No Child Gets Ahead

By Anthony P. Carnevale

In spite of all the political rhetoric about serving the needs of working families, we continue to squander the talents of their children. Grade school data from the federal Early Childhood Longitudinal Study suggest that there are more than a million grade school students from families making less than $85,000 a year who start out in the top half of their class but fall off the college track on the way to high school. There are more than 800,000 left in the top half of their class by the 8th grade, but only half will still be there when they graduate—and only half of those will ever get a two-year or four-year college degree.

These are not rich kids. They are a racially and economically diverse group. Half come from families that make less than $50,000 a year, and 20 percent come from families with an annual income below $30,000.

They are the obvious “low-hanging fruit” whose harvesting would improve our educational performance and economic competitiveness, as well as the vitality of our culture and political system. They would leaven the economic and racial diversity of our campuses and, ultimately, in our best jobs. They also would blaze an upwardly mobile trail that others left even further behind could follow. And helping these students validates the uniquely American notion of social progress that has always been less about who gets what and...