Why The Education System Is Failing America | CNBC Marathon

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is an issue of economic justice. We could make children learn more in school. If we raise the standards. We understood our curriculum and they basically threw us a curve ball. I don't think the salaries match the level of expectations for the position. Teachers have literally done it. 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 to that answer. Now, remember that this is how Common Core students 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, which cost approximately $15.8 billion to implement. They thought the standards were too low in America and that we could make kids learn more in school if we raised the standards. Frankly, they didn't trust schools to be able to do this on their own. One of the most challenging aspects was that we understood our curriculum and basically hit a curve ball in what it was and had to really adopt new practices.

But a couple of years after its release, it was met with confusion and ridicule. I think some of the math items that were made fun of deserved to be made fun of. Frankly, they were very poor articles. 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 the math works. I don't understand mathematics. I went to school in the 2000s and they taught us Common Core. Suddenly, parents had to help their children with math homework that they couldn't understand because they hadn't been taught math that way.

So how can America 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 in the workplace. These standards determine what a student should know and be able to do in language arts, and mathematics from kindergarten to senior year of high school. School when you should know algebra. Should it be eighth grade? Should it be ninth grade? Should you be able to do Algebra one or Algebra two? When would it be appropriate to move into calculus, things of that nature?

It is important to have a standard because you have to have a clear vision or objective of where you are going and what is expected of your students. I think that if you go in without expectations for your students, they themselves will not be clear. Good. What do they go to school every day to achieve? In addition to establishing these benchmarks, Common Core also brought changes to the way students were taught. There was definitely a change, especially in your mindset and thinking about how to approach lesson plans and how to make sure you're disseminating information to your students in a way that they can receive it.

Do you know the Pythagorean theorem? Good? As OC A squared plus B squared equals C squared. You can probably ask any adult and they will answer you. It was more about if you have that knowledge, if you understand what it is, where do you use it? How do you apply it? On the language arts side, there was a lot more focus on moving away from fiction a little bit to focusing a lot more on critical thinking using real documents, like studying Hamilton's papers or something like that to really understand what was going on in that moment.

The revolution. There were two main reasons why the initiative received so much support in its early years. The first was the fear that the United States was lagging behind other countries in academic achievement. In 2009, the United States showed mediocre performance in reading and science and scored below average in mathematics compared to the average score among OECD countries. The idea was to hold schools accountable for teaching at a higher level and then test children to see whether or not they had reached that higher level. The second reason was that the Common Core allowed different states to accurately compare their academic performance by having a uniform standard for education.

And even though one state might now say, We're doing a great job meeting our standards, but the standards are too low, and another state says, you know, we're not doing as well as we'd like and meeting our standards, but they're too high. This creates a confusing conversation. With these intentions for nonprofit groups in mind, the Council of State School Chiefs and the National Governors Association developed Standards Achieve, a nonprofit education reform group, as well as several teachers unions, including the National Association of Education and the American Federation of Teachers. They came together to help in the process.

So when they met in 2009, the first thing they did was have a memorandum of understanding that the state had to sign that basically said, okay, we're going to write these standards. You don't have to accept them now, but can you at least say that you will be interested in seeing them and that you might accept them in the future if you find them meeting your needs? And more than 45 states signed that memorandum of understanding. We made sure that K-12 teachers talked to first-year second-year teachers to make sure we knew what was expected of postsecondary education and to make sure we built those expectations from K to 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 its promotion. The Obama administration's Race to the Top fund offered $4.35 billion in grants to states that agreed to adopt any college and career readiness standard. We will end what has become a race to the bottom in our schools and instead stimulate a race to the top by encouraging better standards and assessments. And this is an area in which other nations are surpassing us. It's not that their children are smarter than ours.

It's just that they are being smarter when it comes to educating their children. In fact, we were bottoming out in 2009 and 2010, in the Great Recession, and so states were desperate for money. The Obama administration put together a recovery package for states, but one of the requirements was that they had to have adopted college and career readiness standards, which is a key word for Common Core. This was seen as the Obama administration's endorsement of Common Core, and is not an unfair accusation. In the face of minimal resistance, it seemed that Common Core would be a guaranteed success.

