For at least the last 25 years, the primary goal of American K-12 schools could be summed up in three words: college for all. As a consequence, most K-12 schools today don’t see career education as central to what they offer. Emphasizing vocational training and experience is thought to undermine the lofty ideal of ensuring that every student attends college and completes a four-year degree.
Though it stems from noble intentions, our focus on preparing students for higher education does not serve them well. Rather, it fails to provide young people with the practical knowledge and skills that would benefit them once they graduate. It also produces an experience gap. Young people leave high school with little understanding of the world of work and the pathways to employment. This disconnect makes it more difficult for them to transition from school to a career.
Today, college for all has lost significant public support. Many no longer believe that a college degree is the default route to success. At the same time, older ways of preparing for a career are gaining popularity.
The U.K.’s Labour Party recently won an overwhelming victory in the country’s general parliamentary election. Its five-part policy platform contained a commitment to break down barriers to opportunity, including creating diverse education and training pathways so individuals can have an alternative to the college-degree pathway to jobs and opportunity. Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. have proposed similar measures at the national, state, and local levels. This approach is encouraging since it could hold the key to developing the types of pathways needed to ensure that young people and workers acquire the knowledge, skills, and social connections they need for upward mobility and prosperity. I call this “opportunity pluralism.”
Vice President Kamala Harris recently described America’s current pathways problem, and what a better approach could look like: “For far too long, our nation has encouraged only one path to success: a four-year college degree. Our nation needs to recognize the value of other paths, additional paths, such as apprenticeships and technical programs.” This issue can unite Democrats and Republicans, as recent proposals make clear.
While education governance in the U.S. is more decentralized than in the U.K., American policymakers should recognize the appeal of this approach and look to the U.K. example to inform how the U.S. pursues opportunity pluralism.
In this episode of The Abundance Podcast, Richard Kahlenberg chats about the persistence of economic segregation, the connection between housing and education, and what the federal government in particular could do about it.
The jobs-to-be-done theory has implications for K-12 career education.
A successful move from one job to another is not only about organizations hiring individuals to do something for those organizations. It’s also about individuals hiring organizations to do something for themselves. This makes job moves a mutual engagement between the demands of job needers and the supply of job seekers.
This approach to jobs is an application of the jobs-to-be-done theory, described by Clayton Christensen and his colleagues in a 2016 Harvard Business Reviewarticle. They write, “People buy products and services to get jobs done, where ‘job’ is shorthand for what an individual really seeks to accomplish in a given circumstance. Jobs are never simply about function—they have powerful social and emotional dimensions.”
Ethan Bernstein, Michael Horn, and Bob Moesta in their forthcoming bookJob Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career, make this theory central to their approach to career development. For well over a decade, they’ve analyzed the activities of thousands of job switchers to distill 9 steps that help job seekers make their next job move.
“As president, I will get rid of the unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs to increase jobs for folks without a four-year degree.” Those words from Vice President Kamala Harris signal a major shift in higher education policy, one which recognizes that earning a college degree costs too much, and not every job should require one.
Since the late 1960s, progressives have supported the expansion of financial aid for college in the belief that a college degree was the key to expanding the American Dream. Pell Grants, student loans, and college tax incentives were all enacted and expanded under Democratic Administrations.
For many years this strategy worked. College enrollments dramatically increased, rising from 8.5 million in 1970 and peaking at around 21 million in 2010. In addition, there are now more women undergraduates than men and some 45% of students come from diverse populations.
Kamala Harris’ presidential acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention promised Americans “an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and the chance to succeed.” But working-class Americans are glum about their economic position today and what this promise means for them. For example, 2 out of 3 say the working class is worse off today than it was 40 years ago, while only 1 out of 5 say the working class is better off.
That information comes from YouGovsurveys of working-class voters—those without college degrees—conducted for the Progressive Policy Institute’s (PPI) Project on Center Left Renewal. They include a focus on 7 Presidential or Senate battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.
