Widening the Access Gap
By Julianne Malveaux

The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education recently

released a policy alert that projects declining income for United States workers if education does not improve. The report hinges on two facts: The U.S. workforce is becoming more diverse, and the country’s least educated racial/ethnic groups are among the fastest growing. The policy alert concludes that if these trends continue and states do not improve the education of all racial/ethnic groups, the skills of the workforce and the incomes of U.S. residents will begin to decline over the next two decades.

From a policy perspective, the rational response to a report like this would be to target rapidly growing populations — concentrated in fewer than half of all states — and increase efforts to have these populations graduate from high school and enter college. Instead, the U.S. Department of Education has a new plan to provide college aid, focusing on high-achieving students at schools with comprehensive curricula. This appears to be a case of rewarding the already able, instead of assisting those who need additional help.

As reported by Sam Dillon in The New York Times (January 22, 2006), the Education Department’s current budget includes $790 million in grant money to distribute to college-bound students who study math and science or who complete a “rigorous secondary school program of study.” Modeled after a Texas program called Texas Scholars, the
program would only provide money to students from “qualifying schools.” Instead of adding money to the Pell grant, as President Bush promised when he ran for office in 2000, this new program would provide money only to “select students” who attended “quality schools.” Clearly this program does not deal with the process by which quality schools are created and ignores those excellent students who attend schools that don’t pass muster.