The Uneducated American
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
>Education made America great;
I'd argue that individual freedom led to American prosperity, and individuals' choice to partake in education was merely a consequence of a free society.
How can someone look at OpenCourseware, free textbooks, and the self-organizing study groups surrounding the former two and not conclude that education is more available than ever before? Up until WW2, going to college was an unlikely occurrence for the child of parents who had not themselves gone. Was the "American Century" really the result of upper middle class education alone? It was not until the GI bill that college became an odd expectation.
The underlying logical fallacy in Krugman's piece is that attending college is the only form of "higher" education available or even desirable. Shouldn't we instead be asking why lower socio-economic status Americans seem to have adopted an anti-learning cultural bias? Why, as Dean Kamen asks, do we not celebrate society's engineering achievements? It's thinkers? Government subsidy of education is one convenient target of many for those who think more government is the answer to all of society's ills. Never before in America has so much knowledge been available for free from the comfort of one's home (star), and yet he argues that we have some sort of education crisis.
(star) Even at minimum wage, an internet connection only costs at most a few hours labor per month. And, the computer sufficient to partake in this knowledge can probably be found at some upper-middle class curb on garbage day.
You could argue that but it is wrong (well, at least the education-specific bit). Mandatory education in America traces back to the culture (in general) and the enacted legislation (in particular) of the Puritan settlers of New England. The Puritans believed in universal literacy so that everyone could read scripture. They passed laws mandating child literacy and required towns to hire teachers to teach the children. This was all mandated and required by the government and in some sense that can be construed taking choice AWAY from individuals rather than giving choice to them. At the time this system and these requirements were unique in the world.
Letter of Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Cabell, September 9, 1817, reprinted in Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Memorial Edition 1904) volume 17, page 423.
Compulsory school attendance seems like a different question, and more like an implementation detail to me. At least today school attendance is not compulsory if the parents arrange for the child to be educated up to the currently mandated educational standards. (i.e. Homeschooling is legal.)
(It might be possible to do a comparative study of countries/cultures which have codified educational requirements vs. ones that don't-- comparing basic literacy rates to get some insight into this in the general case. It could be very tricky to factor out economics though. I know what I suspect the results would indicate. But I've not the time to do the study.)
Singapore is a good example in this regard. Its compulsory school attendance law is still less than two decades old.
Wide spread college attendance is really only in the 2nd half of the 20th century.
I also believe America's success came from its freedom (and perhaps more so just the idea of freedom), and the culture and attitude (optimism, can do anything attitude) that resulted from that, that made it such a successful country.
Not to mention they stole tons of technology from Europe, and didn't get ravaged in WW2.
In my opinion, what has led to the "downfall" of America, is about 10-15 years of, in my opinion, decidedly unstrategic thinking on the part of manufacturers, specifically hi tech. In many cases, the technology that took generations to develop has essentially been given to the cheap labor manufacturers (China)....this was one of America's most strategic advantages, and they no longer have it.
I do know of people that had to leave college in order to financially provide for family members, for instance an unexpected pregnancy, but that is different than the cost of college itself being a problem.
Krugman's point may not be convincing, but neither is yours that unfettered liberty is the reason that America has prospered. Krugman's inaccuracy, in my opinion, is not that America's education was a driving force in economic growth, particularly in post-war America, but rather that the federal government was a driving force in the growth of education.
The sad thing is that the arguments we have today are not all that dissimilar from the ones that were had on the local levels during the common school movement in the 19th century. Some felt that certain segments of the population were not worth being educated, which is essentially what a lot of people today are supporting with a radically inequitable system, especially for those from poorer (both monetarily and 'culturally').
OCW is a laudable example of open education, but that does little to address one of the key points that Krugman is making. Namely, that on indicators of educational success far lower than college education, we are failing so many of our students. The fact that I can read graduate level micro notes from MIT doesn't help someone who can't properly add because they were provided with poor primary education in the Bronx.
I'm a firm believer in the idea that we rise and fall by our citizens, and it is sad that so many of our citizens are provided with substandard education. To that end, whether you think that federal government does or does not have a role in the educational system, I think we can all agree that something needs to be done, or we will continue to fall behind the rest of the industrial world.
So Mr. Krugman thinks we should throw more money at the problem by way of State stimulus? A quick look at the figures would tell anyone that funding isn't the primary issue.
Current expenditure per pupil in 2006 dollars
1961 - $2,670
2008 - $9,391
For one, when they graduated in the early 60s there was a massive gender gap in college attendance - my mom was valedictorian and went to secretarial school because her parents told her "women can be teachers, secretaries, or nurses", by the 70s she knew she should have gone to college. For comparison the female valedictorian from my HS went to Harvard.
Then there is the general quality of the education. Neither of them took Calculus in high school. They had Latin and most schools today teach Spanish, French, and Italian but aside from that they think my education was much harder. College is unquestionably more rigorous today.
