[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 41 (Wednesday, March 11, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1435-S1436]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

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                            MOYNIHAN REPORT

 Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have 
printed in the Record a copy of my remarks at the Hoover Institution.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                            Moynihan Report

       I first met Pat Moynihan four years after he released his 
     explosive report on the circumstances of African-American 
     families in the middle of the civil rights era. I was 28 
     years old then, and by a stroke of providence, had found 
     myself sitting at a desk in the West Wing of the White House 
     next to Bryce Harlow, President Nixon's first senior staff 
     appointment. My job was answering Mr. Harlow's mail, 
     returning his phone calls, and absorbing his wisdom. It was a 
     perfect PhD in politics and government for a young man.
       Downstairs were two real PhD's. At one end of the Hall, 
     Gen. Alexander Haig performed the same sort of services for 
     Henry Kissinger. At the other end was Professor Daniel 
     Patrick Moynihan. By another stroke of Providence, President 
     Nixon had attracted these Harvard professors to the West Wing 
     where they joined one of the most talented and intellectually 
     diverse teams of White House advisers of any first term 
     President of the United States.
       I have always thought, by the way, that if the president 
     had paid more attention to his wiser, more broad gauged 
     advisors in the White House--Harlow, Arthur Burns, Kissinger, 
     Moynihan, and cabinet officials George Schultz and Mel 
     Laird--instead of the advance men who guarded access to the 
     Oval Office that there never would have been a Watergate 
     affair.
       The White House then was brimming with talent. Jim Keogh, 
     the former editor of TIME, shepherded a quartet of young 
     speechwriters: Bill Safire, Pat Buchanan, Lee Heubner, Ray 
     Price. Liddy Hanford--now Elizabeth Dole--worked in the 
     consumer affairs office.
       And Pat himself brought with him from Harvard four of his 
     brightest students: Checker Finn, later the nation's foremost 
     education gadfly; the Rhodes Scholar John Price; Chris 
     DeMuth, later head of American Enterprise Institute; and Dick 
     Blumenthal, now my colleague in the United States Senate.
       Steve Hess, Pat's Deputy in 1969, has detailed in his new 
     book, ``The Professor and the President'', how fascinated 
     Nixon was with Moynihan who ``advised the President on what 
     books to read, to whom he should award the Presidential Medal 
     of Freedom and how not to redecorate the Oval Office.'' 
     Moynihan persuaded Nixon to recommend the Family Assistance 
     Plan, a negative income tax that was the forerunner of 
     today's Earned Income Tax Credit.
       Looking back 50 years, that the author of such a 
     controversial report could have been hired at all by a 
     president of the United States and then that later this 
     author could have been elected to the U.S. Senate three times 
     from New York suggests the wiliness and courage of this 
     professor with the cheerful soul of an Irish immigrant. Let's 
     just say Pat followed the advice of his favorite character, 
     Tammany Hall boss George Washington Plunkitt, ``I seen my 
     opportunities, and I took 'em.''
       Today, 50 years after it was written, the trend Moynihan 
     was detailing--the rise of households led by single mothers--
     has grown more dramatic and cuts across all racial groups. 
     Today more than four in 10 children in the U.S. are born 
     outside of marriage.
       In 2013, the average income for households with married 
     couples was more than double that of households led by women 
     with no spouse present.
       Today's panelists will discuss the implications of the 
     Moynihan Report released 50 years ago as well as the proper 
     policy responses. In my remarks, I will be less ambitious. I 
     will focus on what this trend means for the school--the most 
     important secular institution designed to help children reach 
     our country's goal for them--that every child, as much as 
     possible, have the opportunity to begin at the same starting 
     line.
       And in case you want to step out for coffee at this point, 
     I can jump straight to my conclusion: the school can't come 
     close to doing it all. And neither can the government. If we 
     want our children to be at the same starting line, there must 
     be a revival of interest in these children and their parents 
     from traditional sources: the religious institutions, 
     families, and communities.
