Are Students Today “Relatively Poorer” Than in 1971?

Former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has taken to the pages of theWashington Post to let you know thatyou shouldn ’t listen to people who tell you that “education reform” hasn’t worked well. At least, that is, reforms that he likes—he ignores the evidence thatprivate school choice works because, as far as can be gathered from the op-ed, he thinks such choice lacks “accountability.” Apparently, parents able to take their kids, and money to educate them, from schools they don’t like to ones they do is not accountability.Anyway, I don ’t actually want to re-litigate whether reforms since the early 1970s have worked because as time has gone on I’ve increasingly concluded thatwe do not agree on what “success” means and the measures we have of what we think might be “success” oftendon ’t tell us whatwe believe they do. These are, by the way, major concerns that I ’ll be tackling with Dr. Patrick Wolf in a special Facebook live event on Wednesday.Join us!Rather than assessing the impacts of specific reforms on what are often fuzzy and moving targets, I want to examine one crucial assertion that Duncan says needs to be “noted”: students today are “relatively poorer than in 1971.” To back this, Duncan links to aPostarticle from 2015 that said, “For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families.” The article is based on areport from the Southern Education Foundation, whi...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs