Education Beat Goes On

It’s easy for scholars to study statistics, and then provide solutions to change those numbers. Scholars perform massive amounts of research, but the field reporting is left to journalists. Recently, The Brookings Institution sponsored a panel to discuss policies that would aid in educating low-income children. After the panel had completed, four journalists took the stage to provide analysis on the presented ideas. The journalistic panel consisted of Adrian Wooldridge, of The Economist, Hugh Price, Senior Fellow of The Brookings Institution, Sebastian Mallaby, of The Washington Post, and David Wessel, of The Wall Street Journal; all four of whom have written about inequality and social mobility concerning education.

Indeed, Adrian Wooldridge holds that social mobility and opportunity are decaying due to the failure in education. Whereas the United States was once seen as a beacon of opportunity; that status is slowly beginning to crumble. Wooldridge contends, “Everybody, for a long time, has known that the system of primary education and secondary education is very badly broken in this country and that it tends to reproduce and reinforce inequality.” Wooldridge finds a major problem with the American universities, which he considers “the best higher education in the world when it comes to the quality of research that is being produced.” However, that system of higher education does not promote social mobility.

In fact, Wooldridge argues that in years past universities did promote social mobility, but due to cutbacks on funding for scholarships the reverse began to occur. The reduction in scholarships has led to a disproportionate increase in higher-income students enrolling in elite universities. It was thought that race-based affirmative action policies could fix this problem, but “it did little and is doing less and less to promote upward social mobility.” Heretofore, some universities deliberately favor students depending on their legacy or celebrity, which Wooldridge argued retards upward mobility, and must be solved to reflect a commitment to social mobility.

As Hugh Price sees it, “The level of proficiency for all children has been extended and escalated,” making it more difficult to advance in social classes. Also, there is a burden on schools to prepare all children for college, which is a shift from the past. However, although the rhetoric is different, children and schools have not received the resources to compete. Furthermore, general solutions, such as universal testing, small classrooms, and tough love is “simplistic and cheap” thinking that is “geared to how much we’re willing to spend, not how much must be spent to do the job.” Finally, in order to find practical solutions, Price contends, “The whole conversation…needs to shift into a much more sophisticated realm of how do we create whole schools…so that we are producing whole children that are ready and equipped for the future.”

Sebastian Mallaby is concerned, “A lot of the causes of inherited inequality are clearly beyond the reach of government policy.” Mallaby hearkens back to the genetic component and the socioeconomic component of inequality, and claims they are both out of reach. Furthermore, students with a higher socioeconomic status begin school with a higher degree of social capital, which frees teachers from discipline problems, and allows them to focus on learning. In addition, although low-income students are making vast strides in education, they are not succeeding at the same rate as high-income children. Therefore, if education truly is the best tool to counteract inequality, then “you have to give more to the poor schools.”

David Wessel does not perceive social mobility a serious problem, but instead, “the distance from the cellar to the penthouse has grown.” He warns against accusing educational programs of failing, “We would be worse off if we hadn’t tried a lot of those things…we would be even more unhappy and uneasy if we didn’t have those policies.” Wessel argues that education is a more eloquent engine to redistributing money than simply taking capital away from people, because politicians can market it as a remedy for inequality.

Wessel advises against new spending on education, and challenges the three previous panelists, insisting, “We have to assure people that the money being spent on Head Start is really well spent before we tell them we need to spend $50 million more on pre-K.” In addition, the lack of evidence concerning new policies geared toward primary and secondary education may “paralyze the process.” Finally, to the suggestion of raising tuition rates on the upper middle-class, Wessel explains, “The people that want to change college financing do need to think a little bit about political strategy.”

There were numerous notions batted around the panel, and at times the discussion became heated. Price took offense to Mallaby’s report of genetic components in inequality, even though Cecilia Rouse had discussed them on the first panel. When Wooldridge suggested that standardized testing be the sole basis by which universities consider admission, Price claimed, “That would be affirmative action for whites.” Mallaby claimed the alternative to standardized testing was “much, much worse,” and was promptly labeled a “romantic”—as the company he works for earns more revenue from Kaplan Inc. than their actual newspaper. Ultimately, everyone agreed that America had become more unequal and that education was not improving. However, just like on Capitol Hill, a unified solution was not founded, and appears to be completely distant.

I love the way some people get to be experts in name only, like the "Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution." A title doesn't make someone smart, anymore that a high-school diploma means that one is really educated nowadays.

