Dana Goldstein

In New York's Mayoral Race, Who Will the Teachers' Union Endorse?

Update 2, 5:50 pm: The UFT has endorsed Bill Thompson.

Update 1, 5 p.m: The UFT executive board has recommended Bill Thompson for mayor. Now the 3,400 Delegate Assembly will vote.

This evening, the United Federation of Teachers, the nation's largest teachers' union, will endorse a candidate for mayor of New York City. Most close observers believe the pick will be either Bill Thompson or Bill de Blasio. Thompson is the former city controllor and former head of the now defunct Board of Education, which was abolished when Mike Bloomberg gained mayoral control of the city's schools. In 2009, Thompson shocked New York politicos when he came within just a few points of defeating Mayor Mike Bloomberg in his bid for a third term. Yesterday, Thompson was endorsed by the principals' union, and he had already won the support of Randi Weingarten, the president of the national American Federation of Teachers, to which the city UFT belongs. Bill de Blasio is the current city public advocate and a former member of a Brooklyn community school district board -- another body abolished by mayoral control. He is running generally to the left of the rest of the field, and has already received a major union endorsement from SEIU 1199. (The candidate with a modest lead in the polls, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, has been booed at UFT events, and is seen as overly aligned with union foe Bloomberg.)

On education, Thompson and de Blasio have staked out many similar positions. Both are in favor of continuing mayoral control, but with checks and balances from a more independent Panel for Education Policy. Both are skeptical of standardized testing and are in favor of "moratoriums" on school closings and charter school co-locations within public school buildings. Both have said they would end the Bloombergian practice of appointing school chancellors who built their reputations in fields other than education. Both say they might continue the experiment in weighing student test scores in teachers' evaluations, but in reality, this is not a city-level issue; New York State's new teacher evaluation law, crafted in response to President Obama's Race to the Top competition, requires that student data be included. Thompson's campaign chairwoman is Merryl Tisch, a state education official who strongly supports Race to the Top. 

The candidates' divergences on education policy are ideologically idiosyncratic. De Blasio says generously endowed charter school networks, like Eva Moskowitz's Success Academies, should pay rent if they use space in public school buildings, a position in line with a failed lawsuit filed in 2011 by a group of parent activists who often ally with the teachers' union. Thompson opposes rent for charter schools. But de Blasio also supports ending seniority-based teacher layoffs. Here, he is agreeing with the education reform movement embodied by Mayor Bloomberg and often opposed by the union. Thompson's position on seniority remains unclear. 

To my mind, the major education policy difference between Thompson and de Blasio is that de Blasio supports raising taxes on city residents who earn more than $500,000 annually -- from 3.86 to 4.3 percent -- which could theoretically provide a way to fund the many education extras he is proposing, such as universal pre-K, community and health services within public school buildings, and more arts education. Thompson, on the other hand, has said, "Let me be blunt, so there’s no misunderstanding: I’m not raising taxes."

You'd think this would swing the UFT endorsement toward de Blasio, but that may not be the case. For one thing, only Albany has the power to raise taxes, and there is scant evidence that Republicans and moderates there would be willing to take the lead of a progressive Democratic mayor on this issue. Last week I interviewed Peter Goodman, a veteran UFT teacher, organizer, and staffer, who remains active in the union's retiree chapter. Within the UFT, there is a concern that should de Blasio win the Democratic nomination, it could strike so much fear in the city's tax-averse corporate elite that "they would pump money" toward the campaign of Joe Lhota, the leading Republican, Goodman said. Union leaders are also cogniszant of the coalition-building that could come from allying with a strong, black Democratic mayor. "Having an African American candidate is a good idea," said Goodman, who was a strike leader in 1967 and 1968, when the city schools convulsed with conflict between union teachers and black and Latino activists and civil rights groups, who supported more parent control over schools. 

"If you look at Tweed," Goodman said, the headquarters of the Department of Education, "and who works there, they are very white. And I think things like that, you have to be very sensitive to. To ignore it is at your own peril, and I think this [Bloomberg administration] leadership has done that. To me, that’s one of the great failings. This is an enormously multi-ethnic city and demographics are destiny."

Civil rights organizations are split in their approach to teachers' unions. The NAACP, for example, has joined the UFT in suing New York City to stop school closures and charter school expansions in low-income neighborhoods. From Washington, however, national civil rights-oriented advocacy groups, like Education Trust and the Children's Defense Fund, have been more supportive of charter schools and the push for teacher accountability. 

