Sex education is an economic
justice issue. We could have kids learn
more in school. If we raise standards. We understood our curriculum
and we were basically thrown a curve ball. I don't think
the wages match sort of the level of expectation of the
position. Teachers literally have. The future of the country
in front of them every day. How would you solve this
equation for most of us? It's as simple as following
a series of familiar steps to get us to that answer. Now, remember this this is
how students under Common Core were taught to solve
the exact same question. First adopted in 2009,
Common Core was an ambitious initiative to revolutionize
the American education system. 41 states, the
District of Columbia and four territories signed up
to participate. National leaders from Bill
Gates to President Obama supported the idea of the
common curriculum, and it cost an estimated $15.8
billion to implement. They thought standards were
just too low in the US and that we could have kids
learn more in school if we raise standards. Quite frankly, they didn't
really trust the schools to do this on their own. One of the most challenging
aspects was we understood our curriculum and we were
basically thrown a curve ball into what it was and
had to really adopt new practices. But a couple of years after
its launch, it was met with confusion and ridicule. Some of the math items that
were mocked, I think, deserved to be mocked. Frankly, they were just
very poor items. People deserve to know the
truth, but it wasn't the truth. I was 15 in 1977 and
I'll be 30 next week. I don't think that math
checks out. I don't get math. I went to school in the
2000s and we were taught Common Core. All of a sudden, parents
were having to help their kids with math homework
that they couldn't quite grasp because they hadn't
been taught math that way. So how can the US fix our
lagging school system? Can a common curriculum
work? The Common Core is a set of
standards specifically designed to better prepare
American students for success in college and
their workplace. These standards determine
what a student should know and be able to do in
language, arts and math from kindergarten through senior
year of high. School when you should know
algebra. Should it be eighth grade? Should it be ninth grade? Should you be capable of
doing Algebra one or Algebra two? When would it be
appropriate to move into calculus, things of that
nature? It's important to have a
standard because you have to have a clear vision or goal
of where you are going and what it is that you expect
for your students. I think that if you go in
without any expectations for your students, they
themselves are going to be unclear. Right. What it is that they are
showing up to school every single day to achieve. Besides setting these
benchmarks, Common Core also brought changes to how
students were taught. There definitely was a
shift, especially in just your thought and thinking
about how you approach lesson plans and how you
were going to make sure that you are disseminating the
information in a way to your students that they can
receive it. Do you know the Pythagorean
theorem? Right? Like OC A squared
plus B squared equals C squared. You can probably
ask any adult and they can shoot that back to you. It was more about if you
have that knowledge, if you understand what it is,
where do you use that? How do you apply it? On the language arts side,
there was much more of a focus on moving a little
bit away from fiction to much more focus on the
critical thinking using real live documents, like
studying Hamilton papers or something like that to
really understand what was going on at that time. The Revolution. There were two main reasons
why the initiative received so much support in its
early years. The first was fear that
America was lagging behind other countries in academic
performance. In 2009, the US showed
middling performance in reading and science and
scored below average in mathematics compared to the
average score among OECD countries. The idea was we're going to
hold schools responsible for teaching to a higher level
and then test kids to see whether or not they've
attained that higher level. The second reason was that
the Common Core allowed different states to
accurately compare their academic performances by
having a uniform standard for education. And while one state might
now say We're doing a great job of achieving our
standards, but the standards are very low and another
state is saying, you know, we're not doing as well as
we'd like to be doing and achieving our standards,
but they're very high. This makes for a confusing
conversation. With these intentions in
mind to nonprofit groups, the Council of Chief State
School Officers and the National Governors
Association developed the Standards Achieve a
nonprofit education reform group, as well as various
teachers unions, including the National Education
Association and the American Federation of Teachers,
joined in to help the process. So when they got together in
2009, what they did first is they had a memorandum of
understanding that they had state sign onto and it
basically said, okay, we're going to go write these
standards. You don't have to accept them now, but can
you at least say you'll be interested in looking at
them and might accept them down the road if you find
them to meet your needs? And over 45 states signed
