itself and students are required to use inefficient cumbersome methods for two years. This is done in the belief that the alternative approaches confer understanding, so are superior to the standard algorithm. To teach the standard algorithm first would in reformers’ minds be rote learning. Reformers believe that by having students using strategies in lieu of the standard algorithm, students are still learning “skills” (albeit inefficient and confusing ones), and these skills support understanding of the standard algorithm. Students are left with a panoply of methods (praised as a good thing because students should have more than one way to solve problems), that confuse more than enlighten. 

Zimba responded that the standard algorithm could, indeed, be the only method taught because it meets a crucial test: reinforcing knowledge of place value and the properties of operations.  He goes on to say that other algorithms also may be taught that are consistent with the standards, but that the decision to do so is left in the hands of local educators and curriculum designers:

In short, the Common Core requires the standard algorithm; additional algorithms aren’t named, and they aren’t required…Standards can’t settle every disagreement—nor should they. As this discussion of just a single slice of the math curriculum illustrates, teachers and curriculum authors following the standards still may, and still must, make an enormous range of decisions.

Zimba defends delaying mastery of the standard algorithm until fourth grade, referring to it as a “culminating” standard that he would, if he were teaching, introduce in earlier grades.  Zimba illustrates the curricular progression he would employ in a table, showing that he would introduce the standard algorithm for addition late in first grade (with two-digit addends) and then extend the complexity of its use and provide practice towards fluency until reaching the culminating standard in fourth grade. Zimba would introduce the subtraction algorithm in second grade and similarly ramp up its complexity until fourth grade.

It is important to note that in CCSS-M the word “algorithm” appears for the first time (in plural form) in the third grade standards:

3.NBT.2  Fluently add and subtract within 1000 using strategies and algorithms based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction.

The term “strategies and algorithms” is curious.  Zimba explains, “It is true that the word ‘algorithms’ here is plural, but that could be read as simply leaving more choice in the hands of the teacher about which algorithm(s) to teach—not as a requirement for each student to learn two or more general algorithms for each operation!” 

I have described before the “dog whistles” embedded in the Common Core, signals to educational progressives—in this case, math reformers—that  despite these being standards, the CCSS-M will allow them great latitude.  Using the plural “algorithms” in this third grade standard and not specifying the standard algorithm until fourth grade is a perfect example of such a dog whistle.

It appears that the Common Core authors wanted to reach a political compromise on standard algorithms. 

Standard algorithms were a key point of contention in the “Math Wars” of the 1990s.   The 1997 California Framework for Mathematics required that students know the standard algorithms for all four operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—by the end of fourth grade.^[ii]  The 2000 Massachusetts Mathematics Curriculum Framework called for learning the standard algorithms for addition and subtraction by the end of second grade and for multiplication and division by the end of fourth grade.  These two frameworks were heavily influenced by mathematicians (from Stanford in California and Harvard in Massachusetts) and quickly became favorites of math traditionalists.  In both states’ frameworks, the standard algorithm requirements were in direct opposition to the reform-oriented frameworks that preceded them—in which standard algorithms were barely mentioned and alternative algorithms or “strategies” were encouraged. 

Now that the CCSS-M has replaced these two frameworks, the requirement for knowing the standard algorithms in California and Massachusetts slips from third or fourth grade all the way to sixth grade.  That’s what reformers get in the compromise.  They are given a green light to continue teaching alternative algorithms, as long as the algorithms are consistent with teaching place value and properties of arithmetic.  But the standard algorithm is the only one students are required to learn.  And that exclusivity is intended to please the traditionalists.

I agree with Garelick that the compromise leads to problems.  In a 2013 Chalkboard post, I described a first grade math program in which parents were explicitly requested not to teach the standard algorithm for addition when helping their children at home.  The students were being taught how to represent addition with drawings that clustered objects into groups of ten.  The exercises were both time consuming and tedious.  When the parents met with the school principal to discuss the matter, the principal told them that the math program was following the Common Core by promoting deeper learning.  The parents withdrew their child from the school and enrolled him in private school.

The value of standard algorithms is that they are efficient and packed with mathematics.  Once students have mastered single-digit operations and the meaning of place value, the standard algorithms reveal to students that they can take procedures that they already know work well with one- and two-digit numbers, and by applying them over and over again, solve problems with large numbers.  Traditionalists and reformers have different goals.  Reformers believe exposure to several algorithms encourages flexible thinking and the ability to draw on multiple strategies for solving problems.  Traditionalists believe that a bigger problem than students learning too few algorithms is that too few students learn even one algorithm.

I have been a critic of the math reform movement since I taught in the 1980s.  But some of their complaints have merit.  All too often, instruction on standard algorithms has left out meaning.  As Karen C. Fuson and Sybilla Beckmann point out, “an unfortunate dichotomy” emerged in math instruction: teachers taught “strategies” that implied understanding and “algorithms” that implied procedural steps that were to be memorized.  Michael Battista’s research has provided many instances of students clinging to algorithms without understanding.  He gives an example of a student who has not quite mastered the standard algorithm for addition and makes numerous errors on a worksheet.  On one item, for example, the student forgets to carry and calculates that 19 + 6 = 15.  In a post-worksheet interview, the student counts 6 units from 19 and arrives at 25.  Despite the obvious discrepancy—(25 is not 15, the student agrees)—he declares that his answers on the worksheet must be correct because the algorithm he used “always works.”^[iii] 

Math reformers rightfully argue that blind faith in procedure has no place in a thinking mathematical classroom. Who can disagree with that?  Students should be able to evaluate the validity of answers, regardless of the procedures used, and propose alternative solutions.  Standard algorithms are tools to help them do that, but students must be able to apply them, not in a robotic way, but with understanding.

Let’s return to Carroll’s model of time and learning.  I conclude by making two points—one about curriculum and instruction, the other about implementation.

In the study of numbers, a coherent K-12 math curriculum, similar to that of the previous California and Massachusetts frameworks, can be sketched in a few short sentences.  Addition with whole numbers (including the standard algorithm) is taught in first grade, subtraction in second grade, multiplication in third grade, and division in fourth grade.  Thus, the study of whole number arithmetic is completed by the end of fourth grade.  Grades five through seven focus on rational numbers (fractions, decimals, percentages), and grades eight through twelve study advanced mathematics.  Proficiency is sought along three dimensions:  1) fluency with calculations, 2) conceptual understanding, 3) ability to solve problems.

Placing the CCSS-M standard for knowing the standard algorithms of addition and subtraction in fourth grade delays this progression by two years.  Placing the standard for the division algorithm in sixth grade continues the two-year delay.   For many fourth graders, time spent working on addition and subtraction will be wasted time.  They already have a firm understanding of addition and subtraction.  The same thing for many sixth graders—time devoted to the division algorithm will be wasted time that should be devoted to the study of rational numbers.  The numerator in Carroll’s instructional time model will be greater than the denominator, indicating the inefficient allocation of time to instruction.

As Jason Zimba points out, not everyone agrees on when the standard algorithms should be taught, the alternative algorithms that should be taught, the manner in which any algorithm should be taught, or the amount of instructional time that should be spent on computational procedures.  Such decisions are made by local educators.  Variation in these decisions will introduce variation in the implementation of the math standards.  It is true that standards, any standards, cannot control implementation, especially the twists and turns in how they are interpreted by educators and brought to life in classroom instruction.  But in this case, the standards themselves are responsible for the myriad approaches, many unproductive, that we are sure to see as schools teach various algorithms under the Common Core.

Last week, CNN ran a back-to-school story on homework with the headline, “Kids Have Three Times Too Much Homework, Study Finds; What’s the Cost?” Homework is an important topic, especially for parents, but unfortunately, CNN’s story misleads rather than informs. The headline suggests American parents should be alarmed because their kids have too much homework. Should they? No, CNN has ignored the best evidence on that question, which suggests the opposite. The story relies on the results of one recent study of homework—a study that is limited in what it can tell us, mostly because of its research design. But CNN even gets its main findings wrong. The study suggests most students have too little homework, not too much.

The study that piqued CNN’s interest was conducted during four months (two in the spring and two in the fall) in Providence, Rhode Island. About 1,200 parents completed a survey about their children’s homework while waiting in 27 pediatricians’ offices. Is the sample representative of all parents in the U.S.? Probably not. Certainly CNN should have been a bit leery of portraying the results of a survey conducted in a single American city—any city—as evidence applying to a broader audience. More importantly, viewers are never told of the study’s significant limitations: that the data come from a survey conducted in only one city—in pediatricians’ offices by a self-selected sample of respondents.

The survey’s sampling design is a huge problem. Because the sample is non-random there is no way of knowing if the results can be extrapolated to a larger population—even to families in Providence itself. Close to a third of respondents chose to complete the survey in Spanish. Enrollment in English Language programs in the Providence district comprises about 22 percent of students. About one-fourth (26 percent) of survey respondents reported having one child in the family. According to the 2010 Census, the proportion of families nationwide with one child is much higher, at 43 percent.^[i] The survey is skewed towards large, Spanish-speaking families. Their experience with homework could be unique, especially if young children in these families are learning English for the first time at school.

The survey was completed by parents who probably had a sick child as they were waiting to see a pediatrician. That’s a stressful setting. The response rate to the survey is not reported, so we don’t know how many parents visiting those offices chose not to fill out the survey. If the typical pediatrician sees 100 unique patients per month, in a four month span the survey may have been offered to more than ten thousand parents in the 27 offices. The survey respondents, then, would be a tiny slice, 10 to 15 percent, of those eligible to respond. We also don’t know the public-private school break out of the respondents, or how many were sending their children to charter schools. It would be interesting to see how many parents willingly send their children to schools with a heavy homework load.

