The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [82]
Most future dropouts begin to disengage from school during early adolescence, and during the middle grades achievement gaps often begin to grow. By the time students enter high school, they have one foot out the door and are not prepared to succeed in a rigorous college- and career-readiness high school curriculum. We should start with the feeder middle grade schools to low graduation rate high schools and ensure all students not only stay on track to graduation during the middle grades, but also are engaged in meaningful learning activities that leave them well prepared for high school.10
The reason for the long, slow fuse on high school dropouts seems to be the following:
Dropping out is a process that begins long before a student enters high school. Research shows that a student’s decision to drop out stems from loss of interest and motivation in middle school, often triggered by academic difficulties and resulting grade retention. Research also shows that a major cause of retention is failure to master content needed to progress on time, which in many cases, is the result of not being able to read proficiently as early as the 4th grade.11
The hard charge against teachers’ unions seems misplaced for other reasons as well. Teachers’ unions are not major hindrances in high-income suburbs, only in low-income schools. The unions have become a convenient scapegoat in urban areas because they divert attention from the real ills of urban poverty. Moreover, busting the unions seems on the surface to promise lower costs and higher quality. This is just one more magic bullet that distracts us from the hard, consistent work that we need to do to raise the quality of education for all children, and especially poor children.
Yes, we certainly need innovation in educational delivery and in ways to promote and ensure teacher competence. The best charter schools are providing new and innovative models (though charter schools overall have a mixed track record).12 It seems clear, though, that innovation will be best achieved through a high level of trust among school administrators, teachers, and the community, a kind of trust that can be achieved whether the teachers are in unionized public schools or nonunionized charter schools. Teachers’ unions will participate in this renovation and upgrading of education when they are partners of reform, not its victims.
Investing in Early Childhood
Even before first grade, however, we must also attend to the needs of the youngest and most vulnerable members of society, children ages zero to six. America is failing millions of young children every step of the way. Trying to make up for those failures starting after age six is far more expensive and less successful than starting at birth. As the Nobel laureate James Heckman and many of his colleagues have shown, the highest returns to human capital come from investing early, at the start of life.13 Yet instead of investing, we are leaving a large proportion of our kids to suffer a lifetime of adversity caused by growing up in poverty.
Our kids are the most vulnerable and poverty-ridden group today. It wasn’t always like this. A half century ago, the elderly were the social group with the highest rate of poverty, with 35.2 percent of those above sixty-five living below the poverty line in 1959. Then came the expansion of Social Security and the introduction of Medicare. The poverty rate of the elderly plummeted to 25.3 percent in 1969, 15.2 percent in 1979, 11.4 percent in 1989, and 9.7 percent in 2008. The pattern for children, however, has been a different story. In 1959, the poverty rate for children under eighteen was 27.3 percent. The rate fell to 14 percent in 1969 but then began a long-term climb to 16.4 percent in 1979, 19.6 percent in 1989, and 19.0 percent