On a shorter time frame, say the last 10 years, MAYBE that argument holds true. In my home state the last 3 have had serious state budget problems that affected the schools but until then it was getting better and better every year.
"Fraction" - 9/10ths, 7/8ths.
I really don't know what you would cut out of schools to make it better. Teachers are under paid, most school districts are short on their infrastructure budget, and "extraneous" classes like music, art, or physical education are getting cut all over the country.
If you ask me the biggest waste of money in the school district is the computer in every class room theme. So many hundreds of thousands of dollars in every district for computers, IT professionals, ethernet cables strung to every room, software all over. And how many classes are really improved by this?
First, there is a lot of administrative overhead that has nothing to do with instruction. Second, the Gary Plan is inherently very wasteful. Under the current system when kids fall behind (or if they're gifted) then you need to do 'pullouts'. This is enormously expensive. On the other hand, if you were to do something akin to open systems instruction then a kid would stay in the same 'class' only until they finished the unit, and then move on to a new teacher for the next unit. This means you wouldn't have to do pullouts, because the kids who were having trouble would just spend more time in that section. Then each school just has one or two people who monitor the pupil's time per unit compared to their expected time to complete that unit, which is based on their past performance in the subject compared to the standard performance on that unit. The other benefit of this is that now you have accountability for each student throughout the system as a whole, whereas currently troubled students are just shuffled from class to class without anyone caring enough to fix the problem.
What makes you think so? Working 9 months/yr, elementary school teachers average $52,240 or $5804/mo., high school teachers $54,390 or $6043/mo.. These are jobs with tremendous security and benefits. The average registered nurse makes $65,130 or $5427/mo. Accountants average $65,840 or $5486/mo.
http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes_nat.htm#b25-0000
"…the biggest waste of money in the school district is the computer in every class room…"
Right on. You and I agree with Steve Jobs:
"I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.
It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system."
To ensure that students who elect to pursue a rigorous education are not penalized relative to those who do not so choose, grades at those institutions have been inflated to meaningless extent.
The educational industrial complex is geared toward growth. Effectively serving that market requires lower baseline standards and less meaningful quality metrics within the serviced population. Certainly the market is consuming more educational product than in the early 60s, but whether this produces a better educated populace is less obvious--unless "better educated" is defined to mean "consumed more educational product."
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"in the early 60s there was a massive gender gap in college attendance" As an aside, today's gender gap is the opposite: colleges attract fewer males than females. If you consider graduation and 4-year graduation rates, the gap is greater and growing faster. I don't know that this marketing failure says anything about the quality of education though.
Decades ago, there was a clear distinction between colleges and vocational schools (or "trade schools"). The purpose of colleges was to bring you into a certain culture and tradition: the culture of educated people. The purpose of vocational schools was practical job training, nothing more.
Attending "college" was more prestigious, but also of little interest to most people. (Most people are basically practical.) Social initiatives to bring poorer people into the educated world put money into colleges, not vocational schools. But most people don't want to learn about Keats and the Magna Carta and that sort of thing, they just want to get skills to do a job to make more money than they could without those skills.
Over time, the purpose of colleges became confused. People today see colleges as intended to provide job training, and just doing a lousy job of it. Colleges, with their state funding, grabbed much of the market from vocational schools, killing off most of them.
So today, we have many colleges, with vast numbers of students. Most of the students mostly jump through useless bureaucratic hoops for four or five years, don't learn the things educated people know, and don't get job skills, either.
My guess would be that the biggest differences would be for teachers' pensions and benefits, extracurricular activities, technology, facilities -- but that's just a guess.
I can't imagine that they spend 3.5x as much on textbooks..
What cost $2670 in 1961 would cost $19,226.05 in 2008 (BLS calculator: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl), which means that expenditure per pupil, in real terms has decreased quite a bit. Based on that same calculator, the amount of money we are spending now is $1,304 in 1961 dollars, far below the 2.6k you mention.
Krugman also highlights another problem. The financial crisis has resulted in real job cuts. Consequently, there will be less specialized classes, AP classes etc., especially in rural and urban areas. Christensen's point is that this is a great place to introduce an education based disruption. That is what we are doing at www.nixty.com. As a country, we have limited "teacher bandwidth" (David Wiley, 2009). Whether we like it or not, this bandwidth is going to continue to decrease. We need to find ways to harness the Web, informal learning, opencourseware etc. to create real learning opportunities for people of all ages and across different backgrounds. Many of these disruptive processes are already underway in the homeschooling and unschooling domains. It'll be interesting to see how they play out and impact the traditional K-12 and higher education systems in the coming years.
We are looking for people interested in helping us solve these problems. If you would like to join us, then shoot me an email at glen at nixty.com
I"m not sure there is a great book that lays out some solutions, if there were we wouldn't still be talking about these issues. I'd suggest reading some books that talk more about the problem, just to get a good grasp on the issue. For that, I'd recommend Susan Eaton The Children in room E4 and Linda Perlstein's Tested: One American school struggles to make the grade.