New York's mayoral election will have big implications for school reform nationwide. Have parent activist opponents of standardized testing and charter schools -- who generally support "millionaire's taxes" to fund community schools -- organized themselves into a force strong enough to sway a major union endorsement toward a left candidate like Bill de Blasio? Or will pragmatism prevail? The shape of the race will be clearer after tonight's UFT endorsement. 

For more: Read Philissa Cramer on the union's endorsement process.

On Doing Well to Do Good

Dylan Matthews has an interesting report about a group of young American and British professionals with progressive social values and high-paying jobs in finance and tech. The subjects of the piece are unusual because they are giving away between a quarter and a half of their incomes each year, typically to health and anti-poverty charities operating in sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, inspired by the philosopher Peter Singer, they say they have chosen handsomely paid jobs, like high-frequency trading, because they aspire to give away as much money as they can. 

I'm a fan of some of the organizations, like GiveDirectly and GiveWell, that are loosely part of this movement toward ethical, high-impact giving, with few or no requirements for the individual recipients of aid. Yet I worry about an ethical stance in which any career choice is socially responsible, as long as one pledges to give generously to charity. The fact is, the number of people who choose to make millions in order to give money away is infinitesimal; the ability to donate generously is usually cited as a guilty liberal's justification for richly rewarded work in fields, like finance, that can be defined by bad social values, such as lobbying for lower corporate tax rates, taking advantage of low-income consumers right here in the United States, and bad labor practices. That's not to say progressives should never work on Wall Street or for Big Food/Pharma/Tech; indeed, we need social justice-committed people within those fields to argue and work for ethical change. But the ethical behavior must go beyond individual philanthropy itself and toward efforts to make corporations better American and global citizens.

What We Talk About When We Talk About "IQ:" Algebra and School Quality

The now-unemployed Jason Richwine is portraying himself as a numbers-driven policy wonk who has been unfairly pilloried for a nuanced, intellectually sophisticated Harvard dissertation, whose only crime was questioning liberal pieties on race and IQ. Byron York:

Richwine and others also pointed to the fact that his ideas were expressed most completely in a dissertation done at Harvard, of all places, under the supervision of a group of distinguished scholars, and that the dissertation was accepted and Richwine was awarded a Ph.D. It seems unlikely that a Harvard dissertation, finished in 2009, would qualify as hate speech, his defenders contend. But that is how it was portrayed in the controversy.

Over the past several days, I dove more deeply into Richwine's dissertation arguing that Hispanics are innately less intelligent than whites, and thus should not be granted citizenship. Let me acknowledge at the outset that I disagree profoundly with Richwine's conclusion. I find it inhumane to argue that political rights be conditioned on a test score. Richwine and the Heritage Foundation also downplay the reality that many important jobs in our economy--picking tomatoes, delivering food, cleaning buildings--require little formal education or demonstrated intellectual ability, and that native-born Americans will not do them. 

But what I want to address here, at greater length, is the attention this controversy has put on IQ testing as a means of judging innate intelligence. What do measurements of IQ actually consist of? Does Richwine's analytic work stand up to scrutiny? He argues that education can do very little to help Hispanic immigrants achieve. So does he demonstrate familiarity with the educational and economic research on poverty, schools, and human capacity? 

Richwine's dissertation may not be hate speech, but I emerged from it surprised that this document garnered a Ph.D from the nation's preeminent university. Richwine fails to grasp the difference between testing academic achievement and testing innate cognitive ability, claiming that an exam that includes algebra can be used to draw conclusions about inherited IQ. He explicitly ignores the well-documented, historically persistent reality of educational inequality across the United States, assuming that the only "environmental" factors that affect a child's test score are ones inside the home.

In Chapter 2 of the dissertation, Richwine acknowledges that the "language bias" in most American IQ tests makes it difficult to assess the intelligence of native Spanish speakers or those who grow up in Spanish-dominant homes. He therefore argues that gaps between Hispanic and white performance in math provide the strongest evidence of innate ability differences between the two groups. He draws many of his conclusions from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which collected IQ scores from nearly 12,000 individuals who took the Armed Forces Qualification Test.

Is the AFQT an accurate measure of genetic cognitive ability, as Richwine claims -- as distinct from academic achievement?

