Fifteen years ago we had an economy spurred by the dotcom bubble. Ten years ago it was the housing bubble. Today it’s being driven by the free-money-from-central-banks bubble. Unfortunately there’s no one talking about the one thing that would be a serious response to our current economic troubles.
The fact that the debt ceiling song-and-dance was mostly smoke and mirrors was not lost on most Americans. It was not a discussion about how to revive economic activity or create jobs. But most of the other proposed solutions right now – fiscal stimulus, quantitative easing, shovel-ready public works projects – are also ducking around the fact that our principal economic problem revolves around education. America cannot become more competitive without increasing the productivity of its workers, which means ensuring they have a basic education and improving their workplace skills. This simply does not enter into the discussion about our current economic predicament.
I can remember few occasions in which education has become a major issue of national debate on the level counter-terrorism, foreign wars, economic policy or housing prices. With the possible exception of the fracas over school vouchers, debates over education that splash onto the front pages in fact tend to be debates about something else. The early 1990s clash over voluntary national education standards was mostly of a dispute between liberals and conservatives about how to understand American history. The discussion of Ebonics, which I remember take up a huge amount of media bandwidth when I was in college, was so racially charged that the educational component was almost entirely overshadowed. The continuing disputes about teaching intelligent design in public schools are, in my opinion, about our religious beliefs and our understanding of separation of church and state. None of these examples involve a serious debate about the situation of our education system and how to improve it.
I’ve been thinking about this issue lately for a number of reasons. The first is my friend Rachel Levy’s phenomenal blog about education and education policy that I’ve found one of the most worthwhile out there. She’s a former teacher that is increasingly looked to as an informed voice on what’s happening to education today.
The second was a brilliant piece of reporting last year by Reuters’ Nick Carey looking at how America for the last four decades responded to the stagnation of its manufacturing sector by simply borrowing money – first from the Japanese, now from the Chinese. The result is we did not improve education and workplace training to move workers out of failing industries into new and more competitive ones. For a while we were able to put people to work by building millions of houses that nobody ever planned on living in. That obviously isn’t working any more.
The third is that I’m now reading Diane Ravitch’s book about the state of education in America. It’s been influential in large part because Ravitch was for years a high-profile advocate of using standardized tests to increase accountability and a proponent of using charter schools to create an environment in which neighborhood public schools had to compete for students. She was a major backer of No Child Left Behind, until she realized that the data simply did not confirm it was working. Her book has prompted me to write my first-ever post about education, though I would clarify I do not consider myself an education expert, and what follows is an extremely stripped-down synopsis of exceedingly complex arguments.
Ravitch’s core criticism of the current system is that the country has failed to create a cohesive curriculum that outlines what a students do and don’t need to learn. The only effort to do so was the aforementioned 1990s voluntary standards debacle, in which a group of education professors in California proposed what was probably (from my reading) a left-of-center revision of American history that was quickly attacked by conservative Republicans as indoctrination. Whoever was at fault is less relevant than the end result: after that incident, no local, state or federal official wanted to risk saying what children should be learning.
Then came No Child Left Behind, which requires standardized testing to determine the performance of both the teachers and schools. With so much on the line for both teachers and principals, schools began changing their curriculum to focus on those things that were going to be on the tests – math and reading – with many of them substantially cutting back on social studies, science, art and literature. The result, Ravitch says, is that schools have replaced education with test-taking skills, and in the process have allowed testing companies to determine what kids need to learn. This leaves them making the decisions that politicians and society at large are simply too afraid to make.
She is also highly critical of the way charter schools have evolved over the last decade. Their original purpose, she says, was to find ways to educate those kids that were the least likely to succeed. Instead, she says, they have been magnets for the kids that are most likely to succeed by offering motivated parents a path toward quality education paid for by the state, something that neighborhood schools frequently do not offer. Parent make a bee-line for the charter schools, leaving the neighborhood schools filled with kids that are most likely to have problems, pushing down the quality of those schools. And nobody can blame those parents – who is really going to sacrifice their kids’ education for the sake of improving their local schools? But charter schools simply don’t have capacity to meet demand, meaning families that don’t have the means to pay for private school and don’t win the lottery have to put their kids in a set of steadily declining neighborhood schools.
I believe that is at the heart of our economic troubles -- and fixing that system is the only real long-term solution. But it is a long-term solution. We are several generations behind the curve when it comes to getting workers the skills and education that they need. I do not believe there is any quick-fix solution to these problems, which is exactly what politicians most want to propose – a new round of injecting money into the economy, more interest rates cuts (this can’t really happen because they’re almost at zero), or some silver bullet that Obama will be expected to produce in his speech this Thursday to make the malaise go away.
This is not to say all Americans need to get the liberal arts college education that I did – I don’t think many of them need to or want to. But I don’t have the slightest doubt that an auto mechanic or a construction worker or a plumber will be a better entrepreneur and more capable of starting their own business if they have a highschool degree. I do believe people are less likely to get in over their heads in dodgy home loans if they have basic math skills. And I don’t believe we can truly strengthen our economy as long as education is treated as a second-tier issue.
