Why Does the Press Do This? The Washington Post on DC Public Schools

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The lead article in the Metro section of today’s Washington Post is headlined: “DC has widest race gap in tests”.  It reports on two studies released yesterday (math and reading) by the US Department of Education, which provide figures from test results of 4th and 8th grade students in various urban jurisdictions around the country, with these results broken down by race among other categories.   Figures are provided on 19 urban jurisdictions, which vary between large cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and smaller  jurisdictions such as Jefferson County, Kentucky (Louisville) and Fresno, California.

As the headline states, and as the primary point of the article, the gap in test scores between white and black students in DC public schools, is larger in DC than in any of the other jurisdictions.  This is factually correct.  But the Washington Post article never notes that the reason the gap is so wide in DC is in part due to the fact that the test scores for whites in DC public schools are the highest in the nation among the 19 urban jurisdictions reviewed, for both reading and math, and for both the 4th graders and the 8th graders.

Indeed, the test scores for whites in DC public schools are higher in all four categories than the average scores for whites in any of the 50 US states reported in the similar studies issued by the Department of Education on November 1.  And note that these test results are only for students in DC public schools:  students in charter schools and in private schools are not covered.  Note also that the share of white students in DC public schools, while low, was not the lowest in the country:  7 of the 19 jurisdictions had a lower share of whites in their public schools in the 4th grade, and 2 of the 19 jurisdictions had a lower share in the 8th grade.

The gap is wide in DC also because the test scores reported for blacks are low.  For the four scores for 4th grade and 8th grade reading and math, the scores for blacks vary between the second worst and the fourth worst among the 19.  It is important to know this. The results indicate that students can do well in DC public schools (the white students score higher than any of the others in the 19 urban jurisdictions, and higher than whites in any of the 50 states).  But black students are not doing well, and one should focus on trying to understand why.

Finally, the city with the “best” (lowest) racial gap among the 19 was Cleveland for the 4th grade students, in both reading and math.  Cleveland’s gap in the scores was only 22 in reading and 21 in math.  In contrast, the gap for Washington, DC, 4th graders was 64 in reading and 60 in math.  But Cleveland achieves this distinction of being “best” in the nation by the criterion the Post judges as most important, by having the worst scores among the 19 jurisdictions, for both whites and blacks in both reading and math.   This is obviously not something to emulate.

One clearly should want to reduce the racial gaps in such test scores in DC as well as elsewhere.  But the intelligent way to start to do this is to recognize that at least a certain group of students is performing pretty well in DC public schools, with scores that are consistently the highest in the nation in the jurisdictions reviewed.  This is relevant, but never mentioned in the Post article.  It suggests that the curriculum and other practices in DC public schools can produce good results.  But blacks in DC public schools have struggled, and the focus should be on how to raise this.

The Worsening Distribution of Income: The Top 1% vs. the Other 99%

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The Occupy Wall Street and related groups have brought to the fore concerns about the distribution of income in the US.  And there is validity to these concerns, as the distribution of income has deteriorated markedly in recent decades, starting with the Reagan period in the 1980s.  The share of the top 1% has well more than doubled, to a level not seen since the 1920’s just prior to the Great Depression, with this coming out of a declining share of the bottom 90%.

The graph above is taken from material assembled by Professor Emmanuel Saez and his colleagues and co-authors, and is available through his web site (link here). The specific data here is from a July 2010 update of material originally published by Professor Saez with Professor Thomas Piketty in 2003, with data now through 2008.  Professor Saez and colleagues from around the world have assembled an amazing set of data for a large number of countries, using tax return data to produce long time series of family (tax unit) income levels.  Such data can go much farther back in time than available income surveys will allow, to produce historical data otherwise unavailable.  While there are drawbacks (for example, tax units are not always the same as the household units one would prefer), nothing else can span such periods of time.

The US data show that there was a previous boom in the 1920s in the income share of the top 1%, peaking at 23.9% of national income in 1928.  But the share then fell in the Great Depression and during World War II, and with the reforms and structural changes implemented during that period, eventually came to about a 10% share in the 1950s and 1960s, and to about 9% in the 1970s.  But it then started to grow, and reached a 23.5% share in 2007.  It fell back in 2008, with the onset of the financial collapse in the last year of the Bush Administration.  But as noted in this blog posting of November 26 on this site, profits rebounded in 2009 to now, so it is likely the top 1% share has also rebounded.

