The latest Census figures show real earnings for young college grads fell again in 2011. This makes the sixth straight year of declining real earnings for young college grads, defined as full-time workers aged 25-34 with a bachelor’s only. All told, real average earnings for young grads have fallen by over 15% since 2000, or by about $10,000 in constant 2011 dollars.
This statistic is fundamental to our understanding of the current economy. College graduates have jumped through the hoops that were supposed to give them a better life. They are supposed to have the skills that enable them to compete on the global economy. But something is going wrong. The fastest growing jobs now for young college grads include dental assistants, hairstylists, and bus drivers.
The middle-skill jobs that young college grads generally take (think sales agents, teachers, and financial analysts) continued to shed workers in 2011. And for the few high-skill jobs actively hiring (think engineers, web developers, and computer support specialists) most college graduates still lack the necessary training. That leaves many young grads taking jobs that don’t require a college degree for less pay. I call this “The Great Squeeze” – as college grads take the lower-skill jobs, they squeeze out those with less education and experience from the labor market. Nobody wins.
Given the prospect of falling real wages, coupled with rising college costs and debt, many young people are beginning to question the value of a college degree altogether. That means it’s essential whoever wins the election make the plight of young college grads a priority. Not making the investment in education is not the answer; ensuring there are better jobs upon graduation is.
The Chicago teachers’ strike is turning into an all-round debacle – for school children and their families, for President Obama and his party, and quite likely for the teachers themselves. Only Republicans are smiling, as the strike supplies fresh fodder to their campaign to vilify and weaken public sector unions.
By shutting down the city’s public schools over a contract dispute, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has left about 350,000 students in the lurch, not to mention their parents, who’ve had to scramble to find safe places to park them during the day. Even if you think the teachers have valid grievances, it’s hard to justify using Chicago’s public school students as pawns in a political test of will with city leaders.
Now in its fourth day, the strike also threatens to throw a monkey wrench into President Obama’s finely tuned campaign machine.
Chicago, after all, is the President’s home town. Its mayor, the sharp-tongued Rahm Emanuel, is Obama’s former Chief of Staff and a key political ally. The CTU, 25,000 members strong, is furious at Emanuel for pushing accountability measures it claims are unfair to teachers. And teachers’ unions are a potent source of votes and money for Democrats.
The stage is thus set for a family feud among Democrats at the worst possible moment – just as Obama seems to be pulling away from Mitt Romney.
Last week’s employment status report of America’s youth from the BLS shows the number of people aged 16-24 not in the labor force or enrolled in school in July continues to rise, despite the overall recovery in the labor market.
The number of youth “at loose ends” during the summer of 2012 totaled over 7.5 million – a 2% increase over the same month in 2011, and a 10% increase over 2007. These are young people aged 16-24 that were not working for pay, not actively looking for work, and not enrolled in school in July. I analyzed data from the Current Population Survey to get these numbers.
What’s likely happening is that potential young workers are being squeezed out of the labor force. I’ve written about the “Great Squeeze” before. As middle-tier jobs fall away, we see a shift down in the workforce. College grads squeeze out non-degree holders by taking jobs that don’t require a degree (and pay less). Those with less education squeeze out those with even less education. Eventually there are no jobs left for the youngest, least educated workers.
So, what are these 7.5 million young Americans doing on their summer vacation? Beach getaways and late nights out? Auditioning for American Idol? One Fed economist found an answer that may surprise most parents: “watching TV, playing video games and sleeping.” Of course we can also take comfort knowing at least some of these people are getting experience in unpaid internships, as they don’t count as being employed (statistically speaking).
How young Americans spend their summer vacation matters – for the 7.5 million young people in this category that aren’t unpaid interns, they are not getting the “real-world” experience that will enable future success. And we need them to be prepared for the economy they will inherent. Or at least able to pay for our retirement. That means doing what we can to fix the real problem: Getting young people the education and training that they need to prosper.
The Progressive Policy Institute hosted a forum to discuss the importance of holding charter schools accountable and closing those schools that are failing. David Osborne, Senior Fellow at PPI, released his report “Improving Charter School Accountability: The Challenge of Closing Failing Schools”
Accompanied by Greg Richmond, Nancy Van Meter, and Lindsey Burke, the forum stressed the potential for success of charter schools as a whole, but pointed to the importance of closing those charters that are failing their students. While the causes for failing schools was debated, there was a general consensus that these failing schools must do better and should be held to higher standards in their charters.
