The Trump Administration’s Bold New School-Choice Plan

The Education Freedom Scholarship program proposed by Betsy DeVos and the administration’s congressional allies would be a huge step in the right direction.

American parents are demanding more and better K–12 options, and they deserve the freedom to choose the best educational environment for their children.

While most of the K–12 educational-funding and -policy decisions are appropriately housed in the states, an innovative new policy idea would allow the federal government to play a constructive role in expanding educational opportunity in America. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has unveiled a proposal for Education Freedom Scholarships, with corresponding legislation introduced by Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Bradley Byrne.

The plan would invest $5 billion annually in America’s students by allowing individuals and businesses to make contributions to in-state, non-profit Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) that provide scholarships to students. Contributors would receive a non‐refundable, dollar‐for‐dollar federal tax credit in return for their donations. No contributor would be allowed a total tax benefit greater than the amount of their contribution, and not a single dollar would be taken away from public schools and the students who attend them.

The plan mandates that scholarships must be used for an individual student’s elementary or secondary education, or for their career and technical education. Importantly, the plan’s implementation — including governance of SGOs, education providers, and education expenses as well as student-eligibility decisions — would be left to each state that chooses to participate. The plan would require states to distribute at least 90 percent of the funds as scholarships. Other than that, everything else about the program would be left up to each state.

To be clear, this legislation would not create a new federal program. No state or SGO would be forced to participate, and no family would be forced to accept a scholarship. The legislation respects federalism, the autonomy of parents and education providers, and the appropriate role of the states in K–12 education. It leverages the tax code in an innovative way to facilitate greater educational opportunity, and ultimately greater economic benefit for millions of students.

Why is this legislation needed? Our nation’s K–12 system is denying too many children access to a high-quality education; access to such an education is a moral and economic imperative; and school choice is overwhelmingly supported by voters and it works.

There are thousands of outstanding traditional public schools with fantastic teachers delivering a great education to students. But there are also millions of children throughout our country assigned to public schools that are not meeting their individual learning needs. According to the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), less than 40 percent of fourth- and eighth-graders are proficient in reading and math, and nearly 30 percent are scoring below a basic level. Fewer than 30 percent of young people today are eligible for military service owing in part to “inadequate education.”

Because the K–12 system is leaving so many children behind, voters are demanding more and better options. According to a January 2019 Beck Research poll commissioned by the American Federation for Children, 67 percent of likely voters support school choice. This includes of 80 percent of Republicans, 56 percent of Democrats, 69 percent of independents, 67 percent of African Americans, 73 percent of Latinos, and 75 percent of Millennials. An even higher overall percentage of voters — 69 percent — support a federal K–12 tax-credit scholarship.

True school choice means giving parents the full range of K–12 options for their children, including private school, the most maligned of those options among opponents of choice, despite years of research showing that it works for students. The Urban Institute recently released a second study of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which serves more than 100,000 lower-income students, 68 percent of whom are African American or Hispanic. According to the study, students in the program are far more likely to enroll in and persevere through college than their public-school peers. Depending on their length of time in the program, scholarship students are up to 99 percent more likely to enroll in college, and up to 56 percent more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree.

There is simply no question that access to the best learning environment for every child will improve educational outcomes across the board. There is also no question that this is a moral and economic imperative. The government tells us we have an 84.6 percent public-high-school-graduation rate. What is not well known is that we spend more than $7 billion annually on remedial education for high-school graduates, and untold billions more incarcerating teens and adults who never learned to read. Why should any family in this nation be told that it has to wait five or ten years for its assigned school to improve, or be forced to rely on a bouncing lottery ball to see if its kids can go to the school that best meets their needs?

Education Freedom Scholarships are not a silver bullet for what ails our educational system. But they would facilitate a much-needed expansion of educational choice and opportunity for America’s families and students. They’d give states wide latitude to expand students’ access to a variety of educational opportunities, including advanced, remedial, and elective courses; private and home education; tutoring; educational therapy; concurrent and dual enrollment; apprenticeships; industry certifications; summer and after-school education programs; transportation; and more.

The administration’s plan is an unprecedented opportunity for Republicans and Democrats to come together and allow states to directly empower families with greater educational freedom and choice. It should be supported by every lawmaker with a desire to put families and their children first.

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Increasing diversity is a challenge at Harvard graduate schools

The only way known to achieve it is to dumb the education right down -- and that would be a tragedy for Harvard graduate schools

Facing a stiff legal challenge to their admissions practices, Harvard officials have made an insistent case that they put a premium on assembling a racially diverse class of students for the undergraduate college, that, in fact, it is of utmost importance.

That sense of urgency means that minorities now make up slightly more of the student body than white students. But achieving diversity at Harvard’s 10 prestigious graduate schools has proven to be far more challenging.

Notwithstanding Harvard’s reputation and allure, few of its graduate schools enroll minority students from the United States at the same rate as the undergraduate college, even as foreign-born students flood those campuses.