It is also interesting that this increase in income concentration is essentially only at the very top:  the top 1% is seeing almost all of the increase.  Those in the 90 to 95% percentile, and in the 95 to 99% percentile, have seen some trend rise in their income shares in recent decades, but they have been close to flat.  Rather, the higher share of the top 1% has come out of a falling share of the bottom 90% (the shares of all groups together must sum to 100%).  The share of the bottom 90% has dipped to about 50%, from a level of about 65% (plus of minus a percentage point or two) from 1942 to 1982.  This is a remarkable change after four decades of such stability.

Another interesting calculation, done by Professor Saez, found that 52% of the increase in real national income between 1993 and 2008 accrued to the top 1% of families, even though this top 1% only had a 14% share of national income at the start of this period (and 21% at the end).  That is, more than half of income growth over this 15 year period went to just the top 1% of the population, and where this group accounted for only a 14% share of income at the beginning.  Had the growth been balanced, the top 1% would have obtained 14% of the income growth, not 52% of it.

The data here does not explain why there has been this increasing concentration of income in the US.  One has also seen increasing concentration in other countries around the world in recent decades (the data is available here), which suggests some basic global structural changes are part of the cause.  But the global pattern has not been as extreme as in the US, suggesting that policy changes in the US begun under Reagan and continued since, are also part of the cause.

Non-Defense Federal Government Employment Has Fallen Under Obama, and Grew Under Bush

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(change, in thousands of jobs) Jan 2001 to Jan 2005 Jan 2005 to Jan 2009 Jan 2001 to Jan 2009 Jan 2009 to Oct 2011
Federal Govt Employment -35 66 31 49
Defense Civilian Employees -27.5 25 -2.5 63.5
Federal excl Defense -7.5 41 33.5 -14.5

Federal Government employment, other than civilian employees in the Defense Department, has fallen during the Obama Administration.  In contrast, it grew under Bush.

While the numbers are small, in particular relative to national employment (the Federal Government only employs about 2.8 million workers, out of a US labor force of 154 million, or just 1.8%), it is helpful to get the facts straight in the light of the continued Republican attacks that the Federal Government has boomed under Obama, and accounts for the continued weak economic and employment growth of the US.  The spokeswoman for Republican Congressman and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Megan Whittemore), for example, charged in an email sent to PolitiFact (link here), that the only job growth that can be attributed to the 2009 Stimulus program was in government.  Yet as we saw in a posting made yesterday at this site (link here), total government employment in the US (mostly state and local) has fallen by close to 600,000 since Obama took office.  The purpose of this new post is to focus on what has happened to the Federal Government employment alone.

Federal Government employment is only less than 13% of total government employment in the US, so the changes here will not much matter overall.  But it is interesting that while there has been a very small growth in overall Federal employment since Obama took office (of just 1.8% total, or 0.6% annually), it has all been due to growth in civilian employees at the Defense Department.  The table above, drawn from data issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (US Department of Labor), presents the numbers.  The figures by the BLS on Defense Department employees are not seasonally adjusted, so none of the figures in the table above are either, for consistency.  However, seasonal adjustment does not make much of a change in Federal Government employment figures in any case.  The most recent available figures are for October.  It should also be noted that all employment figures of the BLS are for the civilian population, and hence exclude active military personnel in all categories.

As is seen, while the number of all Federal employees rose by 49,000 under Obama, the Defense Department civilian employees grew by 63,500, so that Federal employment excluding Defense fell under Obama by 14,500.  It is also interesting to note that Federal employment grew under Bush, all in his second term, with an increase of 33,500 non-Defense Federal workers over his two terms together (and by 41,000 in his second term alone).

In sum, Federal Government employment grew under Bush.  Under Obama, non-Defense Federal workers have declined, and overall they have grown only because of additional Defense Department civilian workers.  All the numbers are relatively small, in particular relative to the size of the full US labor force.  But the assertion by many Republican politicians that the Federal workforce has exploded under Obama is false.