Poor Schools Are a Threat to Our Standard of Living

Recently, a taxi driver told me that he was sending his son back to Somalia for high school so he could get a better education than the one offered by the public schools in Washington. In the eyes of a concerned parent, the capital of the world’s wealthiest nation cannot provide a public education comparable to that of an immeasurably poorer Third World nation.

No doubt there are public school systems in the United States that compare favorably to--or are better than--those in Somalia. But for many disadvantaged families, the local funding base of their school districts isn’t enough to provide even rudimentary skills in reading, writing and mathematics.

The problems of American elementary- and secondary-school education are not, however, limited to lower-income families--and are not simply the result of inadequate funding. By now, the appalling facts about American education are well known, at least to those who are able to read and understand an editorial piece such as this one--only an estimated 5% of American high school seniors.

We have the highest dropout and illiteracy rates among the advanced industrial countries and, in comparison to other countries, our students consistently perform at or near the bottom of almost every examination group. Not only are our students far behind those of other advanced countries, they are trailing students of many newly industrialized nations.

Even highly educated, high-income parents face a formidable challenge in obtaining a high-quality education for their children. Recently, a professor I know reported that when his son transferred from an advanced-placement program in a wealthy New England suburban high school to a standard high school program in Spain, he had to struggle to catch up to his classmates. His experience reflects a glaring reality: Other advanced industrial nations provide high school educations for all of their students that equal or exceed those we provide for only our college-bound students.

Both conservatives and liberals share responsibility for the sorry state of American elementary and secondary education. Conservatives steadfastly hold that funding is adequate to the challenge. Yet a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute reveals that America ranks 14th out of 16 industrial nations in the share of national product devoted to pre-college education. It would take an additional $20 billion--spare change compared to the projected cost of the savings and loan bailout--simply to bring us up to the average.

Of course, the average is not good enough. To provide an education comparable to that in other countries, the United States has to spend proportionally more because of the special characteristics of the American school system and American society. Our decentralized system, based on local autonomy and choice, is more expensive than a centrally administered system.

And our population is also more heterogenous than that of most other countries. Many of our school-age children do not speak English and come from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Finally, there are the special educational needs of children raised in poverty--an estimated 20% of all American children, more than twice that of any European country.

For previous generations of immigrants and poor children, an outstanding public school system provided the entry way into the mainstream. Now, for many, the system is an insurmountable barrier.

If conservatives have been unwilling to recognize the funding shortfall, many on the left have been unwilling to support stringent national standards. Despite lip service to the need for academic rigor, most states and communities have failed to impose minimal standards for high school graduation, such as four years of English and three years each of math, science and social studies. Local control and local community values continue to be more highly valued than basic educational competence.

Always enamored of the market mechanism, a growing number of American policy-makers argue that the solution to America’s educational crisis lies in greater competition and choice. The idea is that if school principals have more autonomy, if parents have complete freedom in choosing schools and if schools are funded purely on the basis of the number and types of students they can attract, then fierce competition for students will force schools to raise educational standards and innovate.

Although the choice approach may improve incentives for school performance, it will almost certainly worsen the educational plight of the disadvantaged, whose choice lies between one bad school and another.

Country-by-country experience with effective school systems indicates that choice is unnecessary for educational excellence. A report released last week by the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a bipartisan commission created by the Rochester, N.Y.-based National Center on Education and the Economy, indicates that nations with good schools have one thing in common: a set of stringent national performance standards that virtually all students must meet by age 16 and that have a direct effect on their employment prospects. The standards establish high goals for student achievement and provide an objective measure against which the performance of individuals and schools can be assessed. None of these nations has a system of choices.

The solution to America’s educational crisis lies not in greater choice but in more mundane factors, such as higher teacher salaries relative to those of other professionals, longer school years, introduction of national curriculum and testing standards and a broader commitment to pre-kindergarten education, especially for children from disadvantaged households.

Failure to improve elementary and secondary education will have disastrous consequences on our standard of living. More than 70% of American jobs require only a high school education.

These jobs are the backbone of the American economy. Over the last two decades, as a result of lagging productivity growth and strong foreign competition, real wages for these jobs have fallen by 12%.

During the 1990s, we are in for a shock. There will be fewer workers in America relative to the population that depends on them. If workers’ real earning power continues to fall, everyone will be in trouble.

The solution is to find a way for each worker to produce more goods and services for every hour worked. We used to do that by providing our workers with more sophisticated machinery than our foreign competitors were using. Now, many countries with lower wages use the same machinery, often with better-educated workers--and thus can afford to sell their products at lower prices.

American producers have responded in predictable ways: They have curtailed wages and benefits or moved production offshore. High-paying jobs for American workers have been disappearing at an alarming rate.

But, as the report by the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce indicates, there is a high-wage strategy for meeting the challenges of low-wage foreign competition.

The strategy rests on new forms of work organization that give greater responsibility, earning power and productivity to average workers through greater delegation of authority, reduction of supervision, job rotation and flexibility and continuing training.

Many European and Japanese companies, and some American companies--such as Hewlett-Packard and International Business Machines--have demonstrated the productivity-enhancing effects of such organizational changes.

Without a dramatic improvement in elementary and secondary education, however, the high-wage strategy for meeting foreign competition is not feasible for most American companies. High-performance work organizations require highly qualified workers who can learn continuously, adapt quickly and contribute to the development of new ideas. These are not the characteristics of most American high school graduates today.

Unless we solve our educational crisis, we are doomed to future cuts in our standard of living to meet the competition of better educated, more productive workers in the rest of the world.