At the design school, dental school, government school, and graduate school of arts and sciences, the percentage of African-American students doesn’t crack 5 percent, compared to 8.5 percent at the undergraduate level.

At six graduate schools, including the law school and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Hispanic enrollment is below 6 percent, compared to 11 percent of undergraduates.

At Harvard’s much-vaunted business school and the Kennedy School of Government, the share of black or Hispanic students has either barely budged or declined over the past decade. In the business school last fall, 5 percent of students were black — the same as in 2008. Hispanic students, who were 6 percent of Kennedy School students in 2008, were down to 4 percent last fall. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who identified as white increased during that time.

Harvard is not an outlier. Across the country, graduate schools provide students with advanced training that can often lead to higher earnings, but minority enrollment remains stubbornly low. Cost, fewer opportunities for financial aid, a lack of diversity among faculty, and curriculum are among the reasons experts say many minority groups remain underrepresented on these campuses.

“We still have a very long way to go,” said Suzanne Ortega, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, a trade group that represents graduate deans.

As they have throughout the recent federal trial over whether Harvard discriminates against Asian-American applicants, school officials insist diversity is crucial to the university’s educational mission, including at the graduate schools.

“Bringing together students from different academic, professional, and life experiences is central to the mission of graduate education at Harvard,” said university spokesman Jonathan Swain. “A learning and research community that is diverse on multiple dimensions enriches the education experience for all students.”

Harvard’s top administrators declined to comment on whether the graduate schools should do more to recruit and admit underrepresented minorities. Admissions priorities and strategies, Swain said, are left to the individual schools.

Several Harvard graduate schools said they look at diversity broadly, including race, gender, economic status, and international origin. Foreign students make up a far greater share of the student body at the graduate schools than at the undergraduate college. While foreign students account for about 12 percent of undergraduates, they make up about half the student population at the Kennedy School and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and are about a third of all students at three other graduate schools.

Still, some of Harvard’s graduate schools acknowledge that more must be done to expand diversity among students from the United States.

“We’re taking this very seriously,” said Douglas Elmendorf, who has been dean of the Kennedy School since 2016. “I don’t think there’s a single way to address these challenges. . . . Moving these numbers can be difficult. We have to keep at it.”

Harvard officials contend that graduate school admission officers necessarily draw from a smaller, more specialized applicant pool, making comparisons to undergraduate admissions difficult. They say the high price of graduate schools, with tuition ranging from $29,000 to $73,440 annually, can be a deterrent for minority and low-income students. Harvard does offer many students earning master’s degrees partial financial aid, but full scholarships for tuition and fees are rare, and students are expected to take out loans to attend.

Donors are eager to expand access and affordability for undergraduate education, but graduate education is still seen as optional, said Maritza Hernández, associate dean of enrollment and student services at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

“We can’t cover 100 percent of need, but we try to spread what we have among as many students as we can,” said Hernandez. The university’s education school is considered among the most diverse on campus, with African-Americans making up 10 percent of its students, an even larger share than enrolled in the undergraduate student body.

Even for Harvard, recruiting graduate students can be surprisingly difficult, Hernandez said. Many are older, settled in life, and sometimes reluctant to move to the Boston area from across the country for a master’s or doctoral degree, she said. The results have been disheartening to some students and have sparked protests and rallies at Harvard in recent years.

“The number of students of color at the graduate school is abysmal,” said Ivy Yan, 25, a second-year law school student, who also earned a bachelor’s degree at Harvard.

Harvard’s graduate schools are among the premier master’s and doctoral degree programs in the country, training future physicians, politicians, CEOs, academics, scientific researchers, and theologians. Right now, Yan said, those schools don’t reflect the diversity of the country as a whole.

At the law school, nearly 10 percent of students are Asian-American, slightly more than 6 percent are black, and about 5 percent are Hispanic.

Officials from several of Harvard’s graduate schools said they are expanding recruitment and adopting new approaches. But the efforts vary.

Some schools are growing programs that introduce prospective minority students to Harvard by bringing them to campus events. Many have bolstered relationships with tribal colleges and historically black institutions. Some are trying to get on the radar of high school students who might one day consider an advanced degree, and reaching out to nonprofits that work with low-income, first-generation students.

Harvard Business School is trying to incorporate more black business leaders and black-led businesses in the case studies professors use and it plans to hire its first chief diversity officer. The Kennedy School last year hired an associate dean of diversity, inclusion, and belonging.

“We want to do better on achieving diversity than we have done before,” said Elmendorf, the Kennedy School dean.

Some of the fastest-growing jobs require master’s degrees for even entry-level work, and if minority students aren’t earning advanced degrees, they will be left behind by the transforming economy, said Ortega, the president of the graduate schools group.

Ortega sees reason for some optimism. Hispanic student enrollment in graduate schools has been increasing by about 6 percent annually for the past decade, according to an annual survey by the council.