I wish the CNN team responsible for this story had run the data by some of CNN’s political pollsters. Alarm bells surely would have gone off. The hazards of accepting a self-selected, demographically-skewed survey sample as representative of the general population are well known. Modern political polling—and its reliance on random samples—grew from an infamous mishap in 1936. A popular national magazine, the Literary Digest, distributed 10 million post cards for its readers to return as “ballots” indicating who they would vote for in the 1936 race for president. More than two million post cards were returned! A week before the election, the magazine confidently predicted that Alf Landon, the Republican challenger from Kansas, would defeat Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic incumbent, by a huge margin: 57 percent to 43 percent. In fact, when the real election was held, the opposite occurred: Roosevelt won more than 60% of the popular vote and defeated Landon in a landslide. Pollsters learned that self-selected samples should be viewed warily. The magazine’s readership was disproportionately Republican to begin with, and sometimes disgruntled subjects are more likely to respond to a survey, no matter the topic, than the satisfied.

Here’s a very simple question: In its next poll on the 2016 presidential race, would CNN report the results of a survey of self-selected respondents in 27 pediatricians’ offices in Providence, Rhode Island as representative of national sentiment? Of course not. Then, please, CNN, don’t do so with education topics.

Let’s set aside methodological concerns and turn to CNN’s characterization of the survey’s findings. Did the study really show that most kids have too much homework? No, the headline that “Kids Have Three Times Too Much Homework” is not even an accurate description of the study’s findings. CNN’s on air coverage extended the misinformation. The online video of the coverage is tagged “Study: Your Kids Are Doing Too Much Homework.” The first caption that viewers see is “Study Says Kids Getting Way Too Much Homework.” All of these statements are misleading.

In the published version of the Providence study, the researchers plotted the average amount of time spent on homework by students’ grade.^[ii] They then compared those averages to a “10 minutes per-grade” guideline that serves as an indicator of the “right” amount of homework. I have attempted to replicate the data here in table form (they were originally reported in a line graph) to make that comparison easier.^[iii]

Contrary to CNN’s reporting, the data suggest—based on the ten minute per-grade rule—that most kids in this study have too little homework, not too much. Beginning in fourth grade, the average time spent on homework falls short of the recommended amount—a gap of only four minutes in fourth grade that steadily widens in later grades.

A more accurate headline would have been, “Study Shows Kids in Nine out of 13 Grades Have Too Little Homework.” It appears high school students (grades 9-12) spend only about half the recommended time on homework. Two hours of nightly homework is recommended for 12^th graders. They are, after all, only a year away from college. But according to the Providence survey, their homework load is less than an hour.

So how in the world did CNN come up with the headline “Kids Have Three Times Too Much Homework?” By focusing on grades K-3 and ignoring all other grades. Here’s the reporting:

The study, published Wednesday in The American Journal of Family Therapy, found students in the early elementary school years are getting significantly more homework than is recommended by education leaders, in some cases nearly three times as much homework as is recommended.

The standard, endorsed by the National Education Association and the National Parent-Teacher Association, is the so-called "10-minute rule"— 10 minutes per-grade level per-night. That translates into 10 minutes of homework in the first grade, 20 minutes in the second grade, all the way up to 120 minutes for senior year of high school. The NEA and the National PTA do not endorse homework for kindergarten.

In the study involving questionnaires filled out by more than 1,100 English and Spanish speaking parents of children in kindergarten through grade 12, researchers found children in the first grade had up to three times the homework load recommended by the NEA and the National PTA.

Parents reported first-graders were spending 28 minutes on homework each night versus the recommended 10 minutes. For second-graders, the homework time was nearly 29 minutes, as opposed to the 20 minutes recommended.

And kindergartners, their parents said, spent 25 minutes a night on after-school assignments, according to the study…

CNN focused on the four grades, K-3, in which homework exceeds the ten-minute rule. They ignored more than two-thirds of the grades. Even with this focus, a more accurate headline would have been, “Study Suggests First Graders in Providence, RI Have Three Times Too Much Homework.”

Homework is a controversial topic. People hold differing points of view as to whether there is too much, too little, or just the right amount of homework. That makes it vitally important that the media give accurate information on the empirical dimensions to the debate.  The amount of homework kids should have is subject to debate. But the amount of homework kids actually have is an empirical question. We can debate whether it’s too hot outside, but the actual temperature should be a matter of measurement, not debate. It’s impossible to think of a rational debate that can possibly ensue on the homework issue without knowing the empirical status quo in regards to time. Imagine someone beginning a debate by saying, “I am arguing that kids have too much [substitute “too little” here for the pro-homework side] homework but I must admit that I have no idea how much they currently have.”

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provide the best evidence we have on the amount of homework that kids have. NAEP’s sampling design allows us to make inferences about national trends, and the Long-Term Trend (LTT) NAEP offers data on homework since 1984. The latest LTT NAEP results (2012) indicate that the vast majority of nine-year-olds (83 percent) have less than an hour of homework each night. There has been an apparent uptick in the homework load, however, as 35 percent reported no homework in 1984, and only 22 percent reported no homework in 2012. MET Life also periodically surveys a representative sample of students, parents, and teachers on the homework issue. In the 2007 results, a majority of parents (52 percent) of elementary grade students (grades 3-6 in the MET survey) estimated their children had 30 minutes or less of homework.

The MET Life survey found that parents have an overwhelmingly positive view of the amount of homework their children are assigned. Nine out of ten parents responded that homework offers the opportunity to talk and spend time with their children, and most do not see homework as interfering with family time or as a major source of familial stress. Minority parents, in particular, reported believing homework is beneficial for students’ success at school and in the future.^[iv]

That said, just as there were indeed Alf Landon voters in 1936, there are indeed children for whom homework is a struggle. Some bring home more than they can finish in a reasonable amount of time. A complication for researchers of elementary age children is that the same students who have difficulty completing homework may have other challenges—difficulties with reading, low achievement, and poor grades in school.[v] Parents who question the value of homework often have a host of complaints about their child’s school. It is difficult for researchers to untangle all of these factors and determine, in the instances where there are tensions, whether homework is the real cause. To their credit, the researchers who conducted the Providence study are aware of these constraints and present a number of hypotheses warranting further study with a research design supporting causal inferencing. That’s the value of this research, not CNN’s misleading reporting of the findings.

The release of 2015 NAEP scores showed national achievement stalling out or falling in reading and mathematics.  The poor results triggered speculation about the effect of Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the controversial set of standards adopted by more than 40 states since 2010.  Critics of Common Core tended to blame the standards for the disappointing scores.  Its defenders said it was too early to assess CCSS’s impact and that implementation would take many years to unfold. William J. Bushaw, executive director of the National assessment Governing Board, cited “curricular uncertainty” as the culprit.  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argued that new standards typically experience an “implementation dip” in the early days of teachers actually trying to implement them in classrooms.

In the rush to argue whether CCSS has positively or negatively affected American education, these speculations are vague as to how the standards boosted or depressed learning.  They don’t provide a description of the mechanisms, the connective tissue, linking standards to learning.  Bushaw and Duncan come the closest, arguing that the newness of CCSS has created curriculum confusion, but the explanation falls flat for a couple of reasons.  Curriculum in the three states that adopted the standards, rescinded them, then adopted something else should be extremely confused.  But the 2013-2015 NAEP changes for Indiana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina were a little bit better than the national figures, not worse.[i]  In addition, surveys of math teachers conducted in the first year or two after the standards were adopted found that:  a) most teachers liked them, and b) most teachers said they were already teaching in a manner consistent with CCSS.[ii]  They didn’t mention uncertainty.  Recent polls, however, show those positive sentiments eroding. Mr. Bushaw might be mistaking disenchantment for uncertainty.[iii] 

For teachers, the novelty of CCSS should be dissipating.  Common Core’s advocates placed great faith in professional development to implement the standards.  Well, there’s been a lot of it.  Over the past few years, millions of teacher-hours have been devoted to CCSS training.  Whether all that activity had a lasting impact is questionable.  Randomized control trials have been conducted of two large-scale professional development programs.  Interestingly, although they pre-date CCSS, both programs attempted to promote the kind of “instructional shifts” championed by CCSS advocates. The studies found that if teacher behaviors change from such training—and that’s not a certainty—the changes fade after a year or two.  Indeed, that’s a pattern evident in many studies of educational change: a pop at the beginning, followed by fade out.  

My own work analyzing NAEP scores in 2011 and 2013 led me to conclude that the early implementation of CCSS was producing small, positive changes in NAEP.[iv]  I warned that those gains “may be as good as it gets” for CCSS.[v]  Advocates of the standards hope that CCSS will eventually produce long term positive effects as educators learn how to use them.  That’s a reasonable hypothesis.  But it should now be apparent that a counter-hypothesis has equal standing: any positive effect of adopting Common Core may have already occurred.  To be precise, the proposition is this: any effects from adopting new standards and attempting to change curriculum and instruction to conform to those standards occur early and are small in magnitude.   Policymakers still have a couple of arrows left in the implementation quiver, accountability being the most powerful.  Accountability systems have essentially been put on hold as NCLB sputtered to an end and new CCSS tests appeared on the scene.  So the CCSS story isn’t over.  Both hypotheses remain plausible. 