As Richwine writes, the AFQT "was designed for 17 and 18-year olds who speak English and have taken algebra." Some students in the data set may not yet have enrolled in algebra when they took the exam, so Richwine adjusts for school-entry cutoff birth dates. This ensures, he writes, that his entire sample has completed the same number of years of schooling, and thus their cognitive abilities can be accurately compared to one another using this test that includes algebra.

Here I was taken aback. I don't know about you, but I was not born knowing how to solve for x. It was taught to me at school, by teachers. Was Richwine truly claiming that 12 years of schooling in Scarsdale, for example, was equal in quality to 12 years of schooling in East New York? Was he claiming that there is no significant inequality in schooling across the the United States that could help explain differences in scores on a math test? As I continued to read, this did, in fact, emerge as Richwine's argument. From pages 65-66:

Sure, academic standards are more uniform today than they were 100 years ago, and we give schools more funding, even in the "inner city." But to claim that school quality no longer "varies enormously" is shockingly ignorant. Affirmative action in college and private school admissions does nothing to guarantee the typical young Hispanic child access to effective preK-12 schools or teachers; in fact, in recent decades, American schools have become more segregated by race and class, with the poorest children most likely to be stuck in low-quality schools. We know these children do much better when we get them into better schools and classrooms, because we've tried it. Poor kids score higher than their racially and socioeconomically identical peers when they are enrolled in schools with middle-class students. Teachers who are good at raising their students' test scores (like, in algebra) are also good at helping them graduate high school, avoid teen pregnancy, and get higher-paying jobs -- all those achievements that can supposedly be attributed to genetic IQ. Economists have been demonstrating for 15 years that somewhere between five percent and a third of the achievement gap can be attributed to poor children's lack of access to effective K-12 teachers.

So while Richwine does acknowledge that both genetic and environmental factors contribute to IQ, he locates environmental variability almost solely in the home, as if there were no inequality in contact with good teachers, orderly classrooms, up-to-date textbooks, and engaging curricula. He praises only one school-based intervention, the Abcedarian pre-school project, which he admits demonstrated "modest, tentative" IQ score gains that merit "further research." He quickly moves on, however and his overall elision of school as a factor allows him to claim that "environment" itself is a function of low IQ, with poor parents too unintelligent to provide a stimulating environment for their kids, who inherit the genetic deficit. He does not seem to know or care that such families have, through no fault of their own, unequal access to good schools that can and do raise student achievement in algebra and many other areas.

I've written extensively about how difficult it is for schools to overcome the academic affects of poverty. Yet we know good schooling does make a significant, potentially life-changing difference, and that poor children, including Hispanic immigrants and their descendents, do not have equal access to good schools. When people obsess about IQ in the face of these obvious inequalities and the vast research literature dissecting them, one has to wonder: What is the motivation? Ta-Nehisi Coates takes some guesses here. So does Jamelle Bouie.

Youth Unemployment and the Apprenticeship Gap

Kudos to David Leonhardt for calling attention to the staggeringly high American youth unemployment rate -- 26.6 percent -- compared to rates in Europe and Japan. I just want to add that in addition to overall sluggish job creation, one of the problems is that American employers tend to avoid job training and seek workers who already have the exact experience they're looking for. A Boeing executive pretty much sums up this world view: "To expect business to bring graduates up to speed," he told the Chronicle of Higher Education, "that's too much to ask."

Compare this attitude to the one that prevails in nations like Germany and Switzerland, where schools and employers work together, through the apprenticeship system, to prepare young people for the specific jobs the economy needs. Here's my interview with an expert on those aprrenticeships, who explains how they work and why, contrary to American assumptions, they don't prevent young people from pursuing higher education. I've also reported on promising attempts to replicate the European model in the U.S. at both the high school and community college levels. Even Boeing maintains a small apprenticeship program in Washington State. But there is almost zero political will to provide schools or employers with the incentives they need to create and scale these systems. 

Realistic Expectations for New Teacher Evaluation Systems

I'm seeing some off-the-mark responses to the news--first reported by Education Week's Stephen Sawchuck, and then picked up by the New York Times--that many of the new, high-stakes teacher evaluation systems are rating only 2-6 percent of teachers ineffective. This is being greeted by some supporters of numbers-driven teacher reform as a disappointment, while skeptics, like American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, are suggesting this proves the vast majority of teachers are great performers, after all. 

