Founders Update

It seems more and more people are thinking about the American Dream these days. Investopedia recently announced that the phrase was their most-searched-for term in 2023, and as I write this, American Dream is the #1 album on Apple Music and Billboard.¹ While I don’t spend much time browsing Investopedia or listening to rap music, these signals suggest the Dream is in the popular consciousness. 

Separately, one of our four pillars – Education and the Educator – has also been garnering attention lately. The current discussions are about speech on college campuses, K-12 standards and international test scores, and how school districts are handling disparities among students from different backgrounds. While these are not always positive stories, it’s encouraging that these debates are taking place and evoking such interest and passion. Much is at stake. 

A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free
people.”

James Madison

Education forms the foundation of a free and prosperous society and helps individuals pursue lives of curiosity, discovery, and self-actualization. The better we are able to prepare young people for success – to be productive contributors to the community, the economy, and the culture – the more likely they will be able to carry the society forward when it is their time to lead. Universal education, as Horace Mann observed almost two centuries ago, is the “great equalizer” and is “best provided in schools embracing children of all religious, social, and ethnic backgrounds.” Over the long run, a well-educated citizenry will carry forward values, seek to preserve areas of precious social capital, and invest for the future. Indeed, many of the challenges we’re discussing at our South Florida Dialogues can be traced back to how well we serve our students and educators. 

It was my good fortune to grow up in a family and a community that cherished education. When I left for Berkeley in 1964, the Los Angeles public school system from which I graduated – and our neighborhood schools in particular – were the envy of other districts. More broadly, the American education system was an international wonder. The U.S. had added nearly one year of formal education per decade from 1870 to 1950, granting each successive generation access to a deeper and fuller understanding of the world. By 1960, America’s students averaged two more years of education than any other country. It was saddening when I moved my department from New York to Los Angeles in 1978 and discovered that these trends were reversing and that the quality of public education in my hometown had dropped significantly.

 _¹ The album’s opening title track is a spoken-word poem by the artist’s mother describing her sacrifices moving to the United States so her son could “become a man and live free in his American Dream.”  

The number one factor in determining the quality of in-class instruction is the educator. Yet educators are not held in correspondingly high esteem. 

When we formalized our family’s philanthropy soon after, education was at the forefront of our efforts, along with our preexisting focus on health and medical research. We would quickly learn that what we observed in Los Angeles was not an isolated case. A decade later, the U.S. Department of Education formed a commission charged with documenting the quality of the nation’s education system. The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” opened ominously: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” 

The number one factor in determining the quality of in-class instruction is the educator. Yet educators are not held in correspondingly high esteem. 

Over the past half-century we’ve examined nearly every facet of the educational ecosystem, and while today’s education challenges may seem novel, many are variations of similar challenges we’ve observed for decades. 

Our nonprofit work has shown that the number one factor in determining the quality of in-class instruction is the educator. Yet educators are not held in correspondingly high esteem, and sadly our university departments focused on education – the training ground of our teachers – sometimes struggle to attract the best candidates to this essential profession. This makes it all the more important that we take great care of our most talented teachers: If educators are the key factor in building human capital through education, they should be celebrated accordingly. 

For four decades, we’ve sought to elevate the role of educators and recognize those who exemplify how a good teacher can have a lasting positive impact on thousands of students. Each year we travel the country to honor outstanding teachers with $25,000 Milken Educator Awards. The ceremonies are always inspiring and emotional, as the teachers are not notified beforehand and are honored at surprise assemblies in front of all the kids. Sometimes called the “Oscars of Teaching,” the awards honor early- to mid-career educators, many of whom are the products of the communities they serve. These unsung heroes then become part of a network of nearly 3,000 other past recipients, which enables them to share best-practices and work toward solutions to the challenges facing all teachers. 

I recently had the opportunity to present one of these awards at a public charter school in downtown Washington, DC, less than a mile from our new Center. The school’s educators believe in their students and vigorously challenge them to excel. Last year, 100% of the school’s graduates were accepted into a four-year college, with an average merit-based scholarship of $150,000. Students, nearly half of whom are from underrepresented minority backgrounds, typically take 11 to 12 AP exams and maintain a pass rate comparable to the most competitive schools in the world. In 2023, their graduates’ average ACT score was 30 – for context, that places them in the top 6% of all who sat for the ACTs. We visit many schools and regularly interact with exceptional educators, but even we were taken aback by these outcomes. 

The visit was a reminder that there are many successful initiatives happening around the country – and around the world – often driven by philanthropic foundations and entrepreneurs who are deeply committed to improving student outcomes. Some launch scholars’ or educators’ programs as we have done, while others develop curricula or establish schools. One of the more exciting avenues is the creation of online learning platforms: From pre-K through graduate school, we now live in a world of educational abundance that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. Many of these platforms offer free access to world-class instruction. 