According to Osborne’s report, the primary way of achieving higher accountability and success is to start at the beginning, with the actual charters and authorizers. More training, larger staffs, better funding, and improved information are all critical to improving the quality of charter school authorizers and the schools that they are responsible for.
Today some 5,600 charter schools are in operation, with more than two million students. Some critics persist in a fruitless argument that these schools have failed, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. But regardless of your opinion about them, charter schools are here to stay. Those concerned about public education should quit debating whether we should have charter schools and instead focus on improving their quality. That will require us to do at least two big things. We must replicate the most successful charter models—the subject of a Progressive Policy Institute paper last year, Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best— and we must close down the worst charter schools— the subject of this report.
From the beginning, the charter concept was to give schools more autonomy—freedom to hire and fire their staffs and control their own budgets and curriculum—while still holding them accountable for performance. No charter would be allowed to fail its students year after year, as traditional public schools are often permitted to do. If their students were not learning, they would close.
This promise has not always been fulfilled. Hundreds of school districts have authorized charters then failed to invest in oversight. Even some statewide authorizers report that they have insufficient data to make merit-based renewal and revocation decisions.
Let me be clear: failing charter schools are at much greater risk of closing than other failing public schools. Still, if we are to harness their true potential, many states need to heighten that risk. In its first 10 years, the charter community focused mostly on quantity: getting charters open. Over the past ten years, it has focused increasingly on charter school quality. Today, it is time to open a third frontier: authorizer quality. The key to quality in the charter sector is quality authorizing.
In this report, I discuss why it is so important that authorizers close failing charters, review the facts about charter and authorizer performance, examine why some authorizers fail to close underperforming charters and propose solutions to these problems. To answer such questions, I have reviewed the literature and interviewed fifteen current or former charter authorizers and another ten experts on charter schools. In addition, thanks to the generosity of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), I have reviewed the data accumulated by its annual surveys of authorizers.
According to new calculations by the Progressive Policy Institute, the strongest growth in employment for college grads aged 21-29 since the end of the recession has been in jobs like dental assistants, bus drivers, hairstylists, and event ticket takers.
This sobering news may make recent college grads – and their bill-paying parents – wonder what exactly they’re getting for all the years and dollars invested in getting a degree.
According to data compiled by PPI, since May 2009 young college grads have seen big employment gains in occupations once held by those workers with less than a college degree. That includes healthcare support, transportation, personal care & service, and production jobs, which all saw employment gains of over 20% for those with a college degree or higher aged 21-29. Employment growth in office and administrative jobs – secretaries, file clerks, bank tellers, payroll assistants, etc. – increased over 10% for young college grads. Meanwhile, young workers with less than a college degree saw substantial employment declines in similar jobs.
PPI’s work on the growing debt burden facing young college graduates was cited in the Wall Street Journal:
The average debt load of all new graduates rose 24%, adjusted for inflation, from 2000 through 2010, to $16,932, according to the Progressive Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington.
PPI Economist Diana Carew’s work on the rising burden of student debt for young college grads was cited in the Wall Street Journal:
In the past decade student debt has surged as tuition and enrollment climbed. At the same time, college graduates’ earnings have declined. The average debt load of all new graduates rose 24%, adjusted for inflation, from 2000 through 2010, to $16,932, says the Progressive Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington. Over the same period, the average earnings of full-time workers ages 25 to 34 with no more than a bachelor’s degree fell by 15% to $53,539.
Finally, there is some good news for college grads. New data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) shows the median starting salary for the class of 2012 is 4.5% higher than their peers grading just a year earlier. That translates into a starting annual salary of $42,569, compared to $40,735 for the class of 2011. And since inflation (minus food and energy) increased 2.4% over the last year, the benefit to college grads in the class of 2012 is real.
A lot has been said about the growing pile of student debt college grads are facing, and how policymakers can find ways to alleviate the burden. But that’s just part of the struggle college grads are facing – as PPI noted in a study released earlier this year, the fact grads are becoming less able to repay this debt is just as important as the debt itself. What’s missing from the discussion on college grads is a solution that addresses this double whammy: right as the cost of going to college and debt per student is rising, real earnings have been falling. In fact, PPI found real earnings of young college grads aged 25-34 working full-time declined 15% over 2000-2010.