Working-class voters are divided on which political party will advance their interests. Asked who will “put the interests of working-class people first,” 38% said Democrats and 37% said Republicans. When asked which party would be best at “creating economic opportunities for working Americans,” 38% said Republicans and 33% said Democrats. Nearly 1 out of 5 said neither party.
Ideas about men’s work and women’s work and whether an individual has or does not have a college degree contribute to occupational segregation for young workers in the labor market. But this segregation has decreased since 2000, especially as women without college degrees increased their employment in some occupations.
This information is from several Pew Research Center reports on men and women civilian workers between 25 and 34 years old with and without a college degree. It draws on Pew’s analysis of Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data including a special 2023 report surveying about 57,000 households.
As we celebrate Labor Day 2024, here are 4 important trends from this Pew research that show where opportunity is lacking and where new occupational opportunities may exist for men and women who have or do not have college degrees.
It’s that time of year again–reliably bumming out students and parents alike… it ’s back to school! But back to school is also a time to reflect on the state of education in this country… and it’s not all that great.
America is one of the richest countries in the world. But you wouldn’t know it if you looked at our education statistics. We’re 16th in science globally. In Math, we scored below the average and well below the scores of the top five countries, all of which were in Asia. And in 2018, we ranked an astonishing 125th in literacy among all countries according to the World Atlas.
As we tumble down the international tables, public schools around the country are getting rid of gifted and talented programs. They’re getting rid of standardized testing. All while trying to regain ground from COVID-related learning loss…
So how did we get here? Why have public schools deprioritized literacy and numeracy? What role have teachers’ unions played in advocating for public education in this country and also in holding kids back by protecting bad teachers? How is socioeconomic segregation hurting academic performance? And what kinds of books should really be taught in public schools?
Today, we’re diving deep into these questions and more with three experts who bring diverse perspectives to this debate:
Richard Kahlenberg is Director of the American Identity Project and Director of Housing at the Progressive Policy Institute. His many books and essays have focused on addressing economic disparities in education. Maud Maron is co-founder of PLACE NYC, which advocates for improving the academic rigor and standards of K-12 public school curricula. She’s also the mother of four kids in New York City public schools. Erika Sanzi is a former educator and school dean in Rhode Island. She is Director of Outreach at Parents Defending Education, which aims to fight ideological indoctrination in the classroom.
We discuss the misallocation of resources in education, the promise and perils of school choice, and how we can fix our broken education system.
And if you like this conversation, good news! All week this week at The Free Press—as summer ends and kids return to class—we’re pausing our usual news coverage to talk about education. We’ve invited six writers to answer the question: What didn’t school teach you?
With elite colleges peddling courses on “Queering Video Games,” “Decolonial Black Feminist Magic,” and “What Is a Settler Text?,” there’s never been a better time to go back to the proverbial school of life.
The devastating effects of pandemic K-12 public school closings continue to haunt America’s students. As around 50 million students and more than 3 million teachers go back to school, it is time for a temperature check on learning loss recovery.
There is also a big and pressing reason for this checkup: the federal government provided $190 billion to states and communities for learning loss recovery, and the legal deadline to commit funds for specific use is September 30, 2024. After the largest ever one-time federal investment in K-12 schools dubbed ESSER (for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief), we need to know what difference—if any—those dollars are making in the recovery effort.
The good news: some students are recovering from learning loss, and federal relief funds have had a positive effect on helping students catch up.
The bad news: many students, especially low-income and minority students, are not recovering from learning loss, and we also do not know what new district and school programs helped students catch up.
The Progressive Policy Institute launched its Campaign for Working America in February 2024. Its mission is to develop and test new themes, ideas, and policy proposals that can help Democrats and other center-left leaders make a new economic offer to working Americans, find common ground on polarizing cultural issues like immigration, crime, and education, and rally public support for defending freedom and democracy in a dangerous world. Acting as Senior Adviser to the Campaign is former U.S. Representative Tim Ryan, who represented northeast Ohio in Congress from 2003 to 2023.