on to that memorandum of understanding. We made sure that we were
having K-12 teachers talk to freshman sophomore
professors to make sure we knew what post-secondary
was expecting and making sure we built on those
expectations from K through 12. Since Common Core was a
state led initiative, the federal government did not
play a major role in developing the standards. However, it did play a role
in promoting them. The Obama administration's
Race to the Top fund offered $4.35 billion in grants for
states agreeing to adopt any college and career ready
standards. We will end what has become
a race to the bottom in our schools and instead spur a
race to the top by encouraging better
standards and assessments. And this is an area where
we are being outpaced by other nations. It's not
that their kids are any smarter than ours. It's that they are being
smarter about how to educate their children. In fact, we
were hitting bottom in 2009 2010, in the Great
Recession, and so states were desperate for money. The Obama administration
put together a recovery package for the states, but
one of the requirements was they had to have adopted
college and career readiness standards, which is a code
word for Common Core. This was seen as Obama
administration support for Common Core, and that's not
an unfair accusation. Facing minimal resistance,
it seemed as though Common Core would be a guaranteed
success. We had a meeting in two. Coulson tend to have all
the entities sign off on the adoption of the Common
Core. We had have unanimous
across the state agreement because so many Kentucky
teachers had been involved in giving feedback and
writing the standards. But a couple of years later,
things took a turn as the efficacy of the new
standard came into question. It also didn't help that
the Common Core became the subject of ridicule by
parents and the media unfamiliar with the
concepts taught under the new standard. A lot of parents were
getting homework that came home that they just didn't
understand. They thought it was
bizarre. I went through Common Core
with my kids and I remember looking at my daughter and
going, I'm not entirely clear why what you're
doing, so I'm just going to show you long division the
way I know it. It wasn't until a decade
later that federally funded research was conducted to
find out what the impact of Common Core had on students
performance over time. The results were
disappointing. The studies range from tiny
negative effects to tiny positive effects and a lot
of neutral effects in the middle. So the one thing we
would be pretty certain of is that Common Core did not
have a dramatic impact on student achievement in the
United States. Then we raised standards. Yes, we did. Did we raise
expectations on assessments? Yes, we did. Have we
improved student performance? No. There are numerous theories
as to why the Common Core has failed to improve
student performance. But the most popular theory
is that the standards took away the control from
teachers who always have a better understanding of
what their students need. The idea that you could
dictate curriculum to a teacher or dictate
instruction to a teacher from kind of remote control
from up above and say, well, here, here it is, that
you're going to teach is simply unrealistic. Kids are not cogs in a
machine. So we say something is
going to happen in third grade. But realistically,
for some kids it happened in second grade. And for some
kids it's not going to happen until fifth grade. The Common Core made that
really hard. It really drew a huge
spotlight that all kids aren't going to learn
things in the same path and really started to mark that
as success versus failure. Another theory is that those
who wrote the standards didn't take into account
the financial difficulties of students across America. Studies have shown time
after time that children who grow up poor are more
likely to have poorer academic achievement and
drop out of high school. Roughly 10.5 million
children lived in poverty in the US. A lot of children's needs
are not being met within the four walls of their school
building and I think that we see that that deficit is
even larger for students from low income families or
we have students of color. As a country. We just have
not committed to the underlying problem of
student performance, and that is poverty. Today, Common Core has
fallen out of favor. More than 20 of the initial
45 states have either repealed, revised or
edited. The standards for states
including Arizona, Oklahoma, Indiana and South Carolina
have entirely withdrawn from the initiative. Former
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos went as far as to
call it a disaster, concluding that the Common
Core is dead at the federal level. I think you are seeing today
what kids experience in curriculum kind of is a
little bit more blended. It's not the holistic
approach that maybe Common Core introduced when we
kind of swung completely to that continuum and parents
would look at their children's, you know, third
grade homework and go, I don't get it. I don't think Common Core as
such has a future, honestly. Now it was a movement at a
particular time. It reached its heyday when
we had widespread adoption. And as I said then there
was a retreat from that adoption. Many of the
states have held on substantively to elements
