How Do We Get More People to Have Good Lives?

The Obama administration has invested heavily in a data-based drive to improve the math, reading and science skills of the nation’s school children.

So what do the numbers show?

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in the six years from 2007 to 2013 (the most recent year for which test results are available), the reading scores of fourth graders have gone from 221 to 222, on a scale of 0 to 500, an increase of 0.45 percent. Fourth-grade math scores have risen from 240 to 242 over the same period, an increase of 0.83 percent.

The attempt of governments at all levels to lift test scores is an official acknowledgment that in an era of hyperactive competition, both cognitive and character skills have become ever more important to life opportunities — at the same time that they serve as weapons in the contest for economic and social status.

“It very clear that children’s chances for a good life are highly dependent on their social origins or socioeconomic status,” write Markus Jantti, professor of economics at Stockholm University; Timothy Smeeding, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Robert Erikson, professor of sociology at Stockholm University, in “Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting.”

“More-educated, richer, two-earner couples, at higher levels of social and economic status, have children later in life and do so in more stable marriages,” the authors continue:

As a result, they have fewer children and can therefore invest heavily in their children’s upbringing. In contrast, younger parents with less education, lower incomes, and larger numbers of children, as well as lone parents and those in unstable relationships, are more limited in the extent to which they can guarantee good lives for their children.

It has been widely recognized that the premium on cognitive skills stems from the shift to a knowledge-based economy driven by the decline in manufacturing employment, the growth of the technology and financial sectors, and labor recruitment from a global talent pool.

This is not a situation we can expect even the best teachers to single-handedly remediate. Whatever you think of the educational reform movement — in its charter-school form or its district-takeover form — the forces contributing to contemporary class stratification are beyond the reach of the classroom alone.

Take, for example, the correlation between family income and children’s cognitive skills as measured in the Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, reported by the National Center for Education Statistics. This chart shows that the cognitive ability score (measuring general abstract reasoning abilities and the capacity to apply these abilities to verbal, quantitative and nonverbal tasks) for children from families in the bottom income quintile was 0.7 standard deviation below the mean, while the score for those in the top income quintile was 0.7 standard deviation above the mean.

A similar pattern emerges in the distribution of non-cognitive (character) skills like perseverance, diligence, grit, self-control, creativity and the capacity to postpone gratification — shown in this chart from “The Character Factor: Measures and Impact of Drive and Prudence” by Richard V. Reeves, Joanna Venator, and Kimberly Howard of the Brookings Institution.

For those in the bottom income quintile, according to the Brookings study, 34.9 percent scored always or sometimes low in noncognitive skills, compared with 14.8 percent of those in the top income quintile. Thirty percent of the bottom income quintile scored sometimes or always high in noncognitive skills, compared with 48.3 percent of those in the top income quintile.

Cognitive and noncognitive skills, in turn, correlate with levels of educational attainment.

Educational achievement correlates with income. Cognitive and noncognitive abilities thus become crucial factors underpinning socioeconomic status.

The twin charts shown here, which were developed by David Autor, a professor of economics at M.I.T., for an article in Science, illustrate the close relationship between the growth in men’s and women’s wages from 1963 to 2012 and their level of education, ranging from a near doubling of wages in inflation adjusted dollars for those with post-graduate degrees to an actual decline in wages for those without high school diplomas. The extent of the problem can be seen in the fact that as of 2013, 66.5 percent of Americans did not have a college degree.

Autor noted in an email to me that

We’ve had a strong correlation between income and cognitive skills in the U.S. for many decades. But that link has grown much more determinative over the last 35 years as the return to education, and to cognitive skills more broadly, has risen dramatically.

Autor warns

that the growth in disparities in resources between low and high households — measured in terms of income, quality of schools, quality of neighborhoods — has the potential to reduce social mobility by providing highly unequal life chances for kids who might otherwise fare relatively similarly if born to similar environments.

There is a growing recognition among business leaders as well as in academia of increasing class divisions.

“The economic rewards flowing to people with specialized talents have grown dramatically faster than those going to equally decent men and women possessing more commonplace skills,” Warren Buffett wrote in The Wall Street Journal on May 21. He continues:

To see why that is true, imagine we lived in a sports-based economy. In such a marketplace, I would be a flop. You could supply me with the world’s best instruction, and I could endlessly strive to improve my skills. But, alas, on the gridiron or basketball court I would never command even a minimum wage.

Greg Duncan, professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, and Richard Murnane, professor of education at Harvard, together authored the 2013 book “Restoring Opportunity: The Crisis of Inequality and the Challenge for American Education.”

Duncan, in response to my questions, emailed me:

The combination of technological changes favoring higher-order skills and globalization have made it quite difficult for a high school graduate with basic literacy and numeracy skills to secure a stable middle-class job.

Murnane expanded on these points in a separate email, noting that analytical skills and communication and teamwork skills “have especially grown in value in that last 15 years.” For those “who lack this combination, the work available to many of them will be primarily low-paying service occupations.”

Many scholars argue that the relegation of less skilled workers to the bottom is not inevitable. They contend that various reforms – ranging from new tax rates to moving children out of high poverty neighborhoods — could reduce the incidence of stratification by ability. Without substantial policy intervention, however, these trends are likely, if not certain, to continue, and the current balance of power in Congress suggests that few such interventions will be undertaken.

Autor poses the core problem raised by these developments:

One potential interpretation of the evidence above is that, because rising inequality is substantially a consequence of the impersonal forces of supply and demand, public policy has no role to play in shaping the trajectory of inequality or its social impact.

Autor disputes this conclusion. He contends that public policies have contributed to rising inequality and can be reformed. Autor focuses on raising the minimum wage, strengthening the bargaining power of unions, raising top tax rates and reversing the “political capture of the policy-making process by elites.”

Another tack is to rigorously measure the outcomes of direct interventions in the lives of the least advantaged. The Moving to Opportunity Experiment — a five-city program running since 1994 in which randomly selected poor families were given vouchers to move out of high poverty neighborhoods — produced evidence that the relocations generated significant improvements among children under age 13 at the time of the move.

In a recently released, exhaustive examination of the results, “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children,” a study reported on on May 4 by The Times, Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence F. Katz, all economists at Harvard, found that:

Moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood significantly improves college attendance rates and earnings for children who were young when their families moved. These children also live in better neighborhoods themselves as adults and are less likely to become single parents. The treatment effects are substantial: children whose families take up an experimental voucher to move to a lower-poverty area when they are less than 13 years old have an annual income that is $3,477 or 31 percent higher on average relative to a mean of $11,270 in the control group in their mid-twenties.

The cost of moving a family with two young children out of high poverty public housing into a better neighborhood, according to the authors, was $3,783, most of which was spent on counseling. The children who were moved were reported to have far better employment records than their counterparts who remained in the projects. As a consequence, the authors calculate, based on current earnings, participants will pay $22,400 more in federal taxes than those in the control group.