Reading Instruction in 4^th and 8^th Grades

Back to the mechanisms, the connective tissue binding standards to classrooms.  The 2015 Brown Center Report introduced one possible classroom effect that is showing up in NAEP data: the relative emphasis teachers place on fiction and nonfiction in reading instruction.  The ink was still drying on new Common Core textbooks when a heated debate broke out about CCSS’s recommendation that informational reading should receive greater attention in classrooms.[vi] 

Fiction has long dominated reading instruction.  That dominance appears to be waning.

After 2011, something seems to have happened.  I am more persuaded that Common Core influenced the recent shift towards nonfiction than I am that Common Core has significantly affected student achievement—for either good or ill.   But causality is difficult to confirm or to reject with NAEP data, and trustworthy efforts to do so require a more sophisticated analysis than presented here.

Four lessons from previous education reforms

Nevertheless, the figures above reinforce important lessons that have been learned from previous top-down reforms.  Let’s conclude with four:

1.  There seems to be evidence that CCSS is having an impact on the content of reading instruction, moving from the dominance of fiction over nonfiction to near parity in emphasis.  Unfortunately, as Mark Bauerlein and Sandra Stotsky have pointed out, there is scant evidence that such a shift improves children’s reading.[vii]

2.  Reading more nonfiction does not necessarily mean that students will be reading higher quality texts, even if the materials are aligned with CCSS.   The Core Knowledge Foundation and the Partnership for 21^st Century Learning, both supporters of Common Core, have very different ideas on the texts schools should use with the CCSS.[viii] The two organizations advocate for curricula having almost nothing in common.

3.  When it comes to the study of implementing education reforms, analysts tend to focus on the formal channels of implementation and the standard tools of public administration—for example, intergovernmental hand-offs (federal to state to district to school), alignment of curriculum, assessment and other components of the reform, professional development, getting incentives right, and accountability mechanisms.  Analysts often ignore informal channels, and some of those avenues funnel directly into schools and classrooms.[ix]  Politics and the media are often overlooked.  Principals and teachers are aware of the politics swirling around K-12 school reform.  Many educators undoubtedly formed their own opinions on CCSS and the fiction vs. nonfiction debate before the standard managerial efforts touched them.

4.  Local educators whose jobs are related to curriculum almost certainly have ideas about what constitutes good curriculum.  It’s part of the profession.  Major top-down reforms such as CCSS provide local proponents with political cover to pursue curricular and instructional changes that may be politically unpopular in the local jurisdiction.  Anyone who believes nonfiction should have a more prominent role in the K-12 curriculum was handed a lever for promoting his or her beliefs by CCSS. I’ve previously called these the “dog whistles” of top-down curriculum reform, subtle signals that give local advocates license to promote unpopular positions on controversial issues.

Event Information

The Common Core State Standards have been adopted as the reading and math standards in more than forty states, but are the frontline implementers—teachers and principals—enacting them? As part of the 2016 Brown Center Report on American Education, Tom Loveless examines the degree to which CCSS recommendations have penetrated schools and classrooms. He specifically looks at the impact the standards have had on the emphasis of non-fiction vs. fiction texts in reading, and on enrollment in advanced courses in mathematics.

On March 28, the Brown Center hosted an online discussion of Loveless's findings, moderated by the Urban Institute's Matthew Chingos.  In addition to the Common Core, Loveless and Chingos also discussed the other sections of the three-part Brown Center Report, including a study of the relationship between ability group tracking in eighth grade and AP performance in high school.

Watch the archived video below.

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Check out Reading and Math in the Common Core Era on Spreecast.

The 2016 Brown Center Report (BCR), which was published last week, presented a study of Common Core State Standards (CCSS).   In this post, I’d like to elaborate on a topic touched upon but deserving further attention: what to expect in Common Core’s immediate political future. I discuss four key challenges that CCSS will face between now and the end of the year.

Let’s set the stage for the discussion.  The BCR study produced two major findings.  First, several changes that CCSS promotes in curriculum and instruction appear to be taking place at the school level.  Second, states that adopted CCSS and have been implementing the standards have registered about the same gains and losses on NAEP as states that either adopted and rescinded CCSS or never adopted CCSS in the first place.  These are merely associations and cannot be interpreted as saying anything about CCSS’s causal impact.  Politically, that doesn’t really matter. The big story is that NAEP scores have been flat for six years, an unprecedented stagnation in national achievement that states have experienced regardless of their stance on CCSS.  Yes, it’s unfair, but CCSS is paying a political price for those disappointing NAEP scores.  No clear NAEP differences have emerged between CCSS adopters and non-adopters to reverse that political dynamic.

"Yes, it’s unfair, but CCSS is paying a political price for those disappointing NAEP scores. No clear NAEP differences have emerged between CCSS adopters and non-adopters to reverse that political dynamic."

TIMSS and PISA scores in November-December

NAEP has two separate test programs.  The scores released in 2015 were for the main NAEP, which began in 1990.  The long term trend (LTT) NAEP, a different test that was first given in 1969, has not been administered since 2012.  It was scheduled to be given in 2016, but was cancelled due to budgetary constraints.  It was next scheduled for 2020, but last fall officials cancelled that round of testing as well, meaning that the LTT NAEP won’t be given again until 2024.  

With the LTT NAEP on hold, only two international assessments will soon offer estimates of U.S. achievement that, like the two NAEP tests, are based on scientific sampling:  PISA and TIMSS.  Both tests were administered in 2015, and the new scores will be released around the Thanksgiving-Christmas period of 2016.  If PISA and TIMSS confirm the stagnant trend in U.S. achievement, expect CCSS to take another political hit.  America’s performance on international tests engenders a lot of hand wringing anyway, so the reaction to disappointing PISA or TIMSS scores may be even more pronounced than what the disappointing NAEP scores generated.

Is teacher support still declining?

Watch Education Next’s survey on Common Core (usually released in August/September) and pay close attention to teacher support for CCSS.  The trend line has been heading steadily south. In 2013, 76 percent of teachers said they supported CCSS and only 12 percent were opposed.  In 2014, teacher support fell to 43 percent and opposition grew to 37 percent.  In 2015, opponents outnumbered supporters for the first time, 50 percent to 37 percent.  Further erosion of teacher support will indicate that Common Core’s implementation is in trouble at the ground level.  Don’t forget: teachers are the final implementers of standards.

An effort by Common Core supporters to change NAEP

The 2015 NAEP math scores were disappointing.  Watch for an attempt by Common Core supporters to change the NAEP math tests. Michael Cohen, President of Achieve, a prominent pro-CCSS organization, released a statement about the 2015 NAEP scores that included the following: "The National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, should carefully review its frameworks and assessments in order to ensure that NAEP is in step with the leadership of the states. It appears that there is a mismatch between NAEP and all states' math standards, no matter if they are common standards or not.” 

Reviewing and potentially revising the NAEP math framework is long overdue.  The last adoption was in 2004.  The argument for changing NAEP to place greater emphasis on number and operations, revisions that would bring NAEP into closer alignment with Common Core, also has merit.  I have a longstanding position on the NAEP math framework. In 2001, I urged the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) to reject the draft 2004 framework because it was weak on numbers and operations—and especially weak on assessing student proficiency with whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and percentages.  

Common Core’s math standards are right in line with my 2001 complaint.  Despite my sympathy for Common Core advocates’ position, a change in NAEP should not be made because of Common Core.  In that 2001 testimony, I urged NAGB to end the marriage of NAEP with the 1989 standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the math reform document that had guided the main NAEP since its inception.  Reform movements come and go, I argued.  NAGB’s job is to keep NAEP rigorously neutral.  The assessment’s integrity depends upon it.  NAEP was originally intended to function as a measuring stick, not as a PR device for one reform or another.  If NAEP is changed it must be done very carefully and should be rooted in the mathematics children must learn.  The political consequences of it appearing that powerful groups in Washington, DC are changing “The Nation’s Report Card” in order for Common Core to look better will hurt both Common Core and NAEP.

Will Opt Out grow?

Watch the Opt Out movement.  In 2015, several organized groups of parents refused to allow their children to take Common Core tests.  In New York state alone, about 60,000 opted out in 2014, skyrocketing to 200,000 in 2015.  Common Core testing for 2016 begins now and goes through May.  It will be important to see whether Opt Out can expand to other states, grow in numbers, and branch out beyond middle- and upper-income neighborhoods.

Conclusion

Common Core is now several years into implementation.  Supporters have had a difficult time persuading skeptics that any positive results have occurred. The best evidence has been mixed on that question.  CCSS advocates say it is too early to tell, and we’ll just have to wait to see the benefits.  That defense won’t work much longer.  Time is running out.  The political challenges that Common Core faces the remainder of this year may determine whether it survives.

The eurozone has three problems: national debt obligations that cannot be met, medium-term imbalances in trade competitiveness, and long-term structural flaws.

The short-run problem requires more of the monetary easing that Germany has, with appalling shortsightedness, been resisting, and less of the near-term fiscal restraint that Germany has, with equally appalling shortsightedness, been seeking. To insist that Greece meet all of its near-term current debt service obligations makes about as much sense as did French and British insistence that Germany honor its reparations obligations after World War I. The latter could not be and were not honored. The former cannot and will not be honored either.