of that Common Core, but we've moved on. A few states have also
developed a new educational standard as a replacement. On February 12, 2020,
Florida officially adopted the benchmarks for
excellent student thinking or the best standards as a
replacement for the Common Core. While New York has
developed its own the next generation learning
standards that are expected to be implemented by
September 2022. Some, however, argue that
none of the newer standards would have been possible
without the work of Common Core. The standards that the
states have come up with where they claimed they
were different from Common Core, they're really not
that much different. In fact, some states just
basically took the Common Core label off and then
slapped a new label on the package. So the Common Core is not
going to go anywhere. I feel confident in saying
that. What I think is probably
going to happen is the continued evolution of the
implementation of the Common Core. So the standards
themselves will probably continue to. To exist and
be anchors for our practice. What both supporters and the
opponents of the original standard do agree on is
that Common Core was an initiative doomed to fail
from the start, mainly due to its politicalization. There were people who oppose
standardized testing. They tend to be on the
political left. They didn't like the Common
Core test. It was this left right
coalition that really doomed Common Core. Politically,
it wasn't necessarily evidence coming out that
Common Core was effective or not effective. Once it became politicized,
then all bets were off. States that had adopted it
began to retreat. People began to relabel
their standards, even if they were essentially the
same standards. They didn't want the label
Common Core, because that had become politicized and
identified with a political party or a political
leader. And the thing began to fall
apart. While the Biden
administration has not yet explicitly commented on the
matter. Experts believe that the
federal government will continue to not involve
themselves in the future of educational standards. I don't think you're going
to see the Biden administration
enthusiastically embrace Common. Core, but experts assure
that education in the United States will continue to
improve as long as there are those who believe in the
importance of education. The future of education is
extraordinary, and it's extraordinarily important
because what we need to recognize is that education
is the asset our community is built upon. It's the
thing that we invest in to ensure community growth. It matters whether they
learn it or they don't. And if they're not learning
it as an individual student or as a subgroup of
students, then we have an obligation as the adults in
America to do what we can to bring them up to the
standard, because the standard is ultimately what
they need to survive and thrive in this economy,
which is ultimately what we as a society and as a
nation need if we're going to survive and thrive as a
democracy and as a 21st century international
economy. So your answer is really
good at negative point six. You guys are rock stars and
how are you doing out there? Okay. Yeah. Tell me what you're
thinking. I think I like it. I just don't. I'm a little
bit confused with the equation part, and I
almost. Everyone remembers that one
teacher who had a transformative impact on
their life, the teacher that made school exciting and
interesting and that genuinely cared. Teacher quality is the
number one school related factor to student
achievement. So no stress on that this
weekend, Anna. It's going to be beautiful
weather, so go enjoy it. In the meantime, you all
take good care of yourselves. All right. I'm
going to let you go a couple of minutes early today. This is an extremely
important profession. Teachers literally have the
future of the country in front of them every day. But the teaching profession
is in turmoil. The wage gap between
teachers and others with the same level of education and
experience is nearly 20% and growing. I think I'd be remiss to say
I haven't had that moment where I was like, I could
probably double my salary if I left and went elsewhere. I've never been really
tempted enough to actually pull the trigger and I
really love what I do. And and there is no other
job like this. In some areas of the
country, up to a quarter of teachers leave the
profession annually, and about one fifth of the
workforce has to resort to a second job. The pandemic is likely
making things worse. The exodus of some of our
best and brightest teachers is that they realize they
can't sustain a life that they had dreamed of. So why are teachers paid so
little, and is there anything that can be done
to change that? Hey, guys. How was everybody
at home? I say everybody's finally
here. It's all good. This is Kate Diaz. She's a math and statistics
teacher at Manchester High School in Connecticut. She's been working here her
entire career, nearly 21 years. I came to teaching late in
the game. I wasn't necessarily
somebody who went through high school in college
thinking, I'm going to be a teacher. I was substitute
teaching. I was trying to kind of
navigate those roads and that was where my aha
moment was. I was like, This is
perfect. Show me one of your first. My first OC. Let's see. This is fun. This is my first probably
the first contract. Yeah, this is the first.