There’s been a lot of press lately about how young college grads are struggling. And they are – especially younger grads who have seen their real earnings drop 15% over the last decade.
But that’s missing a big part of the story. You see, when college grads struggle, that trickles down to all levels of educational attainment.
While the economy has officially been in “recovery” for almost three years, we are still about six million jobs short of when the recession began in 2007. But just because we’re short on jobs doesn’t mean the number of available workers decreased alongside it. In fact, the opposite is true – with natural population growth, the number of available workers across all levels of educational attainment continued to rise, for workers aged 25 and older.
Now we all know someone with a college degree generally makes a more desirable job candidate than a non-degree holder – after all, that’s the selling point of going to college (and a big factor behind the $1 trillion in outstanding student debt). So in the competition for the 2.2 million jobs that have been created since the recession officially ended, guess who loses? Answer: Those without education beyond high school.
The job market for new college graduates is healing, but very slowly. The unemployment rate for new college grads was 7.4% in the 12 months ending November 2011, just the same as a year earlier (by our definition, ‘new college graduates’ are people aged 21-26 with a bachelor’s only). That’s up from 3.9% in 2007, according to our tabulations of the Current Population Survey.
And for today’s college grads, a lack of jobs is not the worst of their problems. They are getting the short end of the stick, and the stick is just getting shorter as college costs creep ever higher. Over the last decade, the average amount of student debt for college graduates increased by a staggering 25%, in constant dollars. Yet the reality is this is not surprising, given how tuition costs have skyrocketed in the last ten years. According to the Department of Education, tuition costs and fees across all four-year colleges and universities increased by 32 percent from 2000-2010, with public institutions showing an average increase of 40 percent, all in constant dollars. Families are struggling to keep pace, which lead to two-thirds of 2010 college grads taking on debt before they even finished school.
What’s more, as student debt for young college graduates becoming a bigger burden, their real wages are falling. Over 2000-2010, average wages for full-time workers aged 25-34 with only a Bachelor’s degree fell by 15% percent, after adjusting for inflation. The same jobs their peers got just ten years earlier are paying less. So, just as college is getting more expensive, graduates are less able to pay for it.
This is an inconvenient truth that cannot be wished away. College grads are an important segment of the advanced skill workforce that we are relying on to get America moving again. Instead we find too many them living in tents, spending valuable time wondering how Adele could feasibly “set fire to the rain” instead of developing the next cancer treatment, the next manufacturing technology, or the next software designed to protect America’s borders. If they can’t find work, then where does that leave the rest of us? Perhaps we’ll all be living in tents, playing Hacky Sack and Frisbee, sooner than we think. Like it or not, this truth is here, and until we address it college grads will only become more frustrated and more disconnected. With good reason.
For new college graduates, the world is their oyster. Without many of the real-world burdens the rest of us face, they can do anything they set their mind to.
That is, unless they start their careers staggering under a pile of student debt. It would appear that student debt is one rather onerous real-world burden bestowed upon college graduates the day they are handed their diplomas—and this burden is causing them more stress now than at any point in the last decade.
Using data on average student debt and wages for young college grads, PPI has calculated the Payback Stress Index. This new measure enables us to quantify, for the first time, the increasing burden of student borrowing for today’s college graduates.
Based on the Payback Stress Index, PPI finds that paying off college debt was 58% more economically stressful for students who graduated in 2010 compared with students who graduated in 2000. Specifically, we calculated how long it would take to pay back the average student loan, given the average earnings of full-time workers aged 25-34 with only a bachelor’s degree. We then indexed that calculation to what the average repayment time was in 2000, assuming an interest rate of 6 percent, and assuming that the representative college graduate paid 5 percent of earnings at each repayment. The chart below of PPI’s Payback Stress Index maps the rise in financial stress facing each class of college graduates.
Climbing Stress Mountain, No End in Sight
The Payback Stress Index allows us to compare different graduating classes within a single framework. To be sure, the PPI Payback Stress Index works with averages, and uses certain assumptions that may not hold true for every graduate—each college graduate with a student loan has their own repayment term and some were able to take on no debt at all. We’re also assuming real earnings don’t change throughout the repayment period, which affects how long it takes to repay student loans.
Still, the sharp climb in student debt payback stress has no end in sight—leading young college graduates to wonder when, or if, they will ever make it to the top and come down the other side. It’s no wonder the younger generation has started giving the traditional benefits of going to college a second thought.
