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• Nine-year-olds growing up in low-income communities are already three grade levels behind their peers in high-income communities.
  Does this include children attending private schools? Stating the effect without an understanding of the cause means wasted resources treating symptoms. Could it not be that the war on drugs, which harms low-income communities more, combined with welfare and other government disincentives, combined with the general inefficiencies of government provided education are the sources of these sad statistics and therefore should be the focus?
• Only 31% of fourth graders are proficient in reading. Low-income students do half as well.
  See above. I’d also recommend reading John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education, Mary Ruwart’s Healing our World, and Samuel Blumenfeld’s Is Public Education Necessary?
• As many as fifteen million students have no place to go after school.
  You can blame some of this on the war on drugs and the welfare state which has split apart families. On a more abstract note I would focus on the Federal Reserve System [PDF]. The federal government through the Fed through inflation taxes all users of Federal Reserve Notes without their supposed consent or knowledge. It hurts those who receive lower or no increases in their income the most. As inflation increases so do prices and do so ahead of any increases in income. Slowly wealth is stripped away requiring individuals to work more and/or longer to bring home the same amount. No longer can an average family survive on a single salary.
• Teens who do not participate in after school programs are nearly three times more likely to skip classes or use marijuana or other drugs, drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes.
  Is it that teens who participate in after school programs are less likely to do those things because they are participating or simply because those who tend to participate just don’t. Could it be that those who are not interested in after school programs are also the same ones who have issues with the school curriculum?
• The hours between 3-6 p.m. on school days (referred to by law enforcement officials as a “danger zone”) are the prime time for violent juvenile crime.
• More than 1.2 million children drop out of school each year. The cost is more than $312 billion in lost wages, taxes, and productivity over their lifetime.
• Only 70% of students in the U.S graduate from high school. In the nation’s urban schools, the dropout rate is fifteen percentage points lower. Those who do graduate high school will, on average, read and do math at the level of eighth graders in high-income communities.
• Only 1 in 10 students in low-income communities will graduate from college.

• Since its founding, 17,000 people have participated as Teach For America corps members, teaching and affecting over 2.5 million public school students.
• Since its founding in 1988, City Year’s 10,400 corps members have served 1,060,000 children, completed 16 million hours of service, and engaged more than 1,015,000 citizens in service.
• According to a study by The Urban Institute, high school students taught by TFA corps members on average performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially in math and science, than peers taught by far more experienced instructors.
  If that’s the case why don’t they teach the “far more experienced instructors”? Wouldn’t that be more efficient? Are they teaching a general curriculum or teaching to the state-required end-of-course exams? Are they comparing general instruction to specific tutoring?
• A study by Mathematica Policy Research in 2004 randomly assigned students within the same schools to teachers both from TFA and traditional certification programs. It found that students taught by TFA teachers performed better in math and science as those taught by non-TFA novice teachers.
  Again, if the goal is helping the children why wouldn’t they be teaching those running the certification programs? Perhaps they do but it’s not something I’ve heard from them.
• One study shows that first-, second- and third-graders tutored by AmeriCorps members gained seven to fourteen percentile points in reading scores compared to their peers.
• AmeriCorps members in Education Works help inspire students to improve attendance, helping low-income schools to keep students coming to class for an average of 20 more days per year than other neighborhood schools.
  I have no doubt that showing a student more attention and giving the direct encouragement would increase attendance. But how does the Education Works members compare to Big Brother Big Sister and other organization which are private and perform effectively the same service? 20 days is huge but 20 more days to from what?
• By focusing its efforts on standardized test preparation, the AmeriCorps program Admission Possible helped students raise their ACT scores by an average of sixteen percent.
  This is a meaningless value. Teaching to tests is not education.
  
• AmeriCorps members working for College Summit help low-income students apply to and enroll in college. One study found that 80% of College Summit students got into college, compared to less than 50% of their peers. Aren’t guidance counselors and parents supposed to do this? As with above shouldn’t these College Summit members be working with counselors and parents so that the labor can be distributed?
  
• National service programs give students who did not complete high school a chance to finish their education. Since 2002, almost 5,000 AmeriCorps members in the program YouthBuild USA have earned their GED. Many of these GED recipients were previously incarcerated.
  Doesn’t the federal prison system already provide prisoners with the ability to get a GED and take college courses? Seems to me that AmeriCorps was used by these young people as an outlet from their situation at home. Likely it helped them but these programs should be provided by private institutions which would direct the participants labor toward things the community would need instead of what bureaucrats want.

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