So, you know, 20 years ago, if you had gone through
five, you know, a bachelor's and a masters, you're still
entering it, 36,000. We have what we call like a
slow burn in teaching. So there's this gradual
kind of incremental increase that we are we
contractually will negotiate and then we hit what we
call the max. Ten years in, I was
probably at about 60,000 now, 21 years in, I'm about
90,000. That's considered high in
the US. For example, in
Mississippi, the lowest paying state, a teacher
with 20 years of experience makes around $50,000. The average starting salary
is just over $40,000. That's not a living wage in
many parts of the country. I don't think the wages
match sort of the level of expectation of the
position. If you look at a teacher and you say to
them, we want you to be a therapist, we want you to
be a social worker, we want you to be a teacher. Obviously, we want you to
have some safety training and then you layer in the
joys of the pandemic and learning to teach online
and to teach remotely. But don't forget that we do
have the joy of standardized testing that we're going to
layer on top of that, and then we're going to
evaluate how you're successfully navigating all
of the challenges facing the world while you're teaching
the kid to read. Since the 1990s, the average
inflation adjusted teacher salaries have remained
largely stagnant and even declined in the majority of
states. That and the increasing
stressful environment have resulted in low retention
rates, shortages and national teacher strikes
around the country. In 2018, 375,000 school
employees walked out to demand increased education
funding and better pay. The full effects of the
pandemic remain to be seen, although experts say it's
not looking good. The movement red for Ed was
all about saying We need to pay attention to who the
teachers are and to what they're doing and to what
their compensation is. And it gave a national
platform to the question of do we value education? The American public school
system as we know it today was invented about 100
years ago. Before that, it was mostly
men teaching quite quickly. It was reconfigured into,
quote unquote, women's work. And one of the big reasons
was, is that you could save money for the taxpayer. And so this kind of set the
bedrock, the tone in a sense that this was relatively
low paid work. In the 1960s, teaching paid
women 15 percentage points better than if they had
chosen another field. But at that time, options
were limited. That's not the case
anymore. Still, teaching is overwhelmingly a female
profession and has become more so over time. Today, more than three
quarters of teachers are females. A lot of it boils. Down to. The status of the line of
work. It was this idea that,
gosh, you know, you don't have to be that smart. It's not as complex, as
difficult as, you know, being an accountant,
working with numbers, being a dentist, working with
teeth. Sylvia Allegretto has been
studying something called the teacher pay penalty or
teacher wage gap for nearly 20 years. Allegretto and her partner
found that the weekly wage penalty for teachers has
gotten worse over time. Today, men make about 27%
less and women make about 16% less than if they had
chosen another profession with the same level of
education and experience. You have to wonder how are
you going to attract students into the teaching
profession? An international comparison
with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development, or OECD, found that teachers in the US
make nearly 60% less than that of similarly educated
professionals, lowest across all OECD countries. The claims of a teacher pay
gap are that teachers earn less than similarly
educated private sector workers. What this ignores,
which in every other context we know very well, is
there. Within any given
educational category, there is a lot of differentiation
in pay. We all know today that
people who graduate from a top college with a
bachelor's degree in engineering or another STEM
field there earn a great deal in the private sector. We also know that people
who graduate with a liberal arts. Degree aren't going to earn. Quite so much. There's not one answer to
this question. There's not a national
answer to this question because. Salary levels
differ and markets differ. As an example, in Florida
there schools that train engineers and there are a
lot of jobs that actually the salary levels there for
engineers are lower. Salaries in Massachusetts
for teachers, as an example, are two or three times
higher than salaries in Arizona. In most
localities, we find teachers significantly under the
family living wage. The profession has been
known to have great benefits, according to
Biggs, twice as generous as for the average private
sector worker. But studies show that
teachers only receive their pension if they stay in the
profession for 25 years or more, and only a quarter
reached a break even point on total contribution and
interest. Weekly wages actually really
matter because you can't pay your rent or pay for your
food from your benefits. So you have to find
alternative income. Mobility is another source
of contention. Unless a teacher moves to a
higher paying state, wages only increase 1 to 2% per
year. In a private industry, if
