How to Fix America Part I: The Crumbling Education System
MADISON, WI (The MPJ) — Believe it or not, fixing and, more importantly, expanding America’s education system is the first thing we need to do to get America back in the lead. I can already guess what you’re thinking, though. Shouldn’t we work on jobs first? Or whittle down the deficit? Or fix healthcare?
No. And I’ll tell you why.
Compared to everything else on the list, fixing education is going to be both one of the easiest, and most cost-effective efforts we can undertake. And once we get it fixed, it will go a long way to getting the rest of our problems taken care of. And we can get at least half of the job done with one simple word.
Preschool.
A fascinating study conducted in Ypsilanti, MI found that providing underprivileged children access to a quality preschool education will have a profound effect on their lives well into adulthood. Children who attend preschool get arrested less, earn more, graduate high school more, show greater levels of scholastic achievement, and score higher on IQ tests than children who do not attend preschool. And this is after controlling for family involvement and other outside factors.
The reason is this: Children who attend preschool do so at the main age where humans learn how to navigate social situations. Sharing may be caring, but it’s also key to social interaction. Learning give-and-take, learning how to interact and navigate conflict, learning how to just be somewhere on time and to show up clean and prepared are skills people learn primarily between the ages of 3 and 4. And when you’re kept at home, or with a babysitter, you miss out on the opportunity to learn these skills. By the time you enter kindergarten…it’s literally too late.
Economic studies have found that providing preschool education to underprivileged youth would cost…get this…just over $14 billion dollars. To put that in perspective, the War in Afghanistan alone is projected to cost us $122 billion in fiscal year 2011. That means, for the cost of just over 43 days in Afghanistan, we could pay to send the nation’s most at-risk youth to preschool. What’s more, a University of Wisconsin study finds that for every dollar spent on sending kids to preschool, society at large reaps a benefit of $7.10 (in 1998 dollars). Adjusting for inflation to 2010 dollars, that’s $9.45.
So what we’re looking at, is an investment of $14.5 billion (roughly) generating a net societal benefit of just over $137 billion in 20 years. If you subtract the benefits that the individual student gets and just look at what society at large gets (that means YOU), that comes out to an inflation-adjusted $5.10, or nearly $74 billion.
Personally, I would argue for making preschool part of the required school attendance schedule for all children. This is because what we’re seeing is people who didn’t attend preschool, and end up falling into the pit of disadvantage, cannot acquire the skills to climb out. That’s what we’re finding with job re-training programs. This is born out in a pair of Planet Money reports (from NPR).
Simply stated, job training programs not only don’t help people that don’t have these social navigation skills to begin with, in many cases, they harm them.
But our problems don’t end there.
It used to be, back in the 1950s, 60s, and even 70s that a person could simply graduate from high school, enter the workforce, and find a job where they could make a sufficient wage to get married, buy a house, a car, and raise a family. That’s because there were two routes to middle-class stability: your brain and your back.
People didn’t necessarily need to be smart to bolt a fender onto a car, attach a beater bar to a vacuum cleaner, or pour molten aluminum into a casting. Yes, they needed their wits about them (for safety’s sake), but the process itself didn’t require an “education” per se. But there’s a problem with this approach these days.
People don’t bolt fenders onto cars. People don’t attach beater bars to vacuum cleaners, nor to they pour aluminum into castings anymore. Machines do. Computer controlled robots and other devices make these things happen. These machines still require human guidance, however, that does require some form of education. So does manufacturing many of the more complex devices and doing many of the more complex tasks we need done today.
It takes some form of education to run a CNC machining center. It takes some form of education to both build and install solar panels and wind turbines. It takes some form of education to manufacture semiconductors, handheld devices, as well as the other machines that are now doing a lot of our previously back-breaking work. The days of showing up, punching the clock, and mindlessly doing one task for eight hours are almost gone, if not already. As an example, under Henry Ford’s one-person-one-task system of manufacturing (which revolutionized manufacturing worldwide), Ford’s largest plant (Dearborn’s River Rouge plant) employed roughly 100,000 workers at its height in the 1930s. Today, Ford Motor Company, worldwide, in its entirety, employs about 164,000 people.