We had a meeting in two. Coulson tends to have all entities approve the adoption of the Common Core. We had unanimous agreement across the state because many Kentucky teachers had participated in giving feedback and writing the standards. But a couple of years later, things took a turn when the effectiveness of the new standard was called into question. It also didn't help that the Common Core became the subject of ridicule from parents and the media who were unfamiliar with the concepts taught under the new standard. Many parents received assignments that came home and they simply did not understand.

They thought it was strange. I went through Common Core with my kids and I remember looking at my daughter and saying, I'm not entirely sure why you're doing what you're doing, so I'm just going to show you long division as 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 was on student performance over time. The results were disappointing. The studies range from small negative effects to small positive effects and many neutral effects in between. So the only thing we would be fairly certain of is that Common Core did not have a dramatic impact on student achievement in the United States.

Then we raise the standards. Yes we did it. Have we raised expectations about assessments? Yes we did it. Have we improved student performance? No. There are numerous theories as to why the Common Core has failed to improve student achievement. But the most popular theory is that standards took control away from teachers, who always better understand what their students need. The idea that you can dictate a curriculum to a teacher or dictate instructions to a teacher from some sort of remote control from above and say, well, here it is, what you're going to teach, is just unrealistic.

Children are not cogs in a machine. So we say something is going to happen in third grade. But realistically, it happened to some kids in second grade. And for some children this won't happen until fifth grade. The Common Core made it really difficult. It really brought attention to the fact that not all kids are going to learn things the same way and really started to mark that as success versus failure. Another theory is that those who wrote the standards did not take into account the financial difficulties of students across the United States. Studies have shown time and time again that children who grow up in poverty are more likely to have lower academic achievement and drop out of high school.

Approximately 10.5 million children lived in poverty in the United States. Many children's needs are not met within the four walls of the school building and I think we see that deficit being even greater for students from low-income families or we have students of color. As a country. We simply have not engaged with the underlying problem of student achievement, which is poverty. Today, Common Core has fallen out of favor. More than 20 of the initial 45 states have repealed, revised or edited it. Standards for states such as Arizona, Oklahoma, Indiana and South Carolina have been withdrawn from the initiative entirely.

Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos went so far as to call it a disaster and concluded that the Common Core is dead at the federal level. I think today you're seeing that what kids experience in the curriculum is a little more blended. It's not the holistic approach that maybe Common Core introduced when we completely shifted to that continuum and parents were looking at their kids' third grade homework and saying, I don't get it. Honestly, I don't think Common Core as such has a future. Now it was a movement at a particular time. It reached its peak when we had widespread adoption.

And as I said then there was a setback in that adoption. Many of the states have held on substantially to elements of that Common Core, but we have moved on. Some states have also developed a new educational standard as a substitute. On February 12, 2020, Florida officially adopted the Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking or Best Standards as a replacement for the Common Core. While New York has developed its own next-generation learning standards that are expected to be implemented in September 2022, some nevertheless argue that none of the newer standards would have been possible without the work of Common Core.

The standards that states have developed that they claimed were different from the Common Core are actually not much different. In fact, some states basically removed the Common Core label and then placed a new label on the package. So the Common Core is not going anywhere. I feel safe saying that. What I think will likely happen is the continued evolution of the Common Core implementation. Therefore, the rules themselves will probably continue to do so. Exist and be anchors for our practice. What both supporters and opponents of the original standard do agree on is that Common Core was an initiative doomed to failure from the beginning, mainly due to its politicization.

There were people who opposed 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 that Common Core was effective or not. Once it became politicized, all bets were off. The States that had adopted it began to retreat. People began to relabel their standards, even if they were essentially the same. They didn't want the Common Core label, because it had become politicized and identified with a political party or a political leader. And things started to fall apart.

