EDUCATION GAPS CRISIS FOR U.S. ECONOMY

EDUCATION GAPS  CRISIS FOR U.S. ECONOMY

Concerns about the skill levels of both the current and future workforce are central to the longstanding debates about education reform at all levels. But those worries are especially sharpening the debate over how to improve the performance of community colleges, potentially a key mechanism both for upgrading the skills of mid-career workers and providing a bridge to higher education for many low-income young people. "If you combine the achievement gap with the demographic changes, that is not a recipe for success economically if something doesn't shift," says Cecilia Munoz, the chief domestic policy adviser to President Obama.

EDUCATION GAPS  CRISIS FOR U.S. ECONOMY

Obama's response includes his recently proposed community-college reforms, which would allow many students to attend tuition-free and would also pressure institutions to improve completion rates. "With community colleges, we want to make sure we are providing them incentives not just to enroll students but to help students finish," Munoz says.

Often in tandem with Obama's "Promise Neighborhoods" initiative, more cities are also examining "cradle-to-career" programs that attempt to connect more low-income families with educational and career opportunities at every stage of development. "Cradle-to-career is a new wave of thinking that says, if you want a pathway into the middle class in some of the most distressed communities, that pathway has to be a seamless system of support from the time a child is conceived," says Michael McAfee, a senior director at PolicyLink. "When we look at these [distressed] places, families are not delusional about the heavy lift it is if you are not prepared [with education]. But we are excited by what we are seeing in many of these communities."

Still, these persistent educational gaps have left many major cities facing a glum equation: Even when they generate overall economic growth, those new jobs often do disappointingly little to lift their most impoverished neighborhoods, because the people living there are not equipped with the skills to compete for employment. In a recent PolicyLink analysis of the fast-growing San Francisco Bay area, for instance, "we looked at dozens of indicators of inequities by race and income and what really stood out in that data is how many gaps there are in an economy that is booming," notes Treuhaft.

Such disparities haven't held back growing cities, because their vibrancy is attracting large numbers of college graduates from elsewhere. Those places "are masking a lot of their problems with the importation of highly skilled labor," says Manuel Pastor, director of the PERE program at USC.

But the gulf between reviving urban cores and isolated neighborhoods of concentrated poverty has contributed to the political and social turbulence that has manifested in everything from the populist upheavals in the most recent mayoral elections in New York and Chicago, to the violent street protests in Baltimore. Economically, socially, and politically, these disparate events suggest that such uneven patterns of growth may increasingly destabilize even cities where the overall tide is rising.

"When these students who are very poor and largely black and brown are lagging behind, it's detrimental for them, but also for everyone else," says Dr. Ruth N. López Turley, who directs the Houston Education Research Consortium (HERC), a partnership between Rice University and the Houston Independent School district to close educational-attainment gaps. "We have these large gaps that have to be addressed or else this is going to be really bad for all of us. Sometimes people are tempted to think, 'It's too bad for them.' Well, yes. But it's also too bad for all of us