Since 2016, Democrats have suffered severe erosion among non-college white voters and lately have been losing support from Black, Hispanic, and Asian working-class voters as well. Since these voters account for about threequarters of registered voters, basic electoral math dictates that the party will have to do better with them to restore its competitiveness outside metro centers and build lasting governing majorities. The party’s history and legacy point in the same direction: Democrats do best when they champion the economic aspirations and moral outlook of ordinary working Americans.
To help them relocate this political north star and to inform our work on policy innovation, PPI has commissioned a series of YouGov polls on the beliefs and political attitudes of non-college voters, with a particular focus on the battleground states that have decided the outcome of recent national elections.
This report is the first in a series of Campaign Blueprints detailing new ideas that can help Democrats reach across today’s yawning “diploma divide” and reconnect with the working-class voters who have historically been the party’s mainstay.
Introduction
In the 21st century, education has become America’s most significant marker of class privilege. People with bachelor’s and advanced degrees have mostly prospered, while wages for those with less education have fallen. This divergence in economic fortunes lies at the heart of our country’s present economic and political discontents.
In days past, Americans could get good jobs that paid a family-sustaining wage with just a high school diploma. In today’s increasingly intangible and data-driven economy, most jobs require at least some postsecondary education and training due to automation and technological advancements — demanding different knowledge and skills. If we don’t act now to prepare our current and future workers for these opportunities, more Americans will experience downward mobility and fall further behind.
Some Washington policymakers think we can solve this with “college for all.” It’s true that, on average, a bachelor’s degree confers higher lifetime earnings on those who have them. But most Americans don’t earn degrees. Today, 62% of American adults have no bachelor’s degree, and that number rises to 72% for Black adults and 79% for Hispanic adults. Despite this reality, federal and state policies remain strongly biased in favor of subsidies to Americans who go to college, specifically those who acquire a 4-year degree. In 2018, the federal government spent roughly $149 billion on higher education versus $58 billion for workforce-related education and training. Since the latter figure also includes Pell Grants and veterans’ programs, Washington really only spent about $16 billion, spread across 17 separate federal programs that provide workforce-focused education, employment, and training assistance.
The nation’s chronic underinvestment in work-related learning, experiences, and supports isn’t just unjust, it’s bad economics. It squanders our most precious resource — our workers — and subtracts from U.S. productivity growth and competitiveness.
American workers deserve better than a binary choice between an overpriced college degree program and a patchwork of public and private job training programs of uneven quality. Instead, U.S. leaders should equalize opportunity for workers, regardless of what path they choose. This means building a world-class education system that is inclusive of all options, not just college, to ensure greater upward mobility for American workers.
There is nothing abnormal about deviance. This is a lesson I learned growing up during the 1950s and early 1960s in an Italian American neighborhood called Collinwood on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio. While the neighborhood had plenty of conformity, there was also sufficient forbearance for enough deviance to make life interesting and educational.
Years later in the early to mid-1970s, I found myself a Ph.D. student in a seminar on the works of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. I was pleasantly surprised that the lesson I learned growing up was one of Durkheim’s important sociological insights into our common life.
Durkheim showed that deviance performs at least four important functions in society. It affirms our cultural values and norms; clarifies our moral boundaries; brings us together; and encourages social change by challenging our views. Moreover, our neighborhood was a good example of what’s called the Durkheim Constant: there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior that a community will tolerate since deviant behavior causes conflict.
Pandemic K-12 public school closings disrupted learning nationwide, with the average student in grades 3 through 8 losing the equivalent of half a grade level in math achievement and a third of a grade level in reading achievement.
The federal government’s response was a K-12 financial relief package of three bills for states and districts totaling $190 billion. The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief package was the largest one-time federal investment in K-12 schools, with a Sept. 30 deadline to commit funds for specific uses.
Are the relief dollars making a difference in the learning loss recovery effort? There is good and bad news as students and teachers return to school.
The good news is that these funds are having a positive effect on helping students catch up. The bad news is they are insufficient to return all students to pre-pandemic learning levels. Additionally, we don’t know which newly funded programs helped students catch up.
