Apprenticeship is engrained in America’s history — three of our Founding Fathers started their careers as apprentices. George Washington, for example, apprenticed as a land surveyor. Yet even with this 250-year runway, apprenticeships have not taken off in the United States as they have in other advanced nations.
In 2021, our country had 593,000 registered apprenticeships, mostly in traditional sectors such as building trades and heavy industry. As a share of their labor force, Great Britain, Australia, and Germany have roughly 10 times more opportunities. It is puzzling that the U.S. hasn’t followed its peers in scaling up apprenticeship, a training model that is also a job, allowing people to work and earn while they are learning the critical skills necessary for good jobs and careers. It’s an especially relevant model now, when most U.S. jobs require at least some postsecondary education and training, and when employers, even in our tight labor market, report a serious shortage of skilled workers in their fields.
While many progressives have seized on the panacea of “college for all,” the reality is that 62% of American adults have no bachelor’s degree, and that number rises to 72% for Black adults and 79% for Hispanic adults. Additionally, The college earnings premium appears to be declining for the first time in decades, with 40% of recent college graduates working in jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree. Soaring college tuition costs, low completion rates, and heavy debt burdens are further pushing the American public to rethink the value proposition of a four-year degree.
Recent data proves this changing mindset. A fall 2021 survey of 1,000 high school students found that the likelihood of attending a four-year college dropped by nearly 20% in less than a year. In the spring of 2022, there were 662,000 fewer students enrolled in undergraduate programs than the previous spring, constituting a drop of 4.7%. And a report from the fall of 2022 elevated survey responses from more than 1,500 Gen Z youth and 600 employers, finding that 81% of employers think they should look at skills rather than degrees when hiring and 72% of employers stating they don’t see a degree as a reliable indicator of job preparedness.
It’s clear that America needs alternatives to a four-year degree that are affordable, trusted by employers, and help people learn the technical and digital skills that today’s jobs require. Our nation’s oldest pathway — apprenticeship — is a viable solution.
While apprenticeship pre-dated our nation, it wasn’t until 1937 that the U.S. passed the National Apprenticeship Act (NAA). This law established the Registered Apprenticeship Program (RAP) as it exists today. To meet the requirements of a registered apprenticeship, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), or a federally recognized state apprenticeship agency vets apprenticeships for quality and rigor. The work training curriculum must align with industry standards and enable apprentices to earn a portable, nationally recognized credential. Depending on the industry, Registered Apprenticeship can last from one to six years and typically includes 2,000 hours of on-the-job training and 144 hours of technical instruction. While originally developed for the skilled trades, these opportunities have been expanded into new and in-demand industries like health care, technology, and advanced manufacturing.
Even though the legislation is nearly a century old, registered apprenticeships continue to have an impact on economic security. Individuals who complete an apprenticeship earn an average annual salary of $77,000 compared to an average national salary of $55,000. Those who complete an apprenticeship program also earn an average of $300,000 more than those who don’t over the course of their career.
In addition to helping workers find good jobs and careers, these programs offer an array of benefits to employers. Apprenticeships help businesses boost recruitment; increase the diversity of their workforce; improve retention (94% of apprentices stay with their company after the apprenticeship wrap); preserve institutional knowledge; and leverage skilled, experienced workers close to retirement to serve as mentors and instructors. For roughly every dollar spent on apprenticeship, employers get an average of $1.47 back in increased productivity, reduced waste of time and cost, and greater front-line innovation.
Apprenticeship is a model employers can trust, helping to ensure talent is prepared for in-demand opportunities while also providing a quality postsecondary path for young Americans who are questioning the traditional four-year degree. It also is highly attractive to adult learners, who are older and have increased barriers to accessing and completing skill development opportunities due to child care or the need to keep working. Apprenticeships are the original work-education model, allowing adult learners to learn the skills they need without sacrificing a wage and providing education that is applied — ensuring learning connects immediately to the workforce.
To ensure more American workers and businesses benefit from these opportunities and keep pace with other partner nations, our country must dramatically scale up apprenticeship and create roughly 10 times more, reaching the end goal of 4 million apprentices in this country. To get to this number, it is not only a matter of boosting public investment, but also requires a new policy architecture in which public, nonprofit, and private intermediaries play a catalytic role in training and placing apprenticeships in companies.
In America, education has been famously coined the “great equalizer.” This should mean that regardless of who you are or where you are from, if you have access to education you can succeed and advance in our economy. While it is true that quality education from a young age ensures long-term prosperity and leaves people better off, not all education is created equal. Access to education, especially at an early age, is not only difficult to find, but varies greatly in quality.
The lack of effective learning opportunities for young children is a fundamental flaw in our nation’s education system. High-quality preschool and other early education options provide children with social, emotional, and motivational skills that close school-readiness gaps. These socio-emotional skills also have positive effects on an individual’s educational success and lifetime earnings, increasing upward social mobility across demographics.
While quality prekindergarten learning environments are critical to the future well-being of individuals, these opportunities are inaccessible to the majority of American families. Private programs have high tuition rates, and the publicly funded programs do not reach as many people as they should. The public program Head Start, which is available to families from low-economic backgrounds, reaches only 41% of income-eligible households. Aside from cost, availability is a huge roadblock for families — with 51% of the U.S. population residing in a child care desert.
In addition to access, quality education is also more difficult to find for low-income Americans. Lower-quality education reduces the impact of pre-K on a child’s development and later success. The quality of programming is critical but greatly varies depending on where you live. In economically disadvantaged communities, even when programs are available they face higher rates of negative student-teacher interactions and worse structural quality.
