“Without Cal State L.A., I’m nowhere,” says Pla, who initially got his foot in the door at an East Los Angeles community college. After two years he transferred to Cal State, where he graduated in 1972 before going on to get a graduate degree in public finance from the University of Southern California.

Today, Pla is the founder and CEO of a nationally recognized civil engineering firm, Cordoba Corp. He employs more than 200 people and builds major infrastructure projects for California’s transportation, education, water, and energy sectors. With a base salary of more than $1 million a year, Pla’s story and others like it are held up as the pinnacle of the American Dream. His alma mater, Cal State, Los Angeles, launches more low-income kids into the top income bracket than Harvard, according to a new study by a group of high-level academics working under the title The Equality of Opportunity Project.

For decades, “working-class” colleges like Cal State have been one of the more reliable engines of economic mobility. And, the new research shows, public higher education systems like those in California, Texas, and New York still push low-income kids into the top echelon of earners at far higher rates than the eight Ivy League colleges, plus the University of Chicago, Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Duke University. (The researchers called this the “Ivy-Plus.”)

Sixty percent of Ivy-Plus students from the lowest income bracket reach the top, but the mid-tier colleges beat them on the upward-mobility metric because they accept so many more poor students, and those students still reach the top income bracket at comparable rates. For example, 51 percent of the State University of New York, Stony Brook’s, lowest-quintile students make it to the top economic quintile.

But now, authors of the report – Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility –  say those successes are being significantly hampered. Over the past 15 years, the number of low-income students enrolling at mid-tier universities has been on a downward slide. As such, they say, their new data serves as a timely warning to policymakers and educators for the need to bolster support for high-performing mid-tier institutions. Furthermore, they say, it highlights the need to study what makes top performing public systems so successful so their models can be replicated across the country.

“What we’ve seen is that the colleges that we identify as being very good by our metric, which in many cases includes these mid-tier public schools are in most cases declining in terms of access,” says Robert Fluegge, a pre-doctoral research fellow at Stanford University, who worked on the study. “They’ve seen the proportion of poor students decline pretty substantially, and I think that that’s a bit worrisome, given that these are the colleges that are really doing well for poor students.”

Top five schools for mobility

The research, based on administrative data of 30 million American college students between 1999 and 2013, showed the colleges with the top five upward mobility rates in the nation: Cal State LA was first (9.9 percent). The State University of New York (SUNY), Stony Brook (8.4 percent); City University of New York’s system (CUNY) (7.2 percent); California’s Glendale Community College (7.1 percent); and University of Texas, El Paso (6.8 percent), rounded out the top five. To put those numbers in perspective, the average upward mobility rate across all US colleges is less than 2 percent.

Pla was pleased to see that his alma mater topped the upward mobility rankings, but as someone who has stayed philanthropically involved with the state’s higher education system, he knows firsthand that it’s getting harder for people from backgrounds like his to find their way into such schools.

“Thank God that public education used to be accessible and affordable, and we have really got to fight to keep it that way,” Pla says. “I think an institution like Cal State is absolutely golden.”

Indeed, the study’s sample group revealed a bittersweet picture. On the upside, America’s poorest students are attending college at record rates. Overall college attendance for low-income students over the study’s sample period climbed about 2 percentage points, according to John N. Friedman, an associate professor of economics and international and public affairs at Brown University and co-author of the research. However, at the same time, their access to schools that improve students’ upward economic mobility fell by 2.5 percentage points.

“What our research really points out is that not all community colleges are created equally,” Professor Friedman says. “There are important differences both in the fraction of students from poor families and in the outcomes across different community colleges, and I think it’s probably very important, whether you go to a Cal State university or to another California community college.”

Alma mater as predictor of earnings

In other words, access is everything. Friedman says that what particularly stands out to him is that once a low-income student gains access to a good college, whether an Ivy League or a good mid-tier, there’s very little difference in their performance compared with those of their peers from wealthy backgrounds.

“One of the really striking findings of the study was, that you would in some sense really rather know where somebody went to college rather than how much money their parents make, if you wanted to guess how much money they were going to make in the future,” Mr. Fluegge adds.

The need to bolster and spread access to quality secondary education is highlighted by America’s continual downward trend in upward mobility. Children born in the 1940s had a 90 percent likelihood they would grow up to earn more than their parents, for those born in 1980, it’s a 50/50 prospect, according to another paper by the Equality of Opportunity Project, released late last year.

An the implications for America’s severe income inequality are substantial. As David Leonhardt points out in The New York Times, the earnings gap between four-year college graduates and the rest of the population has boomed in recent decades. The unemployment rate for college graduates is only 2.5 percent, compared with a national average close to 5 percent.

The broad consensus among education watchers is that rising tuition costs along with massive state budget cuts are the main culprits. For Friedman, the research is a solid start, although follow-ups looking at the effects of things like budget cuts, students’ college preparedness, and education policies that enable easy transfers from community colleges to universities, just as Pla did when he went to Cal State, are needed.