Over the past few years, there has been a rise in illiberalism across the United States. One of the most concerning places where this is occurring is at our higher education institutions, the very place that is supposed to nourish freedom of thought and the free exchange of ideas. According to the 2024 College Free Speech Rankings report by College Pulse and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), almost two-thirds of surveyed college students believe that it is acceptable to “shout down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus.” While there are many reasons for this intolerance of different viewpoints among college students, one very important reason is due to poorly constructed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at these institutions. Diversity, inclusion, and equal access to opportunity are important values but can be harmful when implemented with the wrong approach. These programs have been heavily influenced by anti-racism, an ideology that promulgates that all racial disparities are due to racism and calls for unending discrimination in order to make up for past injustices. An ideology such as this elevates race as the most important attribute, pits racial groups against each other, and increases intolerance for those that differ in opinion because if you are not anti-racist, you are a racist.
This intolerance has seeped deep into our higher education institutions, and I have seen it first hand in the classrooms. For example, I took a political science class this past year at the University of Michigan and one day, we were debating about DEI and its funding at the university. The first student who spoke for the side of “increasing funding for the university’s DEI program” ended their argument by saying “and if you don’t support a strong DEI program, then you shouldn’t be here.” This was followed up by a round of finger snaps from the students’ side which showed that they supported the message. Now, whether or not the student meant that you shouldn’t be in the classroom, in the class, or at the university, is not important. The message was clear, an opposing view of the DEI program was unwelcome. I believe that this moment perfectly encapsulates what DEI currently stands for. A program that calls for diversity and inclusion, and yet does not value diversity or inclusion of differing opinions.
This intolerance, however, is not exclusive to the University of Michigan. An analysis by the EAB, an education consulting firm, of 130 statements by U.S. and Canadian universities on racial justice and anti-racism in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police found that 60% of the statements included some sort of short-term institutional commitment to anti-racism. This ideology is clearly not a fringe theory at our higher education institutions and has some substantial, negative consequences for free inquiry. A statistical analysis by the Heterodox Academy, a non-profit advocacy group working to protect free speech and viewpoint diversity on college campuses, found that “the size of a university’s DEI bureaucracy is […] strongly correlated with how students feel about allowing controversial conservative speakers on campus.” This means that the larger the DEI bureaucracy, the more intolerant students are of allowing controversial conservative speakers on campus. For example, when looking at support for preventing a speaker who once said “Black Lives Matter is a hate group”, a predicted 66% of students at universities with the smallest DEI bureaucracy support the prevention while a predicted 80% of students at universities with the largest DEI bureaucracy support the prevention. Furthermore, the study also found that “the size of a university’s DEI bureaucracy is significantly and positively correlated with student support for disruptive action.” More specifically, “universities with the largest DEI bureaucracies are predicted to have student populations” that are 19 percentage points “more supportive of shout-downs,” 10 percentage points “more supportive of blockades,” and 12 percentage points “more supportive of violence” than student populations of universities with the smallest DEI bureaucracy.
While this study does not indicate causation, it does show that there is a strong connection between the size of university DEI bureaucracies and intolerance of conservative speakers, who usually hold a differing opinion from the majority of students at liberal universities. However, this does not mean that DEI must be dismantled. Instead, it needs to be reimagined. First, these programs must distance themselves from anti-racism as there is no benefit in following an ideology that calls for continuous discrimination based on race which pits racial groups against each other. This only creates division among students and intolerance for differing opinions. Second, there must be a commitment to diversity and inclusion, not only of different races, but also of different political perspectives. In a time of rising illiberalism, universities should be at the forefront of free speech, allowing for different viewpoints to be disseminated and debated. Only then, will students of all different perspectives feel like they belong in the classroom and the university community.
Looking back on the past 40 years, many working-class Americans are justifiably glum about their economic position in the country.