Growth of African-American students, however, is expanding at a much slower annual rate of 1.3 percent, compared to 2.7 percent for Asian-Americans, according to the report. Native American enrollment in graduate schools has been shrinking by 3 percent a year.

“Progress is unevenly distributed,” Ortega said. “There’s a real need in all communities for leaders with the skill sets that graduate education empowers.”

Several Harvard minority students said they are seeing some changes, whether it’s a more inclusive curriculum that incorporates discussions of race and equity, or an acknowledgment that some schools may need more faculty of color.

But several said Harvard, with its $39 billion endowment, must do more to help graduate students with financial aid and provide more support to help students succeed when they get to campus.

For those on campus, being among a handful of minority voices can be isolating.

Raquel Sofia Sandoval, 24, a second-year student at Harvard Medical School, said that in one introductory class she was the only Latina and much of the work had to be done in teams. Her teammates often ignored her comments or kept talking over her, Sandoval said, making her feel like an outsider and forcing her to consider whether she belonged at the university.

“When you’re on the receiving end, it really makes you question: What have I done?” said Sandoval, whose family is originally from Colombia and now lives in Houston.

After talking to other minority students, she realized it wasn’t unique to her. Sandoval worked with medical school faculty to develop more curriculum offerings that incorporate readings and discussions about race and micro-aggressions into the team work, so minority students could be more certain to have a voice.

“There’s so much room for change,” Sandoval said. “We’re training the physicians of tomorrow, and we’re thinking about the populations these physicians will serve. We need to think about what kind of students we should be admitting.”

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Colleges and Income Mobility: Undermatched, Overmatched and More

A potential academic contretemps between some giants in the economics profession has emerged relating to the issue of the role that colleges play in promoting intergenerational income mobility—the ability of lower-income Americans to use education as a means of achieving prosperity and sharing in the American Dream. One remarkable thing about this dispute is that it is led largely by women and nonwhite males, not the white males who dominate most of modern economics.

On the one side is Raj Chetty, a Harvard educated economist now at Stanford, and his team of colleagues located mostly at East Coast Ivy League schools. Chetty is an economics wunderkind, a recipient of the American Economic Association’s highest award, the John Bates Clark Medal, as well as the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. The team’s data on incomes of students attending American colleges is widely used, recently by myself on a widely watched national news commentary show. On the other side is the remarkably prolific writer on the economics of education, Stanford’s Caroline Hoxby, arguably America’s most distinguished African-American female economist, and her coauthor, the University of Virginia’s Sarah Turner. Among other things, Professor Hoxby is known for advancing the “undermatch” hypothesis, namely that some very bright members of minority groups often end up going to schools of lesser quality than those they are capable of attending. Some able members of minority groups reduce their chances for future national distinction.

Chetty’s Opportunity Insights project uses a massive amount of federal income tax data to look at the incomes of parents of students attending college and the subsequent post-graduate earnings of their student offspring. They demonstrate, for example, that at some 38 colleges, more kids attended school from the top 1% of the income distribution than the bottom 60%. The data purportedly show the degree to which colleges promote income mobility—by low-income kids moving up the economic ladder. But the Hoxby and Turner findings show that some findings of, for example, low-income mobility, are skewed by such factors as the geographic location of the college. It is harder for the University of Connecticut to attract lots of low-income students, for example than the University of Maine because Maine is a poorer state.

The Chetty findings, heavily promoted by the New York Times, have led many colleges to alter admissions policies, but in some cases in devious and questionable ways. For example, the number of students barely eligible for Pell Grants seems to have soared (denoting greater interest in low-income students), while the number of low-income students just above the Pell Grant eligibility line has declined because colleges are gaming the system to claim they have more “Pell eligible applicants.”

I have always been a little mystified by this debate. It is unquestionably laudable to encourage kids with lower incomes to apply to good schools. But for every “undermatched” student I suspect there have been at least five that have been “overmatched” —accepted at schools above the level best fitting their academic record. This has been argued by others (e.g., Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor) to be a negative result of well-intended affirmative action programs, leading to unfortunate unintended consequences such as low bar examination passage by minority law school students.

The Chetty data show the average income of families of kids attending Ivy League schools is roughly $500,000 a year, with the median income much lower but still a hefty $200,000 or so. Our nation through tax policies and lucrative government subsidies for research favors public assistance to these schools. This is arguably inappropriate on equity grounds. The reality is that many low-income students, burdened by dysfunctional family and school attributes, have difficulty faring well in college, and some of them end up without degrees but with significant college debt. And it is true that some colleges give discriminatory treatment for children of mostly affluent alumni (legacy admissions). If colleges reach out with a wide net in recruiting students, accept them strictly based on academic potential with deep discounts for kids from poor families, they would be doing the right thing. For those seeking quotas based on income, gender, race, etc., this might seem inadequate but would be consistent with a merit-oriented system showing compassion for the less fortunate.

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