One of the most bizarre aspects of the United States is how we organize public education at the elementary and secondary levels. For mysterious historical reasons, we leave all of the important decisions — from curriculum and testing to financing and bus routes — in the hands of local school boards. 130,000 of them, all told. The result, predictably enough, is screaming chaos. Not only do we have haphazard ideas about what to teach and how to judge how well it’s been taught, but the dispersal of resources makes economies of scale impossible, so we don’t put anything like the appropriate amount of effort into developing new techniques and training our teachers.
And it shows. Matt Miller has written a compelling article in The Atlantic, documenting how our screwy system — unique, apparently, in the developed world — has utterly failed to give our children the educations they deserve.
The United States spends more than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem-solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading. Half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. don’t graduate on time (or ever) from high school. As of 2005, about 70 percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in reading. By the end of eighth grade, what passes for a math curriculum in America is two years behind that of other countries.
This dismal failure might at least be explicable if it served some misguided egalitarian impulse, but it doesn’t. This map, from Miller’s article, shows the spending per pupil on a county-by-county basis; the poorest counties spend less than $7,500 per student, while the rich ones are over $17,500. (Click for larger version.)
Is there any theory behind the idea that students should getter significantly better or worse educations based on the county in which they are born? This isn’t an issue of private vs. public; it’s a public service, paid for by taxes, just like Medicare or national defense. But we finance public education by combination of state and local revenues, rather than through the national government.
Faced with such a patently misguided system, the most common calls for reform involve the imposition of some sort of national standards, such as those featured in the No Child Left Behind Act that has lately been foisted on our schools. In principle, national standards are a great idea; in a sensible system, however, they be the last of a series of necessary reforms. It’s like a team that hires a new football coach, who addresses the team on the first day of practice by saying “Here’s the system: we’re going to win all of our games!” Without an actual playbook, appropriate equipment, and some strategy, exhortations to do better aren’t going to achieve any tangible results.
It’s obvious what is needed: a basic national curriculum that is shared by all schools, with a set of requirements that leave room for creativity and innovation by individual districts within the overall framework. (There is no reason why American math classes should be two grade levels behind European math classes.) Plus, crucially, an overhaul of the financing system so that resources are distributed fairly. Those are just the minimal reforms that every sensible person should be able to agree on; after those are implemented, we can return to our regularly scheduled debates about school choice and bilingual education. Apparently the problem is that conservatives hate “national” and liberals hate “standards,” and both are afraid of the teachers’ unions. So we should all be able to compromise and do the right thing! As Miller says, “We started down this road on schooling a long time ago. Time now to finish the journey.”
Ooh – now here’s a subject that’ll be a red rag to a bull for many! Should be interesting.
If I recall correctly, the $7,500 per child per year figure was quoted by someone on Bill Maher’s show last week in contrast to the $20,000 per inmate per year we’re spending on keeping criminals incarcerated. When even the most affluent school districts are paying less to educated your child than it costs to keep one of millions of drug addicts locked up then there is definitely something screwy with the system.
My parents are over from England at the moment (where the same problems of funding education are evident, though where having a national curriculum doesn’t come close to solving all the school system’s ills) and my father, who has been an educator all his life, made a very pertinent observation about his circle of friends back in the UK. He has wealthy friends–friends who are bank managers, accountants, and actuaries; and he has less well off friends–friends who are teachers. The people we employ to look after our money, we pay generously. The people we pay to look after the education of our children… not so much. Something seems not quite right about that.
Of course, simply funneling more money into teachers’ pockets is not going to solve the ills of the US education system, since the situation is much more complicated than that, but when the disparity in pay between teaching and the private sector is so large the capable people, the brightest and the best are not going to hang around on teacher’s wages when there is much more money to be earned elsewhere.
Every so often you see what huge difference a wonderful teacher can make in a child’s life, especially of those who have no stable family background through no fault of their own. Imagine what our future would be like if teachers were the cream of the crop, those who could afford to follow their vocation without being lured by the big bucks available to them elsewhere.
(I should add that I do know that there are plenty of wonderful teachers out there who endure low wages for the love of teaching and dedication to their pupils, so my above post was not meant as a slight to those who are currently in the teaching profession.)
What happened? It seemed that both you and The Atlantic were taken down and replaced with those annoying typo-portals (the ones that I would expect if I typed in http://www.cosmicvarience.com) and The Atlantic still has that problem.
A significant factor in the disparity in school funding is the fact that the source of these funds is property taxes. Poor neighborhoods have lower value property and so the local schools receive less money while the schools in rich areas are flush with cash. It’s a rather alarming positive feedback mechanism for enlarging the gap between the rich and poor.
The problem is not that your curricula are set locally – this is quite common in the developed world. Your problem is that you elect school boards. In most countries the curriculum is set by (usually) State or Province level by educational experts (often university level experts int he subject), and funding is set by the State not the local government. [I think the UK is not consistent about this.] Hence local politics and religious agendas do not fly in state schools, and since there are standards for government funding of private (mostly religious) schools, they don’t fly much in those schools either.