Although the Biden administration has not yet explicitly commented on the matter. Experts believe the federal government will remain uninvolved in the future of educational standards. I don't think we'll see the Biden administration enthusiastically embrace Common. Core, but experts say that education in the United States will continue to improve asThere are those who believe in the importance of education. The future of education is extraordinary and it is extraordinarily important because what we must recognize is that education is the asset upon which our community is built. It's what we invest in to ensure the growth of the community.

It matters whether they learn it or not. And if they don't learn it as an individual student or as a subgroup of students, then we have an obligation, as adults in America, to do everything we can to raise them to the standard, because ultimately the standard is what they need. survive and prosper in this economy, which is ultimately what we, as a society and as a nation, need if we are to survive and prosper as a democracy and as a 21st century international economy. So your answer is really good on negative point six. You guys are rock stars and how are you doing?

Well. Yes. Tell me what you're thinking. I think I like it. I just don't do it. I'm a little confused with that part of the equation, and almost. Everyone remembers that teacher who had a transformative impact on their lives, the teacher who made school exciting and interesting and who truly cared about it. Teacher quality is the number one school-related factor for student achievement. So don't worry about that this weekend, Anna. It's going to be beautiful weather, so enjoy it. In the meantime, everyone take good care of yourselves. Alright. Today I will let you go a couple of minutes early.

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 crisis. The pay gap between teachers and others with the same level of education and experience is almost 20% and growing. I think I'd be remiss to say that I haven't had that moment where I thought I could probably double my salary if I left and went somewhere else. I've never been tempted enough to pull the trigger and I truly love what I do. 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 approximately a fifth of the workforce has to turn to second jobs.

The pandemic is likely making things worse. The exodus of some of our best and brightest teachers is that they realize they cannot maintain the life they had dreamed of. So why are teachers paid so little? Is there anything that can be done to change that? Hi guys. How was everyone at home? I say everyone is finally here. Everything is alright. This is Kate Diaz. She is a mathematics and statistics teacher at Manchester High School in Connecticut. She has worked here her entire career, almost 21 years. I came to teaching late in the game. I wasn't necessarily someone who went through high school and came to college thinking, I'm going to be a teacher.

I was a substitute teacher. I was trying to navigate those paths and that's where my aha moment was. I thought: This is perfect. Show me one of the first. My first OC. We'll see. This is fun. This is probably my first contract. Yes, this is the first. So, you know, 20 years ago, if you had gone through five, you know, a bachelor's degree and a master's degree, you're still coming in, 36,000. We have what we call a slow process in teaching. So there's this sort of gradual incremental increase that we'll negotiate contractually and then we'll hit what we call the maximum.

Ten years later, it probably had about 60,000 now; 21 years later, I have about 90,000. That is considered high in the United States. For example, in Mississippi, the lowest-paying state, a teacher with 20 years of experience earns about $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 salaries match the level of expectations for the position. If you look at a teacher and say, 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 get some safety training and then enjoy the joy of the pandemic and learn how to teach online and remotely.

But don't forget that we have the joy of standardized testing that we are going to administer on top of that, and then we will evaluate how you are successfully facing all the challenges that the world faces while we are teaching the child to read. Since the 1990s, inflation-adjusted average teacher salaries have remained largely stagnant and even declined in most states. That and the increasingly stressful environment have resulted in low retention rates, shortages and national teacher strikes across the country. In 2018, 375,000 school employees demonstrated to demand increased funding for education and better salaries. The full effects of the pandemic remain to be seen, although experts say it doesn't look good.

The red movement for Ed was about saying: We need to pay attention to who the teachers are, what they're doing, and what their compensation is. And he provided 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, they were mostly men who taught fairly quickly. It was reconfigured, in quotes, as women's work. And one of the main reasons was that it could save the taxpayer money. And so, this set the stage, the tone that this was a relatively low-paying job.