you're doing really well, you'll be eligible for a
raise or you're going to shift companies. We end up
sort of stuck in the profession, and the only
way to kind of substantially increase your salary is to
leave the profession. Raising teacher quality is
the number one driver to improve student
achievement, and the US is falling behind
international counterparts. It's one of our highest
ideals that we're going to make the adequate
investments in all of public education so that each and
every kid in this country is able to get a good and
decent education. And we're falling short of
those promises. But increasing teacher
salaries seem unlikely at the moment. Even at times
when education spending increased, it still didn't
impact salaries. On top of that, there are a
lot of teachers out there, about three and a half
million. In fact. It's been hard to tackle
teacher compensation right now because they're so low
to start with that there's always this feeling that
any solution somebody loses. And so how do you get out
of this zero sum winners and losers kind of situation
to. Close the API teacher
compensation gap, Andrew Biggs estimates that it
would cost roughly $29 Billion. The CARES Act
included $13.2 Billion in direct funding for K to 12
public education, but that was less than 2% of total
public education funding. An additional relief from
Congress is uncertain at the moment. Karen works with
school districts around the country to figure out how
to reallocate available money to maximize results. She says one viable
solution is creating leadership roles in
Washington, DC. For example, teachers can
make upward $130,000. The way they funded that was
at first. They got outside support,
grant support and and help to fund the transition to a
new salary structure. Then they transitioned to a
new salary structure where they paid the teachers that
did the most and worked in the toughest assignments
significantly more, and they freed it up by reducing
staff. Also in the salary
structures, it means probably giving less money
for every additional year and linking the raises
instead to changing roles. Experience matters, but
experience matters if it's leading to good teaching. Washington, DC is just one
of the over 13,500 school districts in the US. While the Red for Ed
movement resulted in 15 states increasing salaries. A complete overhaul of pay
structure for the profession, such as the one
in Washington, D.C., could take a long time, money and
resistance. People get into teaching
really do get into it for some very altruistic
notions. For this to be a
sustainable profession, we have to build a model
that's financially sustainable for people. Otherwise what will be is a
revolving door profession where people come in, hang
out as long as they can, and then leave to go make
money. And that's not what we want. We know that the
best teachers come from experience, they come from
commitment, and they come from the willingness to
stay and really learn about the communities. Learn
their curriculum, learn their craft. Sex ed in the US is kind of
a joke. Take, for example, this
clip from Tina Fey's mean. Girls don't have sex because
you will get pregnant and die. With the majority of U.S. students reporting they've
had sex before graduating high school, the type of
sex ed they receive is a big deal for themselves,
personally and for the economy. Direct medical
costs of unintended pregnancy in the United
States totaled at least $5.5 billion in 2018, a rise
from the 2011 estimate of $4.6 billion. But there's been a debate
spanning decades about what information to include in
the curriculum. We believe that sex
education is an economic justice issue for the
ability of giving people the determination over their
own decision making as it relates to families and
sexual activity and behavior. As a society becomes more
diverse, it's ever more difficult to have any sort
of consensus on a subject like sex and sexuality
because it's so deeply connected to our ideas
about ourselves as human beings. So the politics of
this are complicated. Most young people are
getting something. They're just not getting
very much sex education. There is no national or
federal mandate around sex education. And so what kids
are taught in schools varies by state, by county, even
by school. Only in sex ed is the sex ed
teacher enjoined to actually change how the kids behave
out of school. And this may be an
impossible burden. So what does sex education
mean for the economy and what happens when some
students are left behind? Sex education didn't become
a part of the public school system until the early 20th
century. Why do babies have fathers? There was a panic in
American cities about sexually transmitted
diseases. Middle and upper middle class white men were
patronizing prostitutes, which has always been a
conduit for STDs. Infected prostitutes are
being legally removed for cure and rehabilitation. And we're going home and
infecting their wives. There was a rise in reported
cases of venereal disease among young people. During the First World War,
as more and more soldiers got infected with STDs that
the federal government started to sponsor efforts
at sex ed. Preventing the spread of
sexually transmitted infections is one common
goal of sex ed. Another is preventing