The U.S. Senate is finally getting around to reauthorizing the controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), something that was supposed to happen in 2007. Unfortunately, instead of fixing NCLB’s evident flaws, there’s a bipartisan push to fatally weaken the law as a credible tool for educational accountability.
A bill to renew the bill (known again by its historic title, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act) crafted by Sens. Harkin (D-Iowa) and Enzi (R-Wyo.) is being widely panned by education reformers. As Michelle Rhee points out, “by removing meaningful evaluations, the country would be taking huge step backward in the effort to reform our schools.”
In a rare moment of bipartisanship, Congress passed NCLB in 2002. It was designed to tie federal support to education (mostly through the Title I program of aid to schools in low-income areas) to improvements in student performance. Its signal achievement was to require local school authorities to measure the academic achievements of all students, including racial and ethnic subgroups. This provision meant that schools could no longer hide their failure to educate all students behind averages.
But NCLB’s critics pointed to several glaring flaws. One was the requirement that 100 percent of public school students reach proficiency in reading and math by the 2013-2014 school year. Not only is this standard deemed unattainable, but it puts too much weight on standardized assessments of widely varying quality.
Another problem with NCLB is its requirement that schools have “highly qualified teachers”. That sounds innocuous, but in practice it has led schools to hire teachers based on their academic credentials rather than their actual ability to teach. An abundance of data has shown that one of the quickest ways to achieve student growth is through an effective teacher. A “highly qualified teacher” by NCLB definition is one that is simply “certified and proficient” in the subject matter taught—regardless of how well those credentials translate into student learning, achievement, or growth.
The Harkin-Enzi bill kills the “100 percent proficiency” target, but doesn’t replace it with a better yardstick. Instead, it vaguely charges states to strive for “continual growth.” The bill is thus a throwback to NCLB’s predecessor, 1994’s weak Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA). This toothless measure paved the way for such lax accountability standards as Tennessee’s goal to “improve mean performance level(s) across grades by [an] average of .05” for grade-levels three through eight—hardly a worthy goal for true reform.
Harkin’s original draft required the states to adopt teacher and principal evaluations which would focus on both in-class observations and student achievements. Unfortunately, it was watered down in a redraft on Monday.
After the rewrite all the meaningful elements—save perhaps the mandate that states enforce a college-readiness standard—went by the wayside. The weaker version of the bill closely tracks a letter sent to the senators by teacher and principal advocacy groups, including the National Education Association. The gist of their message to the Senate was, “We appreciate the great reform ideas you’re proposing here but just please don’t implement them.” Also, the new version is clearly intended to assuage the “federal overreach” fears of GOP local control advocates.
In short, the bill not only omits concrete accountability standards, it also disregards the policy prescription that effective teachers—effective in the sense that the teacher actually impacts the student—are the key to true education reform. This ESEA reauthorization does nothing to positively impact an education system that is consistently failing the future of this country. The redrafting effort headed by Sen. Enzi on Monday is a clear message to reform-minded advocacy groups that the letters they are sending urging the federal government to do more in the way of education standards—such as the ones published by EdWeek and EdTrust—are not as effective as those sent by the teachers’ unions. In other words, you can speak loudly but you better carry a larger voting contingency.
Almost 30 years after the landmark study A Nation at Risk, and the subsequent hundreds of billions spent trying to ramp-up children’s mastery of basic skills through Head Start, Title 1 and No Child Left Behind, American school performance is stuck in wet cement. In the United States today, the majority of low-income children and a shocking one-third of their more affluent peers are behind when it comes to one key predictor of future achievement: fourth grade reading. Only 14 percent of African-American and 17 percent of Hispanic children are deemed “proficient” readers in fourth grade as judged by the National Assessment of Educational Progress scores.
Why is fourth grade so important? Because if children are not well on their way toward being confident readers by the age of 10, they will fall progressively behind in learning complex academic content. Researchers have found a nearly 80 percent correlation between being two years behind in reading at the 4th grade mark and dropping out of high school later.
But instead of meeting these pressing needs with modern approaches and new technologies, national education policy has unintentionally turned many of our schools into test-prep academies focused on standardized skill sets in a world that demands higher-level critical thinking. Policymakers also have ignored the central modernizing force of the 21st century—the creative media tools that have transformed nearly every element of life today except schools. In this policy brief, we suggest a new way to get over the early learning hump: Create a Digital Teacher Corps to unleash the untapped power of digital media to boost literacy among our most vulnerable children.