In the 1960s, teaching paid women 15 percentage points more than if they had chosen another field. But at that time the options were limited. That is no longer the case. Still, teaching is overwhelmingly a female profession and becomes increasingly so over time. Today, more than three-quarters of teachers are women. Much boils. Down to. The status of the line of work. It was the idea that, God, you know, you don't have to be so smart. It's not as complex or 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 pay gap for almost 20 years.

Allegretto and her partner discovered that the weekly pay penalty for teachers has gotten worse over time. Today, men earn about 27% less and women about 16% less than if they had chosen another profession with the same level of education and experience. The question arises: how are they going to attract students to the teaching profession? An international comparison with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that teachers in the United States earn almost 60% less than professionals with similar education, the lowest level in all OECD countries. Claims of a teacher pay gap are that teachers earn less than similarly educated private sector workers.

What this ignores, which in any other context we know very well, is there. Within any educational category, there is a lot of salary differentiation. We all know today that people who graduate from a top university with a bachelor's degree in engineering or another STEM field earn a lot in the private sector. We also know that people who graduate with a liberal arts degree. The title is not going to win. Quite. There is no answer to this question. There is no national answer to this question because. Salary levels differ and markets differ. For example, in Florida there are schools that train engineers and there are many jobs where the salary levels for engineers are actually lower.

Teacher salaries in Massachusetts, for example, are two to three times higher than salaries in Arizona. In most localities, we find teachers significantly below the family living wage. The profession is known to offer great benefits, according to Biggs, twice as generous as those earned by 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 broke even on the total contribution and interest. Weekly wages really matter because you can't pay rent or food with your benefits. Then you have to find alternative income.

Mobility is another bone of contention. Unless a teacher moves to a higher-paying state, salaries only increase 1 to 2% per year. In a private industry, if you are doing really well, you will be eligible for a raise or you will change companies. We end up stuck in the profession, and the only way to substantially increase your salary is to leave the profession. Raising teacher quality is the biggest factor in improving student achievement, and the United States is lagging behind its international counterparts. One of our greatest ideals is that we are going to make the right investments in all public education so that each and every child in this country can receive a good and decent education.

And we are not keeping those promises. But raising teacher salaries seems unlikely for now. Even at times when education spending increased, it still did not affect wages. In addition, there are many teachers, about three and a half million. In fact. Teacher pay has been difficult to address right now because it is so low to begin with that there is always a sense that with any solution someone loses. So how do you get out of this zero-sum winners and losers situation? Closing the API teacher pay gap, Andrew Biggs estimates, would cost approximately $29 billion. The CARES Act included $13.2 billion in direct funding for K-12 public education, but that was less than 2% of total public education funding.

Additional relief from Congress is currently uncertain. Karen works with school districts across the country to figure out how to reallocate available dollars to maximize results. She says a viable solution is to create leadership roles in Washington, DC. For example, teachers can earn more than $130,000. The way they financed that was in the beginning. They received external support, grants and help to finance the transition to a new salary structure. They then transitioned to a new salary structure in which they paid significantly more to teachers who did the most and worked on the most difficult tasks, and freed it up by reducing staff.

Also in salary structures, this probably means giving less money for each additional year and linking increases to role changes. Experience matters, but experience matters if it leads to good teaching. Washington, DC is just one of more than 13,500 school districts in the United States. While the Red for Ed movement resulted in 15 states raising wages. A complete overhaul of the profession's pay structure, like the one in Washington, D.C., could require a lot of time, money and stamina. People get into teaching really out of some very altruistic notions. For this to be a sustainable profession, we have to build a model that is financially sustainable for people.

Otherwise, it will be a revolving door profession where people come in, hang out as long as they can, and then leave to make money. And that's not what we want. We know that the best teachers come from experience, commitment, and a willingness to stay and really learn about communities. Learn your curriculum, learn your craft. Sex education in America is kind of a joke. Take, for example, this clip of Tina Fey's stocking. Girls don't have sex because you will get pregnant and die. Since most American students report having had sex before graduating high school, the type of sex education they receive is very important to them personally and to the economy.