I don't think we can jump to either conclusion. First of all, the goal of these systems is not necessarily to fire large numbers of teachers, it is to help them improve their practice, since previously, most American educators received little constructive feedback on their work. Most new evaluation plans include more classroom observations, which means teachers are not just receiving number ratings, but actual notes and suggestions on their instruction. Of course, whether that feedback is helpful or useless depends entirely on the quality of the administrator.

Contra Nicholas Beaudrot, it's not true that education reformers have a "hazy" idea of how many bad teachers they'd like to see lose their jobs after this overhaul. I've asked a number of prominent accountability hawks that question over the past six years and the answer I've heard most frequently is "5 to 10 percent." As Matthew DiCarlo explains, that estimate is culled from the research of the ubiquitous Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, and by that standard, these evaluation systems are already half way to where they are intended to be, a reasonable outcome for something so new.

That said, I'm still quite skeptical that the new evaluation plans will transfrom the teaching profession, in part because of the lessons from history I'm learning as I research my book. For over a century, school reformers have been dissatisfied with how teachers are evaluated, yet overhauling rating systems has not, historically, been an effective way to improve educational outcomes for kids. This is like hoping to lose weight by buying a new, high-tech scale, without changing your diet or exercise routines.

During the late nineteenth century, the New York City schools used an "excellent-good-fair-bad" rating system for teachers. When reformer William Maxwell became superintendent in 1898, he complained that 99.5 percent of teachers were rated "good" and instituted a plan to grade teachers on an A-D scale instead. The city distributed intricate tables for judging teachers’ output. First, teachers would be measured by evidence of their students’ learning, which could be demonstrated through test scores or examples of children’s essays, penmanship, and drawings. Teachers would also be judged on their personal characteristics and given numeric ratings in largely subjective categories, such as “obedience,” “honesty of work,” “dress,” “voice,” and “force of character.” A teacher’s command of classroom discipline could be assessed by counting the number of students who were late or unruly, and even by timing the number of seconds and minutes it took for a teacher to distribute or collect worksheets. 

By the late teens, the vast majorty of teachers were earning perennial ratings of B+, the exact sort of slightly-better-than-average rating that had predominated under the previous plan. In prominent education journals, dissident principals like Alexander Fichlander, a Brooklyn leftist, explained that the paperwork involved with implementing the system was so burdensome that administrators rushed through it; what's more, there was little incentive to spend a lot of time rating teachers if the district provided no extra funding or training to those who needed to improve. Additionally, when managers find it is difficult to replace low-performing teachers with workers who are more effective--another likely outcome--they may decide evaluation systems are not worth their time.

Because of these problems, by mid-century, detailed evaluation systems were being replaced by simpler "satisfactory-unsatisfactory" plans, which today are being replaced by value-added measurement and frequent observation notes. But if the new evaluation systems end up being more about paperwork than about improving practice, then they, too, will fail to improve instruction and will lose their political palatibility.

On "Innovation" in Social Policy, and "Solutionism" in Education

The following was written by the Princeton sociologist Melvin Tumin, in 1973. Tumin was thinking about the Teacher Corps, a Great Society program that was a sort of lefty precursor to Teach for America, in which intern teachers arrived in disadvantaged schools eager to close achievement gaps and -- because it was the sixties -- also build racial pride, improve student self-esteem, and overhaul the curriculum to better reflect African American history and culture. Most Teacher Corps interns grew frustrated by the slow pace of change within schools; most veteran educators were suspcious of the interns' intentions and ideology. As Tumin points out, this inevitable culture clash is a key finding of research in organizational theory, and helps explain why it is so difficult for small social programs to impact bureaucracies:

...one of the most important factors that made the Program difficult to implement was that it could not promise the members of agencies and institutions whose cooperation was needed that it would be worth their while. Innovation is a charming word, beguiling and rousing. But it is like other terms such as relevance, concern, sensitivity. One cannot be against these on principle. But they are almost always privately read as warning signs that there is trouble ahead for those who are fulfilling their accustomed routines. Moreover, since most innovation efforts fail sooner or later, wise masters of ongoing enterprises have learned to live and wait until such innovations speed themselves to their ultimate demise. While not many other earthly travails can be safely waited out, with any hope of relief, innovative programs do have that special quality of a high probability of failure, so that “this too shall pass” is a reasonably sound prediction about most of them. 