The medium-term problem is that, given a single currency, labor costs are too high in Greece and too low in Germany and some other northern European countries. Because adjustments in currency values cannot correct these imbalances, differences in growth of wages must do the job—either wage deflation and continued depression in Greece and other peripheral countries, wage inflation in Germany, or both. The former is a recipe for intense and sustained misery. The latter, however politically improbable it may now seem, is the better alternative.

The long-term problem is that the eurozone lacks the fiscal transfer mechanisms necessary to soften the effects of competitiveness imbalances while other forms of adjustment take effect. This lack places extraordinary demands on the willingness of individual nations to undertake internal policies to reduce such imbalances. Until such fiscal transfer mechanisms are created, crises such as the current one are bound to recur.

Present circumstances call for a combination of short-term expansionary policies that have to be led or accepted by the surplus nations, notably Germany, who will also have to recognize and accept that not all Greek debts will be paid or that debt service payments will not be made on time and at originally negotiated interest rates. The price for those concessions will be a current and credible commitment eventually to restore and maintain fiscal balance by the peripheral countries, notably Greece.

The Supreme Court today decided that Congress meant what it said when it enacted the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA requires people in all 50 states to carry health insurance and provided tax credits to help them afford it. To have offered such credits only in the dozen states that set up their own exchanges would have been cruel and unsustainable because premiums for many people would have been unaffordable.

But the law said that such credits could be paid in exchanges ‘established by a state,’ which led some to claim that the credits could not be paid to people enrolled by the federally operated exchange. In his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts euphemistically calls that wording ‘inartful.’ Six Supreme Court justices decided that, read in its entirety, the law provides tax credits in every state, whether the state manages the exchange itself or lets the federal government do it for them.

That decision is unsurprising. More surprising is that the Court agreed to hear the case. When it did so, cases on the same issue were making their ways through four federal circuits. In only one of the four circuits was there a standing decision, and it found that tax credits were available everywhere. It is customary for the Supreme Court to wait to take a case until action in lower courts is complete or two circuits have disagreed. In this situation, the justices, eyeing the electoral calendar, may have preferred to hear the case sooner rather than later to avoid confronting it in the middle of a presidential election.

Whatever the Court’s motives for taking the case, their willingness to hear the case caused supporters of the Affordable Care Act enormous unease. Were the more conservative members of the Court poised to accept an interpretation of the law that ACA supporters found ridiculous but that inartful legislative drafting gave the gloss of plausibility? Judicial demeanor at oral argument was not comforting. A 5-4 decision disallowing payment of tax credits seemed ominously plausible.

The Court’s 6-3 decision ended those fears. The existential threat to health reform from litigation is over. But efforts to undo the Affordable Care Act are not at an end. They will continue in the political sphere. And that is where they should be. ACA opponents know that there is little chance for them to roll back the Affordable Care Act in any fundamental way as long as a Democrat is in the White House. To dismantle the law, they must win the presidency in 2016.

But winning the presidency will not be enough. It would be mid 2017 before ACA opponents could draft and enact legislation to curb the Affordable Care Act and months more before it could take effect. To borrow a metaphor from the military, even if those opposed to the ACA win the presidency, they will have to deal with ‘facts on the ground.’

As government funding for disability insurance is expected to run out next year, Congress should re-evaluate the costs of the program.

Nine million people in America today are receiving Social Security Disability Insurance, double the number in 1995 and six times the number in 1970. With statistics like that, it’s hardly surprising to see some in Congress worry that more will enroll in the program and costs would continue to rise, especially since government funding for disability insurance is expected to run out by the end of next year. If Congress does nothing, benefits would fall by 19% immediately following next year’s presidential election. So, Congress will likely do something. But what exactly should it do?

Funding for disability insurance has nearly run out of money before. Each time, Congress has simply increased the share of the Social Security payroll tax that goes for disability insurance. This time, however, many members of Congress oppose such a shift unless it is linked to changes that curb eligibility and promote return to work. They fear that rolls will keep growing and costs would keep rising, but findings from a report by a government panel conclude that disability insurance rolls have stopped rising and will likely shrink. The report, authored by a panel of the Social Security Advisory Board, is important in that many of the factors that caused disability insurance to rise, particularly during the Great Recession, have ended.

• Baby-boomers, who added to the rolls as they reached the disability-prone middle age years, are aging out of disability benefits and into retirement benefits. 


• The decades-long flood of women increased the pool of people with the work histories needed to be eligible for disability insurance. But women’s labor force participation has fallen a bit from pre-Great Recession peaks, and is not expected again to rise materially. 


• The Great Recession, which led many who lost jobs and couldn’t find work to apply for disability insurance, is over and applications are down. A recession as large as that of 2008 is improbable any time soon. 


• Approval rates by administrative law judges, who for many years were suspected of being too ready to approve applications, have been falling. Whatever the cause, this stringency augurs a fall in the disability insurance rolls.

The 2016 presidential election confronts the U.S. electorate with political choices more fundamental than any since 1964 and possibly since 1932. That statement may strike some as hyperbolic, but the policy differences between the two major parties and the positions of candidates vying for their presidential nominations support this claim.

A victorious Republican candidate would take office backed by a Republican-controlled Congress, possibly with heightened majorities and with the means to deliver on campaign promises. On the other hand, the coattails of a successful Democratic candidate might bring more Democrats to Congress, but that president would almost certainly have to work with a Republican House and, quite possibly, a still Republican Senate. The political wars would continue, but even a president engaged in continuous political trench warfare has the power to get a lot done.

Candidates always promise more than they can deliver and often deliver different policies from those they have promised. Every recent president has been buffeted by external events unanticipated when he took office. But this year, more than in half a century or more, the two parties offer a choice, not an echo. Here is a partial and selective list of key issues to illustrate what is at stake.

The Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare or the ACA, passed both houses of Congress with not a single Republican vote. The five years since enactment of the ACA have not dampened Republican opposition.

The persistence and strength of opposition to the ACA is quite unlike post-enactment reactions to the Social Security Act of 1935 or the 1965 amendments that created Medicare. Both earlier programs were hotly debated and controversial. But a majority of both parties voted for the Social Security Act. A majority of House Republicans and a sizeable minority of Senate Republicans supported Medicare. In both cases, opponents not only became reconciled to the new laws but eventually participated in improving and extending them. Republican members of Congress overwhelmingly supported, and a Republican president endorsed, adding Disability Insurance to the Social Security Act.  In 2003, a Republican president proposed and fought for the addition of a drug benefit to Medicare.

The current situation bears no resemblance to those two situations. Five years after enactment of Obamacare, in contrast, every major candidate for the Republican presidential nomination has called for its repeal and replacement. So have the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives and Majority Leader in the Senate.  

Just what 'repeal and replace' might look like under a GOP president remains unclear as ACA critics have not agreed on an alternative. Some plans would do away with some of the elements of Obamacare and scale back others. Some proposals would repeal the mandate that people carry insurance, the bar on 'medical underwriting' (a once-routine practice under which insurers vary premiums based on expected use of medical care), or the requirement that insurers sell plans to all potential customers. Other proposals would retain tax credits to help make insurance affordable but reduce their size, or would end rules specifying what 'adequate' insurance plans must cover.

Repeal is hard to imagine if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2016. Even if repeal legislation could overcome a Senate filibuster, a Democratic president would likely veto it and an override would be improbable. 

But a compromise with horse-trading, once routine, might once again become possible. A Democratic president might agree to Republican-sponsored changes to the ACA, such as dropping the requirement that employers of 50 or more workers offer insurance to their employees, if Republicans agreed to changes in the ACA that supporters seek, such as the extension of tax credits to families now barred from them because one member has access to very costly employer-sponsored insurance.

In sum, the 2016 election will determine the future of the most far-reaching social insurance legislation in half a century.

Social Security faces a projected long-term gap between what it takes in and what it is scheduled to pay out. Every major Republican candidate has called for cutting benefits below those promised under current law. None has suggested any increase in payroll tax rates. Each Democratic candidate has proposed raising both revenues and benefits. Within those broad outlines, the specific proposals differ.

Most Republican candidates would cut benefits across the board or selectively for high earners. For example, Senator Ted Cruz proposes to link benefits to prices rather than wages, a switch that would reduce Social Security benefits relative to current law by steadily larger amounts: an estimated 29 percent by 2065 and 46 percent by 2090. He would allow younger workers to shift payroll taxes to private accounts. Donald Trump has proposed no cuts in Social Security because, he says, proposing cuts is inconsistent with winning elections and because meeting current statutory commitments is 'honoring a deal.' Trump also favors letting people invest part of their payroll taxes in private securities. He has not explained how he would make up the funding gap that would result if current benefits are honored but revenues to support them are reduced. Senator Marco Rubio has endorsed general benefit cuts, but he has also proposed to increase the minimum benefit. Three Republican candidates have proposed ending payroll taxes for older workers, a step that would add to the projected funding gap.

Democratic candidates, in contrast, would raise benefits, across-the-board or for selected groups—care givers or survivors. They would switch the price index used to adjust benefits for inflation to one that is tailored to consumption of the elderly and that analysts believe would raise benefits more rapidly than the index now in use. All would raise the ceiling on earnings subject to the payroll tax. Two would broaden the payroll tax base.