The direct medical costs of unintended pregnancy in the United States amounted to at least $5.5 billion in 2018, an increase from the 2011 estimate of $4.6 billion. But there has been a debate spanning decades about what information to include in the curriculum. We believe that sexuality education is an issue of economic justice because of its ability to give people agency over their own decision-making as it relates to families and sexual activity and behavior. As a society becomes more diverse, it is increasingly difficult to achieve any kind of consensus on a topic like sex and sexuality because it is deeply connected to our ideas about ourselves as human beings.

So the politics of this are complicated. Most young people are achieving something. They just don't get much sex education. There is no national or federal mandate regarding sex education. Therefore, what children are taught in schools varies by state, county, and even school. Only in sex education is the sex education teacher required to actually change children's behavior outside of school. And this can be a burdenimpossible. So what does sex education mean for the economy, and what happens when some students are left behind? Sex education did not become part of the public school system until the early 20th century.

Why do babies have parents? Panic over sexually transmitted diseases reigned in American cities. Middle and upper middle class white men patronized prostitutes, which has always been a conduit for STDs. Infected prostitutes are being legally expelled for healing and rehabilitation. And we go home and infect their wives. There was an increase in reported cases of venereal diseases among young people. During World War I, as more and more soldiers became infected with STDs, the federal government began sponsoring sex education efforts. Preventing the spread of sexually transmitted infections is a common goal of sexuality education. Another is the prevention of unwanted pregnancies, especially among adolescents.

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 expected behavior for adolescents and often excludes information about contraceptive options and other safe sex practices. My name is Maryanne Mosaddeq and I am the president and CEO of a national nonprofit organization called Ascend. And we support education to avoid sexual risks. When you just say the word abstinence, it seems like you would be inferring that abstinence is the only thing we talk about in a sexual risk avoidance program.

It's much more than that. It is very holistic and speaks to many broader issues that impact a person's life. The second curriculum is called Comprehensive Sexual Education, which provides students with information about abstinence as well as safer sexual practices, such as using contraception and ways to reduce the risk of contracting an STI. These programs may also include discussions of miscarriages, abortions, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Those are the extremes. Most programs fall somewhere in between. The intermediate curriculum is often called abstinence plus. These programs generally emphasize abstinence as the best way to prevent pregnancy and the transmission of STIs, while also including information about contraception and condom use.

I think we can all agree that very young teenagers should not engage in behaviors that could get them pregnant or give them an STD. I think the division really exists. 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 necessary skills? Are young people going to need to stay out of risky situations? The government does not set any sexual health education policy requirements unless a program receives federal funding. That means each state sets its own policies, leading to inconsistent curricula across the country.

I did a study that showed that even among Republicans there was support for teaching virtually all sex education topics when we've had controversy over sex education in this country. The truth is that it has actually been caused by a very small minority. And I think that has created the perception that there is more debate and disagreement about sex education than there actually is in communities across the country. Despite this decline in public opinion, sex education policy remains inconsistent across the United States, with some states not requiring schools to teach any type of sex education. 32 states and Washington, D.C. require that students receive some type of sex education, according to Sex Education Advocacy Group Six. 33 states require curricula to emphasize abstinence whenever sex or HIV education is taught, and 16 states require contraception instruction.

Only 19 states require lesson plans to be medically accurate. What we found was that most kids can get access to that basic information about condoms and so on through 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 programs led to a 5.7% reduction in teen births between 2009 and 2010. Sexuality education has big public health goals and, if not achieved, can have serious economic consequences. Teenage girls who become unintentionally pregnant tend to receive less education and are less likely to have a spouse with whom to share financial support for raising a child.

Society as a whole loses a lot because we lose productivity. Babies born to teenagers are much more susceptible to having low birth weight and having other health conditions that affect the health care system. Increase our health care costs. Many of these costs are financed by public money when it comes to teenage pregnancies. It is a bit difficult to determine the economic impacts because, all too often, young women who experience teen pregnancy already have very low incomes. So the fact that they continue to be low income may be more due to the fact that it is very difficult to change economic quintiles in this country than to actually be associated with being an early parent.