The model for this proposal is Teach for America (TFA), a non-profit civic enterprise that also receives some public funding from the Corporation for National and Community Service. We challenge U.S. foundations to create a competition for the best design for a non-profit organization focused on a specific goal: Ensure that 80 percent of all 10-year-olds are competent readers by 2020. The winning design would receive seed money to launch the Digital Teacher Corps, which would recruit and dispatch digitally proficient teachers into low-income school districts where they are most needed.
Simmering tensions between the nation’s largest teachers’ union and a highly acclaimed national service program boiled over this week. The National Education Association vowed to “publicly oppose Teach for America (TFA) contracts when they are used in Districts where there is no teacher shortage or when Districts use TFA agreements to reduce teacher costs, silence union voices, or as a vehicle to bust unions.”
Teach for America is a nonprofit organization that recruits graduates from leading universities to teach for two years in some of the nation’s most impoverished school districts. Study after study shows that TFA’s dedicated teachers are effective in lifting achievement levels among the poor and minority students they serve. Why would the NEA want to deprive our neediest kids of good teachers?
NEA member Marianne Bratsanos of Washington, who proposed the anti-TFA resolution, complained that the volunteer group undermines schools of education and accepts money from foundations and other funders who are hostile to unions. The key complaint, however, seems to be that TFA volunteers are displacing more experienced teachers, even in districts with no teacher shortages.
Full disclosure: I’m a TFA alum. You may discount my views accordingly, but the NEA’s indictment is very far from the reality I encountered on the ground teaching Language Arts to inner city kids in Charlotte, N.C.
TFA corps members fill vacancies in schools that many teachers want to avoid, or that are saddled with the least-skilled and effective teachers. Believe me, we don’t take jobs from good teachers who are making gains in student achievement. And it’s hard to see how TFA undermines schools of education. In fact, Teach for America has formed many successful partnerships with colleges of education to help train their recruits and provide ongoing development. TFA’s success in molding volunteers who bypass traditional education schools into good teachers may raise troublesome questions about the relevance and effectiveness of those schools, but whose fault is that?
Though green when I entered Teach for America in 2007, I quickly honed the requisite skills through classroom preparation, student teaching, and one-on-one time with my support staff. The first few months of actual teaching were difficult to say the least, but with the support and continuous development I received from TFA, my students demonstrated significant progress by the end of the year.
TFA isn’t anti-union, it’s pro-student. Its mission is to ensure that all children have a chance for an excellent education. It exists because there is a dearth of highly qualified and effective teachers in America’s poorest communities.
TFA members serve the lowest performing schools in 39 urban and rural regions. Teachers, known as corps members, commit to teach for two years to help end educational inequality. Applicants go through a rigorous application period, where approximately twelve percent of applicants are selected and around 4,500 first year teachers accept. Corps members begin their journey with five weeks of intensive training and are supervised by experienced teachers and support staff. TFA members are then provided with ongoing professional development and one-on-one support throughout their two years as teachers.
The Teaching as Leadership Model that Teach for America employs is different than the traditional training model used by many schools of education. Though many union members argue that the summer leadership institute is not the best way to insure excellent teaching, the proof is in the pudding.
In a 2010 study, Gary Henry and Charles Thompson found that TFA members had a greater impact on student success than teachers who graduated from a traditional school of education. A 2008 Urban Institute study likewise found that TFA teachers were more effective than other teachers in similar settings, including more experienced teachers and those certified in their field. Similarly, a NYC study concluded that TFA members were more effective in improving math and reading scores than those traditionally certified.
The RAND Institute has found that a five-year increase in teaching experience improved student achievement very little – less than one percentage point. Likewise, the level of education and the licensure scores held by a teacher had no effect on student achievement. Additionally, research has shown that corps members’ impact exceeds that of experienced and certified teachers in the same schools.
Policy Studies Associates, Inc. recently published a report that may explain why the NEA is kicking up such a fuss about Teach for America. “Ninety-five percent of the principals rated corps members as effective as other beginning teachers in terms of overall performance and impact on student achievement; sixty-six percent rated corps members as more effective than other beginning teachers, ninety-one percent of the principals reported that corps members’ training is at least as good as the training of other beginning teachers, sixty-three percent rated corps members’ training as better than that of other beginning teachers, and eighty-seven percent of the principals said they would hire a corps member again.”