As these examples indicate, the two parties have quite different visions for Social Security. Major changes, such as those envisioned by some Republican candidates, are not easily realized, however. Before he became president, Ronald Reagan in numerous speeches called for restructuring Social Security. Those statements did not stop him from signing a 1983 law that restored financial balance to the very program against which he had inveighed but with few structural changes. George W. Bush sought to partially privatize Social Security, to no avail. Now, however, Social Security faces a funding gap that must eventually be filled. The discipline of Trust Fund financing means that tax increases, benefit cuts, or some combination of the two are inescapable. Action may be delayed beyond the next presidency, as current projections indicate that the Social Security Trust Fund and current revenues can sustain scheduled benefits until the mid 2030s. But that is not what the candidates propose. Voters face a choice, clear and stark, between a Democratic president who would try to maintain or raise benefits and would increase payroll taxes to pay for it, and a Republican president who would seek to cut benefits, oppose tax increases, and might well try to partially privatize Social Security.

On no other issue is the split between the two parties wider or the stakes in their disagreement higher than on measures to deal with global warming. Leading Republican candidates have denied that global warming is occurring (Trump), scorned evidence supporting the existence of global warming as bogus (Cruz), acknowledged that global warming is occurring but not because of human actions (Rubio, Carson), or admitted that it is occurring but dismissed it as not a pressing issue (Fiorina, Christie). Congressional Republicans oppose current Administration initiatives under the Clean Air Act to curb emission of greenhouse gases.

Democratic candidates uniformly agree that global warming is occurring and that it results from human activities. They support measures to lower those emissions by amounts similar to those embraced in the Paris accords of December 2015 as essential to curb the speed and ultimate extent of global warming.

Climate scientists and economists are nearly unanimous that unabated emissions of greenhouse gases pose serious risks of devastating and destabilizing outcomes—that climbing average temperatures could render some parts of the world uninhabitable, that increases in sea levels that will inundate coastal regions inhabited by tens of millions of people, and that storms, droughts, and other climatic events will be more frequent and more destructive. Immediate actions to curb emission of greenhouse gases can reduce these effects. But no actions can entirely avoid them, and delay is costly.  Environmental economists also agree, with little partisan division, that the way to proceed is to harness market forces to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” 

The division between the parties on global warming is not new. In 2009, the House of Representatives narrowly passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. That law would have capped and gradually lowered greenhouse gas emissions. Two hundred eleven Democrats but only 8 Republicans voted for the bill. The Senate took no action, and the proposal died.

Now Republicans are opposing the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a set of regulations under the Clean Air Act to lower emissions by power plants, which account for 40 percent of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. The Clean Power Plan is a stop-gap measure. It applies only to power plants, not to other sources of emissions, and it is not nationally uniform. These shortcomings reflect the legislative authority on which the plan is based, the Clean Air Act. That law was designed to curb the local problem of air pollution, not the global damage from greenhouse gases. Environmental economists of both parties recognize that a tax or a cap on greenhouse gas emissions would be more effective and less costly than the current regulations, but superior alternatives are now politically unreachable.

Based on their statements, any of the current leading Republican candidates would back away from the recently negotiated Paris climate agreement, scuttle the Clean Power Plan, and resist any tax on greenhouse gas emissions. Any of the Democratic candidates would adhere to the Clean Power Plan and support the Paris climate agreement. One Democratic candidate has embraced a carbon tax. None has called for the extension of the Clean Power Plan to other emission sources, but such policies are consistent with their current statements.

The importance of global policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions is difficult to exaggerate. While the United States acting alone cannot entirely solve the problem, resolute action by the world’s largest economy and second largest greenhouse gas emitter is essential, in concert with other nations, to forestall climate catastrophe.

If the next president serves two terms, as six of the last nine presidents have done, four currently sitting justices will be over age 86 and one over age 90 by the time that presidency ends—provided that they have not died or resigned.

The political views of the president have always shaped presidential choices regarding judicial appointments. As all carry life-time tenure, these appointments influence events long after the president has left office. The political importance of these appointments has always been enormous, but it is even greater now than in the past. One reason is that the jurisprudence of sitting Supreme Court justices now lines up more closely than in the past with that of the party of the president who appointed them. Republican presidents appointed all sitting justices identified as conservative; Democratic presidents appointed all sitting justices identified as liberal. The influence of the president’s politics extends to other judicial appointments as well.

A second reason is that recent judicial decisions have re-opened decisions once regarded as settled. The decision in the first case dealing with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), NFIB v. Sibelius is illustrative.

When the ACA was enacted, few observers doubted the power of the federal government to require people to carry health insurance. That power was based on a long line of decisions, dating back to the 1930s, under the Constitutional clause authorizing the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. In the 1930s, the Supreme Court rejected an older doctrine that had barred such regulations. The earlier doctrine dated from 1905 when the Court overturned a New York law that prohibited bakers from working more than 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week. The Court found in the 14^th Amendment, which prohibits any state from ‘depriving any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law,’ a right to contract previously invisible to jurists which it said the New York law violated. In the early- and mid-1930s, the Court used this doctrine to invalidate some New Deal legislation. Then the Court changed course and authorized a vast range of regulations under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.  It was on this line of cases that supporters of the ACA relied.

Nor did many observers doubt the power of Congress to require states to broaden Medicaid coverage as a condition for remaining in the Medicaid program and receiving federal matching grants to help them pay for required medical services.

To the surprise of most legal scholars, a 5-4 Supreme Court majority ruled in NFIB v. Sibelius that the Commerce Clause did not authorize the individual health insurance mandate. But it decided, also 5 to 4, that tax penalties could be imposed on those who fail to carry insurance. The tax saved the mandate. But the decision also raised questions about federal powers under the Commerce Clause. The Court also ruled that the Constitution barred the federal government from requiring states to expand Medicaid coverage as a condition for remaining in the program. This decision was odd, in that Congress certainly could constitutionally have achieved the same objective by repealing the old Medicaid program and enacting a new Medicaid program with the same rules as those contained in the ACA that states would have been free to join or not.

NFIB v. Sibelius and other cases the Court has recently heard or soon will hear raise questions about what additional attempts to regulate interstate commerce might be ruled unconstitutional and about what limits the Court might impose on Congress’s power to require states to implement legislated rules as a condition of receiving federal financial aid. The Court has also heard, or soon will hear, a series of cases of fundamental importance regarding campaign financing, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, abortion rights, the death penalty, the delegation of powers to federal regulatory agencies, voting rights, and rules under which people can seek redress in the courts for violation of their rights.

Throughout U.S. history, the American people have granted nine appointed judges the power to decide whether the actions taken by elected legislators are or are not consistent with a constitution written more than two centuries ago. As a practical matter, the Court could not maintain this sway if it deviated too far from public opinion. But the boundaries within which the Court has substantially unfettered discretion are wide, and within those limits the Supreme Court can profoundly limit or redirect the scope of legislative authority. The Supreme Court’s switch in the 1930s from doctrines under which much of the New Deal was found to be unconstitutional to other doctrines under which it was constitutional illustrates the Court’s sensitivity to public opinion and the profound influence of its decisions.

The bottom line is that the next president will likely appoint enough Supreme Court justices and other judges to shape the character of the Supreme Court and of lower courts with ramifications both broad and enduring on important aspects of every person’s life.

***

The next president will preside over critical decisions relating to health care policy, Social Security, and environmental policy, and will shape the character of the Supreme Court for the next generation. Profound differences distinguish the two major parties on these and many other issues. A recent survey of members of the House of Representatives found that on a scale of ‘liberal to conservative’ the most conservative Democrat was more liberal than the least conservative Republican. Whatever their source, these divisions are real.  The examples cited here are sufficient to show that the 2016 election richly merits the overworked term 'watershed'—it will be the most consequential presidential election in a very long time.

Recently, Brookings has posted two articles commenting on proposals to raise the full retirement age for Social Security retirement benefits from 67 to 70. One revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of how the program actually works and what the effects of the policy change would be. The other proposes changes to the system that would subvert the fundamental purpose of the Social Security in the name of ‘reforming’ it.

A number of Republican presidential candidates and others have proposed raising the full retirement age. In a recent blog, Robert Shapiro, a Democrat, opposed this move, a position I applaud. But he did so based on alleged effects the proposal would in fact not have, and misunderstanding about how the program actually works. In another blog, Stuart Butler, a conservative, noted correctly that increasing the full benefit age would ‘bolster the system’s finances,’ but misunderstood this proposal’s effects. He proposed instead to end Social Security as a universal pension based on past earnings and to replace it with income-related welfare for the elderly and disabled (which he calls insurance).

Let’s start with the misunderstandings common to both authors and to many others. Each writes as if raising the ‘full retirement age’ from 67 to 70 would fall more heavily on those with comparatively low incomes and short life expectancies. In fact, raising the ‘full retirement age’ would cut Social Security Old-Age Insurance benefits by the same proportion for rich and poor alike, and for people whose life expectancies are long or short. To see why, one needs to understand how Social Security works and what ‘raising the full retirement age’ means.

People may claim Social Security retirement benefits starting at age 62. If they wait, they get larger benefits—about 6-8 percent more for each year they delay claiming up to age 70. Those who don’t claim their benefits until age 70 qualify for benefits -- 77 percent higher than those with the same earnings history who claim at age 62. The increments approximately compensate the average person for waiting, so that the lifetime value of benefits is independent of the age at which they claim. Mechanically, the computation pivots on the benefit payable at the ‘full retirement age,’ now age 66, but set to increase to age 67 under current law. Raising the full retirement age still more, from 67 to 70, would mean that people age 70 would get the same benefit payable under current law at age 67. That is a benefit cut of 24 percent. Because the annual percentage adjustment for waiting to claim would be unchanged, people who claim benefits at any age, down to age 62, would also receive benefits reduced by 24 percent.