I read this just after I returned from SXSWedu, and it seemed particularly relevant to the (almost total lack of) dialogue between social entrepreneurs who want to use software to disrupt traditional classroom practices in ways that are supposed to benefit poor children, and the majority of teachers and administrators who might be enthusiastic about specific technologies, but who simply do not see the lack of technology as the key barrier preventing schools from better serving all students. Educators are more likely to point to teacher quality, or to the content of the curriculum, or to factors stemming from the home and family. And sure, technology may be able to address many of these challenges. Yet tech-hypers lose credibility when they ignore the fact that inequalities outside the realm of access to technology remain the primary drivers of disparate educational outcomes.

Evgeny Morozov's recent essay on technological "solutionism" is certainly applicable to the tendency to mistake the technocratic measurement of educational problems, using software, as the very same thing as coming up with solutions to those problems. It should be obvious--yet at SWSWedu, it rarely was--that the quantification of inequality, whether in student achievement scores or ratings of teacher effectiveness, is only a jumping off point for complex political, policy, and social debates over how to use such data, and whether and how to close achievement gaps. The collection of "Big Data" does not, in and of itself, guarantee the formulation of effective solutions to problems.

Is Working From Home a Feminist Issue?

I've worked in offices for small magazines, large media companies, and think tanks. So I know there's a lot about office culture that sucks: useless meetings, crackberries that ruin your precious out-of-the-office hours, and sometimes an assumption that whoever stays latest or arrives earliest is working hardest. In New York, there's competitive dressing. In DC, there are old-school dress codes, as if everyone were about to meet with a senator, any minute now! A lot of this is absurd. I'm a huge believer in flex time for office workers. There's nothing about the hours 9-7 that make them especially productive; a lot of us get more done in the evenings, or while fighting insomnia, or at sunrise. And the occasional guilt-free day of working from home is priceless: the quiet, the pajamas, the home-cooked lunch. For new parents, people with chronic health conditions, or people who serve as caretakers for sick or elderly relatives, having the ability to work from home at least some of the time can mean the difference between being able to hold down a job and being forced to quit. 

So I sympathize with those who are outraged over Marissa Mayer's decision to put the kibosh on work-from-home arrangements at Yahoo. It's insulting to employees to suggest that the only legitimate reason to stay home is "for the cable guy," and Mayer does sound like kind of a nightmare boss, counting the cars in the corporate parking lot at 5 pm. Because women tend to disproportionately handle child care and other domestic responsibilities, it is very likely that female employees will be especially affected by Yahoo's policy change. 

All that said, I'm not sure working from home is feminist nirvana.

I'm a freelance writer -- a really lucky one, with a book project, an interesting editorial consulting gig, and frequent magazine assignments. I love what I do. But working from home is by far the hardest and least enjoyable part of my professional life. For one thing, it's lonely, isolating, and, at least in my case, challenging for my physical and emotional health. I often get so caught up in my indoor responsibilities that I forget to get fresh air, put on real clothing, take a walk, or talk to other human beings. At The Awl, Ken Layne pretty much nails what this can feel like. 

And here's the thing. For a woman, being stuck inside "the home" all day--a space traditionally coded as female, one that many women hold themselves to high standards to care for--can be especially stultifying. Here are some of the things I can do, in my home, when I'm supposed to be writing my book: Laundry. Emptying the dishwasher. Booking a hotel reservation for a friend's wedding. Cleaning the toilet. Shopping for and preparing a healthy, low-carb, high-protein dinner for my boyfriend and me. (This morning, I've already done several of these chores, and it's only 11 am.)

No one is forcing me to take sole responsibility for these tasks. If I don't do them when I'm "working from home," they will still get done. My boyfriend and I will split them up, or do them together. But here's the thing: It's really hard for me to be at home and ignore my domestic to-do list. I have a voice in my head telling me that until my apartment is neat, clean, and stocked with fresh food, it's perfectly okay to procrastinate on my real jobs, the ones for which I get paid: reporting, writing, and editing. After nearly three years of freelancing, I've learned that I shouldn't work from home more than one or two days per week. I now commute from Brooklyn into "the city" almost every morning, to work at the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. Yes: I voluntarily spend my days in midtown Manhattan, eat lunch at the ubiquitous Hale & Hearty Soups, and dodge tourists in the subway.