According to opinion research conducted with working-class Americans (defined as those without a college degree) over the past year for the Progressive Policy Institute’s Project on Center Left Renewal, two out of three believe the working class is worse off today than it was four decades ago while only one in five believe the working class is better off. Despite overall displeasure, working-class Americans do retain hope for the future and look specifically to improved educational opportunities as a possible pathway to economic mobility for their children and themselves.
However, this research finds working-class voters divided on which political party will actually advance their educational and economic interests.
The next administration must confront the consequences that the American people are finally facing from more than two decades of fiscal mismanagement in Washington. Annual deficits in excess of $2 trillion during a time when the unemployment rate hovers near a historically low 4% have put upward pressure on prices and strained family budgets. Annual interest payments on the national debt, now the highest they’ve ever been in history, are crowding out public investments into our collective future, which have fallen near historic lows. Working families face a future with lower incomes and diminished opportunities if we continue on our current path.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) believes that the best way to promote opportunity for all Americans and tackle the nation’s many problems is to reorient our public budgets away from subsidizing short-term consumption and towards investments that lay the foundation for long-term economic abundance. Rather than eviscerating government in the name of fiscal probity, as many on the right seek to do, our “Paying for Progress” Blueprint offers a visionary framework for a fairer and more prosperous society.
Our blueprint would raise enough revenue to fund our government through a tax code that is simpler, more progressive, and more pro-growth than current policy. We offer innovative ideas to modernize our nation’s health-care and retirement programs so they better reflect the needs of our aging population. We would invest in the engines of American innovation and expand access to affordable housing, education, and child care to cut the cost of living for working families. And we propose changes to rationalize federal programs and institutions so that our government spends smarter rather than merely spending more.
Many of these transformative policies are politically popular — the kind of bold, aspirational ideas a presidential candidate could build a campaign around — while others are more controversial because they would require some sacrifice from politically influential constituencies. But the reality is that both kinds of policies must be on the table, because public programs can only work if the vast majority of Americans that benefit from them are willing to contribute to them. Unlike many on the left, we recognize that progressive policies must be fiscally sound and grounded in economic pragmatism to make government work for working Americans now and in the future.
If fully enacted during the first year of the next president’s administration, the recommendations in this report would put the federal budget on a path to balance within 20 years. But we do not see actually balancing the budget as a necessary end. Rather, PPI seeks to put the budget on a healthy trajectory so that future policymakers have the fiscal freedom to address emergencies and other unforeseen needs. Moreover, because PPI’s blueprint meets such an ambitious fiscal target, we ensure that adopting even half of our recommended savings would be enough to stabilize the debt as a percent of GDP. Thus, our proposals to cut costs, boost growth, and expand American opportunity will remain a strong menu of options for policymakers to draw upon for years to come, even if they are unlikely to be enacted in their entirety any time soon.
The roughly six dozen federal policy recommendations in this report are organized into 12 overarching priorities:
I. Replace Taxes on Work with Taxes on Consumption and Unearned Income II. Make the Individual Income Tax Code Simpler and More Progressive III. Reform the Business Tax Code to Promote Growth and International Competitiveness
IV. Secure America’s Global Leadership
V. Strengthen Social Security’s Intergenerational Compact
VI. Modernize Medicare
VII. Cut Health-Care Costs and Improve Outcomes
VIII. Support Working Families and Economic Opportunity
IX. Make Housing Affordable for All
X. Rationalize Safety-Net Programs
XI. Improve Public Administration
XII. Manage Public Debt Responsibly
Britain’s Labour Party celebrated July Fourth with an overwhelming victory. It will hold at least 411 of the 650 seats in Parliament, taking power after 14 years of Conservative rule with a clear mandate for change.
Its Manifesto, or party platform, describes five national missions, including one on education and workforce training named “Break down barriers to opportunity.” Details are provided in a companion 130-page reportfocused on “Learning and Skills.“
Labour’s education and workforce training agenda for working families in the United Kingdom is similar to those numerous states and communities in the U.S. are creating under the banner of career pathways programs. It also has similarities to the bipartisan bill reauthorizing the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives and is under consideration by the Senate.