The federal government currently addresses early education through a patchwork of different programs and funding streams aimed at solving different challenges of the early care conundrum. The last federal appropriations bill, which funded the federal government and associated programs for the 2022 fiscal year, included $11 billion for Head Start and $6 billion for The Child Care Development Block Grant, which provides families from low-income backgrounds financial aid for child care. Additionally, the Preschool Development Grant Birth Through 5 Grant (PDGB-5) received only $290 million. This grant is for state and local governments to improve their preschool’s infrastructure, provide states with comprehensive evaluations of their current programs, and other general funding to improve learning outcomes.
Despite these investments, it is clear our country does not have a cohesive early education policy, which disrupts the reach and efficacy of existing programs. Even without a strong national effort, however, some states and districts across the country have figured out ways to expand access and offer high-quality early education programs. For example, Washington, D.C., subsidizes two years of full-day preschool for district residents. Since 2017, 9 out of 10 of D.C.’s four-year-olds have been enrolled in publicly and privately funded programs. Students in these public programs are effectively mirroring the population demographics, as the percentage of applicants and the percentage of matched students are almost equal across all races and income levels. Elementary students in D.C. have shown academic improvement in reading since 2007, outpacing the national average for large cities. Another example is Oklahoma. The state also boasts a successful pre-K program, serving 70% of the state’s four-year-olds. Today, third-graders in Oklahoma who attended its pre-K program had stronger socio-emotional skills, and performed better in math.
These outcomes demonstrate D.C. and Oklahoma’s ability to provide high-quality and far-reaching education. The state of Oklahoma meets 9 out of 10 quality standards of the Nation Institute for Early Education Research, including extensive professional development, small class sizes, and a continuous quality improvement system. Washington, D.C., has developed a comprehensive system called CLASS to evaluate their program on an annual basis, ensuring quality and consistency for the district’s students. While politically D.C. and Oklahoma could not be more different, leaders in both regions understand that early education is fundamental to the future success of their constituents and that this public investment yields strong return on investments.
Bipartisan support amongst the states can make it all the more possible to develop a comprehensive, national approach to early education. The federal government should define standards and create a quality evaluation system that encourages effective learning environments, addresses teacher-student ratios, cultural diversity, and minimum training requirements for teachers. Policymakers would not have to start from scratch either. Leaders can look to D.C. and Oklahoma, or to other national leaders like The National Association for the Education of Young Children, to ensure federally funded efforts have strong outcomes for pre-kindergarten students.
To effectively implement a national early education policy, federal leaders should coordinate and expand their current programs and funding streams to create a more comprehensive early education system that meets the needs of all young students. The PDBG-5 should be expanded and improved upon to enable and incentivize state and local governments to build education programs that meet the national standards established by the federal government. State programs need the resources and guidelines to create effective and far-reaching programs that lead to strong learning outcomes. Expanding support of state programs does not mean that Head Start has to go away, either. Recent studies argue that Head Start is successful at improving cognitive skills and school-readiness for students who would otherwise be learning at home. The funding for federal and state pre-kindergarten programs should be attached to quality standards, including a comprehensive annual evaluation system, which would help programs ensure stronger socio-economic outcomes and mobility for our nation’s most disadvantaged students. Federal and state programs should be designed to work together to reach every student from low- and middle- income homes, turning the current patchwork of programs and funding for early education into a wide-reaching system that works for all Americans.
Expanding access and developing quality standards needs to be addressed nationally. These efforts can help states and regions offer high quality early education programs that foster equality, collaboration, and consistency. Oklahoma, D.C., and federal programs like Head Start demonstrate that publicly funded programs with the right quality guardrails are successful and have strong impacts on child well-being and their future success. If we want to close readiness gaps in education and ensure upward mobility for all, we need to start with early education and development, making “education as a great equalizer” ring true for the generations to come.
Montana is making progress on creating more school choices for families, but it needs to ensure the quality of choices families have to choose from is good. Thus, lawmakers should carefully decide between competing public charter school bills pending in Helena. One focuses on public charter schools’ core purpose: improving student outcomes. The other is likely to polarize communities, politicize education, and doesn’t guarantee high-quality new schools for its students.
HB 549 would make each of Montana’s 302 school districts a charter school “authorizer,” which is the term for the entity that grants a charter school the right to exist and to use taxpayer dollars to provide free public education. HB 549 would effectively turn the state’s school boards into fiefdoms with the power to deny a charter school sought by its citizens, no matter how much the community wants it. That could pit parents against one another and roil school board meetings. While well-intentioned, it invites chaos around what should be professional, pragmatic decisions based on merit, not emotion.
To further understand why this is a bad idea, consider research from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) — the nation’s foremost authority on charter school authorizing practices. After studying authorizing practices nationwide for 15 years, NACSA released a report that nailed “the” critical element in authorizing that produces high-quality schools. NACSA Executive Director Karega Rausch wrote, “When there’s institutional commitment, the work of authorizing is visible, it’s part of the larger organization’s strategic plan and goals, and it’s adequately resourced.”
The United States’ education system overemphasizes college advising and prep coursework, while work-based opportunities and career preparation programs are overlooked and under-resourced. The reality is that most Americans do not earn college degrees — either forgoing college altogether or enrolling in college but not finishing — often leaving them with crushing student debt.
In an effort to address a lack of career readiness in high school curriculums, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) released a new policy brief “Reinventing High Schools: The Importance of Exposing Every Young Person to the World of Work,” detailing innovative approaches to ensuring high-quality career instruction is infused in every young person’s educational experience. Report author Taylor Maag, PPI’s Director of The New Skills for a New Economy Project, offers policy recommendations and calls on leaders to adopt solutions that: ensure every high school student can participate in high-quality work-based learning; boost public investment, and make resources more effective; and build strong cross-sector partnerships which are critical for these efforts to succeed.
