Education: May 2006 Archives
David S. Kahn offers a whithering condemnation of America's mediocre public education system by laying the responsibility for plummeting SAT scores right where it belongs: on the schools.
People complain that the SAT is biased and that the bias explains why students don't do well. That's true--it is biased. It's biased against people who aren't well-educated. The test isn't causing people to have bad educations, it's merely reflecting the reality. And if you don't like your reflection, that doesn't mean that you should smash the mirror.That the new SAT tests more reading comprehension than the old test did is a good thing. Colleges complain that their incoming students don't have sufficient skills to read and analyze the kind of material that their professors will assign them. I hope that the new SAT's emphasis will make students realize that you can't get much of an education if you can't read.
Maybe the decline in SAT scores will force people to notice that their children are not getting good educations. If your children don't read or do math, why would you think that they would do well on the SAT? I would love to get into a time machine and go back to 1960 and give this new SAT to high-school students back then. I suspect that they would do much better than today's students. If we want people to get good scores on the SAT, I have a suggestion. Stop complaining about how unfair the test is and do your homework.
I've written before that our society foolishly puts school teachers on a pedestal despite their rather poor results, and I think much of the blame rests with the teachers' unions which utterly refuse to move past seniority-based employment despite the demonstrated benefits of merit pay on teacher performance. We need to eliminate public education or at the very least create some economic pressure for schools and teachers to improve, such as widespread voucher programs.
What's one of the most important factors that will determine a graduate's future financial success? Their major? Their height? Their GPA? Their alma mater? Maybe, but apparently the general state of the economy at the time of graduation can have far-reaching effects on salary.
Lost in the argument over whether young people today know how to work, however, is the mounting evidence produced by labor economists of just how important it is for current graduates to ignore the old-school advice of trying to get ahead by working one's way up the ladder. Instead, it seems, graduates should try to do exactly the thing the older generation bemoans — aim for the top.The recent evidence shows quite clearly that in today's economy starting at the bottom is a recipe for being underpaid for a long time to come. Graduates' first jobs have an inordinate impact on their career path and their "future income stream," as economists refer to a person's earnings over a lifetime. ...
The Stanford class of 1988, for example, entered the job market just after the market crash of 1987. Banks were not hiring, and so average wages for that class were lower than for the class of 1987 or for later classes that came out after the market recovered. Even a decade or more later, the class of 1988 was still earning significantly less. They missed the plum jobs right out of the gate and never recovered.
The fact is that you will never catch up by "working your way to the top". The only way to use a good job market to your benefit is to jump ship and move to a different company altogether. Your existing employer will never increase your salary just because the job market is strong. By staying put when the job market goes down and then moving when the market goes back up you can continually stay on top by working your career like a ratchet.
(HT: Alex Tabarrok.)