In plain English, ‘raising the full benefit age from 67 to 70' is simply a 24 percent across-the-board cut in benefits for all new claimants, whatever their incomes and whatever their life-expectancies.

Thus, Robert Shapiro mistakenly writes that boosting the full-benefit age would ‘effectively nullify Social Security for millions of Americans’ with comparatively low life expectancies. It wouldn’t. Anyone who wanted to claim benefits at age 62 still could. Their benefits would be reduced. But so would benefits of people who retire at older ages.

Equally mistaken is Stuart Butler’s comment that increasing the full-benefit age from 67 to 70 would ‘cut total lifetime retirement benefits proportionately more for those on the bottom rungs of the income ladder.’ It wouldn’t. The cut would be proportionately the same for everyone, regardless of past earnings or life expectancy.

Both Shapiro and Butler, along with many others including my other colleagues Barry Bosworth and Gary Burtless, have noted correctly that life expectancies of high earners have risen considerably, while those of low earners have risen little or not at all. As a result, the lifetime value of Social Security Old-Age Insurance benefits has grown more for high- than for low-earners. That development has been at least partly offset by trends in Social Security Disability Insurance, which goes disproportionately to those with comparatively low earnings and life expectancies and which has been growing far faster than Old-Age Insurance, the largest component of Social Security.

But even if the lifetime value of all Social Security benefits has risen faster for high earners than for low earners, an across the board cut in benefits does nothing to offset that trend. In the name of lowering overall Social Security spending, it would cut benefits by the same proportion for those whose life expectancies have risen not at all because the life expectancy of others has risen. Such ‘evenhandeness’ calls to mind Anatole France’s comment that French law ‘in its majestic equality, ...forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in streets, or steal loaves of bread.’

Faulty analyses, such as those of Shapiro and Butler, cannot conceal a genuine challenge to policy makers. Social Security does face a projected, long-term funding shortfall. Trends in life expectancies may well have made the system less progressive overall than it was in the past. What should be done?

For starters, one needs to recognize that for those in successive age cohorts who retire at any given age, rising life expectancy does not lower, but rather increases their need for Social Security retirement benefits because whatever personal savings they may have accumulated gets stretched more thinly to cover more retirement years.

For those who remain healthy, the best response to rising longevity may be to retire later. Later retirement means more time to save and fewer years to depend on savings. Here is where the wrong-headedness of Butler’s proposal, to phase down benefits for those with current incomes of $25,000 or more and eliminate them for those with incomes over $100,000, becomes apparent. The only source of income for full retirees is personal savings and, to an ever diminishing degree, employer-financed pensions. Converting Social Security from a program whose benefits are based on past earnings to one that is based on current income from savings would impose a tax-like penalty on such savings, just as would a direct tax on those savings. Conservatives and liberals alike should understand that taxing something is not the way to encourage it.

Still, working longer by definition lowers retirement income needs. That is why some analysts have proposed raising the age at which retirement benefits may first be claimed from age 62 to some later age. But this proposal, like across-the-board benefit cuts, falls alike on those who can work longer without undue hardship and on those in physically demanding jobs they can no longer perform, those whose abilities are reduced, and those who have low life expectancies. This group includes not only blue-collar workers, but also many white-collar employees, as indicated by a recent study of the Boston College Retirement Center. If entitlement to Social Security retirement benefits is delayed, it is incumbent on policymakers to link that change to other ‘backstop’ policies that protect those for whom continued work poses a serious burden. It is also incumbent on private employers to design ways to make workplaces friendlier to an aging workforce.

The challenge of adjusting Social Security in the face of unevenly distributed increases in longevity, growing income inequality, and the prospective shortfall in Social Security financing is real. The issues are difficult. But solutions are unlikely to emerge from confusion about the way Social Security operates and the actual effects of proposed changes to the program. And it will not be advanced by proposals that would bring to Social Security the failed Vietnam War strategy of destroying a village in order to save it.

Only days before her retirement at age 71, Kathleen Elliott Yinug succumbed to a recurrence of cancer, which had been in remission for fifteen years. Over a Brookings career spanning four decades, she not only assisted several members of the Brookings community, but also became their valued friend. A woman of intelligence and liberal values, she elicited, demanded, and merited the respect of all with whom she worked.

After college, she joined the Peace Corps and was sent to the island of Yap. There she met her husband to be and there her son, Falan, was born. The family returned to the United States so that her husband could attend law school. Kathleen came to work at Brookings, helping to support her husband's law school training. When he returned to Yap, Kathleen assumed all parental responsibility. Her son has grown into a man of character, a devoted husband and father of two daughters. He and his wife, Louise, with compassion and generosity, made their home Kathleen's refuge during her final illness. Over extended periods, she held second jobs to supplement her Brookings income.

Her personal warmth, openness, and personal integrity made her a natural confidante of senior fellows, staff assistants, and research assistants, alike. She demanded and received respect from all. Her judgment on those who did not meet her standards was blunt and final; on one occasion, she 'fired'—that is, flatly refused to work with—one senior staff member whose behavior and values she rightly deplored.

With retirement approaching, Kathleen bought a condominium in Maine, a place she had come to love after numerous visits with her long-time friend, Lois Rice. After additional visits, her affection for Maine residents and the community she had chosen deepened. She spoke with intense yearning for the post-retirement time when she could take up life in her new home. That she was denied that time is a cruel caprice of life and only deepens the sense of loss of those who knew and loved her.

We can be sure that the 2016 presidential candidates, whoever they are, will be in favor of promoting opportunity and cutting poverty. The question is: how? In our contribution to a new volume published today, “Campaign 2016: Eight big issues the presidential candidates should address,” we show that people who clear three hurdles—graduating high school, working full-time, and delaying parenthood until they in a stable, two-parent family—are very much more likely to climb to middle class than fall into poverty:

But what specific policies would help people achieve these three benchmarks of success?  Our paper contains a number of ideas that candidates might want to adopt. Here are a few examples: 

1. To improve high school graduation rates, expand “Small Schools of Choice,” a program in New York City, which replaced large, existing schools with more numerous, smaller schools that had a theme or focus (like STEM or the arts). The program increased graduation rates by about 10 percentage points and also led to higher college enrollment with no increase in costs.

2. To support work, make the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) refundable and cap it at $100,000 in household income. Because the credit is currently non-refundable, low-income families receive little or no benefit, while those with incomes above $100,000 receive generous tax deductions. This proposal would make the program more equitable and facilitate low-income parents’ labor force participation, at no additional cost.

3. To strengthen families, make the most effective forms of birth control (IUDs and implants) more widely available at no cost to women, along with good counselling and a choice of all FDA-approved methods. Programs that have done this in selected cities and states have reduced unplanned pregnancies, saved money, and given women better ability to delay parenthood until they and their partners are ready to be parents. Delayed childbearing reduces poverty rates and leads to better prospects for the children in these families.

These are just a few examples of good ideas, based on the evidence, of what a candidate might want to propose and implement if elected. Additional ideas and analysis will be found in our longer paper on this topic.

The issue of paid leave is heating up in 2016. At least two presidential candidates — Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) — have proposed new federal policies. Several states and large cities have begun providing paid leave to workers when they are ill or have to care for a newborn child or other family member.

This forward movement on paid-leave policy makes sense. The United States is the only advanced country without a paid-leave policy. While some private and public employers already provide paid leave to their workers, the workers least likely to get paid leave are low-wage and low-income workers who need it most. They also cannot afford to take unpaid leave, which the federal government mandates for larger companies.

Paid leave is good for the health and development of children; it supports work, enabling employees to remain attached to the labor force when they must take leave; and it can lower costly worker turnover for employers. Given the economic and social benefits it provides and given that the private market will not generate as much as needed, public policies should ensure that such leave is available to all.

But it is important to do so efficiently, so as not to burden employers with high costs that could lead them to substantially lower wages or create fewer jobs.

States and cities that require employers to provide paid sick days mandate just a small number, usually three to seven days. Family or temporary disability leaves that must be longer are usually financed through small increases in payroll taxes paid by workers and employers, rather than by employer mandates or general revenue.

Policy choices could limit costs while expanding benefits. For instance, states should limit eligibility to workers with experience, such as a year, and it might make sense to increase the benefit with years of accrued service to encourage labor force attachment. Some states provide four to six weeks of family leave, though somewhat larger amounts of time may be warranted, especially for the care of newborns, where three months seems reasonable.

Paid leave need not mean full replacement of existing wages. Replacing two-thirds of weekly earnings up to a set limit is reasonable. The caps and partial wage replacement give workers some incentive to limit their use of paid leave without imposing large financial burdens on those who need it most.

While many states and localities have made sensible choices in these areas, some have not. For instance, the D.C. Council has proposed paid-leave legislation for all but federal workers that violates virtually all of these rules. It would require up to 16 weeks of temporary disability leave and up to 16 weeks of paid family leave; almost all workers would be eligible for coverage, without major experience requirements; and the proposed law would require 100 percent replacement of wages up to $1,000 per week, and 50 percent coverage up to $3,000. It would be financed through a progressive payroll tax on employers only, which would increase to 1 percent for higher-paid employees.