“Career learning and experiences are critical for an individual’s success after high school — preparing young people for the world of work and providing strong alternatives for those not interested in or unable to access a four-year degree,” said Tayor Maag. “It is time for our education system to undergo much-needed reform and finally reinvent high schools.”
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Find an expert at PPI and follow us on Twitter.
It is the end of February in Indianapolis. I arrive at a newly developed building complex that houses Ascend Indiana — a nonprofit intermediary organization that connects Hoosiers to in-demand careers and regional employers to skilled talent, fostering cross-sector partnerships, building capacity, and developing insights that enable system-level change to transform the career trajectory of youth and adults in the community.
As part of their efforts, Ascend partners with EmployIndy, the local workforce board, to offer the Modern Apprenticeship Program (MAP). MAP is a three-year program designed to prepare Central Indiana high school students for the workforce with paid, hands-on experiences that complement their traditional academic coursework. Apprentices start in their junior year and pursue jobs in growing fields such as business, advanced manufacturing, and IT. Afterward, they can continue to college or jump right into their career.
While visiting Ascend, I had the pleasure of meeting three of these youth apprentices. They all are extremely impressive, going to school full-time while also advancing in their apprenticeship program — with positions working in human resources, talent acquisition, and business management. High school students earning college credits, a wage, and critical job skills; this type of opportunity was not available to me and my peers in high school.
In fact, most young people in our country still don’t have access to high-quality career learning experiences like MAP apprentices. This is a result of our nation’s education system over-emphasizing college prep coursework and advising, while career preparation programs are overlooked, under-resourced, and even discouraged by federal and state policy. While we know that college — specifically a bachelor’s degree — often leads to higher long-term earnings, most Americans still do not earn degrees, with many forgoing college altogether, and many — 39 million to be exact — enrolling in college but not completing a degree. They are left with student debt and without a credential of value.
This trend is expected to worsen as young people increasingly question the career and financial benefits of traditional higher education. As a result, students aren’t attending, or are postponing their college plans altogether, which is apparent in the sharp declines in college enrollment among recent high school graduates. Rather than just focusing on college prep in their academic curriculum, students seem to be looking for ways to infuse career relevance into their education.
Career education does exist in schools today, for example, through our nation’s Career and Technical Education (CTE) system. CTE funds most of career learning in K-12 and these programs seek to provide students with academic and technical skills and the guidance needed to make informed career choices. Data shows that CTE concentrators, or students that have completed at least two CTE courses in a pathway, have a 94% high school graduation rate, which is 8% points higher than the national average. Additionally, CTE concentrators are employed full-time at higher rates and earn more than non-concentrators throughout their career. Yet even with promising outcomes, one in four high schools don’t offer CTE at all and out of roughly 15 million public high school students across the country, only 3 million are CTE concentrators.
It is clear the CTE system has its limitations. Funding is a big one. The federal government spends over $57 billion annually on our nation’s secondary schools. This investment does not include the majority of public funds for K-12 which come from the state and local level or the $122 billion in relief from the American Rescue Plan Act. Of all that, the CTE system receives roughly $1.3 billion annually for both youth and adult career education. As a result, only $600 million of total CTE funds goes toward K-12 to support career learning and experiences.
Compared to other public resources for secondary education, that truly is a drop in the bucket. School districts trying to provide career learning opportunities cite insufficient funding as the biggest barrier to offering these options in high school. However, funding constraints are not the only challenge. Inconsistent state support and the stigma that often attaches to career-oriented coursework and its students result in programs of widely varying quality and accessibility. Additionally, logistical hurdles, like recruiting and retaining qualified instructors, inflexible scheduling of programming, and finding willing employers make it especially hard to offer a critical element of CTE: work-based learning.
Work-based learning programs, like MAP in Indianapolis, can include apprenticeships, pre-apprenticeships, internships, and on-the-job training, among other options. These opportunities help young people gain the knowledge, skills, and credentials needed to achieve strong career outcomes. Work-based learning is beneficial for all young people but can be especially useful for individuals from low-income backgrounds and others who may otherwise not have access to career exposure, educational opportunities, professional networks, and social capital that play a critical role in career success.
The popularity of work-based learning has surged in recent years, with new energy and activity from the public and private sectors. States and locals can now leverage federal CTE dollars for these activities while also including work-based learning as a program quality indicator. While roughly half of states selected work-based learning as a quality indicator for their CTE programs, early data from these efforts demonstrated mixed success, with fewer students than expected accessing high-quality opportunities. The pandemic was a factor in these outcomes, especially for young people in rural and underserved communities that lack an extensive employer base or access to the necessary digital tools to access virtual options.
Faced with these obstacles, it is no wonder schools have continued the outdated approach of focusing on college prep coursework and have generally ignored career education in high schools. However, it can’t be ignored any longer. These opportunities are critical for an individual’s success after high school — preparing young people for the world of work and providing strong alternatives for those not interested in or unable to access a four-year degree. It is time for our education system to undergo much-needed reform and finally reinvent high schools.
This brief calls on policymakers to do just that — elevating innovative approaches across the country, like MAP in Indianapolis, that can be replicated and scaled. It also offers policy recommendations, calling on leaders to adopt solutions that: ensure every high school student can participate in high-quality work-based learning, boost public investment, and make these resources more effective and build strong cross-sector partnerships, which are critical for these efforts to succeed. This work is more important now than ever to ensure our nation’s education system creates paths to greater economic opportunity and avoids leaving millions of young people behind, especially those who don’t go to college.