The reason I mention all this is because we now need to revamp our K-12 education system so that, when our children graduate, they’re prepared for their next step in life, whatever that may be. Colleges and universities report the students they’re taking in are less and less prepared for the rigors of higher education. Employers nationwide report around 3 million job openings, but cannot find people with the skill sets needed to fill them.
So how do we fix this? First step is to revamp the schedule of K-12 education. School years need to run longer than the current 180 day minimum (200 would be preferable), and summer breaks need to be eliminated and replaced with more intermittent breaks. The current school calendar is an anachronism dating back to America’s agrarian past which, by and large, doesn’t exist anymore. Even in rural areas. Kids are no longer needed at home to tend the farm. Mom and Dad, along with their mechanized implements can take care of that by themselves, assuming they aren’t living in the suburbs working in an office.
Studies have shown that low-income and disadvantaged youths, once again, are the biggest victim of this old-timey system. One study showed that by the end of elementary school, low-income students learned about as much as their better-off counterparts, but lost much more during the summer to the point that they were 3 grade levels behind by the time they went to middle school. By the time freshman year rolls around, about two-thirds of the achievement gap existing between income classes could be explained through summer learning loss.
Our kids need to learn more and retain more. Longer school years coupled with shorter (in duration) breaks will allow teachers to cover more material per school year, and will allow students to maintain more of that learning from year to year. If we can align our K-12 education system so that students are, once again, ready to enter some form of sustainable work upon graduation from high school, we’ll be serving all sectors of life better. Major companies will have to import (or outsource) less labor. More people will be able to make a proper living. More and better work could be done in the US. And college-bound students will be better prepared to achieve, and do better work, during their post-secondary years.
There’s going to have to be efficiencies realized in this realm as well, though. Automatic yearly pay raises and degree-based pay raises cannot remain the norm, nor can overinflated school administration bureaucracies. Teacher pay should be based more on merit than on experience, and seniority being the ultimate arbiter of who stays and who goes during funding cuts should be tossed out. At the same time, administrations need to be streamlined. Fewer mid-level administrators, fewer fringe benefits (like cars) for administration, and smarter allocation of resources.
A restructuring of funding should also be included. Rich kids in a rich neighborhood or suburb shouldn’t be at an automatic advantage because property values (which school districts rely on for tax levies) are higher than they are in rural and inner-city areas. Each state should have a single “price per head” across the entire state. That means schools in more affluent areas are going to lose money if overall funding remains the same. Which means they’re going to have to be willing to pay more into the pot. Fair is fair. They’ll see the benefits overall.
But what about when college-bound students make it to college? Students are not out of the woods yet.
Funding for higher education needs to get back to an upward trajectory. We continue to complain about the skyrocketing cost of tuition and fees, and question whether our students are receiving an increased value for the extra money they’re paying. In large part, the answer is “no.”
One study shows that, while tuition rises, the cost of providing that higher education has changed little over the past 50 years. (In the interest of fairness to this site’s guiding principles, yes, the study was conducted by the overtly libertarian Cato Institute, but it cites US Dept. of Education figures) What makes things worse is that employers, once again, are saying they’re finding the recent college graduates they either hire or interview to be less and less fully prepared for the jobs which they are applying for.
There are two main reasons for this.
1. States and the federal government continue using education funds as their favorite go-to to cut spending. This is largely because higher education is one of the very few places funded by government that can make up the funding difference on their own…through tuition and fee hikes. So while the cost of a college education remains barely changed, students themselves are baring more and more of the actual cost of it.
Libertarians believe this is a good thing since the students that are receiving the benefit of the education they’re receiving should also pay the costs. However, those same libertarians don’t realize the benefits they themselves see when other people get educated.
2. Less and less money from each university’s budget is being spent on actual education, while more and more goes to research and other ventures (like administration) that don’t do much to benefit students. One study published in the Chronicle of Higher Education found, for instance, reporting discrepancies at private, Ivy League Dartmouth College.
Students there pay around $50,000 per year in tuition. Dartmouth says, however, this cost is justified since the school spends more than $100,000 per student per year. However, further examination into the school’s spending finds very little of that money goes into actual cost of providing an education. A PBS documentary, “Declining by Degrees,” found more and more classes are being taught by either graduate students or itinerant/part-time professors, while the rest of the professors are busy doing the published research required of them to keep their jobs.