Another profound truth we’ve highlighted is the crucial value of early childhood education. Nobel economist James Heckman, whose famous equation is depicted below, observed that “the best investment is in quality early childhood development from birth to five for disadvantaged children and their families.” 

Heckman’s argument is not limited to disadvantaged children, but his work demonstrates that the longer-term benefits to society are greatest when we invest in kids from marginalized communities and from families with less education and fewer financial resources. Doing so fosters better long-term health and less poverty in later life. To express it in terms of the American Dream, investments in early childhood education increase economic mobility among those who can most benefit. 

It’s worth noting here that America’s challenges in education are generally not financial in nature. Conversely, some of our poorest-performing districts have the highest per-student budgets, and the United States routinely spends more per student than other advanced economies. (Currently, only Luxembourg, with a population roughly the size of Portland, Oregon, spends more per student.) 

² While some of the drop-off in performance is explained by disruptions caused by Covid school closures, those same closures affected other nations as well, and U.S. math scores were already flagging before the pandemic.

The larger challenge with U.S. public education is ensuring that the spending is directed toward improved student outcomes for all. We recently reviewed the latest results from the OECD’s standardized international testing program, PISA, and it seems we are not achieving strong returns on our education investments. The exam tests 15-year-old students across 81 nations. The United States ranked 31st in math, with scores among the lowest ever recorded for the country.2 (Education Secretary Miguel Cardona greeted the results with a call to action: “We need a math revolution.”) Our ranks for Reading and Science were better – 7th and 13th, respectively – but the United States was among the bottom quintile of all countries in terms of our 10-year trend lines. Diving further into the PISA data tables, Americans of Asian descent actually outperformed all other countries in math; even as our national averages remain stubbornly low, there are areas of high performance, some driven by in part by immigration. 

2023 PISA Results 

The PISA tables reflect that we are underserving populations in the United States who would most benefit from stronger educational foundations, namely lower-income students and students from underserved communities. Sadly, many attempts to address this challenge focus on the symptoms rather than the causes. 

Last year, the school board of Culver City – an affluent neighborhood just south of Beverly Hills – opted to remove honors classes from its high school curriculum as a way to achieve equity among students. The district’s high-school English teachers pushed for the change after observing that fewer black and Latino students were enrolling in 9th and 10th grade honors English, which would make it difficult for them to then take AP English in 11th or 12th grade. Their cause is a noble one with which most can agree: We all want increased “educational mobility.” The challenge, as expressed by students and parents, is that some of the kids are eager and motivated to learn and excel in school while others are not, and it’s no easy thing to change those behaviors in high school. Without earlier interventions, then, it’s difficult to see an outcome other than the lowering of standards and opportunities for the higher-performing students who must now learn at a slower pace. 

Oregon took a different and more direct tack in its efforts to flatten disparities. During the pandemic, when classrooms were closed and standardized tests difficult to administer, the state paused its proficiency standards testing through 2024. These tests required high school students to demonstrate basic mastery in nine essential skills, including reading, writing, and math. Last October, the state board of education voted to extend the pause through at least 2029, citing the tests as harmful hurdles for historically marginalized students. One equity-focused nonprofit organization told The Oregonian that the decision “’risks leading Oregonians to believe that our state is lowering expectations to artificially mask disparities’ and reinforces false and prejudiced ideas that students’ demographics dictate their academic success.” 

This brings us to a larger point at the heart of the Center for Advancing the American Dream. We should indeed take it as a national challenge that our education system does not adequately support students most in need. However, we should also not lose focus on providing high-quality education to our most talented students. We can achieve both. 

We should also recognize the crucial distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. The former reflects the American Dream aspiration that everyone – regardless of background, beliefs, demographics, or personal preferences – should have the opportunity to pursue his or her dreams and have access to the building blocks of a meaningful life, including good health, a quality education, and access to capital. We believe this philosophy is not only laudable but supreme among all competing ideals; it is the basis of the founding of the country, a cornerstone of liberal democracy, and part of the DNA of our Center. 

In good-faith we may find that most advocates of both approaches seek the same goal: a broad-based improvement in outcomes such that every person has the fullest opportunity to realize his or her potential. But how we work to achieve that is of crucial importance. 

³ In recent years, several schools have moved away from requiring standardized tests because of concerns over disparate performance. Historically, however, ACTs and SATs have served as great equalizers for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who show strong academic potential but have lower GPAs. A 2020 University of California report by the Standardized Testing Task Force found that among 23,000 students guaranteed admission to the UC system by merit of their test scores, “25% were members of underrepresented minority groups, and 47% were low-income or first-generation students … who would not have been guaranteed admission on the basis of their grades alone.” Standardized testing secured these students a university seat.