Our analysis suggests that this level of leave would be badly underfunded by the proposed tax, perhaps by as much as two-thirds. Economists believe that payroll taxes on employers are mostly paid through lower worker wages, so the higher taxes needed to fully fund such generous leave would burden workers. The costly policy might cause employers to discriminate against women.

The disruptions and burdens of such lengthy leaves could cause employers to hire fewer workers or shift operations elsewhere over time. This is particularly true here, considering that the D.C. Council already has imposed costly burdens on employers, such as high minimum wages (rising to $11.50 per hour this year), paid sick leave (although smaller amounts than now proposed) and restrictions on screening candidates. The minimum wage in Arlington is $7.25 with no other mandates. Employers will be tempted to move operations across the river or to replace workers with technology wherever possible.

Cities, states and the federal government should provide paid sick and family leave for all workers. But it can and should be done in a fiscally responsible manner that does not place undue burdens on the workers themselves or on their employers.

Editor's note: this piece originally appeared in The Washington Post. 

The injustices faced by African Americans are high on the nation’s agenda. “Black Lives Matter” has become a rallying cry that has elicited intense feelings among both supporters and detractors. As William Julius Wilson has pointed out on this blog, the focus on policing and criminal justice is necessary but not sufficient. Concerted action is required to tackle systematic racial gaps in everything from income and wealth to employment rates, poverty rates, and educational achievement.

Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that financial reparations should be paid to all those who have suffered directly or indirectly from slavery and its aftermath, including present day injustices such as the targeting of subprime mortgages to minorities. The moral case is compelling, and Coates notes that there have been other instances in U.S. history when reparations have been paid—such as to some Native American tribes and to the Japanese-Americans thrown into internment camps during World War II.

Even if the moral argument for reparations is won, there are formidable obstacles in terms of policy, politics, and law. How would reparations work in practice? To be fair, Coates does support the bill from Congressman John Conyers establishing a commission to examine precisely these questions. Even if a workable policy can be found, the political opposition would, to put it mildly, be formidable. There are also doubts about constitutional legality. However, these are certainly questions worthy of better answers than the ones currently being made.

Reparations are a stark example of a race-based policy: targeting resources or an intervention at an explicitly-defined racial group. At the other extreme are “race-blind” policies, applied with no regard to race (at least in theory). But there is a middle ground, consisting of what might be labeled ‘race-conscious’ policies. These policies would be designed to close racial gaps without targeting racial groups.

What might race-conscious policies look like? Here are some ideas:

1. Professors William Darity at Duke and Darrick Hamilton of The New School propose to tackle race gaps in wealth by providing “baby bonds” to children born to families with limited wealth. In 2013, median net worth was $11,000 for black households compared to $141,900 for whites. Darity and Hamilton are supporters of reparations in principle, but are alert to policy and political feasibility. Their specific proposal is that every baby born into a family with below-median wealth receives a “baby bond” or trust fund. These would be worth $50,000 to $60,000 on average, but scaled according to the level of the family’s wealth. The money would be available at the age of 18 for certain expenditures such as paying for college or buying a home. This is a good example of a race-conscious policy. It is not explicitly targeted on race but it would have its greatest impact on African American families.
2. While racial wealth gaps are large and troubling, the disappearance of almost half of unskilled, young black men from the labor force may be an even greater problem in the long run. A comprehensive approach on jobs could include raising the minimum wage, expanding the EITC, and providing subsidized jobs in either the public or private sector for those unable to find jobs on their own. The job subsidies might be targeted on young adults from high-poverty neighborhoods where joblessness is endemic. The subsidized jobs would help people of all races, but especially African Americans. A jobs-based program is also likely to find greater political support than straightforward wealth redistribution. Granted, such jobs programs are hard to administer, but we now have a large number of workers whose job prospects are slim to nonexistent in a technologically-oriented and service-based economy.
3. An enhanced EITC could also help to increase wealth (or lower indebtedness). As Kathryn Edin and her colleagues note in It’s Not Like I’m Poor, the EITC is normally received as a lump sum refund at the end of the year. As a form of forced saving, it enables poor families to repay debt and make mobility enhancing investments in themselves or their children. According to Edin, recipients like the fact that, unlike welfare, the tax credit links them socially and psychologically to other Americans who receive tax refunds. A more generous EITC could therefore help on the wealth as well as income side, and narrow racial gaps in both.
4. A final example of a race-conscious policy is the Texas “top 10” law, which guarantees admission to any public university in the state for students in the top 10 percent of their high school class. This plan could be expanded to other states.

The “Black Lives Matter” movement has refocused the nation’s attention on mass incarceration and related injustices in the criminal justice system. But this problem exists side by side with racial inequalities in income, wealth, education, and employment. There are no easy answers to America’s stubborn race gaps. But jobs and wages seem to us to be of paramount importance. Implemented in a race-conscious way (by targeting them to areas suffering from high rates of poverty and joblessness), employment policy might be the most powerful instrument of all for race equality.

Tomorrow, President Obama unveils his last budget, and we’re sure to see plenty of proposals for spending on education and skills. In the past, the Administration has focused on investments in early childhood education, community colleges, and infrastructure and research. From a budgetary standpoint, the problem with these investments is how to capture their benefits as well as their costs.

First step: find out what works. The Obama Administration has been emphatic about the need for solid evidence in deciding what to fund. The good news is that we now have quite a lot of it, showing that investing in human capital from early education through college can make a difference. Not all programs are successful, of course, and we are still learning what works and what doesn’t. But we know enough to conclude that investing in a variety of health, education, and mobility programs can positively affect education, employment, and earnings in adulthood.

For example:

1. Young, low-income children whose families move to better neighborhoods using housing vouchers see a 31 percent increase in earnings;

2. Quality early childhood and school reform programs can raise lifetime income per child by an average of about $200,000, for at an upfront cost of about $20,000;

3. Boosting college completion rates, for instance via the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) in the City University of New York, leads to higher earnings.

If such estimates are correct (and we recognize there are uncertainties), policymakers are probably underinvesting in such programs because they are looking at the short-term costs but not at longer-term benefits and budget savings.

First, the CBO’s standard practice is to use a 10-year budget window, which means long-range effects are often ignored. Second, although the CBO does try to take into account behavioral responses, such as increased take-up rates of a program, or improved productivity and earnings, it often lacks the research needed to make such estimates. Third, the usual assumption is that the rate of return on public investments in human capital is less than that for private investment. This is now questionable, especially given low interest rates.

A hot topic in budget politics right now is so-called “dynamic scoring.” This means incorporating macroeconomic effects, such as an increase in the labor force or productivity gains, into cost estimates. In 2015, the House adopted a rule requiring such scoring, when practicable, for major legislation. But appropriations bills are excluded, and quantitative analyses are restricted to the existing 10-year budget window.

The interest in dynamic scoring is currently strongest among politicians pushing major tax bills, on the grounds that tax cuts could boost growth. But the principles behind dynamic scoring apply equally to improvements in productivity that could result from proposals to subsidize college education, for example—as proposed by both Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton. Of course, it is tough to estimate the value of these potential benefits. But it is worth asking whether current budget rules lead to myopia in our assessments of what such investments might accomplish, and thus to an over-statement of their “true” cost.

We have known for some time that children who grow up in single parent-families do not fare as well as those with two parents – especially two biological parents.  In recent years, some scholars have argued that the consequences are especially serious for boys.  Not only do boys need fathers, presumably to learn how to become men and how to control their often unruly temperaments, but less obviously, and almost counterintuitively, it turns out that boys are more sensitive or less resilient than girls. Parenting seems to affect the development of boys more than it affects the development of girls.  Specifically, their home environment is more likely to affect behavior and performance in school.

Up until now, these speculations have been based on limited evidence.  But new research from Harvard professor Raj Chetty and a team of colleagues shows that the effects of single parenthood are indeed real for all boys, regardless of family income, but especially for boys living in high-poverty, largely minority neighborhoods.

When they become adults, boys from low-income, single-parent families are less likely to work, to earn a decent income, and to go to college: not just in absolute terms, but compared to their sisters or other girls who grew up in similar circumstances.  These effects are largest when the families live in metropolitan areas (commuting zones) with a high fraction of black residents, high levels of racial and income segregation, and lots of single-parent families.  In short, it is not just the boy’s own family situation that matters but also the kind of neighborhood he grows up in.  Exposure to high rates of crime, and other potentially toxic peer influences without the constraining influence of adult males within these families, seems to set these boys on a very different course than other boys and, perhaps more surprisingly, on a different course from their sisters.

The focus of a great deal of attention recently has been on police practices in low-income minority neighborhoods.  Without in any way excusing police brutality where it has occurred, what this research suggests is that the challenge for police is heightened by the absence of male authority figures in low-income black neighborhoods.  In his gripping account of his own coming of age in West Baltimore, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates recounts being severely punished by his father for some adolescent infraction.  When his mother protested, Ta-Nehisi’s father replied that it was better that this discipline come from within the family than be left to the police.  But Coates’ family was one of the few in his neighborhood where a father still existed.

Repairing families is difficult at best.  Most single-parent families are initially formed as the result of an unplanned birth to an unmarried young woman in these same communities.  Perhaps girls and young women simply suffer in a different way.  Instead of becoming involved in crime and ending up in prison or the informal economy, they are more likely to drift into early motherhood.  With family responsibilities at an early age, and less welfare assistance than in the past, they are also more likely to have to work.  But in the longer run, providing more education and a different future for these young women may actually be just as important as helping their brothers if we don’t want to perpetuate the father absence that caused these problems in the first place.  They are going to need both the motivation (access to education and decent jobs) and the means (access to better forms of contraception) if we are to achieve this goal.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in Real Clear Markets. 