“By identifying these schools and drawing attention to them hopefully it’ll lead to follow-up research where we can identify what makes the City University of New York or the Cal State systems so outstanding in a way that we can find a model to replicate at other schools.”

Source: Why Cal State L.A. turns most low-income students into top earners – CSMonitor.com

By Sandra Stotsky –

Who are the most powerful influences on students’ academic achievement? Teachers? School administrators? D.C. Beltway policy wonks? Foundation officials? Civil rights organizations?

Most people with common sense would point to children’s parents. Whether or not they grew up in a family (i.e., not in an orphanage), most people know that students’ families are more important to school performance than any other factor.

Indeed, we have known for decades that such direct school-related factors as average number of students in a class, quality of a school’s physical plant, per-pupil expenditures, size of a school’s library, and the principal’s salary have little effect on school outcomes. Nor have the ideas of current policy makers had much positive effect, even though they’re sure they know what education policies are best for other people’s children. (Those ineffective ideas include, by the way, annual grade-by-grade standardized tests.)

The famous James S. Coleman report of 1966 (Equality of Educational Opportunity), authorized by what was then known as the U.S. Office of Education, pointed out the significant influence of children’s families on children’s academic achievement so clearly that the author was denounced as a racist. That issue may lie at the heart of the problem — policy-makers do not know how to address the influence of children’s families on their academic achievement without inviting charges of racism from those whose ideas have failed but who have garnered lots of national publicity from their sensationalistic charges and costly policies.

As a society we need to be able to focus policy on what the most extensive piece of research on school achievement had to say:  parents matter. But how can we, when they are seemingly ignored by the major media?

The talking heads in the media, education schools, psychology departments, and think tanks tend to think highly of what each other writes about (such as “demanding new standards,” “grit,” “tenacity,” or social and emotional learning) as if what they are referring to could really make a difference for the better in our public schools.

But not only do these talking heads usually have no skin in the game (i.e., children in Common Core-d schools) — even more bizarrely, our national leaders seem to think parents are part of the problem, not part of the solution. So, they go out of their way to keep children’s parents from having any say on what these talking heads propose to do to these parents’ children.

All public officials seem to want is their children’s live bodies in the schools — to judge by the conflicting statements on opting-out in the Every Student Succeeds Act, known as ESSA. (That’s the 2015 congressional re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act — ESEA — that is supposed to focus on improving the education of low-income children but has become the mechanism for centralizing education policy-making in Washington.) The Every Student Succeeds Act demands 95 percent participation of all students in federal/state-mandated tests at the same time that it says states can pass laws letting parents opt their children out.

(For more on that, see the last paragraph here or read this article.)

On Wednesday, January 11, the Boston Globe ran an editorial raising concerns about the nomination of Betsy DeVos to head the U.S. Department of Education. Not one word about parents’ concerns. The main topic mentioned in the Globe editorial was charter schools and DeVos’s support for them.

Most Globe readers don’t have kids in charter schools and their kids won’t be eligible for new ones that might be created. (That is, they are typically not low-income parents.) Do the editors have any children in the state’s regular public schools? Aren’t they aware of the massive amount of criticism by parents and teachers of federally promoted student tests, whether or not based on inferior state standards?

Instead, the Globe has practiced omerta on the controversy over MCAS 2.0. It’s supposed to replace the current Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test that students have been required to take at various grade levels. The new version is a supposed compromise between an official Common Core-based test (known as Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC) and an MCAS test, which by law must also be based on the state board’s adopted Common Core standards. But a 2015 analysis of practice test items for PARCC suggests that any Common Core-based test would be inferior to MCAS tests based on the state’s pre-Common Core standards.

Amazingly, the Globe couldn’t even tell its readers that the state’s commissioner of education wouldn’t let the public know in January 2017 what percentage of test items on the MCAS 2.0 tests to be given in March 2017 come from PARCC. Bay State Parent did, though.

In another egregious example, Education Week recently blogged on questions that could be asked at the DeVos hearing, which is scheduled for Tuesday, January 17. Not one question came from the many parent groups sending questions for their federal senators to ask, such as here and here and here.

Parents want to know, for example, what DeVos might do “to end Common Core” or “what specific strategies” she has for “reducing USED’s influence on American life.”  Indeed, the Education Week bloggers didn’t bother to mention that parents had concerns, never mind concerns other than the ones that Education Week offered.

If our media are insensitive to parents’ interests in their children’s education and the crucial role they have always played, how do “reformers” expect to make public education in this country the success it once was?

Sandra Stotsky, former senior associate commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, is professor of education emerita at the University of Arkansas.

Source: Do Parents Matter? Questions Senators Should Ask Education Nominee Betsy DeVos | NewBostonPost