or not,

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.

The post How to Fix America Part I: The Crumbling Education System appeared first on The Midwest Guy.