The most ambitious US presidency in living memory hardly needs to extend its list of tasks, you might think. Yet the country's long-term economic prospects turn on something that is all too easy to neglect, just as it has been neglected in the past. The US is failing calamitously in primary and secondary education. The average quality of its workforce is falling, and its schools are adding to the problem rather than mitigating it.You can read the rest of the article here.
Much of what ails the country - including growing economic inequality - can be traced to this source. Politicians recognise the fact, and prate about it endlessly. Barack Obama puts improving the schools alongside health reform and alternative energy whenever he lays out his long-term goals.
The trouble is, fixing the schools is not something that a crisis ever forces you to do. The consequences of a third-rate education system creep up on you and, experience shows, can be tolerated indefinitely. Many vested interests prefer it that way. Talk about the issue and move on is the line of least political resistance.
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My latest column for the Financial Times looks at America's education deficit, and what it costs the country.
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The consequences of a third-rate education system creep up on you and, experience shows, can be tolerated indefinitely.
This is true, but, as you note, it seems like the charter school movement is finally gaining some momentum—as this New Yorker article about Green Dot in Los Angeles observes—and it seems like some combination of charter schools and vouchers are moving forward.
Clive,
You wrote a whole column on American education, lamented the drop in our high school graduation rates in the last forty years, and not once mentioned the significant demographic changes in this country over the same time period. Do you not think there is any connection between the two?
Also, regarding teachers unions: I am not a big fan of them, but I'm sure there are some fine public schools in the suburbs of D.C., as there are in the suburbs of every major American city. And I'm also fairly confident that the teachers in those schools are unionized. So perhaps the obstinacy of the teachers unions doesn't quite explain the difference in performance between poorly performing urban schools and high-achieving suburban schools.
One thing we need to teach in schools at all levels is that latinum does not grow on trees.
Jeepers creepers, please wake up Mr. Crook. Sociological study after study shows that it is the larger environment, primarily the family, that determines outcomes not 'failing schools and cruddy teachers.' If parents at home encourage academic pursuits, with books, penetrating discussions, travel, stimulating contact with educated adult visitors (wow, is that what an oceonographer does, Mr., or Mz, Smith?), then intellectual progress in children and youth takes place. It is precisely because all this human intellectual capital is lacking in predominantly inner city black, hispanic, and other disadvantaged minority families that academic performance is so poor...and the work force is declining in quality. Blaming primarily an admittedly inferior school system is like a paunchy wanna-be athlete blaming the low quality of his athletic gear for his poor performance...it is a factor, but fundamental personal fitness, whether athletic or domestic intellectual-capital, is 90% of the problem. But since it is impossible to remedy this familial, domestic shortcoming, pundits like you, civil-rights screechers like Al Sharpton, and a self-interested education-critique industry, like the chartered schools, concentrate on the schooling end of things. If all this reform effort had gone into encouraging better functioning of families, and junked gangsta rap, Hollywood depravity, and first person shooter computer games, we would all have been much farther along to building a decent society than by just firing incompetent teachers and instituting smart school uniforms.
Cuppla questions:
1) how does educational achievement parallel with a nation's percentage of rural inhabitants? does this track with changes in those populations over time?
2) how does the influx of non-native speakers in this and other countries parallel with achievement tests? (or daveinhackinsack's question)
3) do these achievement tests take into account basic concepts that are "controversial" amongst a large subset of the u.s. population but not elsewhere (i.e. biology)?
more directly relevant to your piece
1) how does the influence of teacher's unions affect a school's performance? or are the "low influence" schools too small a sample to compare with their (otherwise identical) strong union counterparts?
2) how about local school boards? are they interfering with educational progress? i always suspected many of them are.
"But the evidence is clear that what happens in the classroom matters, and that underperforming schools are contributing hugely to the problem."
That is exactly what James Coleman thought when he started the largest study of schooling ever done over forty years ago. What he found out was that the parents income was the sole factor in determining how well educated a school's students were. Politicians and pundits like Crook ignore the results but have little evidence to rebut the Coleman Report. Ignoring evidence doesn't make it go away.
This post is based on a false premise. The U.S. education system is not particularly bad. There are some ways it could be improved, for example in terms of cost efficiency, but when you control for other factors, the outcomes it delivers are entirely respectable.
Pockets of poor education and pockets of low wages, in the U.S. as in Europe, are pockets of unskilled immigrant labor. Finland imports alomost no unskilled immigrant labor. Germany imports some. The U.S. imports a lot. This ordering is precisely reflected in PISA scores and Gini coefficients.
This is not to argue against unskilled immigration! It dramaticly improves the lives of the immigrants and incrementally improves the lives of the natives -- via lower prices, better food, support for the pension system, etc.
It is simply to say that, given the differing unskilled immigration regiemes, one should expect the corresponding income and education inequalities. If second and third generation immigrants were to stop climbing the education and income ladder, we should worry. (And a lot of Europeans should worry, because their countries are not nearly as good as the U.S. at integrating immigrants.) But as long as we continue to lift up the underclass, the fact that we replenish it with imports should be seen as a feature, not a bug, for all involved.
"If second and third generation immigrants were to stop climbing the education and income ladder, we should worry."
The descendants of Mexican American immigrants are not climbing the income ladder (and haven't been for decades), so you should start worrying.
Clive, Step No. 1 would be a school year of at least 200 days, like every other advanced nation in the world.
The reason the U.S. student performance gap, vis-a-vis other countries, widens every year is that the school attendance deficit is cumulative.
Sort of in line with the school board thing. What I'd like to see is a lot more national standardization. This, BTW, is another major difference between us and other industrialized countries. The idea of school boards or local control of curriculum is worth a laugh to them. At the very least we need a national mechanism for gauging educational progress. Get rid of the 50 different flavors of tests and institute a way that teachers in Mississippi can know immediately how well a student from Idaho is doing.
Actually, more than that, I'd like this mechanism to double as a way of confirming credits. A standardized test that must be passed to recieve credit for a class. Students who fail can retake it after remediation over the summer. Teachers with too many failing students (proportional to the demographic) will be given the opportunity to take classes in teaching, and if it remains consistent, they will be fired.