The American tendency to Elect Dogcatchers and above is problematic – some things cannot be properly determined by majority vote.
I have to ask…
What methodology was used to produce that map?
Specifically, have the differences in cost-of-living been taken into account?
If the cost-of-living was factored in, it seems likely that if it were factored in, then the differences would look much less dramatic.
I suspect that deep down many people like the system as it is. If you have enough money, you can buy advantage for your children by buying a home in a higher quality school district. When there is a huge population of less-advantaged people, the competition for your child to get into the top colleges is less fierce. Leveling the playing field is fair, but by virtue of its fairness it takes power away from parents to control their child’s destiny. The parents who have such power will not want to give it away.
Are you familiar with all the joys that have been foisted upon teachers and students alike with the advent of standardized testing? Having to achieve a certain level of scoring in your class (to keep your job) and in your school (to keep your funding) frequently means that teachers are teaching to the test, and only the test. Everybody says there is room for creativity, and there is, when the students are willing to put forth the effort to achieve the basics in a timely manner.
But when students don’t care, and parents don’t care, teachers are often forced to spend more time than is desirable (to teachers and students) ‘teaching the test’. This the great drawback of ‘No Child Left Behind’. You might as well call it ‘Enthusiasm Left Behind’. Money doesn’t fix this problem.
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There is nothing wrong with teaching to the test (and only the test), as long as the test is of a sufficiently high level, and the ones who teach do not design the test.
Teaching to the test is done almost everywhere. For physics and math, the tests are of a very low level (not just in the US but almost everywhere else in the world too).
Teaching to the test then leads to education at a very low level. This in turns dumbs down students. And not surprisingly, the students then find math and physics difficult. It then becomes difficult to raise the level of the tests. 🙁
I have two kids: one homeschooled, one in a charter school. It has become apparent that my homeschooled kid’s agenda is education and my schooled kid’s agenda is to win an academic game of attendance, tests, and conformity.
Our teachers aren’t paid enough and they are stripped of their freedom to teach by boards and imposed standards (local and national). Until we fix that problem, I don’t think we can expect our kids to be educated in our public schools.
There’s another aspect that I think we’re missing here. I have a number of relatives who are teachers. In talking with them, I’ve realized that a large number of teachers aren’t qualified to teach the topics they cover. This is especially true in advanced science and math courses. A solid curriculum will only hold-up if the teachers understand what they are teaching.
There is an ass-backwards approach to teaching where you need to be “certified” by the state. As a result of this implementation, a person with a B.A in liberal arts who took a few teaching credits is deemed “better suited” to teach a high-school physics course than a person with an MS in physics who teaches Physics 101 lectures at a state university. I vaguely remember a story about some noted physicist (Carl Wieman?)trying to teach high-school classes but being shot down because of the state saying “he wasn’t qualified”.
Eeek! I dropped a key word. Instead of:
If the cost-of-living was factored in, it seems likely that if it were factored in, then the differences would look much less dramatic.
I meant to write:
If the cost-of-living was not factored in, then it seems likely that if it were factored in, the differences would look much less dramatic.
Regarding the “mysterious historical reasons”, James Madison had this to say about the US Constitution and the principle of limited government:
James Madison on the Cod Fishery Bill debate, February 7, 1792, as quoted in
Debates, Vol. 4, p. 429, (Elliot, ed. 1836).
Let me preface this comment by stating: I hate the Republicans (Newt Gingrich more than most).
Anyway, Newt’s recent response to Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” touched on many of these issues. Surprisingly, the response is serious and worthy of discussion.
http://newt.org/tabid/102/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/3284/Default.aspx
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/samgrahamfelsen/gGBbKG
Instead of combining 130,000 bureaucracies into one giant one (yeah, that will really help things), why don’t you look at what actually works? Public (government) schools don’t work. Public healthcare won’t work. Name one country that it does work in. Private school children outscore public school children almost across the board. Home schooled children outscore public school children. Maybe the government is actually the problem here.
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Bad math education leads to this 🙂
Matthew, you’re forgetting, the people who go to private schools are not the same group of people who go to public schools. Last time I remember about trying to get into a private school, I had to take an entrance exam.
Matthew? I can name two. France. Cuba.
At 20. That’s hilarious. But wait a minute – didn’t bad math education actually created jobs and wealth in this case?
While limited-government principles such as the ones that are just starting to poke their heads into the debate do appeal to me on an ideological ground, I think it might be more sensible to set that aside until we can answer a key question. Namely, is there any (successful) large-scale implementation of nationwide education wherein the government plays no part? I’m genuinely curious to see if anyone has an affirmative answer, or even a case where it has been tried and then failed.
Matthew, you didn’t ask about countries where public schools work, maybe because you know there are many so it would destroy your argument. In fact your statement that they don’t work is wrong, but I guess you can’t be a libertarian if you actually look at how the world is. So I will answer that question anyway with just one example: Scandinavia and Finland have mostly public schools and consistently perform better than the US on for example literacy and math tests. (Article in Science.)
At least in Sweden, public schools are run on the muncipal level but curricula are set by the government and must be adhered to, even by private schools.