The high cost of teen pregnancy may have pushed Mississippi to legislate sex education requirements in 2000. Nine teen births in Mississippi cost taxpayers nearly $155 million, according to a report by the Mississippi Economic Policy Center. The report attributes these costs to lower wages among teen parents, higher incarceration rates for children of teen parents, and higher foster care costs. In 2011, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour signed a law requiring all school districts to adopt a sex education curriculum. Family planning allows parents to control when they have children and how many children they have, allowing them to prioritize how to continue their education and career.

There have been several studies on birth control itself, showing that any $1 investment in family planning ends up saving between $4 and $7 in terms of preventing unwanted pregnancies on the other end. This certainly saves money in terms of economics. Absolutely. Sexual delay is very important. Three out of five children living in poverty live in families headed by single mothers. And we know the impact of single-parent families in terms of benefits, the social benefit programs that we have for them and all of that impacts the economy. Access to contraceptive options like the pill correlates with greater earning potential for women.

Many women with access to the pill receive lower wages in their 20s as they continue their education. But then their income grows faster in their 30s and 40s, compared to women who didn't have access to the pill. Preventing the spread of sexually transmitted infections also has an economic impact. The CDC estimates that in 2018, about one in five people in the U.S. had an STI, and half of new STI cases were among people ages 15 to 24. The CDC estimates that STIs cost the U.S. nearly $16 billion in healthcare costs alone. Care for people between 15 and 24 years old represented approximately 26% of that total cost.

Testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections carries an enormous cost through both public and private insurance, individual costs, and of course the lifetime costs of some of the viral STDs. For a particular individual who may be having to go to the doctor more for more treatments throughout their life. It can be really expensive. There is no federal policy in the United States governing sex education. Rather, the way the federal government participates in sexuality education is by allocating limited funds for certain types of approaches. The U.S. government began funding abstinence-only programs in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, when fear of HIV and AIDS was sweeping the country.

Frequently, these programs were faith-based. The amount of money that the federal government allocates to sex education actually increased as part of welfare reform in 1996. And since then there has been some funding, a couple hundred million dollars that has really come and gone. Funding for abstinence-only education has varied by election cycle. So during the Obama era it went down. During the Trump era, it rose again. In 2015, the federal government contributed about $55 million. In 2021, that number rose to 110 million. The Obama administration was the first to try to establish some evidence-based metrics for 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 suspend 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 teens. The program has been funded with 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 of law has not been approved by the Senate. The federal government also provides funding through the Competitive Personal Responsibility Education Program. This funding stream supports a variety of evidence-based programs that focus on youth ages 10-19 who are homeless, in foster care or aging, living with HIV or AIDS, victims of human trafficking or living in areas with high teen birth rates. .

The objectives of the program are to prevent pregnancies and STIs. By emphasizing abstinence and contraception, it typically receives between $70 and $75 million in funding annually. Both abstinence only and comprehensive sexual education. Proponents claim victory because the teen birth rate in the U.S. has fallen to a new low every year since 2009. The American approach is always to emphasize activity. After all, that's what a rate is, right? An STD rate or a pregnancy rate. That is a collective measure, a collective result. And the European approach has focused much more on the individual, helping each individual develop what in sex education is called a healthy sexual life.

Now, that's really difficult in a diverse society because healthy is an extremely loaded and evaluated term. And what is healthy for one set of individuals or communities may not be healthy for another. I hope that comprehensive and universal sexual education is truly offered in the world. 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 directly addresses those needs. I also think it means we're doing the right thing by talking about sex education from a broader goal perspective than simply preventing teen pregnancy.

It's really important that we reinforce those good habits that teens are adopting right now, helping them with rejection skills, self-regulation skills, and helping them set goals. Keeping an eye on your future personal agency is extremely important, and we are just there to provide medical facts and also begin to instill some critical thinking.