In light of such evidence, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that what really rankles the NEA is competition, and worse, being shown up by the competition. Instead of trying to crush the competition, teachers’ unions ought to learn from it.
Here’s a thought for the NEA: why not work with Teach for America to develop ways to attract more talented college grads to teaching, and for that matter, encourage some of TFA’s two-year volunteers to go pro?
Graduation season is upon us, but the approximately 1.3 million high school students who dropped out this year won’t be hearing “Pomp and Circumstance.” These dropouts are disproportionately black and Hispanic, and overwhelmingly poor. Since failing to finish school contributes mightily to poverty and inequality in America, increasing high school graduation rates should be an urgent national priority.
Why do so many poor kids drop out? Some dwell on low expectations and a lack of motivation among kids who struggle to learn, get frustrated and eventually give up. But lately researchers have drawn attention to an under-appreciated reason that students drop out: pregnancy. Among dropouts, 30 percent of girls cite pregnancy or parenthood as a key reason they left school. According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, only 51 percent of teen moms earn a high school diploma compared to 89 percent of female students who did not give birth as a teen. The picture is even worse for the youngest mothers: just 38 percent of teen girls who have a child before they turn 18 have a high school diploma. For these teens, the task of balancing their education and a baby proved impossible.
Focusing on curbing the teen pregnancy problem will most certainly put a dent in the number of school dropouts. While teen pregnancy often causes students to drop out, being engaged in school can reduce instances of teen pregnancy. Teens who stay in school and are academically involved are less likely to get pregnant than their peers who aren’t as engaged. In other words, dropping out also increases the chances that a teen will get pregnant.
Unplanned pregnancy and childbearing are also implicated in the failure of many young women to finish their college education. Research shows that 61 percent of women who have children in community college don’t finish their degree, and less than two percent of teen mothers who have a baby before age 18 get a college degree by age 30.
The nexus between getting pregnant and dropping out adds yet another example to the dismal catalog of social ills that stem from family breakdown and too-early childbearing. Within three years of having a child, about one-quarter of teen moms go on welfare. Children of teen mothers are more likely to suffer abuse, end up in prison, and drop out of high school. High school dropouts are also more likely to rely on welfare and have higher crime and incarceration rates.
While teen birth rates in the United States plummeted by 37 percent between 1991 and 2009, the dramatic decrease may have fed a premature sense of complacency about the issue. There was actually an uptick of teen pregnancies between 2005 and 2007, when the rate rose five percent. In any case, the teen pregnancy epidemic is far from over. In 2009, about 410,000 teen girls aged 15 to 19 gave birth with the majority being Hispanic or African-American. What’s more, America’s teen pregnancy rate is up to nine times higher than that of most developed nations.
Now some social analysts worry that funding for teen pregnancy prevention will be a casualty of budget-cutting fever in Washington. An especially frightening proposition given that teen pregnancy prevention is already dealing with a short stack. In 2010, Congress appropriated $110 million for evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention programs. Meanwhile, the U.S. spends, nationally, nearly $11 billion each year to remediate the social consequences of teen pregnancy.
Yet House Republicans tried to eliminate this modest $110 million investment for FY 2011.They also tried to cut funding entirely for Title X, which is instrumental in helping provide teens and low income women with contraceptives and reducing the number of unintended pregnancies, teen pregnancies, and abortions. If Republicans are really serious about reducing the deficit, they need to realize that investing in teen pregnancy prevention saves money over time and resist cutting this funding. Because of the overall decrease in teen pregnancy rates, taxpayers saved $8.4 billion in 2008 alone.
The school dropout crisis isn’t cheap either — if graduation rates don’t improve, dropouts will cost us $3 trillion over the next decade. Cutting funding for teen pregnancy prevention means more dropouts, which means losses in tax revenue and more spending on welfare, prison costs, and Medicaid, to name a few.
Progressives ought to “just say no” to GOP efforts to balance the budget on the backs of America’s most vulnerable families. In fact, we’ll save money over the long run by investing more in cost-effective teen pregnancy programs. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has a list of such successful prevention programs here. Investing in them will pay double dividends, reducing both teen pregnancy and mitigating its related ills – including the drop out crisis.
Finally, there is some good news for college grads. 
Simmering tensions between the nation’s largest teachers’ union and a highly acclaimed national service program boiled over this week. The National Education Association 
