Anyone interested in education simply must go read Clive Crook's recent piece in its entirity: "The Lure Of Education". (This means you, mom!) He echos many of the points I made in my previous two posts on this topic, "Education: America's Panacea" and "Education: America's Panacea 2", but since he's surely more prominent than I am perhaps he will be more listened to. He starts by pointing out that education has been hailed as the solution to every social ill, and that vast sums of money have been poured into our public education system for decades now, with negative results. It's easy to propose "better education" as a solution to a problem because it will take years or decades for you to be proven wrong, and even then, no one may believe it.
"Better education" is something all sides agree on, as a remedy for almost anything. Stagnant real wages for the middle class? Better education. The decline of civility in public life? Better education. The obesity epidemic? Better education. The China and India challenge? Better education. ...And the issue has not just been serving rhetorical time. Things have happened. In America -- as in Britain -- the past 25 years have seen a torrent of educational reforms, and school systems have been deluged with cash. Per-pupil spending in the United States is way up, compared with 20 years ago. Educational systems have been in a decades-long state of permanent and well-financed revolution, with issues such as organization, management, curriculum, training, accountability, and the rest perpetually in motion. Everything has been tried, it seems. And, apparently, nothing works. After more than 20 years, you only have to consider [insert policy issue here] to realize that the country still cries out for better education.
Standards of achievement in schools have flatlined for years. In math and science, American high school students are among the poorest performing in the developed world. Remembering that the money spent has vastly increased, the productivity of the system has collapsed. If you measure it by national test scores divided by per-pupil spending on education, school productivity was two-thirds higher in 1970 than 30 years later at the end of the 1990s.
Summing up, the orthodoxy to emerge from all this is (a) better education is the answer to all our problems, and (b) improving education is extremely difficult to do (see how hard we tried?).
And then he continues by arguing that neither of these is true, and that improving education would actually be quite simple if we greatly reduced government interference.
I think this is wrong on both counts. We do know how to improve education, and, politics aside, it is not even that difficult. That is the good news. Unfortunately, if we ever get around to it, we will find that most of the problems we were trying to solve will refuse to go away. Improving education is enormously desirable in itself. Especially at the bottom of the skills pyramid, it requires no ulterior justification. We should do it. But for society at large, it is not the panacea that so many people take it to be.What, then, is this easy method for improving education? Competition among schools.
Americans have a strange attitude toward competition. They take it for granted -- much more than most foreigners -- that competition is vital to ensure the highest standards in almost any kind of endeavor. But some things -- such as education and health care -- are then deemed "too important" to be left to the market, too important to be thrown open to competition. This makes no sense. I for one would far rather have my car or my shoes or my breakfast cereal issued to me by officials in the D.C. government than to have those officials in monopoly control of the school my children attend or the hospital my kids get taken to when they are sick. Some things are just too important to be sheltered from competition. Education is one.
There is no great mystery, no great controversy over the facts. Competition among schools raises standards. The United States has been experimenting, far too timidly, with two ways of creating educational competition: vouchers and charter schools. Economists have been tracking these initiatives. Their findings are in: The schemes work. And this is not just because charter schools are better than public schools (though often they are), or because vouchers let low-income parents opt out of failing public schools (which they do). It is also because, under pressure, the existing public schools get better. Amazing! Who would have guessed? A charter school opens, or a voucher program gets started, and before you know it, the neighborhood public schools are offering extra classes after school, Saturday morning openings, new tutoring and mentoring schemes. Why didn't we think of this before?
Mr. Crook continues by (rightly) denigrating "whole language" reading programs that have created a generation of illiterates whose teachers couldn't be bothered with phonics, and he explains why this would never have happened in an education system in which schools competed for students. He then puts his finger on an issue that I've decried for years:
School systems in this country are run to protect the interests of producers (teachers and educational bureaucrats), not consumers (parents and children). That is what happens when you declare something "too important to leave to the market." Please, no more hand-wringing about how hard it is to fix education. If anybody truly wants a solution to the problem, it is there in plain sight.
Exactly right, and refreshing to read from someone else's fingertips. Mr. Crook is on the money with this essay, and I hope he forgives my extensive quoting but I'm very excited to see my own opinions given such a skilled rendition and broad exposure. Go read the whole thing!
I agree with the basic idea that a competitive-market-type system would do public education some good.
My only concern is making sure every family can participate in that competition, since education is such a fundamental right. A big point of free public education is that everyone gets it, no matter their income level. Competition is about consumer choice, and if this choice costs any money, then poorer students will be the ones who end up stuck in the worst schools - kinda like the way it is now, but worse. Of course, this principle is not so straightforward, and I don't claim to have all the answers. One simple example; Going to a school more distant from one's home will cost more money, and whether or not the school system (or government) should pay for that transportation is a tricky question.
I like the point about how per-pupil spending is up but results (no matter how you measure them) are down. To be honest I am a little skeptical that per-pupil spending is up: Why are so many schools having to cancel so many programs? But in any case, the article is right in that if schools were more motivated to do more, many schools probably could.
It is important to realize that many schools probably COULDN'T, though. Per-pupil spending varies a lot between, say, the poorer urban schools and the nicer schools in the suburbs. I think that an important first step should be trying to come up with a way to distribute money among schools so that their per-pupil resources vary less from school to school. If you don't do that before you allow schools to "compete" (i.e. have more freedom and flexibility in what they teach and how they teach it), then the competition will not be fair.