unintended pregnancies, especially among teenagers. There are two general
approaches to adolescent sex education. One is
abstinence only until marriage, which is also
called sexual risk avoidance. This curriculum
teaches that abstaining from sex is the expected
behavior for teenagers and frequently excludes
information about contraception options and
other safe sex practices. My name is Maryanne Mosaddeq
and I'm the president and CEO of a national nonprofit
called Ascend. And we support the sexual
risk avoidance education. When you say the word
abstinence only, it seems that it would be inferring
that abstinence is the only thing we talk about in a
sexual risk avoidance program. It's way more than
that. It's very holistic and
talks about lots of broader topics that impact a
person's life. The second curriculum is
called Comprehensive Sex Education, which provides
students with information about abstinence as well as
safer sex practices such as contraception use and ways
to reduce risk for contracting an STI. These programs may also
include discussions of miscarriages, abortions,
sexual orientation and gender identity. Those are the extremes. Most programs fall
someplace in the middle. The middle ground curriculum
is usually called abstinence plus. These programs
typically stress abstinence as the best way to prevent
pregnancy and STI transmission, while also
including information about contraception and condom
use. I think we all agree that
very young adolescents ought not to be engaging in
behaviors that could get them pregnant or cause them
to have an STD. I think that really the
divide is on. How do you get there? Do you get there by
withholding critical information or do you get
there by providing the information and developing
the skills that young people are going to need to stay
out of risky situations? The government doesn't set
any requirements for sexual health education policy
unless a program is receiving federal funding. That means each state sets
its own policies, which leads to inconsistent
curricula across the country. I did a study that showed
that even among Republicans, there was support for
teaching practically every topic in sex education when
we've had controversy in this country over sex
education. The truth is, it has really
been caused by a very small vocal minority. And I think that's created
the perception that there is more debate and dissent
about sex education than there actually is in
communities across the country. Despite this narrowing of
public opinion, sex education policy is still
inconsistent across the US, with some states not
requiring schools to teach any sex education at all. 32 states and Washington,
D.C. require students to receive
some kind of sex education, according to the sex ed
advocacy group six. 33 states require the
curricula to emphasize abstinence whenever sex or
HIV education is taught, and 16 states require
instruction on contraception. Only 19
states require that lesson plans be medically
accurate. What we discovered was that
most kids can get access to that basic information
about condoms and so forth from a variety of sources. I mean, you see it on TV. Mtv shows like 16 and
Pregnant and Teen Mom potentially contributed to
lower teen birth rates, according to a 2014 study
from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Because I'm pregnant. The researchers concluded
that these shows led to a 5.7% reduction in teen
births between 2009 and 2010. Sex education has
some big public health goals,
and if they aren't achieved, they can have serious
economic consequences. Teenagers who
unintentionally become pregnant tend to receive
less education and are less likely to have a spouse
with whom they can share in the financial support of
raising a child. Society as a whole loses big
time because we lose the productivity. Babies born
to teens are much more susceptible to being low
birth weight and having other health conditions
that bear down on the health care system. Raise our
health care costs. A lot of those costs get
funded through public dollars when it comes to
teen pregnancy. It is a little bit
challenging to figure out economic impacts because
all too often the young people who experience teen
pregnancy are already very low income. So the fact
that they remain low income may be more the result of
the fact that it's really hard to change economic
quintiles in this country versus really being
associated with being an early parent. The high cost of teen
pregnancy may have pushed Mississippi into
legislating sex education requirements in 2000. Nine teen births in
Mississippi cost taxpayers nearly $155 million,
according to a report from the Mississippi Economic
Policy Center. The report attributes these
costs to lower wages among teen parents, higher
incarceration rates for the children of teen parents,
and increased foster care costs. In 2011, Mississippi
Governor Haley Barbour signed a law that required
all school districts to adopt a sex education
curriculum. Family planning allows
parents to control the timing of when they have
children, how many children they have, which allows
them to be able to prioritize how to pursue
their education and career. There have been a number of
studies on birth control itself, which shows that
any $1 investment in family planning ends up saving 4
