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A penchant among far too many education writers who embrace the Poverty Myth of Education is to oversimplify the debate over the role of education in stemming the long-term effects of poverty. First, they argue that school reformers proclaim that education is the sole solution for economic development in poor communities - even though no one ever says this. Then they argue that education can't possibly be either the long-term or short-term solution for poverty - and find some flimsy data or examples to back it up.

This paper presents a dynamic model of the decision to pursue a college education in which students face uncertainty about their future income stream after graduation due to unobserved heterogeneity in their innate scholastic ability. After students matriculate and start taking exams, they reevaluate their expectations about succeeding in college and may find it optimal to drop out and join the workforce without completing an undergraduate degree. The model shows that, in accordance with the data, poorer students are less likely to graduate and are more apt to drop out earlier than are wealthier students. Our model generates these results without introducing credit constraints. Conditioning on measures of innate ability, in the data we find that poor students are at least 27 percent more likely to drop out of college and they do so sooner than wealthier students. 

John Merrow Gets It Wrong on Testing: Any education reporter or editorialist worth his salt has to admire the work of broadcaster John Merrow. But in his interview last week with Mother Jones, Merrow ended up embracing the wrongheaded view of so many education traditionalists when it comes to standardized testing. Argues Merrow: "No Child Left Behind has done a great deal of damage… Testing is largely punitive. It's a "gotcha" game. We are disempowering teachers."