Granted, I don't have children yet. And if I'm still freelancing when I do, I know my flexible schedule will make parenthood much easier. Yet I have many freelancer female colleagues, a few years older than me, who admit that a big professional challenge is learning to turn off their mom selves and simply get to work (luckily, work they love). They are some of the people who helped me realize that even if you "work from home," you have to work outside your home often, and if that means scrimping for a babysitter, a coworking space, or a $104 monthy Metrocard, it's totally worth it, if you're privileged enough to be able to afford it. 

So here's my tentative conclusion. Flex-time is a feminist issue. Working from home full time? Maybe not so much. And here are some very definite feminist issues: Access to high-quality, affordable childcare. Paid sick leave, maternity leave, and paternity leave. Male partners who pull their weight at home. 

Behind Obama's SOTU Remarks on Vocational Education, Germany, and American High Schools

In his State of the Union address, President Obama promised to create a new federal funding stream to provide high school students with technical education, to help them prepare for the workforce. This is promising. As I've reported, during the first term, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan talked about vocational education almost exclusively in the context of post-secondary schools. That allowed the administration to dodge controversial, historically-freighted debates over K-12 "tracking," a practice that, throughout the twentieth century, pushed non-white students, girls, and the intergenerationally poor into lower-paid professions and away from college. But this political dodge also ignored some important research and innovation at the K-12 level.

For one thing, surveys of high school drop-outs show a leading cause of their leaving school is the belief that nothing they are learning in the classroom will help them get a job. What's more, a number of innovative new high schools across the country are pioneering a model for career and technical education that has little to do with the narrow vocational classes of yesteryear, in which kids were taught how to sew or operate a printing press -- skills that technological change can render less relevant over time. Instead, at the MET schools in Rhode Island, Linked Learning schools in California, and at Tech Valley High outside Albany, high school students complete externships in real workplaces, exploring fields as diverse as baking, engineering, biotechnology, and train conducting. Students have the opportunity to dip into more than one profession, because the idea is less to train for a specific job than to see how adults use their own educations in the workplace each day. That helps students stay motivated to earn a degree, and introduces them to the behaviors and practices specific to the working world.

A few notes of caution. First, the school Obama referenced in his address is P-Tech here in Brooklyn -- the Pathways in Technology Early College High School. Like a lot of celebrated educational arrangements in New York City (ex; the Harlem Children's Zone), P-Tech is special; it is a partnership between the New York City schools, IBM, and the City University system. To earn the combined high school diploma/associate's degree P-Tech offers, students must commit to a six-year course of study, which is time-consuming and expensive, requiring extra resources that most school districts simply don't have, especially absent the deep-pocketed corporate partners present in a city like New York. Obama's promise of more funding is desperately needed if we want to recreate schools like this one. But since the Republican Congress has demonstrated a specific interest in cutting job-training programs, I'd like to hear more about exactly where the president believes this new money will come from. (Same goes for his pipe dream of universal pre-K, by the way.)

There are certainly discomfiting curricular trade-offs at many vocationally-oriented schools, and we shouldn't overlook them. P-Tech doesn't offer foreign languages or Advanced Placement courses, for example. So I found it interesting that Obama praised the German secondary school system in his address, saying, "Right now, countries like Germany focus on graduating their high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges, so that they’re ready for a job." German "dual track" vocational education has been hotly debated among American school reformers for over a century. Why? Because this system is radically different from our own. It separates students after the 10th grade and places them on a vocational, academic, or mixed vocational/academic track. The result is that in Germany today, only about one-third of all upper secondary school students are enrolled in a course of study that leads directly to a liberal arts university. That reality deeply challenges American notions of "college readiness" for all, a major priority of the new Common Core -- shared national curriculum standards that the Obama administration also supports.

The truth, of course, is that despite our romanticization of college, only about one-third of Americans under 30 have earned a bachelor's degree. Where we actually do differ from Germany is what happens to the other two-thirds of young adults. In Germany, they typically hold an occupational certification by the age of 20, while in the United States, non-college grads are often left without marketable skills or qualifications.

More on vocational education in the US and Europe:

• The Future of Vocational Education
• The Apprentice
• Should All Kids Go to College?

