The Lesson Education Must Learn
The probable reelection of President Clinton this week means more money for education, which could help Americans get good-paying jobs. Although maybe not, because money alone can’t fix U.S. education.
Clinton has pledged a $1,500 tax credit “to make at least two years of community college education as universal for every American as a high school education is today.” He also will ask Congress for a $10,000 tax deduction for college tuition or training expenses.
The aim is to give high school graduates an incentive to step up to higher education and reverse a disheartening historic decline in their incomes. In 1979, the average 30-year-old man with a high school diploma earned $27,700, but today a similarly educated worker earns only about $19,000 in comparable dollars, according to Frank Levy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scholar who first documented an education-income gap almost 10 years ago.
Blame has been widespread. World trade and new technology were held responsible for bringing down wages of the less educated while creating opportunities for those with more training.
Such thinking set off a surge in college enrollment as many Americans sought extra schooling that might land them better jobs.
Yet trouble persisted. Even advanced education didn’t bring job security, and at the other end of the scale, dropout rates remained high and test scores remained low. Schools seemed incapable of adapting to a changing world.
In fact, U.S. education has been a curious exception to most trends in this time of wholesale change. At $550 billion a year in total private and public expenditure, education ranks far beyond defense and second only to medicine in tapping the American pocketbook.
Yet as defense firms have been forced to restructure and medicine is being turned upside down, education seems to sail along, with academic experts and politically powerful unions demanding monopoly control, excusing failure and asking constantly for more money.
Now, however, the reform of American education is beginning at last, in local efforts involving parents, teachers, businesses and other institutions. These efforts are quieter than debates about school vouchers and teachers unions, but they stem from the same demand for results from America’s enormous investment in education.
The upshot is that Clinton’s tax credits will succeed if they are accompanied by dedicated efforts like those of William Segura, who recently ran the community college district of Austin, Texas--or those of concerned citizens in Boston, Pasadena and many other places.
Segura, 48, went to Austin three years ago to head the 25,000-student, seven-campus community college system. He was told immediately by the local electronics industry that it wanted higher standards in education. So he and such major firms as Advanced Micro Devices and the Sematech consortium designed a curriculum richer in math, chemistry and physics.
Then Segura went visiting homes in the poorer neighborhoods of Austin where the electronics factories were. He explained to parents and students the payoff for studying math early in high school and for qualifying at one of the community colleges. “This was a tremendous opportunity for poor kids to get great jobs,” Segura says.
That opportunity amounted to $25,000 a year for entry-level jobs--a standard pay for skilled electronics workers worldwide. When Samsung came to Austin to invest $1 billion in a semiconductor plant, its main concern was to get a trainable work force. It was more than willing to pay the same high wages it pays in Seoul.
And Segura has moved on to head the 98,000-student, nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District.
In most places, business doesn’t shape curricula directly, as in Austin, but indirectly through hiring requirements. And that’s at the heart of both our education and our income problems, says Levy, who has co-written a new book, “Teaching the New Basic Skills,” with Richard Murnane of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
In their research, the professors visited Diamond-Star Motors, the joint venture of Mitsubishi and Chrysler in Normal, Ill. Its requirements for production workers include reading and math at ninth- grade levels, plus the ability to work in groups, communicate effectively and use personal computers.
They also visited Northwestern Mutual Life, a 139-year old insurance company in Milwaukee that requires employees to use PCs and think conceptually. A standard question to applicants is: “If you could create a job tailored to you, what would that job entail?”
None of those requirements should be beyond a high school graduate, of course. Yet companies long ago found they couldn’t count on a high school diploma to guarantee such skills. So they compensated for the schools’ failure by demanding college degrees.
But if elementary and secondary schools do their job, a lot of expensive college tuition can be saved and college facilities can be used for more than simple reading and math classes.
That’s where the hard work of parents and teachers in the Zavala elementary school district of Austin and in the public schools of Cabot, Mass., come in. In recent years, teachers and parents in those districts have worked together to raise standards and expand student horizons.
Apprenticeships are increasingly in use. In Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital gives high school students part-time jobs that really teach them something. In Pasadena, scientists at Caltech work with poor children and their teachers to improve science instruction. Fluor Corp. in Irvine is taking part in programs to give high school students practical instruction in international trade.
The thrust of all those efforts is to help schools provide students with skills demanded by the modern economy.
Yes, but why aren’t schools providing such skills already? The answer is that schools and the education establishment long ago turned inward, as automobile companies did before global competition forced them to change and big computer companies did before the PC transformed their industry.
As those industries were, education is ripe for restructuring. And the good news is that in many local school districts, the hard work of reform has begun.