So, in the end, this is what we need to do to prime the economic pump of our nation in a long-term fashion. Universal preschool, longer school years with shorter breaks spaced more evenly through the year, streamlined administration, and restoring funding for higher education while re-prioritizing teaching over research.
If we can do this, it will go a long way to fixing America. But it’s not the only screw we need to tighten. However, it should be the first.
While you raise some interesting points, I think you are missing one of the main problems with our education system, which is not the amount of money being pumped into it, but rather, what we are teaching our children. The classic courses in basic mathematics, social studies, and proper use of language may be a good staple early on, but developing these skills is only necessary to a certain extent when it comes to managing our lives.
Practical courses in money management, job skills training, and other life needs knowledge should become our focus. Right now we encourage high school graduates to trot on to college to learn even more about liberal arts, majoring in English, History, our, *gasp* Telecom. Ultimately, these kids graduate college with a head full of knowledge that qualifies them for nothing more than arm-chair enthusiasm in the subject matter. And no, they cannot all go on to get Ph.Ds in the subject and become professors themselves… there would be no one left to take my order at the drive through.
Ultimately, more time and effort needs to go into vocational training and better guidance counseling for students. My guidance counselor asked me about my family background and decided college was right for me. No inquiry into my personality, no attempt to discern what I enjoy doing, no investigation of my work ethic or actual intelligence level. A guidance counselor who is close to the kids, knows what they are like, and has a good understanding of the job market would do miracles for helping place people into careers they will excel at and actually enjoy. Not my guidance counselor and his three options: College for the middle class kids, Food service or fixing cars for the lower class kids, and cosmetology school for the girls.
And, I know you think fixing education is key, number one on your list of things that will fix America, but I don’t think that’s our main concern right now. Our main concern has got to be that we are not far off from ceasing to be part of the “developed world.” ANd it’s not because our kids are stupid or ignorant. It is because our businesses send the money that should be paid to middle class Americans to do manufacturing or production jobs overseas. While this must have some positive effect on these foreign economies which, in a couple hundred years may benefit us greatly, in the short term (as in, a couple of generations), we are watching our middle class get poorer while those who own these business reap the only domestic rewards.
Until our economy begins producing again, rather than merely consuming, it doesn’t matter how bright the eggheads are that we churn out of our public schools. They’ll graduate with swollen heads, swollen egos, and zero job prospects. There is always room to build a life using your back and the growing sophistication in some industries does not mean that we need a genius or even highly educated labor force. Certainly some industries will require it, but Ford’s unimpressive increase in workforce size over the past eighty years is a red herring. Technology has constantly been decreasing the number of workers needed to do a task, but a growing number of consumers and reduced prices for the fruits of those tasks has so far allowed for a balance to be struck with more money and more people with more time constantly looking for more stuff to spend their time and money on.
The manufacturing jobs allocated to sweat shops or even legitimately operated factory throughout the developing (or unfriendly to labor) world could very well be done by Americans right here at home. The financial incentive, however, is too great to ignore. Our workers simply cost too much. Now that 401(k)s have replaced defined benefit plans as our main source of retirement funding, we should see the cost of hiring an American decrease significantly, however, something more needs to be done.
The two obvious solutions are both fraught with significant drawbacks. First, we could de-unionize our labor force. Let them rely on government set minimum wages, ERISA protections, and other state sponsored labor regulation to protect their interests. This would certainly decrease the costs associated with hiring American laborers. It also means that the guy who installed your airbags got paid as much as the guy who picked his nose in front of you while he folded peanut butter chips into your vanilla ice cream atop the Cold Stone. You never saw what happened to the booger after it escaped his nostril, but you cannot help thinking that it was the same color as your peanut butter chips… I think we can all agree that some jobs require more care than others, and that it might be wise to pay the people that do them a little more than people who wear paper hats and touch pictures on a computer screen to arrive at your total.