Inside My Interview with Bill Gates

Yesterday I got to meet and interview Bill Gates, along with five other writers and reporters. We sat around a conference table at a midtown Manhattan hotel. Gates, wearing a totally unassuming gray suit and sipping Diet Coke out of a glass bottle, was business like and to the point. His passion flared up a few times during the hour-long conversation. He vehemently pushed back against economist and blogger Tyler Cowen's suggestion that macroeconomic and population growth, as well as better roads and other infrastructure, could bring faster humanitarian relief to Africa than more direct health interventions like vaccinations or contraceptives, which the Gates Foundation funds. Discussing the bleak living conditions in the Central African Republic and Yemen, Gates said, "If you don't invest in health there, you're a cold-hearted bastard." In a rare personal comment, he discussed how one of his daugthers was moved by video footage of a child survivor of polio limping down a dirt road. "What did you do to help her?" she asked her dad -- an insightful comment, since Gates said he feels growing concern about the survivors of once-deadly childhood diseases like malaria and polio, who often arrive at school with cognitive delays that make it difficult to learn. 

On education, I think a few of Gates' comments broke news. He hinted that his foundation may soon invest resources in alternate rankings of American colleges, saying the true metric for success in higher education should be whether a school accepts a student "with a combined SAT score of 600, and they got $100,000 jobs, and they're super happy." In response to several questions from yours truly, he also discussed standardized testing and teacher evaluation at length, particulary in non-traditional subjects such as art and music. Gates said he isn't sure if good tests can be created in the arts, and he called Florida's plan to move forward quickly with such non-traditional testing "crazy," as well as something that could create a popular backlash against education reform. 

In response to Jason Kottke, Gates briefly addressed his reputation as one of the world's most celebrated college drop-outs, and I thought his comments were interesting considering the backlash against college coming from Peter Thiel and some other Silicon Valley luminaries, who tend to imagine upper middle class kids and the Ivy League when they hear the words "higher education." First, Gates correctly pointed out that community colleges and four-year public universities make up "the heart and soul of education in America," and that those schools are currently operating under severe budget constraints, which hinder their ability to move the working poor into the middle class. Second, he said the number of successful tech entrepreneurs or programmers without a college degree is "a rounding error, that's why it's so mythic," and added that he had enjoyed college and "I'm just about as fake a drop out as you can get," since he loves lectures and left Harvard only to pursue the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to launch Microsoft.

Lastly, in response to Jacob Weisberg, Gates addressed the potential of MOOCs--massive online open courses--to transform higher education, saying such classes would not live up to their full potential unless they enroll more low-income students and provide some sort of counseling or support to guide students through completing the MOOC and ultimately attaining some sort of credential. Currently, most MOOCs are seeing drop-out rates of up to 80 percent, and are reaching a fairly privileged audience. 

Head on over to The Atlantic to read my full report.

Further Thoughts on the Politics of Unconditional Cash Transfers and the Notion of the "Deserving" Poor

This morning I told you about my new Atlantic article about GiveDirectly, a charity that distributes cash to poor families in Kenya, and allows them to spend the money on whatever they want. The recipients are chosen not because they have demonstrated any kind of favored behavior, like enrolling their children in school, but simply because they are among the poorest people in their rural villages, living in homes made of mud or thatch and frequently going without enough food. They are generally spending their new income on worthwhile causes, like food and weatherproof roofs.

Yet conditional cash transfer programs are more politcally palatable across the world than unconditional ones like GiveDirectly, whether they are pursued by philanthropies or governments. Why? Because, as this beautiful Reuters piece demonstrates, much public policy rests on the assumption that there are two kinds of poor people: the deserving poor and the undeserving. Deserving poor people work, even if the wages they earn are less than the costs of child or health care. They endure cumbersome bureaucratic processes to seek child support from the absent fathers of their children, even if those fathers are in jail, drug addicted, or otherwise unable to provide for their kids. They open college savings accounts, even if they need 100 percent of their monthly income just to cover the costs of housing and food. They attend classes on why it's important to get married.

In the United States, government tells a small group of poor people -- typically mothers of young children -- that if they fulfill such requirements, they can receive, for a discrete period of time, a small amount of supplemental monthly income. Childless adults and the longterm non-working, non-disabled poor are almost completely excluded from social welfare efforts in many states. 

No matter how much economic research we cite showing that unconditional cash income and savings improve the lives of poor people and their children, it will remain politically difficult to tell taxpayers that we aren't going to require anything from the recipients of social welfare. That's because most of us assume poor people need to learn how to best help themselves. The radical premise of GiveDirectly is that poor people already know, much better than their governments or a charity director, what they need. 

Which assumption is true? Should governments and non-profits use the promise of cash to attempt to train or educate the poor out of poverty? Or should a basic income be understood as a matter of human dignity?