Today marks Equal Pay Day. How are we doing? We have come a long way since I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the pay gap back in the late 1960s. From earning 59 percent of what men made in 1974 to earning 79 percent in 2015 (among year-round, full-time workers), women have broken a lot of barriers. 

There is no reason why the remaining gap can’t be closed. The gap could easily move in favor of women. After all, they are now better educated than men. They earn 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees and the majority of graduate degrees. Adjusting for educational attainment, the current earnings gap widens, with the biggest relative gaps at the highest levels of education:

If we want to encourage people to get more education, we can't discriminate against the best educated just because they are women.

One source of the current gap is the fact that women still take more time off from work to care for their families. These family responsibilities may also affect the kinds of work they choose. Harvard professor Claudia Goldin notes that they are more likely to work in occupations where it is easier to combine work and family life. These divided work-family loyalties are holding women back more than pay discrimination per se. This should change when men are more willing to share equally on the home front, as Richard Reeves and I have argued elsewhere.  

But there is much to be done while waiting for this more egalitarian world to arrive. Paid family leave and more support for early child care and education would go a long way toward relieving families, and women in particular, of the dual burden they now face. In the process, the pay gap should shrink or even move in favor of women. 

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has just released a very informative report on these issues. They call for an aggressive expansion of both early childhood education and child care subsidies for low and moderate income families. Specifically, they propose to cap child care expenses at 10 percent of income, which would provide an average subsidy of $3,272 to working families with children and much more than this to lower-income families. 

The EPI authors argue that child care subsidies would provide needed in-kind benefits to lower income families (check!), boost women’s labor force participation in a way that would benefit the overall economy (check!), and reduce the gender pay gap (check!). In short, childcare subsidies are a win-win-win.

For present purposes I want to focus on the likely effects on the pay gap. In the mid-1990s, the U.S. had the highest rate of female labor force participation compared to Germany, Canada, and Japan. Now we have the lowest. One reason is because other advanced countries have expanded paid leave and child care support for employed mothers while the U.S. has not:

If we want to eliminate the pay gap and perhaps even reverse it, the primary focus must be on women’s continuing difficulties in balancing work and family life. We should certainly attend to any remaining instances of pay discrimination in the workplace, as called for in the Paycheck Fairness Act. But the biggest source of the problem is not employer discrimination; it is women’s continued double burden.

Senior Fellows Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill are the first joint recipients of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize from the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS). The prize is awarded each year to a leading policymaker, social scientist, or public intellectual whose career focuses on advancing the public good through social science. It was named after the late senator from New York and renowned sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The pair accepted the award May 12 at a ceremony in Washington, DC. 

In their joint lecture delivered at the ceremony, Haskins and Sawhill emphasized the importance of evidence-based public policy, highlighting Sawhill’s latest work in her book, Generation Unbound (Brookings, 2014). Watch their entire speech here:

“Marriage is disappearing and more and more babies are born outside marriage,” Sawhill said during the lecture. “Right now, the proportion born outside of marriage is about 40 percent. It’s higher than that among African Americans and lower than that among the well-educated. But it’s no longer an issue that just affects the poor or minority groups.”

Download Sawhill's slides » | Download Ron Haskins' slides »

The power of evidence-based policy is finally being recognized, Haskins added. “One of the prime motivating factors of the current evidence-based movement,” he said, “is the understanding, now widespread, that most social programs either have not been well evaluated or they don’t work.” Haskins continued:

Perhaps the most important social function of social science is to find and test programs that will reduce the nation’s social problems. The exploding movement of evidence-based policy and the many roots the movement is now planting, offer the best chance of fulfilling this vital mission of social science, of achieving, in other words, exactly the outcomes Moynihan had hoped for.

He pointed toward the executive branch, state governments, and non-profits implementing policies that could make substantial progress against the nation’s social problems.

Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at Brookings and co-director, with Haskins, of the Center on Children and Families (CCF), acknowledged Haskins and Sawhill’s “powerful and unique intellectual partnership” and their world-class work on families, poverty, opportunity, evidence, parenting, work, and education.

Haskins and Sawhill were the first to be awarded jointly by the AAPSS, which recognizes their 15-year collaboration at Brookings and the Center on Children and Families, which they established. In addition to their work at CCF, the two co-wrote Creating an Opportunity Society (Brookings 2009) and serve as co-editors of The Future of Children, a policy journal that tackles issues that have an impact on children and families.

Haskins and Sawhill join the ranks of both current and past Brookings scholars who have received the Moynihan Prize, including Alice Rivlin (recipient of the inaugural prize), Rebecca Blank, and William Julius Wilson along with other distinguished scholars and public servants.

Want to learn more about the award’s namesake? Read Governance Studies Senior Fellow and historian Steve Hess’s account of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s time in the Nixon White House in his book The Professor and the President (Brookings, 2014).

At an event this past week, Hillary Clinton announced that, if elected, she planned to put Bill Clinton in charge of creating jobs. If he becomes the “First Gentlemen” -- or as she prefers to call him, the “First Dude,” – he just might have some success in this role. The country’s very strong record of job creation during the first Clinton administration is a hopeful sign. (Full disclosure: I served in his Administration.)

But assuming he's given the role of jobs czar, what would Bill Clinton do? The uncomfortable fact is that no one knows how to create enough jobs. Although about 50 percent of the public, according to Pew, worries that there are not enough jobs available, and virtually every presidential candidate is promising to produce more, economists are not sure how to achieve this goal.

The debate centers around why we think people are jobless. Unless we can agree on the diagnosis, we will not be able to fashion an appropriate policy response.

Some economists think that an unemployment rate hovering around 5 percent constitutes “full employment.” Those still looking for jobs, in this view, are either simply transitioning voluntarily from one job to another or they are “structurally unemployed.” The latter term refers to a mismatch, either between a worker’s skills and the skills that employers are seeking, or between where the workers live and where the jobs are geographically. (The decline in housing values or tighter zoning restrictions, for example, may have made it more difficult for people to move to states or cities where jobs are more available.)

Another view is that despite the recovery from the Great Recession, there is still a residue of “cyclical” unemployment. If the Federal Reserve or Congress were to boost demand by keeping interest rates low, reducing taxes, or increasing spending on, say, infrastructure, this would create more jobs – or so goes the argument. But the Fed can’t reduce interest rates significantly because they are already near rock-bottom levels and tax and spending policies are hamstrung by political disagreements.

In my view, the U.S. currently suffers from both structural and cyclical unemployment. The reason I believe there is still some room to stimulate the economy is because we have not yet seen a significant increase in labor costs and inflation. Political problems aside, we should be adding more fuel to the economy in the form of lower taxes or higher public spending.

High levels of structural unemployment are also a problem. The share of working-age men who are employed has been dropping for decades at least in part because of outsourcing and automation. The share of the unemployed who have been out of work for more than six months is also relatively high for an economy at this stage of the business cycle. One possibility is that the recession caused many workers to drop out of the labor force and that after a long period of joblessness, they have seen their skills atrophy and employers stigmatize them as unemployable.

The depressing fact is that none of these problems is easy to solve. Manufacturing jobs that employ a lot of people are not coming back. Retraining the work force for a high-tech economy will take a long time. Political disagreements won’t disappear unless there is a landslide election that sweeps one party into control of all three branches of government.

So what can Bill Clinton or anyone else do? We may need to debate some more radical solutions such as subsidized jobs or a basic income for the structurally unemployed or a shorter work week to spread the available work around. These may not be politically feasible for some time to come, but former President Clinton is the right person to engage communities and employers in some targeted job creation projects now and to involve the country in a serious debate about what to do about jobs over the longer haul.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in Inside Sources.

Employment among lower-income men has declined by 11 percent since 1980 and has remained flat among lower-income women. Men and women in the top and middle of the income distribution, on the other hand, have been working as much or more since 1980, creating a growing “work gap” in labor market income between haves and have-nots.   

This paper simulates the effect of five labor market interventions (higher high school graduation rate, minimum wage increases, maintaining full employment, seeing all household heads work full time, and virtual marriages between single mothers and unattached men) on the average incomes of the poorest one-third of American households. They find that the most effective way to increase average incomes of the poorest Americans would be for household heads to work full time, whereas the least effective intervention would be increasing education.

In terms of actual impact on incomes, the simulation of all household heads working full time at their expected wage increased average household earnings by 54 percent from a baseline of $12,415 to $19,163. The research also suggests that even if all household heads worked just some—at expected wages or hours—average earnings would still increase by 16 percent.

The least effective simulation was increasing the high school graduation rate to 90 percent and having half of those “newly” graduated go on to receive some form of post-secondary education. The authors note that the low impact of increasing education on mobility is likely because only one in six of bottom-third adults live in a household in which someone gains a high school degree via the intervention.

Because single parents are disproportionately represented among low-income families, Sawhill and coauthors also explored the impact of adding a second earner to single-parent families through a simulation that pairs low-income, single-mother household heads with demographically similar but unrelated men. That simulation increased the average household earnings of the bottom-third only modestly, by $508, or about 4 percent.

Efforts to increase employment among heads of the poorest households must take into consideration why those household heads aren’t working, they note. According to data from the 2015 Census, the most cited reason for women not working is “taking care of home and family” and for men it is being “ill or disabled.”  

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