Maybe it’s because New Jersey voters support public charter schools by a 2:1 margin. Maybe it’s because of achievement data. Maybe he’s moderating his positions in advance of a potential presidential run. Or, maybe he’s finally listening to frustrated parents. Regardless, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy recently took a softer line on public charter schools by allowing 11 in his state to expand to accommodate wait-listed students. We applaud his decision and encourage other Democrats to follow his lead.
Charter schools are free, open enrollment public schools that operate outside of traditional school district bureaucracies. In many states, they are concentrated in cities where most parents cannot afford private school tuition if their assigned district school is lacking.
Parents love them because they generally get better results than district schools operating in poor, urban environments. For example, Camden is New Jersey’s poorest city by most measures. On the first state assessments since the pandemic began, 52.9% of Camden’s charter school students were meeting or approaching English Language Arts (ELA) state standards in the fall of 2021. On the same test, only 35.5% of traditional public school students met or approached the ELA standard. Math was even tougher for Camden’s students, but again, public charter school students outperformed their traditional school counterparts at 29.5% to just 13.7% in meeting or approaching state standards.
The education of school children has long been a contentious issue in American politics. At its heart, its purpose is to prepare young people for the future. Parents, elected officials and communities grapple with how to best to do this, how and where schools should be built and how to fund them. Unfortunately, the legacy of segregation, white flight and the hollowing out of urban communities has left many low-income Black students stuck in poor, underperforming schools that don’t prepare them for the future.
Politicians of both parties have made a lot of hay about the state of inner-city and majority Black schools. As the party that largely controls many large urban centers, and overwhelmingly wins the African American vote, Democrats politically own the outcomes in most of these jurisdictions.
The Democratic Party has pushed to increase funding for low-income schools, aiming to solve a perceived lack of funding equity. However, the districts with the most income and racial segregation actually tend to spend more on low-income and minority schools than on wealthier, typically white-dominated ones.
Join PPI’s New Skills for a New Economy project on Wednesday, March 15th at 1:00 PM ET for a one-hour Zoom webinar on Getting Non-Degree Pathways Right: Expanding Opportunity and Ensuring Quality.
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. To meet these skill needs, many policymakers think we need “college for all,” but most Americans don’t earn degrees, and a bachelor’s or advanced degree, which takes extensive time and resources — shouldn’t be the only paths to good, middle-class jobs.
This webinar will address this challenge and offer bold and innovative approaches to expand non-degree pathways, for young people and adults alike. Speakers will discuss why these opportunities are important, how to ensure they are industry-aligned as well as how to encourage quality outcomes for program participants. Speakers will also elevate best practices and successes of non-degree programs while discussing persisting roadblocks in developing and sustaining these opportunities – highlighting potential policy solutions to mitigate these challenges.
Panelists discussing this riveting topic include:
Yuanxia Ding, Senior Program Manager, Amazon’s Career Choice Team
Shalin Jyotishi, Senior Policy Analyst, New America’s Center on Education & Labor
Dr. Ian Roark, Vice Chancellor of Workforce Development & Innovation, Pima Community College
Moderator: Taylor Maag, Director of Workforce Development at PPI
Join us to learn about the current state of non-degree pathways and this topics impact on America’s workforce and our economy!
This essay was published as part of Opportunity America’s report: Unlocking the Future – Toward a new reform agenda for K-12 education. The full collection of essays can be found here.
Introduction
For decades, US education reformers have struggled to narrow stubborn achievement gaps among White, Black and Hispanic students. With China driving hard to overtake America as the world’s largest and most dynamic economy, our country’s leaders should show a greater sense of urgency in closing another kind of achievement gap: the underwhelming performance of US students compared to their peers abroad.
As President Joe Biden often observes, the United States is locked in a “strategic competition” with China for economic and technological leadership in the 21st century. The United States won’t win this contest by continuing to tolerate mediocre public schools for the middle class and low-performing schools for low-income Americans.
China sees itself as the rising power in the world and the United States as a decadent and spent historical force. Under its ultranationalistic president, Xi Jinping, China is keen to demonstrate to developing countries the supposed superiority of its state-directed model for economic growth over the “chaos” of Western capitalism. Beijing also draws invidious comparisons between the “social harmony” enforced in increasingly totalitarian fashion by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and an America riven by internal political and racial strife.
In short, the rivalry between the United States and China isn’t simply commercial; it’s a contest of political beliefs and governing systems—liberal democracy versus Beijing’s new hybrid of markets and autocracy. At issue isn’t only which country will achieve the highest living standards and per capita wealth but also which will set global standards on trade, economic competition, climate change and human rights.
On the innovation front, the CCP has made no secret of its determination to mobilize state resources to help Chinese companies dominate the high-tech industries of the future—5G, supercomputing, AI, biotech, electric cars and batteries and more. China already leads the United States in electric car production, while US automakers are hobbled by a shortage of semiconductor chips, most of which are manufactured in Taiwan, China and South Korea.
Our national security also is at stake. China has been rapidly translating its economic clout into military power, with an eye toward a shotgun wedding with a democratic Taiwan; establishing hegemony over the surrounding seas; and pushing the United States out of East Asia.
To be sure, China’s rise isn’t inexorable. Hit hard by weakening global demand and a stern policy of “zero Covid” lockdowns at home, its economic growth rate recently has fallen by about half. Having been awarded an unprecedented third term by a compliant CCP in October, Xi continues to consolidate power in what looks like a return to a Mao-style dictatorship.
Xi has reined in China’s high-flying tech giants and is steadily extinguishing Hong Kong’s once-vibrant democracy. He has matched harsh repression at home with an aggressive “wolf warrior” diplomacy aimed at intimidating Taiwan and China’s neighbors and silencing international criticism of Beijing’s predatory trade practices, ethnic cleansing of Muslim Uyghurs and status as the world’s biggest carbon emitter.