In 2022, LAUSD reported some hopeful news: not only had grades recovered since the pandemic, but they had actually gotten better. Closer inspection revealed an inconvenient second data point. While 73% of LAUSD high school juniors earned grades of A, B, or C, only 19% of them were achieving at grade-level standards. At the same time, LAUSD and other major California districts eliminated the grades D and F. As a Sacramento news affiliate reported, “high schoolers who fail a test or homework assignment can get a do-over or more time. … Students who don’t ever finish the assignments or who fail the final exam would earn an ‘incomplete.’” These improvised reworkings of standards become particularly challenging for college admissions officers who are now dealing with the combined ambiguity of grade-system changes, grade inflation, and in some cases the removal of standardized testing. 

In recent years, several schools have moved away from requiring standardized tests because of concerns over disparate performance. Historically, however, ACTs and SATs have served as great equalizers for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who show strong academic potential but have lower GPAs. A 2020 University of California report by the Standardized Testing Task Force found that among 23,000 students guaranteed admission to the UC system by merit of their test scores, “25% were members of underrepresented minority groups, and 47% were low-income or first-generation students … who would not have been guaranteed admission on the basis of their grades alone.” Standardized testing secured these students a university seat. 

Unfortunately, these and other challenges are also reflected in our colleges and universities, including the most elite institutions. Readers are doubtless familiar with the controversy that erupted last fall as three university presidents performed a legalistic tap dance in response to direct questions about their institutions’ codes of conduct. I won’t rehash the story here other than to note that part of the outrage was the obvious double-standard it revealed. 

Our university campuses have become increasingly unwelcoming of speech that falls outside a narrow set of common beliefs. By now most people have seen stories of individuals facing dire consequences for stating things that would have been considered innocuous a decade ago. It’s as though the language has become laden with secret rules that change suddenly and frequently, and the punishment for violating those rules can be wildly disproportionate. One result of this shift is a new era of self-censorship. The lines do not map perfectly to traditional left-versus-right politics, and in fact both self-identified liberal and conservative students and faculty say they exercise varying degrees of self-censorship for fear of reprisal from other students, faculty, or administrators. 

In his book Collective Illusions, Todd Rose points out that during the height of McCarthyism, only 13% of Americans reported being more constrained in their speech. We often hold that period up as a particularly dark moment in contemporary American history – a time when fear ruled over speech. Researchers have used the same questionnaire more recently and found that today more than 40% of Americans self-censor. A separate poll placed the number at 62% – that’s nearly two-thirds of Americans who don’t feel they can express their beliefs. 

Free expression and open dialogue hold special provenance especially on college campuses. The competition of ideas in the university begets better ideas and better graduates who are capable of articulating their positions and values while holding a sophisticated understanding of complex issues from multiple perspectives. 

Earlier I noted that most of our current educational challenges are not entirely novel. The college monoculture has been developing for decades, and debates about the parameters of free expression on campus date back at least to 1964. I should know: I was a Berkeley undergraduate when the Free Speech movement swept first across our campus and then the rest of the country. To be clear, the Berkeley campus was not exactly a convent before the movement: on any given day one would see propaganda tables all along Bancroft Way populated by individuals who were more than happy to share their passion about everything from Communism to Nazism to Free Love. (Regarding their impact: none of my friends suddenly ran away to join the Sexual Freedom League; we all managed to survive just fine hearing and seeing provocative ideas.) 

A couple of years later, the University of Chicago issued its own report on the role of the university in political and social action. The Kalven Report’s overall message holds true today: “A university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.” More succinctly, the report noted that “a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.” 

The instinct on university campuses is to shield one’s ears from upsetting ideas, just as the prevailing approach in K-12 seems to be to shield one’s eyes from disappointing outcomes. Both approaches have results that are as predictable today as they were when Shakespeare observed that eventually “the truth will out.” Rather than mask or defer our challenges, we would better serve our students and educators by addressing them directly. 

—Mike Milken, February 2024 

⁴ In his book Collective Illusions, Todd Rose points out that during the height of McCarthyism, only 13% of Americans reported being more constrained in their speech. We often hold that period up as a particularly dark moment in contemporary American history – a time when fear ruled over speech. Researchers have used the same questionnaire more recently and found that today more than 40% of Americans self-censor. A separate poll placed the number at 62% – that’s nearly two-thirds of Americans who don’t feel they can express their beliefs.

Click here to download a PDF version of this article.

---