Bureau of Economic Research, December 2011).
But between about 1925 and 1945: Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 248.
“upward mobility with regard to education”: Ibid., 290.
“Each generation of Americans”: Ibid., 289.
education-policy types who concerned themselves: David Leonhardt, “The College Dropout Boom,” New York Times, May 24, 2005; Sarah Turner, “Going to College and Finishing College: Explaining Different Educational Outcomes,” in College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay for It, ed. Caroline M. Hoxby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 14; and Tamar Lewin, “Once a Leader, U.S. Lags in College Degrees,” New York Times, July 23, 2010.
the United States still ranks a respectable eighth: OECD, Education at a Glance 2011, 316, table C2.1.
But in college completion: Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, Education at a Glance 2008: OECD Indicators (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2008), 96, chart A4.2; 92, chart A4.1.
can now expect to earn 83 percent more: David Leonhardt, “Even for Cashiers, College Pays Off,” New York Times, June 25, 2011.
among the highest in the developed world: OECD, Education at a Glance 2011, 150, table A8.2a.
it has risen sharply: Goldin and Katz, The Race, 290, figure 8.1.
American college graduates earned just 40 percent more: Leonhardt, “Even for Cashiers.”
“is leaving large amounts of money”: Goldin and Katz, The Race, 325.
data covering about two hundred thousand students: David Leonhardt, “Colleges Are Failing in Graduation Rates,” New York Times, September 9, 2009.
Americans’ natural tendency toward “educational romanticism”: Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality (New York: Crown Forum, 2008), 11.
“a fog of wishful thinking”: Ibid., 12.
students who had those same lofty academic credentials: Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson, Finish Line, 104, 110.
the most accurate predictor of whether a student: Ibid., 113.
he explains that the SAT was invented: Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
high-school grades turned out to be excellent predictors: Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson, Finish Line, 122.
“Students with very good high school grades”: Ibid.
And when Angela Duckworth: Angela Duckworth, Patrick Quinn, and Eli Tsukayama, “What No Child Left Behind Leaves Behind: The Roles of IQ and Self-Control in Predicting Standardized Achievement Test Scores and Report Card Grades,” Journal of Educational Psychology, in press, 2011.
“high school grades reveal much more”: Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson, Finish Line, 123.
Alex Kotlowitz’s book: Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (New York: Anchor Books, 1991).
contrasting the “superfluity of opportunity”: Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991), 67.
“shunned—or, probably, shut down”: Ibid., 68.
read a front-page story: Jodi S. Cohen and Darnell Little, “Of 100 Chicago Public School Freshmen, Six Will Get a College Degree,” Chicago Tribune, April 21, 2006. After the Tribune article came out, the consortium report was updated and corrected to show that eight of every one hundred Chicago high-school freshmen would earn a college degree, not six of every one hundred.
just eight of every one hundred students: Melissa Roderick, Jenny Nagaoka, and Elaine M. Allensworth, From High School to the Future (Chicago: Consortium on Chicago Schools Research, 2006).
fewer than one in thirty black male: Cohen and Little, “Of 100 Chicago Public School Freshmen, Six Will Get a College Degree”; Roderick, Nagaoka, and Allensworth, From High School to the Future; e-mail communication with Emily Krone of the Consortium on Chicago Schools Research. The Tribune story showed that the odds were one in forty; that figure changed when the report was updated.
“study skills, work habits, time management”: Melissa Roderick, Closing the Aspirations-Attainment Gap: Implications for High School Reform (New York: MDRC, April 2006), 25.
“critical thinking and problem-solving abilities”: Ibid., 26.
“High school teachers could have very high workloads”: Ibid., 22–23.
the percentage of American tenth-graders: Ibid., 3.
“the worst slum area in the United States”: Pam Belluck, “Razing the Slums to Rescue the Residents,” New York Times, September 6, 1998.
one in nine murders in Chicago: William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 25.
single mothers on welfare: Ibid.
The Chicago public schools’ average is 17: Rosalind Rossi, “CPS High School ACT Scores Go Down—and They Go Up,” Chicago Tribune, November 3, 2011.
only students who score in the top 20 percent: Murray, Real Education, 67, 75.
“As long as it remains taboo”: Ibid., 104.
“just not smart enough”: Ibid., 44.
Recently, two labor economists: Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, “Leisure College, USA: The Decline in Student Study Time,” AEI Education Outlook (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, August 2010); Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, “The Falling Time Cost of College: Evidence from Half a Century of Time Use Data,” unpublished paper (March 24, 2010).
A separate study of 6,300 undergraduates: Steven Brint and Allison M. Cantwell, Undergraduate Time Use and Academic Outcomes: Results from UCUES 2006 (Berkeley, CA: Research and Occasional Paper Series, Center for Students in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley, October 2008).