These self-isolating policies have bred security fears across East Asia and triggered a strong political backlash in the United States and Europe. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to assume that China can’t change course. Its stunning national development over the past four decades shows that the United States can no longer take for granted our century-old status as the world’s biggest and most advanced economy.
Americans are faced with a clear choice: we can resign ourselves to being surpassed eventually by a Chinese economic and military superpower, or we can raise our game.
The Global Achievement Gap
For America’s public schools, that means a new resolve to narrow the global achievement gap. International comparisons of student performance indicate that our students have fallen well behind their counterparts in China and the Asia-Pacific.
For example, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide study that periodically compares the performance of 15-year-olds in 78 nations on mathematics, science and reading.
The latest PISA results show that in 2018, the United States ranked an underwhelming 25th in the world in average math, science and reading scores. Breaking the scores down, the US ranked 37th in math, 18th in science and 13th in reading. Chinese students were number one in each subject.
But perhaps the most dismal headline from the PISA tests is this: the performance of US teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, despite federal efforts to raise academic standards and create financial incentives for school improvement.
Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, is one of the chief architects of the test. Comparing scores, he found that about a fifth of American 15-year-olds hadn’t achieved the reading levels expected of 10-year-olds and consequently face “pretty grim prospects” in the labor market.
Also illuminating are the results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). These tests measure math and science achievement in fourth and fifth grade every four years.
According to the latest TIMSS results, US fourth graders ranked 15th among 64 participating education systems in math and eighth in science. Singapore and China were ranked first and second. US eighth graders ranked 11th of 46 in science and 11th in math.
Crucially, the TIMSS tests illuminate wide performance gaps between America’s top- and bottom-performing eighth graders. On math, for example, the US gap is larger than the gap in 31 of the 45 other participating systems.
Although many US students perform at high levels, these international tests show that, on average, US students significantly underperform their peers in China and other Asian countries on math, reading and science. The tests also highlight yawning performance gaps that reflect America’s deeply entrenched social and racial inequities.
These achievement gaps will not be closed overnight. So it’s all the more important that our political and education leaders start now by benchmarking US students’ academic progress against the high levels of proficiency in reading, math and science achieved by students in China and other Asian competitors.
A Call for National Leadership
It’s a formidable challenge—and President Biden ought to take it up. In fact, it’s hard to think of an American institution more ripe for “building back better” than our public schools. They are both formative to American citizenship at a time when democratic norms are under political attack at home and essential to our capacity to innovate and grow at a time when America’s long run of economic primacy faces a determined challenge from China.
Although public education in the United States always has been a primarily local responsibility, there is a Cold War precedent for invoking national interests and security to rally public support for a dramatic upgrade of school quality. In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite. This shocked a complacent America, prompting Congress to pass the landmark National Defense Education Act in 1958.
The law explicitly made improving public schools a national security imperative, galvanizing federal investments in science, technology and math education. In fact, it marked the beginning of Washington’s large-scale involvement in elementary and secondary schools, preceding the equity-oriented federal interventions of the 1960s.
Today, our political leaders should again forge a broad public consensus for harnessing public education as a national strategy for promoting science, frontier technologies and high-tech entrepreneurship. Equally as important, we need dramatic improvements in school quality to ensure that our students acquire skills comparable to those of our toughest competitors.
Hackneyed calls for new “moonshots” and Marshall Plans to solve this problem or that litter US political discourse. Nonetheless, only presidents have the standing to set urgent national goals. In the spirit of JFK’s race to the moon, Biden should challenge state and local school authorities to make our schools second to none in the world—and for all our students. In this way, the president could tap into both Americans’ patriotism and their love of competition.
Reaching for world-class standards of performance doesn’t mean making America’s schools more like China’s. The highly regimented way students learn in authoritarian countries with a collectivist ethos will not work in a liberal country like ours that values individual liberty and initiative.
China places a heavy emphasis on rote memorization and rigorous drilling for tests. The American path to educational excellence will be different, putting greater emphasis on creativity, inquiry-based approaches, diverse curricula and personalized learning. Nonetheless, US students will have to do a better job of mastering the fundamentals of reading, math and science, and here the international tests like PISA and TIMMS can help us mark progress toward closing the gap.
Complicating this challenge are the steep learning losses American students experienced when schools shut down during the Covid pandemic. The latest report from the National Assessment of Education Progress shows sharp declines in math and reading proficiency among students of all backgrounds in most states.
Only 36 percent of US fourth graders and 26 percent of eighth graders scored proficient or above on math tests. For reading proficiency, the scores were 33 percent for fourth graders and 31 percent for eighth graders.
These domestic test results, of course, augur ill for how America’s kids are likely to score in the next round of international assessments. US public school leaders need to go all out to make up for pandemic learning losses, which also will help prepare US students to chip away at the international achievement gap on math, reading and science.
Invest in National Change, Not the Status Quo
Another good reason to act now is that schools are awash with money. Since March 2020, Congress has passed a slew of pandemic relief bills that have included $200 billion for K–12 education. President Biden’s March 2021 American Rescue Plan alone includes $125 billion, the largest-ever federal investment in public schools. In July 2021, Congress passed President Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, which included $13 billion to bolster STEM in K–12, postsecondary schools and job-training programs.
Public schools can use this extraordinary federal bounty in a wide variety of ways. These include helping tackle pandemic learning losses with extended school years, after-school programs, summer school and tutoring. Schools can also spend federal dollars to upgrade facilities for healthy learning environments, equip students with wraparound social supports and stabilize and diversify the school workforce.
