Black father holding his baby at Black Fatherhood event in Los Angeles, California. Photos: Dreamstime.com [(upper-left) Annsife, (upper-right) Rmarmion, (center) Americanspirit]

By Jazelle Hunt -NNPA Washington Correspondent

May 29, 2015 

The Centers for Disease Control report, which covered a sample of 10,403 men aged 15-44 years from 2006-2010, and a separate survey debunked the myth.

It is true that Black dads are more likely to live apart from their children; the Pew Research Center reports that 44 percent do. However, Pew also found that 67 percent of Black fathers who don't live with their children see them at least once a month, compared to 69 percent of White dads and 32 percent of Latino dads who don't live with their children.

Among fathers who resided with their kids, African American dads were more involved in their children's lives.

In the survey, fathers rated how often they performed certain activities with any or all of their children over the previous four weeks. Black fathers were most likely to bathe, dress, diaper, or help their children use the toilet on a daily basis. This was true for 70 percent of Black dads who lived with their children, compared with 60 percent of White dads and 45 percent of Latino dads.

According to a similar report from the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of all Black fathers read to their children at least several times per week. Black dads in the CDC survey who didn't live with their children were more than twice as likely as their White counterparts to host story time every day.

These same "absent" Black dads were significantly the most likely to talk to their school-age children about their day-more than 50 percent reported having done so several times per week or more, compared to 34 percent of absent White dads and 23 percent of absent Latino fathers.

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Anya Kamenetz

May 28, 2015

More and more people in education agree on the importance of learning stuff other than academics.  But no one agrees on what to call that "stuff".

There are least seven major overlapping terms in play. New ones are being coined all the time. This bagginess bugs me, as a member of the education media. It bugs researchers and policymakers too.

"Basically we're trying to explain student success educationally or in the labor market with skills not directly measured by standardized tests," says Martin West, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "The problem is, you go to meetings and everyone spends the first two hours complaining and arguing about semantics."

West studies what he calls "non-cognitive skills." Although he's not completely happy with that term.

The problem isn't just semantic, argues Laura Bornfreund, deputy director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation. She wrote a paper on what she called "Skills for Success," since she didn't like any of these other terms. "There's a lot of different terms floating around but also a lack of agreement on what really is most important to students."

As Noah Webster, the great American lexicographer and educator, put it back in 1788,"The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head."

Yet he didn't come up with a good name, either.  So, in Webster's tradition, here's a short glossary of terms that are being used for that cultivation of the heart. Vote for your favorite in the comments - or propose a new one.

Susan Dynarski

Rich and poor students don't merely enroll in college at different rates; they also complete it at different rates. The graduation gap is even wider than the enrollment gap.

In 2002, researchers with the National Center for Education Statistics started tracking a cohort of 15,000 high school sophomores. The project, called the Education Longitudinal Study, recorded information about the students' academic achievement, college entry, work history and college graduation. A recent publication examines the completed education of these young people, who are now in their late 20s.

The study divided students into four equally sized groups, or quartiles, depending on their parents' education, income and occupation. The students in the lowest quartile had parents with the lowest income and education, more likely to work in unskilled jobs. 

Those in the highest quartile had parents with the highest income and education, those more likely to be professionals or managers.

In both groups, most of the teenagers had high hopes for college. 

Over all, more than 70 percent of sophomores planned to earn a bachelor's degree. In the top quartile, 87 percent expected to get at least a bachelor's, with 24 percent aiming for an advanced degree.

In the bottom quartile, 58 percent of students expected to get at least a bachelor's degree and 12 percent to go on to graduate school.

Thirteen years later, we can see who achieved their goals.

Among the participants from the most disadvantaged families, just 14 percent had earned a bachelor's degree.

That is, one out of four of the disadvantaged students who had hoped to get a bachelor's had done so. Among those from the most advantaged families, 60 percent had earned a bachelor's, about two-thirds of those who had planned to.

Seeing these numbers, some readers may wonder whether the poor children were simply overconfident, with aspirations outstripping their academic skills. Maybe the low-income children weren't completing college because they were not able.

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