Raising the Quality
and Lowering the Cost of
Education
By Winograd and Hais
Millennials (young
Americans born
1982-2003) rate the
quality of education and
the cost of college near
the top of the list of
issues about which they
are most concerned, just
behind jobs and the
economy. This week,
President Barack Obama
responded to those
concerns with the
release of his plan to
fix the No Child Left
Behind Law and focus the
federal government's
efforts even more on
ensuring school's
deliver the results and
outcomes that
Millennials and their
parents expect from
America's institutions.
The announcement capped
a remarkable series of
events that saw
Democrats joining
parents and educators
across the country in
taking important steps
to address those
educational needs,
providing Millennials
new hope that their
investments in politics
and civic engagement
will finally pay off.
NDN's newest survey
research indicates that
Millennials, unlike all
other generations, rate
education generally, and
the cost of a college
education specifically,
as two of the top four
critical problems they
believe government must
address and fix.
Clearly, Millennials,
like older generations,
see a need to improve
public education in
America. And, in fact,
Millennials perceive
this need from a very
personal perspective.
While the Millennial
Generation is slightly
more positive about the
overall quality of
education in the United
States (41% positive/50%
negative) than older
generations (32%/62%),
they give significantly
lower grades to the
education they have
personally received than
older generations.
Seventy percent of
Millennials believe that
the poor quality of
public education stems
from a lack of money and
the way schools are
managed and organized.
Unlike the majority of
older generations,
Millennials are about
evenly split on whether
or not unions and work
rules are a major
problem in our system of
public education. In
response to attitudes
like these, an
increasing number of
urban school districts
are beginning to abandon
the strategy of
incremental reform and
adopting more radical
and dramatic changes to
address the concerns of
Millennials and their
parents.
In Rhode Island, the
Central Falls school
board fired all the
teachers, the principle
and the administrators
in an underperforming
high school where half
the 800 students were
failing every subject
and only seven percent
were proficient in math.
Unable to reach
agreement with the
teachers on how to pay
for the changes needed
to break this cycle of
mediocrity, the board
invoked the "turnaround
option" sanctioned by
the Obama
administration's school
reform initiative, which
allows school boards to
start over at failing
schools with a brand new
set of teachers and
administrators. Given
the President's
unwavering support for
systemic reform of
schools that fail to
educate children
embodied in his Race to
the Top initiative, the
White House's support of
the school board's
actions should not have
come as a surprise to
those still trying to
protect the status quo.
In Kansas City, Missouri
the school board, that
previously had stood in
the vanguard of those
believing primarily in
racial integration and
increased per pupil
spending as the solution
to the problems of
education in urban
environments, decided to
try a completely
different approach. Less
than third of Kansas
City elementary school
students are now reading
at or above grade level
and no more than a
quarter of most of their
schools' students have
achieved the levels of
proficiency required for
the skills they will
need in life. Faced with
these results, and the
prospect of running out
of money by next year,
the board voted to close
about half of the
district's schools in
order to "dramatically
enhance education for
each of our students by
combining our very best
teachers and very best
resources in fewer
schools," as Kansas
City's School
Superintendent put it.
But perhaps the most
dramatic news of the
week came from Detroit
where a coalition of
nonprofit organizations,
Excellent Schools
Detroit, announced its
plan to replace
Detroit's failing public
schools with 70 new ones
and make a $200-million
investment over the next
ten years in order to
achieve its goal of
graduating 90% of
Detroit kids from high
school by 2020 and
having 90% of graduates
go on to college.
Currently, about 58% of
students in Detroit's
school system and 78% of
those enrolled in
charter schools in the
city graduate from high
school, while fewer than
25% enroll in college.
The plan includes a push
for mayoral control of
Detroit Public Schools,
but more importantly the
establishment of an
independent commission
to grade every school in
the city, including
charters, every year
against a uniform set of
standards and outcomes
focused on achieving
educational excellence.
The new Standards and
Accountability
Commission will
establish a competitive
public education
marketplace complete
with report cards
grading each school's
progress against an
agreed upon set of
standards that will
enable parents to become
smart shoppers for their
child's education. The
commission will also
suggest closures in
order to weed out
failing schools, half of
which, under the plan,
would be closed or
replaced with schools
under new management by
2015. Like the Kansas
City solution, the plan
does not rely on
increased funding from
the state but rather the
commitment of Detroiters
to the future of their
children. The idea was
greeted with cheers from
everyone except the
members of the current
school board.
Meanwhile, back in the
U.S. Senate, a flurry of
phone calls and emails
from Millennials across
the nation, convinced a
majority of Democratic
Senators to join in an
effort to rescue Pell
grants for students
attending college from
dramatic cuts that would
have reduced payments by
60% for eight million
students and eliminated
the money altogether for
another half a million.
The House had already
passed the Student Aid
and Fiscal
Responsibility Act,
which would reform the
student loan program by
eliminating the current
subsidies to private
lenders who make student
loans guaranteed by the
federal government and
invest the money saved
in increasing the size
and availability of Pell
Grants. But six
Democratic Senators, who
should know better, had
argued that the nation
couldn't afford to
continue to make these
investments in its
future and should
instead continue to
underwrite the bank's
profits, even as
students on campuses
across the nation
demonstrated to protest
increases in tuition at
cash strapped state
universities.
Since Republicans were
united in defending the
interests of banks over
Millennials, the only
way to enact President
Obama's student aid
reform proposal was to
include the concept in
the budget
reconciliation package,
central to efforts to
finally pass health care
reform, which only
requires a simple
majority in the Senate
for passage. After
hearing from their House
colleagues on the
political benefits and
policy importance of the
concept, even budget
hawks like North Dakota
Senator Kent Conrad,
chairman of the Budget
Committee, agreed to
find a way to bundle the
two items by adjusting
the education portion to
account for a revised
Congressional Budget
Office cost analysis.
The principle driver of
the increased costs of
the program is the
popularity of this type
of college financial aid
among Millennials
struggling to stay out
of debt and still get
the education they need
to get a good paying
job. By combining ways
to reduce the cost of
college with a major
expansion of health care
in the reconciliation
package, Democrats have
taken a major step
forward in solidifying
the support of all
elements of the
Democratic Party's 21st
Century majority
coalition-from young
voters to minorities.
This new coalition
presents the best
opportunity for
Democrats to solidify a
dominant majority
coalition since FDR and
the New Deal. But key
members of the
coalition, especially
Millennials, are
currently not convinced
that voting in 2010 will
make much of a
difference, given the
results they have seen
from Congress in the
first year of the Obama
administration in the
election of which they
played such a
significant role. But
these recent events
suggest the country is
finally beginning to
listen to the voice of
this new generation and
address its concerns. As
educators and parents at
the grass roots of this
revolution begin to have
an impact in cities
across the nation, the
best thing that
Democrats in Congress
could do before this
week is out is pass both
health care and student
aid reform as part of
their budget
reconciliation process.
Doing so would finally
begin to align the
nation's budgetary
priorities with its
future and bring hope
for Millennials that
changes they can believe
in will continue to flow
from their investment in
the country's political
process.