These are all important goals. But simply pouring money into our legacy education system, which wasn’t yielding the results we need pre-pandemic, is hardly the way to construct the more nimble, resilient and responsive public schools Americans have a right to expect post-pandemic.
The Covid shutdowns thrust America’s parents deep into the world of their children’s schools and the adults who run them. For many, the experience has been anything but confidence-inspiring. In addition to being fed up with school closures and steep learning losses, many parents are frustrated because they think school officials don’t listen to them. Popular pressure for change in how schools operate is building, and a crucial question is whether it will merely inflame our country’s tribal divides or give fresh impetus to modernizing an outdated public education system.
In the first scenario, public schools become the new front in America’s culture wars. In 2021, Republican Glenn Youngkin won an upset victory in Virginia’s gubernatorial contest by exploiting parents’ anger over a wide array of school-related grievances, from broadly shared concerns about shutdowns and unresponsive district bureaucracies to such right-wing bugaboos as mask and vaccine mandates and critical race theory.
This mix of fact and myth became the template for Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections. Although education was eclipsed by voters’ concerns over inflation, abortion and threats to democracy, it’s worth noting that one of the midterm’s biggest winners was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, an ardent GOP proponent of “parent power.”
In the second scenario, public consternation over how the pandemic has magnified all the pathologies of our legacy K–12 system—stubborn class and racial inequities, bureaucratic rigidity and inertia, antiquated labor relations and standardized, one-size-fits-all instruction yielding mediocre results—feeds cross-partisan demands for systemic change.
Americans who believe in equal educational opportunity and inclusive prosperity should be rooting for the second scenario. There’s a huge opportunity here for President Biden to speak to the public’s post-pandemic hunger for sweeping changes in their K–12 schools.
As the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) has documented, a new, 21st-century model for public education is incubating in such pioneering cities as New Orleans, Denver, Indianapolis, San Antonio, Newark and Washington, DC. The emerging model is built on parental choice of public schools, a shift in decision-making power from central bureaucracies to school leaders, diverse curricula, personalized learning and rigorously enforced performance contracts.
These and other hubs of innovation are producing new kinds of schools that go by a variety of names: innovation schools, renaissance schools, partnership schools and contract schools. Where these reinvention efforts have reached critical mass, gains in student attainment have been dramatically positive. As the PPI has documented, over the past 15 years, urban school districts that embrace the 21st-century model—offering families a choice of public schools, shifting decisions from central bureaucrats to autonomous public charter schools and holding these schools strictly accountable for performance—have produced the fastest academic gains among disadvantaged urban students.
In sifting through the PISA results, PPI analysts David Osborne and Tressa Pankovits report that OECD has detected positive effects for school autonomy, a key feature of the 21st-century model: “OECD found that the greater the number of schools with the responsibility to define and elaborate their curricula and assessments, the better the performance of a country’s school system, even after accounting for national income.”
In addition to more parental choice and school autonomy, a modernized K–12 system should be charged with creating more seamless transitions from school to work, especially for the 60 percent of young Americans who do not get college degrees. They deserve better than a binary choice between high-cost college degrees they may not need and low-quality public training programs. And whether college-bound or not, US students should learn about how job markets work and have opportunities for apprenticeships and other work-learning opportunities with local employers before they graduate from high school.
President Biden should use his bully pulpit to make closing the international achievement gap a national priority. He could take as his model the 1989 Education Summit in Charlottesville, Virginia. Cohosted by President George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas and chair of the National Governors Association, the summit convened 49 governors to focus exclusively on raising education standards.
Such a display of bipartisanship may seem inconceivable amid today’s red-blue culture wars. But Biden was elected in part to rise above today’s virulently negative partisanship, and Republican governors presumably are as eager as their Democratic counterparts to see America prevail in the intensifying contest with China for economic preeminence.
The Charlottesville summit was inspired by the landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk, which warned that the lackluster performance of US schools and students was imperiling America’s economic security. Biden could use a successor summit to challenge governors to use unspent federal education dollars to align state standards and tests with those in countries that dominate the international proficiency rankings.
Governors have their own discretionary Covid recovery funds (the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund), which should be dedicated to closing an international achievement gap exacerbated by the pandemic learning losses and our slow reopening of schools. They could also tap into a large pool of unspent money in the states’ Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund to invest in dual enrollment programs that allow high school students to enter college early and earn credits. Biden could also promise federal money to extend such gap-closing efforts past the 2024 deadline for spending American Rescue Plan funds.
Reinventing America’s public schools will require challenging stale dogmas on both ends of the political spectrum: the right’s insistence that the supposedly sacrosanct principle of “local control” trumps our national interest in a modern education system that supports US global competitiveness and the left’s defense of yesterday’s bureaucratic and highly centralized K–12 school model as the one true way to deliver public education for all times.
The United States is trying to prepare its young to compete in the knowledge economy with a factory-style school system designed for the industrial era of more than a century ago.
Amid populist attacks and rising public frustration with that system, it’s time to acknowledge that new school models aren’t a threat to the public education ideal, but the way to save it.
Democrats and Republicans couldn’t be farther apart in political outlook. With distance comes fear and loathing: Each party views the other not just as misguided but as an alien menace to their idea of America.
Nonetheless, neither party is monolithic. Each has internal cleavages, varying shades of opinion reflecting differences in race, class, ethnicity, gender, religion and age. When it comes to deciding elections, the fault line that matters most is the diploma divide.
Since 2008, white voters with college degrees have gravitated steadily toward the Democrats. According to researcher Zach Goldberg, they outnumbered non-college white Democrats for the first time in 2020, and now probably also exceed the GOP share of college-educated whites.
Republicans already have a massive advantage among blue collar whites, and in recent elections cycles have made inroads among non-college Hispanics, Asians and (on the margins) Black men.
