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IS DEPT. OF EDUCTION SMARTER THAN A FIFTH GRADER? EFFECTIVENESS OF PELL GRANT EXPERIMENT FINALLY WILL BE STUDIED
Since 2015, the federal Dept. of Education has been experimenting with returning Pell grant assistance to inmates, giving grants to about 8,800 prisoners have been funded to take college-level courses inside their correctional institutions.
But no one knows whether the program has been effective. Back in 5th grade, we learned the scientific method. Integral to that method was evaluating the experimental testing, and refining or eliminating hypotheses as a result of the evaluation.
So let’s try this, kiddies. Our hypothesis is that providing prisoners with access to college-level course in prison will reduce recidivism. So four years ago, we experimented by giving 8,800 inmates Pell grants so that they could take college course while locked up. So what was the result? Was our hypothesis supported by the experimental results or not?
No one knows, because no one at DOE ever looked at the experimental results. When the agency was finally called out on it last week by the Government Accountability Office, DOE unabashedly announced plans to conduct a “rigorous” examination of the program (after earlier saying it could not afford to do so.) The study is to “help provide policymakers with the information needed to make decisions about the future of Pell grants for incarcerated students,” wrote Gretta L. Goodwin, director of the Homeland Security and Justice division at GAO.
Pell grants were made available 55 years ago to help low-income Americans benefit from higher education. The grants were denied to inmates after passage of the Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act in 1994. But policymakers, faced with mounting evidence that education is critical to prisoner rehabilitation, approved the “Second Chance Pell” pilot program in a cautious attempt to rehabilitate the concept.
Advocates hoped the study will spark a bipartisan consensus about the need to return Pell grants in order to reduce mass incarceration.
The Crime Report, Does College Education in Prison Work? Ask the 8,800 Inmates Who Got Pell Grants (Apr. 11)
– Thomas L. Root