One last thing: The article says, near the end; "...it would be a mistake to expect too much from improving the schools... We have a popular culture in this country... that exalts stupidity, meaningless fame, misogyny, incivility, and outright criminality. I have no idea what to do about that. 'Improve education' strikes me as inadequate to the task." Actually, it sounds adequate to me. The more one is educated about social, political, economic, technological, and international issues, and about the bad things all kinds of people get away with on a daily basis, the less one will be inclined to spend their time watching VH1 or MTV rather than the news or PBS or the Discovery channel or the History channel. To an un-educated person, that kind of informative programming is not exciting enough. To an educated person, VH1 has no content, it's about being excited about things that really don't matter, excitement for excitement's sake - it can occasionally be entertaining and gives you something to chat about with the people you know, but it's not as fundamentally appealing when you appreciate how empty and stupid it is.
If nothing else, an educated populace should be better about telling the important issues from the not-so-important issues, and about acting in such a way as to improve the important issues, such as voting for politicians who appear to care about the important issues, rather than for the politicians who are better at scaring everyone into worrying about things that are not that important.
Public schools in my area and many others across the country are very good schools; that raise standards, expect more from students and their teachers, who don't waste money (because they have none to waste) and are a major component in the communities they're a part of.
Bernardo> No one is born with society owing them an education. Parents owe their own children an education but I dont owe your kids squat. (Heres another product of the 'entitlement generation')
And youre right about how the per pupil spending is different in urban schools and sub urban schools. The inner city urban schools typically have a much higher per pupil spending rate. (at least in my city and Im quite sure its the same everywhere) They also have less students per teacher often times. So Im glad you agree that these inner city schools shouldnt be getting special treatment just because they're filled with thugs.
Hard work and risk taking are the ingredients in success. Education is only a catalyst and can be obtained by an individual in many ways. A government funded university education is one good way, but not necessarily the only or best way.
I don't think it's about "owing" anyone an education. I think it's about having a vested interest in the education of others. Your children's education is relevant to more than just themselves and their family. It is relevant to everyone those children meet and interact with throughout their lives. What kind of adults they will grow up to be? How will their own children be brought up? At some level, we all have an interest in making sure the education of others is good.. not just for them and the impact it has on their life, but for how it impacts our lives as well.
I agree Mark. Bernardo's comment "education is such a fundamental right" is just what struck a nerve with me.
I'm not saying that a really really great education is a fundamental right. It just seems to me that a lot of people graduate from some public high-schools barely knowing how to read and multiply, let alone think critically or have an appreciation for humanity's amazing technological achievements. Sure, some of them is their own fault, but the fact is, at some schools you have to be pretty exceptional to begin with in order to get those things, while at others they're basically handed to you.
I do think we all owe all the children in the society we live in the opportunity to learn enough so that, by the time they're 18, they can pick up any book that is not super technical and understand it, rather than be constrained by a small vocabulary and by limited exposure to interesting ideas.
The kind of education I got - the education my parents paid a fortune for - is not a basic right. But it seems to me that a high school where a small-ish fraction of graduates can read at a high school level is not giving its students what they went there to get.
I mean, c'mon, we're all pretty smart here, and we all realize how great that is. Would you want that to only be available to those who can pay for it - or, rather, to those whose parents can pay for it?
In the first paragraph I meant to say "some of THAT is their own fault", not "them".
So much for being smart and educated. I guess it doesn't really kick in until after 7AM.
Right Tim. I'd like Bernardo to back up his claim with some example of law. The Father's had it correct when they said "the pursuit of happiness" rather than simply "happiness". Should we say that the fundamental right is to "the pursuit of a good education" ?
BTW, I was talking with my sister yesterday. She has a MA and has been receiving a paycheck from a public school for 25 years. She kindly ask what I had been doing and I said reading The Brothers Karamazov. She said "What's that?" I said "It's by Dostoevsky" She said "Who's that?"
So much for fundamental rights
"I'd like Bernardo to back up his claim with some example of law."
I'm not talking about law. I'm talking about a principle, an ideal, a goal, one we could try and see if we can make reality.
"Should we say that the fundamental right is to "the pursuit of a good education" ?"
That sounds good to me.
Bernardo: The problem with rights is that a right for your creates an obligation for me. You have the right to free speech, so I am obligated not to shut you up, etc. If someone has a "right" to education, then someone else has an obligation to pay for that education. I'm not sure that it's morally desirable to say that A has a "right" to an education sufficient that A can put a gun to B's head and force B to pay for it. "Pursuit of a good education" seems right to me, but it's simply a fact of life that those who have more money will get more opportunities.
I know. And I am more than happy to pay enough taxes to make that happen. I feel like, as a member of this society, I have the duty to make sure that every kid has access to classes that teach them how to do math, understand the scientific method (and maybe even some of the things that have been discovered with it), and think critically about communication and about issues regarding our society. If a kid chooses to waste that opportunity, that is his choice, but I do think everyone should pay for it. And everyone DOES pay for it, but some public schools still end up being much better than others.
Yes, private schools will always be better (otherwise they would not exist). My point is, I think we should figure out how to make different public schools more equal, how to make the worse ones be more like the better ones. And I think this because I think that a modern fair enlightened society (which really just means "members of a society") has the obligation to offer all its young the means to understand how it works and how to contribute to it. Anything short of that is like a less enlightened society (like much of Europe was 600 years ago) that is comfortable with saying "This section of our population does not need to be told by us any more than what they need to know in order to be able to perform physical labor".
In Brazil, education is basically privatized. Public schools are all terrible, so the poor stay poor. The US is doing much better in that department, but you have to admit there is room for improvement.
By "make that happen" at the beginning of my comment, I meant "make public schools as good as I think they should be". Sorry if this wasn't clear.
Bernardo
I still believe that there is an over emphasis on formal organized education and the institutions that claim to provide such, but I appreciate your acknowledgement that freedom to pursue is the key. The major problem with education in the USA is the failure of students and parents to take responsibility and demand a fair exchange from schools and teachers.