PPI has long supported the expansion and reform of income-driven repayment programs that directly tie debt cancellation to a borrower’s ability to pay. Considering the high cost of a college education today, we believe policymakers ought to target relief to borrowers who are stuck with the debt of pursuing a degree without being able to reap the financial benefits of attaining one.
Accordingly, PPI was encouraged when the administration announced efforts to simplify and expand income-driven repayments. The current proposal should be commended for streamlining the array of repayment options, many of which have complicated terms and lengthy processes that deter enrollment by borrowers who would benefit, while also automatically enrolling eligible borrowers in an IDR plan. Additionally, the rule would offer new benefits for low-income borrowers with high loan balances. PPI supports efforts to make IDR more accessible, help distressed borrowers, and ensure affluent college graduates still pay their fair share for the benefits their degrees confer.
However, we are concerned that the proposed expansion is overly aggressive. Below is an analysis we submitted as part of the public comment period that shows the proposed rule will likely turn income-driven repayment from a safety net for vulnerable populations into a broad-based subsidy that Congress never intended. PPI estimates that a typical college-educated worker enrolled in the reformed program would only pay 2.5% of their income in student loan payments over 20 years, after which point the remaining balance would be forgiven. As a result, they would only end up paying three-fifths of the amount they initially borrowed, and not a dollar of interest.
With such generous terms for the average borrower, the new proposal is likely to become the new normal for most college students. Even families that can afford to save and pay for school with cash are likely to borrow money with such a generous subsidy for the vast majority of students. We are not alone in our findings: the Penn Wharton Budget Model and Adam Looney of the Brookings Institution both estimate that over 70% of college attendees would enroll in the revamped program. Whether it is through higher future taxes or inflation, workers who don’t have the opportunity to benefit from a college education will be stuck footing the bill for those who do.
By providing such a large and broad-based subsidy, the proposed changes would also encourage colleges and universities to avoid making the tough choices needed to contain costs, and would enable them to keep hiking tuition and fees faster than the growth in incomes and other prices. For these reasons, independent estimates have found that the cost increase associated with this proposal is likely to be between three and ten times as much as the $128 billion estimated by the Department of Education. It would also
Our comment urges the Department to delay implementation of this rule until it has conducted a more thorough estimate of the proposal’s cost to taxpayers and the impact it would have on the higher education financing system. It is our hope that the proposal is refined to be more carefully targeted toward those borrowers who leave college with low incomes and high debts. Insofar as higher education suffers from structural problems such as runaway tuition hikes, those are issues for Congress to address. Overly aggressive expansion of income-driven repayment is not a solution for structural financing problems, and as we have demonstrated, is likely to make them worse.
On the eve of last week’s annual School Choice Week celebration, the Supreme Court gave millions of parents, teachers, and students, including the public charter school community, a surprising gift. Many Americans are likely unaware of pending legal activity in Washington, D.C., that could dramatically alter public education as we’ve known it. The pending litigation is a big deal, and the Supreme Court acted with common sense by seeking outside advice on whether or not to take the case.
The case at issue is Peltier v. Charter Day School. The defendant, Charter Day School (CDS), has appealed an en banc ruling from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court. The Fourth Circuit’s ruling legally designated the North Carolina public charter school as a public school, finding that it had acted under the “color of state law” when it implemented a policy prohibiting girls from wearing pants to school.
President Biden’s State of the Union address comes at a turning point for the economy. Although fiscal stimulus was right for the economy in the depths of a pandemic recession, continuing to pursue legislation and executive actions that increase rather than reduce deficits undermines the Federal Reserve’s progress in controlling inflation. After a midterm in which a plurality of voters in exit polls ranked inflation as their number one concern and gave Democrats poor marks for their handling of it, Biden should use his speech to show that he will do the hard work to regain credibility on the issues of responsible fiscal management and inflation control. One way he could do this is by announcing a commission to review the recovery response and how policymakers can better address recessions and inflation in the future, which is an idea first proposed by PPI and endorsed in the New Democrat Coalition’s Inflation Action Plan last year.
The president also needs to lay a clear marker for the upcoming fight over the federal debt limit. He is right not to reward Republican hostage-taking with the full faith and credit of the United States. But with annual interest payments on the national debt set to eclipse defense spending by 2030 and Social Security by 2050, Biden should outline a process for better budget negotiations, such as the Responsible Budgeting Act and the TRUST Act, that he is willing to engage in good faith after Republicans take the threat of default off the table. Getting our fiscal house in order would help control inflation today and boost economic growth over the long term.
Finally, Biden should offer a real plan for making access to higher education affordable for all Americans. With the Supreme Court likely putting his attempt to enact roughly half a trillion dollars of mass student debt cancellation by executive action on ice, it’s not enough to simply blame “partisan lawsuits” for his inability to reduce costs and expand access in a responsible and sustainable way. He should challenge Congress to strike a “grand bargain” on higher education and workforce development that controls costs and expands opportunity for workers across the income distribution. This includes both forcing colleges to get more cost-effective and finding new pathways to good jobs for non-college educated workers.
This post is part of a series from PPI’s policy experts ahead of President Biden’s State of the Union address. Read more here.
We’d like to see President Biden call for reinstating the universal “free and reduced lunch” program that Congress let expire last June. Too many low-income children are hungry at school, and many are incurring debt because they can’t pay for their lunches upfront. The School Nutrition Association estimates that America’s school children have incurred $19 million in debt this year alone. Schoolchildren should not have to choose between empty bellies or empty wallets.