       To begin with, what is a school supposed to do anyway? 
     Professor James Coleman is often quoted as having said that 
     the purpose of the school is to help parents do what parents 
     don't do as well. So what have our schools traditionally done 
     that parents did not do as well?
       In 1988, I attended a conference in Rochester at which the 
     president of Notre Dame asked, ``What is the rationale for a 
     public school?''--schools which 90 percent of our children 
     attend. Albert Shanker offered this answer: ``A public school 
     is for the purpose of teaching immigrant children reading, 
     writing and arithmetic and what it means to be an American 
     with the hope they'll go home and teach their parents.''
       But obviously in today's world, Shanker's vision of the 
     school does not come close to doing all the things that many 
     parents are not able to do for their children. In a 
     Washington Post story earlier this year, Sonya Romero-Smith, 
     a veteran teacher at Lew Wallace Elementary School in 
     Albuquerque, said this: ``When they first come in my door in 
     the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of 
     immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean? A big part of my 
     job is making them feel safe.''
       The article was reporting that, for the first time in at 
     least 50 years, more than half of public school students are 
     eligible for the federal program that provides free or 
     reduced-price school lunches. That means that their family's 
     income is less than 185 percent of the federal poverty line, 
     or below about $44,000 for a family of four. Many of them, of 
     course, are far poorer than that.
       Romero-Smith said she helps her students clean up with 
     bathroom wipes and toothbrushes, and stocks a drawer with 
     clean socks, underwear, pants and shoes. The job of teacher 
     has expanded to ``counselor, therapist, doctor, parent, 
     attorney,'' she said.
       If parents are unable to meet the needs of these children, 
     should the school try to meet those needs? If the school does 
     not, who does?
       Part of understanding the answer to that question may come 
     from a study last year that was not unlike the Moynihan 
     report in that the news it delivered was uncomfortable but 
     important. This study came from the Equality of Opportunity 
     Project, made up of economists from Harvard and Berkeley, who 
     looked at intergenerational mobility across areas of the 
     U.S.--how likely a child from a low-income family is to make 
     more money as an adult than their parents did.
       The researchers determined that we are, in fact, a 
     collection of societies--some of us live in ```lands of 
     opportunity' with high rates of [upward] mobility across 
     generations,'' and others in places where few children raised 
     in low-income homes escape poverty.
       The researchers looked at the anonymous tax records of 
     millions of Americans born between 1980 and 1982, measuring 
     their income in 2011-2012, when they were roughly 30 years 
     old. They found five key variables that seemed to explain why 
     some places had more upward mobility than others:
       The first was segregation: Areas that are more 
     residentially segregated by race and income have lower levels 
     of upward mobility. The second was income inequality. The 
     third was the quality of the K-12 school system, as measured 
     by factors like test scores and dropout rates. The fourth was 
     social capital--rates of civic and religious involvement.
       The fifth was the strongest correlation--they found that 
     the strongest predictor of upward mobility is family 
     structure, such as the fraction of single parents in the 
     area. ``Parents'' marital status does not matter purely 
     through its effects at the individual level. Children of 
     married parents also have higher rates of upward mobility if 
     they live in communities with fewer single parents,'' the 
     researchers write. Put another way, if our goal is to help 
     every child begin at the same starting line, many children 
     raised in single parent families have a harder time getting 
     there.
       The Equality of Opportunity Project also did a second 
     study. This one found that economic mobility has not changed 
     much over time and is lower in the U.S. than in most 
     developed countries.
       They write: ``For example, the probability that a child 
     reaches the top fifth of the income distribution given 
     parents in the bottom fifth of the income distribution is 
     8.4%

[[Page S1436]]

     for children born in 1971, compared with 9.0% for those born 
     in 1986.'' In other words, your chances of moving up the 
     economic ladder depend a lot upon who your parents are, how 
     much money they make--and whether or not they're married.