to $7 in terms of preventing unintended pregnancy on the
other end. That certainly saves money
in terms of the economy. Absolutely. Sexual delay is
so important. Three out of five children
who are living in poverty live in families that are
headed by unwed mothers. And we know the impact of
single parents in terms of the benefits, the
entitlement programs that we have in place for them, and
that that all impacts the economy. Access to birth control
options such as the pill is correlated with higher
earnings potential for women. Many women with
access to the pill have lower wages in their
twenties as they pursue more education. But then their
income grows more rapidly in their thirties and forties,
compared to women who did not have access to the
pill. Preventing the spread of sexually transmitted
infections also has economic impact. The CDC estimates
that in 2018, about one in five people in the U.S. had an STI with half of new
STI cases among people aged 15 to 24. The CDC estimates STIs cost
the US nearly $16 billion in health care costs alone. Care for 15 to 24 year olds
made up an estimated 26% of that total cost. Testing and treating for
sexually transmitted infections does incur a
huge cost through both public insurance, private
insurance, individual costs, and, of course, the life
long costs of some of the viral STDs. For a particular individual
who may be having to go to the doctor more by more
treatments throughout their life. It can be a really
high cost. There is no federal policy
in the United States that governs sex education. Rather, the way that the
federal government is involved in sex education
is by appropriating limited funding for certain kinds
of approaches. The US government began
funding abstinence only programs in the 1980s
during the Reagan administration as fear of
HIV and AIDS spread throughout the country.
Frequently, these programs were faith based. The amount of money the
federal government puts into sex education really
expanded as part of welfare reform in 1996. And since then there has
been some funding, a couple hundred million dollars
that has really gone back and forth. The funding for abstinence
only education has varied with the electoral cycle. So during the Obama era it
went down. During the Trump era, it
went back up. In 2015, the federal
government provided about $55 million. In 2021, that number was up
to 110 million. The Obama administration was
the first to try to establish some evidence
based metrics to federal funding. They also created
the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program in order
to strengthen federal funding for more medically
accurate evidence based programs. But they did not
discontinue the sexual risk avoidance programs. The Teen Pregnancy
Prevention Program, which was established in 2010, is
a national evidence based grant program to develop
and evaluate new approaches to prevent unintended
pregnancies and STIs among adolescents. The program
has been funded to the tune of about $100 million each
year through fiscal year 2021. In July 2021, the
House passed a bill that would allocate $130 million
to the program that would last through September
2022. As of December 2021, that
bill has not passed the Senate. The federal
government also provides funds through the
Competitive Personal Responsibility Education
Program. This funding stream
supports a variety of evidence based programs
that focus on young people ages 10 to 19 who are
homeless in or aging out of foster care, living with
HIV or AIDS, victims of human trafficking, or
living in areas with high adolescent birth rates. The program's goals are to
prevent pregnancy and STIs. By emphasizing abstinence
and contraception, it typically receives roughly
70 to $75 Million in funding per year. Both abstinence
only and comprehensive sex ed. Proponents claim
victory in that the teen birthrate in the U.S. has
fallen to a new low every year since 2009. The American approach is
always emphasize the activity. After all, that's
what a rate is, right? An STD rate or a pregnancy
rate. That's a collective
measure, a collective outcome. And the European
approach has been much more focused on the individual,
helping each individual develop what the sex ed is
call a healthy sexual life. Now, that's really
difficult in a diverse society because healthy is
an extremely loaded and evaluated term. And what's healthy to one
set of individuals or communities may not be
healthy to another. I hope to see in the world
is really universal, comprehensive sex education
being offered. We are working with the
federal government and members of Congress to
advance new legislation, the Real Education and Access
for Healthy Youth Act that speaks directly to those
needs. I also believe that it
means that we are doing the right thing by talking
about sex education from this bigger goal
perspective than just preventing teenage
pregnancy. It's really important that
we reinforce those good habits that the teens are
making right now by helping them with refusal skills,
self-regulation skills, helping them with goal
setting. Putting an eye on their
future personal agency is extremely important, and
we're only there to provide the medical facts and to
also begin to instill some critical thinking.