The second is to disincentivize the use of foreign labor for products shipped into this country. This could be done through the tax code, taxing the goods as they return to the country, offering tax breaks for companies that use a domestic labor force, or increasing taxes on all dollars earned abroad. This, however, risks running us afoul of a number of treaties we actually sponsored regarding tariffs and the flow of trade goods from country to country.
Obviously, I am way off point here (but this is just ranting in the comment section, so I have not got the same duty of coherence as you do as the author) and no longer talking directly about schools. So, I’ll wrap it up and in summary say that schools need fixing, but more with regard to what their primary purpose is rather than simply doing the same thing they already do, only with the funding to do it better. I don’t want an over-educated workforce, I want an employed one.
Redeveloping curriculum to better fit the needs of our economy is part of what I am talking about. Maybe I didn’t emphasize that point well enough. But changing our curriculum (and overall increasing the amount of knowledge taught) so that kids that don’t have plans to go to college can still get a sustainable job (operating high-tech machines in a manufacturing establishment, for example) is paramount.
And the reason I make it my #1 priority is twofold.
1. It’s (comparatively) the easiest to get done.
2. It has the highest cost-benefit ratio of anything we can do.
Yes, more vocational education is needed. But teaching kids to just fix cars or cut wood (which was the extent of my high school’s tech ed offerings) isn’t going to cut it. Kids are going to have to learn computers beyond Facebook, Twitter, and Google. They’re going to have to learn how to program a CNC lathe. They’re going to have to learn basic CAD. They’re going to have to learn some basic electrical engineering, like working a multimeter, etc.
And those that are college-bound are going to have to learn how to write a frickin’ paper (it’s amazing how few understand that’s part of what’s expected of them). They’re going to have to learn some form of calculus, physics, chemistry, or something else along those lines. And they’re going to have to have a well-rounded education for a couple reasons. Mainly, having someone who can solve theoretical physics equations but can’t string a coherent sentence together isn’t particularly useful. That, and the broad curriculum employed in the first year or two of college is part of what helps guide students into their fields of interest.
Either way, I think it speaks rather negatively of our education system when, in this economic state we’re in, we have companies in the US looking to hire 3 million people (according to US DoL data on current job openings), but cannot find people in the US with the skill sets needed to fill them.
Beyond that, all the economic reform stuff you’re talking about…well…that’s coming next. Heh.
Wow! I’m loving this blog! I completely agree that when you start early you get more bang for your buck. I will be writing an article on the Swedish preschool system. Their government invests in a high quality system for all children and implements an interesting and exciting curriculum that allows kids to be kids. They’re not evaluating kids at a young age, instead they advocate for self-motivated learning. Interestingly enough, they are leading the literacy table in Europe. I can’t wait to hear more from you.
http://www.daretheschool.org
Wow. Thank you. I don’t know how you found us, but please help others find it. And you can keep up with us on Facebook, too.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Midwest-Politics-Journal/234984366534898
Thanks for the kind words, and please come back!
Just to clarify, since you didn’t cite your source (unless I missed it) you claimed: “…an investment of $14.5 billion (roughly) generating a net societal benefit of just over $137 billion in 20 years.”
A ONE TIME spend today of 14.5 billion dollars will provide preschool for underprivileged children for the next 20 years without further investment? Seems like a stretch to me. Can you provide the backup for the figure?
Your ideas as to the merit and benefits of such a program are convincing. I’m having a hard time swallowing the figure.
I guess I should clarify. First, the $14.5 billion comes from the NPR report (which, ultimately, came from the Ypsilanti study). And it would cost $14.5 billion per year.
However, that’s not the entire story. For each $14.5 billion (to be somewhat simple), we realize roughly $137 billion in economic gains over a 20-year time span. That is, in year 1, we spend $14.5 billion and receive in year 20 $137 billion. In year 2, we invest another $14.5 billion, and receive $137 billion in year 21, and so on. And we realize these dollars not just in increased economic output of the individual, but in the decrease in imprisonment, decrease in remedial education, etc.
Essentially, study after study in economics have found the best place to spend money if you’re a government is in educating underprivileged youth. The reason it’s such a hard sell is that you don’t see the benefits immediately. It takes roughly 20 years, or until the newly preschooled toddler becomes an adult.