Opportunity

Heritage Foundation

Published in

2014 Index of Culture and Opportunity

7 min readJul 7, 2015

Climbing the Ladder of Upward Mobility Through Education

By Lindsey M. Burke and Stuart M. Butler

Effective education is an important foundation for upward mobility. The quality of a child’s education can determine whether the child is able to grab hold of, and advance on, the ladder of opportunity. Yet, thousands of elementary and secondary schools across the country are underperforming to the extent that they have been deemed “dropout factories.” Meanwhile, higher education is increasingly important for economic advancement, but colleges suffer from a crisis of both quality and cost, strapping students with debt without guaranteeing they acquire the necessary skills or academic content mastery to prepare them for career success. These challenges call for student-centered education reforms that allow for choice, thereby encouraging more competitiveness regarding quality and cost. Most importantly, such choice is the key to ensuring all students have an opportunity to succeed.

The research on opportunity underscores the central importance of a good education to future success. Access to quality educational options, effective teachers, and a supportive learning environment at the K–12 level can set students on a path toward a rewarding career or an advanced degree. Yet, many students are assigned to schools with high dropout rates and chronic academic underperformance. Moreover, the erosion of a neighborhood culture that lauds success also stands in the way of effective education.

Teacher quality is a significant factor in whether a school helps or hinders upward mobility. As Stanford University’s Eric A. Hanushek explains, teacher quality is by far the most important measured aspect in determining student success. According to Hanushek’s calculations, an above average teacher at the 84th percentile “will shift [a classroom of 20 students’] earnings up by more than $400,000…a very low performing teacher (at the 16th percentile of effectiveness) will have a negative impact of $400,000 compared to an average teacher.”[1] Replacing the lowest-performing 5 percent to 7 percent of teachers with average teachers, he writes, would allow American students to catch up to the education level of students in higher-performing nations.

How can we ensure more students have access to better teachers? By making it easier for aspiring teachers to enter the classroom, and demanding solid performance once they are there. Incentives matter: tenure and step increases in pay based on time worked — rather than quality of instruction — do not encourage excellence. What is needed is a combination of subjective observations by peer teachers, principals, parents, and students, and objective evaluations based on growth models of student performance.

In addition to good teachers, literacy is a critical component of any future academic and economic success. But for many American children, this first, foundational step is never mastered: Just 35 percent of 4th graders are proficient in reading. Failing to acquire this most basic skill dooms upward economic mobility. Some states, however, are taking action. Florida, for instance, has ended the “social promotion” of third graders who cannot read. The result? Fourth graders in Florida have made gains in reading three times that of the national average. [2]

Graduating from high school is also essential to upward mobility. For every 100 high school students, roughly 76 will graduate. In some of the nation’s large urban districts, the situation is far worse. In Detroit, Michigan, just 65 percent of students graduate from high school in four years — a stark reality that likely results from the fact that just 9 percent of 8th graders are proficient in reading. In Cleveland, Ohio, graduation rates hover around 54 percent; in Chicago, Illinois, just 63 percent of students graduate within 5 years. For modest-income parents whose children attend these failing schools there is no alternative. That is why school choice is so important.

Parental choice in education enables families to pursue the educational options that are right for them, providing the means for students to escape schools that are either underperforming or are not meeting their unique learning needs. Not only does choice — whether through vouchers, tuition tax credits, education savings accounts, charter schools, or homeschooling — provide students with options as diverse as their learning needs, it creates the conditions necessary to spur schools to implement reforms and strategies that work — or risk losing students and their attendant funding.

While a high school diploma is essential, in today’s economy many young Americans will need college-level skills to advance substantially up the professional ladder. Indeed, a high school diploma is typically no longer enough to reach the American Dream — an American with a bachelor’s degree can earn, on average, about 70 percent more each year than one with just a high school diploma.

Like the K–12 system, America’s system of higher education is also facing a number of challenges. College degrees are enormously expensive to obtain, and the payoff is often below face value. Recent graduates who borrowed for college now average over $26,000 in debt. Yet almost half of college graduates are in jobs that do not really need college skills, and more than half of recent graduates cannot find full-time work in their area of concentration. Employers increasingly say that graduates from colleges and universities are not adequately prepared. Other students incur tens of thousands of dollars of debt without graduating at all.

The good news in higher education is that the bad news on cost and quality is now triggering an entrepreneurial revolution. It is no surprise that the customer is demanding more and better information from colleges about graduation rates, expected earnings, and other measures of value. The private sector is responding with a range of “scorecards” in publications likeForbes and Kiplinger’s that reflect different visions of value. The proper role of public policy is to remove obstacles to that revolution — not to try to manage it.

The market is also responding with new and customized forms of higher education, reflecting the needs and lifestyles of modern Americans. This approach includes increasingly sophisticated online courses, as well as institutions with very different business models than the traditional four-year residential system — models that can sharply reduce costs while adapting to student preferences. These new ventures stress credentialed courses that fit the skills students need and employers demand, allowing students to seek an education from a range of vendors, including new entrants to the market.

But there are obstacles to this market-driven “disruptive innovation” that promises to do for college cost and quality what Steve Jobs did for music and telephones. For instance, the antiquated accreditation system gives a seal of approval to institutions, not courses, and favors the established providers, not the upstarts. Moreover, student aid is contingent on this federally determined accreditation system. If the promise of this higher education revolution is to be realized, student aid must be separated from accreditation. At the very least, states and industries should be able to accredit institutions available for aid. Better still would be degrees and aid based on competence in credentialed courses provided by any institution.

In order to foster upward mobility, public policy should create the conditions for educational choice to flourish. At the K–12 level, this means providing parents with control over their child’s education through options like vouchers, tax credits, and education savings accounts. Such options empower parents to choose schools and educational options that meet their children’s unique learning needs. At the postsecondary level, choice and innovation can be cultivated by reforming the ineffective system of accreditation and enabling new business models to enter the higher education market. At both the K–12 and university level, creating the conditions for markets, choice, and innovation to flourish is key to fostering opportunity.

— Lindsey M. Burke is the Will Skillman Fellow in Education Policy in the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity at The Heritage Foundation.

— Stuart M. Butler is Director of the Center for Policy Innovation at The Heritage Foundation.