President Biden should also announce he will direct the U.S. Education Department (ED) to monitor the proliferation of school voucher and education savings account (“ESA”) program in the states. Last summer, ED added restrictions to the federal Charter School Program (CSP) on the types of schools that are eligible for federal grants, eliminating all for-profit charter schools. The Biden administration’s effort to restrict the use of the federal money by private education entities should not stop at the public charter schoolhouse door.
One rationale ED offered for the CSP rule change was to encourage more collaboration between traditional district schools and public charter schools. To that end, we would like to see the federal CSP expanded to include autonomous innovation and partnership schools that operate autonomously from a traditional district office, pursuant to a performance contract with the elected school board. They are proving to be a resounding success in states like Texas where they are known as “1882 schools” and in cities such as Denver and Indianapolis, where they are known as innovation schools. Biden should direct ED to establish an innovation category in the CSP to encourage more district-nonprofit partnerships that improve student outcomes.
Finally, we call on President Biden to direct ED to expand the Center of Educational Excellence for Black Teachers Program at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (CEEBT) program, and to lobby Congress to increase its funding. CEEBT is designed to support HBCUs with demonstrable records of graduating skilled, well-prepared, Black teachers. Researchers from Johns Hopkins and American University in 2018 found that having even just one Black teacher in elementary school makes Black children more likely to graduate high school and makes them more likely to enroll in college. With 15 states enacting educational gag orders, many of them centered on race, it’s important for the federal government to dedicate resources to increasing America’s Black teacher corps.
This post is part of a series from PPI’s policy experts ahead of President Biden’s State of the Union address. Read more here.
Never underestimate the power of New York City’s (NYC) and state teachers unions. For decades, even when the city was desperate for funds to run its schools, it was spending tens of millions to pay hundreds of teachers their full salary and benefits to sit around and do crossword puzzles, engage in other hobbies, or nap. Those teachers were consigned to reassignment centers — also derisively known as “rubber rooms” — because they were so problematic that they had to be removed from the classroom. Still, thanks to the United Federation of Teachers (UTF), and its affiliate, the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), the school district couldn’t, and still can’t, easily dismiss ineffective or even abusive teachers. Now known as the “Absent Teacher Reserve,” idle UFT members reportedly cost NYC $150 million in 2016.
That example gives context to the courage it took to do what Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul did yesterday when she released her budget proposal. In it, Hochul made good on a campaign promise to do what she could to allow new public charter schools to open in NYC.
Tens of thousands of students — most in communities of color — are on public charter school waiting lists in NYC, but there has been no relief in almost a decade for parents seeking better schools for their children. Since the passage of the state’s charter school law in 1998, the NYSUT and UTF, through their Democratic proxies in the state legislature, have artificially “capped” the number of charter schools permitted in the state, with a smaller subset cap for NYC. The law was amended in 2007, 2010, and 2015 to allow slight increases in charter school numbers, but then, thanks to Democrats’ obeisance to the teachers unions, progress ground to a halt. Charter school expansion has been synthetically halted in NYC for about five years, despite ever-growing, organic demand.
Too many teachers union leaders reflexively oppose public charter schools, not least because the vast majority of charters aren’t unionized. Charters cost unions dues paying members. They also embarrass them when they outperform traditional district schools, as most do in NYC.
Hochul’s budget does not propose doing away with the caps, even though a new poll by the nonprofit Democrats for Education Reform found that almost two-thirds of NYC parents want the cap lifted, including half of Democrats.
But a proposal to eliminate the cap likely would have been a fool’s errand. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx), once supportive of charters, couldn’t ascend to the speaker’s chair until he’d won the unions’ backing — and it’s obvious he had to make promises about maintaining the cap to get it. At the same time, Deputy Senate leader Mike Gianaris (D-Queens) has sung the praises of one charter waiting to open in his district, but he hypocritically refuses to even ease the cap because the NYSUT and the UFT are having none of that.
What Hochul did propose is more pragmatic, and hopefully will be more palatable to her legislative colleagues. Her proposal would keep the statewide cap of 460 charters in place — at least for now — but it would eliminate regional caps to make 85 more slots available for new charter schools anywhere in the state — including New York City.
NYC parents who don’t care how the sausage gets made but do care very much about their kids’ education should cheer Hochul on. But they should push themselves to keep an eye on the sausage-making, too. They must ensure their assembly members understand just how much this issue matters to them as the legislative session grinds on. It’s going to be a heavy lift.
And those of us who advocate for public charter schools need to raise our voices too — especially those of us on the Democratic side of the aisle. We need to praise Hochul for doing a hard thing; the right thing. We also need to hold her up as an example of a Democrat who has the courage — and the pragmatism — to understand that while Democrats appreciate union support, that doesn’t translate to permitting them to indefinitely trample constituents’ right to something as basic as seeking a decent public education for their children.
Join us! New Skills for a New Economy: The Rising Importance & Popularity of Youth Career Development
Thursday, January 19th at 2:00 PM ET
Join us on Thursday, January 19th at 2:00 PM EST for a one-hour Zoom webinar on the importance of preparing young people for career success. Speakers will discuss the policies and practices they are championing in their states and communities as well as the rising political will to ensure young people learn the skills needed to succeed in the U.S. economy.
The webinar is the first sponsored event by the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Skills for A New Economy Project and presents an opportunity to engage with stakeholders at the forefront of policy and practice in youth career development.
The webinar is co-sponsored by the New Skills for A New Economy Project, the Reinventing America’s Schools Project, and The 74.
Panelists discussing this riveting topic include:
• Hon. Jim Rosapepe, Maryland State Senate
• Don Fraser, Education Design Lab
• Lateefah Durant, Cityworks DC
Moderator: Taylor Maag, Director of Workforce Development at PPI
Join us to learn about the current state of workforce development policy and its impact on America’s young people and our economy.