       These are not easy conclusions to reach or easy discussions 
     to have.
       But the evidence of these long odds is strong enough that 
     our 100,000 public schools--as well as our private schools--
     should do all they reasonably can to help today's American 
     children--and their parents--to succeed.
       School policies can help low-income, single-parent families 
     get their children to the same starting line as children from 
     better off families.
       Here are 8 ideas:
       1. More parental choice of schools: The most obvious and 
     important step the federal government can take to improve the 
     education of children is to give their parents a choice of 
     schools.
       First, we know that one of the best ways to lift a child 
     out of poverty is to give them a good education.
       Second, we know that many low-income parents are seeking 
     these opportunities for their children and will work to get 
     their children into better schools if they are able.
       A single mom who is busy working two jobs may have a harder 
     time getting to a parent-teacher conference, but we see in 
     the D.C. voucher program and elsewhere that some of the 
     fiercest advocates for school choice are single parents of 
     children enrolled in the program.
       Researchers at the American Enterprise Institute conducted 
     a series of focus-group sessions and personal interviews with 
     low-income urban families enrolled in the D.C. voucher 
     program. They found that ``parents report that they want to 
     be respected as advocates of their child's education and will 
     fight hard to keep their child's private-school choice 
     program if that program's future is threatened.''
       A 2007 study published in Education Next found that 
     ``parents in high-poverty schools strongly value a teacher's 
     ability to raise student achievement and appear indifferent 
     to student satisfaction.'' It was parents in schools serving 
     better-off families who seemed to place less weight on 
     academics when requesting a particular teacher for their 
     child.
       2. More charter schools: One promising way to provide more 
     low-income parents with school choice is by creating more 
     charter schools. In fact, one of the most exciting 
     developments in American education in the past two decades 
     has been the emergence of a growing number of charter schools 
     that have demonstrated remarkable success educating 
     disadvantaged children. The success of these schools is 
     attributable to many factors, from close attention to student 
     behavior and discipline to the flexibility their leaders have 
     to put together an excellent teaching staff. But one thing 
     that many of them have in common is that they have expanded 
     the amount of time students spend in school, usually with 
     longer school days.
       Low-income parents, many of them single-parents, are 
     rushing to enroll their children in these schools. I suspect 
     that one reason is school schedules that make it easier for 
     parents to make ends meet while knowing that their children 
     are well cared for.
       3. Different school schedules: It shouldn't be just 
     charters that experiment with different schedules. School 
     schedules that follow traditional work schedules--year-round, 
     7 am to 6 pm--would make it easier for parents to keep full-
     time jobs and still have the ability to be there with their 
     child before and after school to make sure they've had 
     breakfast in the morning, or make sure they've done their 
     homework in the evening.
       4. Flexible workplace schedules: I intend to try putting in 
     statute authorization for employers to negotiate schedule and 
     overtime with employees, so they know they have the full 
     support of federal law in enabling employees to find 
     arrangements that suit their needs. This would help working 
     parents have the flexibility to attend parent-teacher 
     conferences.
       5. Work-site day care: Years ago in my private life, I 
     helped start a company with Bob Keeshan of Captain Kangaroo, 
     and my wife and a couple of others that later merged with 
     Bright Horizons and became the largest work-site daycare 
     provider in the country. We recognized that the number of 
     mothers of young children working outside the home had 
     created a need, and we helped corporations provide worksite 
     daycare centers that were safe and good for those moms and 
     dads as well.
       6. Work-site schools: A few dozen large U.S. corporations 
     have partnered with their local school districts to open 
     public schools in their corporate facilities. It's a similar 
     idea to work-site day care--it provides working parents with 
     choice, as well as makes it easier for them to be involved 
     with their children's care and education.
       Federal policy ought to enable and at least not discourage 
     states and local school districts and businesses from these 
     kinds of arrangements. Policymakers can support states and 
     school districts to take these steps to enable low-income 
     families to get their children the education they deserve.
