Success Is Failure?,” New York Times Magazine, September 18, 2011.
“I’m left now, in my thirties”: See http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/ what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html?permid=141#comment141.
“one of the best decisions I ever made”: “‘You’ve Got to Find What You Love,’ Jobs Says,” Stanford Report, June 14, 2005.
There are fewer entrepreneurs: Paul Kedrosky and Dane Stangler, Financialization and Its Entrepreneurial Consequences (Kansas City, MO: Kauffman Foundation Research Series, March 2011).
36 percent of new Princeton graduates: Catherine Rampell, “Out of Harvard, and Into Finance,” New York Times Economix blog, December 21, 2011.
an insightful blog post addressing this issue: James Kwak, “Why Do Harvard Kids Head to Wall Street?,” Baseline Scenario blog, May 4, 2010, http://baselinescenario.com/2010/05/04/why-do-harvard-kids-head-to-wall-street/.
The recruiters also make the argument: Marina Keegan, “Another View: The Science and Strategy of College Recruiting,” New York Times DealBook blog, November 9, 2011.
an ongoing survey of attitudes by the Pew Research Center: “September 22–25, 2011, Omnibus,” Pew Research Center.
In 1966, at the height of the War on Poverty: Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2011), 14, figure 4.
And the child poverty rate: “Poverty Among Children,” Congressional Budget Office, December 3, 1984; DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith, Income, Poverty, 17, figure 4.
The first goes back to The Bell Curve: Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994). See also James J. Heckman, “Lessons from the Bell Curve,” Journal of Political Economy 103, no. 5 (1995).
gap between rich and poor was getting worse: Sean F. Reardon, “The Widening Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor,” in Whither Opportunity?, eds. Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane (New York: Russell Sage, 2011). See also Sabrina Tavernise, “Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say,” New York Times, February 9, 2012.
The consensus of most reform advocates: Steven Brill chronicles the way that the broad education-reform movement became a narrowly focused teacher-quality movement in Steven Brill, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011).
This argument has its intellectual roots: William L. Sanders and June C. Rivers, Cumulative and Residual Effects of Teachers on Future Student Academic Achievement (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Value-Added Research and Assessment Center, November 1996); William L. Sanders and Sandra P. Horn, “Research Findings from the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) Database: Implications for Educational Evaluation and Research,” Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education 12, no. 3 (1998); Heather R. Jordan, Robert L. Mendro, and Dash Weerasinghe, Teacher Effects on Longitudinal Student Achievement: A Report on Research in Progress (Dallas: Dallas Public Schools, July 1997); Kati Haycock, “Good Teaching Matters… a Lot,” Thinking K ?16 3, no. 2 (Summer 1998); Eric A. Hanushek, John F. Kain, and Steven G. Rivkin, “Teachers, Schools, and Academic Achievement,” NBER Working Paper 6691 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, August 1998); Eric A. Hanushek, “Efficiency and Equity in Education,” NBER Reporter (Spring 2001); Robert Gordon, Thomas J. Kane, and Douglas O. Staiger, Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job, Hamilton Project White Paper 2006-01 (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2006).
brilliant teachers suddenly go downhill: See, e.g., Michael Marder, “Visualizing Educational Data,” unpublished paper, Department of Physics, University of Texas at Austin, February 9, 2011; and Michael Marder, “Failure of U.S. Public Secondary Schools in Mathematics: Poverty Is a More Important Cause than Teacher Quality,” unpublished paper, 2011.
teacher quality probably accounted for less than 10 percent: Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin, “Teachers, Schools”; Eric Eide, Dan Goldhaber, and Dominic Brewer, “The Teacher Labour Market and Teacher Quality,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 20, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 232.
$41,348 for a family of four: United States Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service, National School Lunch Program Fact Sheet (Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service, October 2011).
covers about 40 percent of American children: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2011 Annual Social and Economic Supplement, http://www.census.gov/hh es/www/cpstables/032011/pov/new01_185_01.htm.
just one student in eight doesn’t qualify: As of the spring of 2012, 87 percent of Chicago public school students are low-income by federal education standards. “Stats and facts” page, Chicago Public Schools website, http://www.cps.edu/about_cps/at-a- glance/pages/stats_and_facts.aspx.
about 10 percent of all American children: DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith, Income, Poverty, 19, table 6.
an income of less than about $11,000 a year: Ibid., 61. See also Hope Yen and Laura Wides-Munoz, “Poorest Poor in US Hits New Record: 1 in 15 People,” Associated Press, November 3, 2011.
more than seven million American children: DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith, Income, Poverty, 19, table 6.
an effective program of support for parents: See, for instance, Jack Shonkoff, speech at the NBC News Education Nation Summit, September 26, 2011, http://developingchild.harvard.edu/index.php/resources/multimedia/lectures_and_presentations/education _nation/.
between seven and twelve dollars of tangible benefit: James J. Heckman, Seong Hyeok Moon, Rodrigo Pinto, Peter A. Savelyev, and Adam Yavitz, “The Rate of Return to the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program,” Journal of Public Economics 94, nos. 1 and 2 (February 2010).