The Senior Fellow, Hugh Price, thinks that only throwing money at the problem will make any difference. He does not believe that there is a genetic component to academic success, although all the evidence suggests otherwise. At the same time, he objects to using objective, standardized tests, because that would unfairly favor "whites." Now, which is it? Does genetics count, or not?

Answer: Genetics counts, and there are genetically favored people everywhere. We find them only by putting them in a challenging environment.

There are educational approaches which work, and those that don't. For example, almost everyone thought that Head Start would work to help children from lower socio-economic strata to overcome a poor environment. It does not accomplish what it is supposed to do. So, maybe a poor environment is not really that bad, as far as brain-stimulus goes. Maybe something else is at work. Maybe Head Start is not adequately breaking through the cultural barriers which perpetuate poor academic perfomance.

There is a plentitude of research on education and its outcomes. The principles which come into focus are not all that complicated. One big one is that you need a "family culture" favoring intellectual activities. Rather few households honor learning the way they honor sports and entertainment. The higher the regard for sports and entertainment, the poorer the academic performance of the children. Kids absorb the messages early: they watch their parents, and interact with their parents and with other, similar kids in the neighborhood. I have observed first hand how parents will respond with delight should a three-year old mimic blocking (as in football), but the same parents will not show such pleasure or interest in anything involving book-learning, because that is not their own focus.

We can look at countries with successful educational outcomes, and see what they are doing. We can study families, espcially poorer families, who have succeeded. It is an obvious thing to look for successful methods, and merely imitate. A sports coach would do the same thing!

We can insist that our children be drilled in basics in school. On the sports field, they are drilled relentlessly. We can use the competitive instinct, as we do in sports. Somehow competition, which works in sports and every other endeavor, is thought to be harmful when it comes to education. Why? There really is competition, so why do many educators pretend that it should be hidden, lest someone's tender ego be hurt, or they get discouraged? Heck, the old self-esteem theory has been abandoned for years, and we know very well that real self-esteem does not depend on false flattery and deception. We also should know that to learn not to be discouraged is an important lesson in life, and should be taught in the classroom, just as it is on the athletic field.

And while we are making these comparisons, no coach in his right mind would try to claim that all individuals have equal sports ability. Why should we believe that there are no inherent differences in academic ability?

Here is a short list of factors which promote educational success:
1. Parental attitude toward learning.
2. Innate ability.
3. Stable, peaceful, conventional two-parent family environment (no divorce)
4. Good work ethic
5. Study programs geared to the individual student: slow enough for the turtles, and fast for the hares (so that they can foreg ahead without becoming bored).
6. Neighborhood schools, rather than large, anonymous, regional operations.
7. Civic pride and interest in schools, and volunteer help from the community.
8. Insistence on discipline, dignity, and no drugs.
9. Sports for all, but never interfering with the academic program.

There is a reason why we don't let the government dictate the content of out newspapers.

I would argue that in a free society, the government should not be allowed to dictate content in the classroom.

As Milton Friedman has observed, government feeds the poor, but it doesn't own the supermarkets.

We are told each year that our schools are in crisis. Thus, we have George W Bush and Ted Kennedy teaming up in 2001 to fix public education by giving us “No Child Left Behind,” which was supposed to fix a system supposedly already fixed by a 1994 piece of federal legislation called “Goals 2000,” which was supposed to fix a system already fixed by “America 2000,” which was a 1991 response during the first Bush administration to a 1983 Reagan-era federal report on education called “A Nation at Risk, which was published a full four years after Jimmy Carter fixed the nation’s public school system by first establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.

You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see what the future holds if this trend is allowed to continue – more money thrown at ever larger failures, year after year after year. Has there ever been a year in which the federal government has spent less money on education than the year before? In 2003, our federal government spent $50.3 billion, up from $23 billion in 1996. According to news reports, the US spends more per pupil than any other country. Has there ever been a year in which America has been able to declare that it has the best educated population in the world? Not that I’ve ever heard.

I understand what you're saying. And love your summary of the 'fixes' that have been implemented time and time again. Any time the government gets involved in anything, it becomes more costly and less effective.

But - getting the NEA out is also necessary. The two teamed together doesn't work. All I know is that the NEA began infiltrating our schools in the 50's and that was the last time our schools were decent.

Were our public schools always funded by the state governments?

The fed. gets its hands in schools by dictating certain actions in order to get federal money. Other than that, I thought the founding fathers wanted each state to be autonomous in how it handled education. And that's why we see such a discrepancy from state to state in the standards and teacher training.

Do you mean the federal gov. or the state gov. or both?

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