       7. Better Teaching, Better schools: Over the long run, 
     improving schools so that they serve students well regardless 
     of their circumstances may have a direct effect on the 
     challenges of single parenthood.
       For example, the Harvard economist Raj Chetty has done 
     studies showing that a good teacher improves earnings and, 
     for girls, reduces teenage pregnancy. A study at Promise 
     Academy in the Harlem Children's Zone found that girls 
     attending that school, a high-performing charter school, were 
     12.1 percentage points less likely to have a child as a 
     teenager.
       Results like these show how great teachers and schools can 
     put their students on track to college and, eventually, the 
     kinds of jobs that enable them to move out of the cycle of 
     poverty.
       8. Wraparound services: Professor Coleman's suggestion was 
     that if parents don't do it, schools should--in which case we 
     should look at a whole range of services schools ought to be 
     providing. This takes us far afield from the traditional role 
     of the school described by Albert Shanker.
       There are today many social programs that are not school-
     based--many funded by the federal government, other by the 
     states--that are designed to support families that need help.
       For example, welfare programs, child-care vouchers, Earned-
     Income Tax Credit, the housing allowance. The total amount 
     spent by the federal government on these kinds of safety net 
     programs was $398 billion in 2013, or about 12 percent of the 
     total federal budget.
       Some suggest that these services should be ``wrapped 
     around'' the school--that the school should become the 
     dominant institution through which children whose families 
     are unable to provide basic supports receive them. I am not 
     so sure. There is a limit to what the school can do and, for 
     that matter, what the government can do.
       If the challenges single parents face are so great, at the 
     very least the government can make sure it ``does no harm'' 
     and does nothing to discourage marriage. Yet there is strong 
     evidence that that is precisely what the government does.
       In testimony before the Senate Budget Committee last year, 
     Robert Doar of American Enterprise Institute said that our 
     ``policies aimed at assisting low- and moderate-income 
     households with children often penalize marriage.
       Doar said that ``A single parent with two children who 
     earns $15,000 enjoys an [Earned Income Tax Credit] benefit of 
     about $4100. The credit decreases by 21.06 cents for every 
     dollar a married couple earns above $15040. . . . [I]f the 
     single parent marries someone earning $10,000, for a combined 
     income of $25,000, [the tax credit] benefit will drop to 
     about $2,200. The couple faces a marriage tax penalty of . . 
     . $1,900.''
       He continued: ``Similar penalties are embedded in Medicaid, 
     Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, 
     housing assistance, and child care--all of which apply to 
     low-and moderate-income Americans. Efforts to mitigate 
     marriage penalties have largely taken the form of tax cuts 
     directed toward married couples. But . . . 81 percent of that 
     relief flowed to couples earning above $75,000.''
       Doar suggests that a ``host of reforms could alleviate this 
     burden'' including: ``implementing a maximum marginal tax 
     rate for low-income families would tamp marriage-induced 
     hikes in rates. Providing a subsidy on individual earnings--
     not combined earnings (like the EITC)--would enable a low-
     wage American to marry someone with a child, but do so 
     without sacrificing significant income or transfer payments. 
     And mandatory individual filing, as done in Canada, 
     Australia, Italy and Japan, would either require or allow 
     low-income individuals to avoid income tax penalties.''
       Perhaps the wisest advice comes from AEI fellow W. Bradford 
     Wilcox, who says this: ``Government's role when it comes to 
     strengthening marriage and family life is necessarily 
     limited. Any successful twenty-first century effort to renew 
     the fortunes of marriage in America will depend more on civic 
     institutions, businesses, and ordinary Americans than upon 
     federal and state efforts to strengthen family life.''
       What would Pat Moynihan say today?
       Well, surely it would be creative, entertaining, insightful 
     and probably controversial. And since those on today's panels 
     are among those who knew him best and know this subject the 
     best, we'll let them answer that question.

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