education, skills, and the future
In his recent interview with David Leonhardt, President Obama said:
My grandmother never got a college degree. She went to high school. Unlike my grandfather, she didn’t benefit from the G.I. Bill, even though she worked on a bomber assembly line. She went to work as a secretary. But she was able to become a vice president at a bank partly because her high-school education was rigorous enough that she could communicate and analyze information in a way that, frankly, a bunch of college kids in many parts of the country can’t. . . . She could write a better letter than many of my — I won’t say “many,” but a number of my former students at the University of Chicago Law School. So part of the function of a high-school degree or a community-college degree is credentialing, right? It allows employers in a quick way to sort through who’s got the skills and who doesn’t. But part of the problem that we’ve got right now is that what it means to have graduated from high school, what it means to have graduated from a two-year college or a four-year college is not always as clear as it was several years ago.
What he says about his grandmother I could say about my mother. She was educated in tiny northern Alabama towns in the 1940s, and would never for a moment have considered going to college — that wasn’t on the radar screen of a family that scrabbled together enough money to feed seven kids by having everyone work odd jobs and by growing as much of their own food as they could.
But she later came to run the accounting department at a bank, and now does much the same for a mail-order electronics firm. At age 77 she still works nearly full-time, and was telling me recently that her boss made a mistake by shifting to a new accounting software package which is less functional than the previous one — and which she is having to teach to her co-workers. I don’t think too many 77-year-olds are the first in their company to learn complex new software suites, and then teaching others a third their age. My mother, then, is a remarkably resourceful and adaptable woman, and while a lot of that should simply be chalked up to native intelligence, there’s also no doubt that she was well-prepared for her work by an education that drilled her in the basics of mathematics and the English language.
Is it likely that President Obama, or anyone else, can re-invent American public education, especially on the high school level, so that it can once again give people the basic preparation they need for entering the workforce? No, it’s not likely. Arrayed against the reformers are the massed resistance of teachers (many of whom want to make things as easy as possible for themselves, and who rightly fear that their own poor educations do not equip them to do the job) and parents (many of whom want schools simply to be babysitters for their children, and do not want to become involved in anything more demanding than that). Those are powerful inertial forces, and I don’t see how they can be overcome. But I try to be hopeful. There are millions of Americans who are what my mother was: poor and with limited horizons, but smart and willing to learn, willing to work. It would be nice if we could start thinking about them for a change.
Is it likely that President Obama, or anyone else, can re-invent American public education, especially on the high school level, so that it can once again give people the basic preparation they need for entering the workforce? No, it’s not likely.
Even if you could, it would have a marginal effect at best. Again, the absolute refusal of conservatives to reckon with the most salient aspect of educational reform— the social and economic reality of the students who are failing— means that conservative opinions on education are not to be taken seriously. Education has extremely powerful correlative factors. To a high degree of accuracy, we can predict whether a given student does well or poorly in school by knowing a little bit about him or her: is the student poor? Is there a single parent or two parents in the home? Does he or she live in a high-crime neighborhood? Does his or her parent have a criminal record? Is there drug abuse in the home? This is very broadly true in America: poor kids do badly in school. Rich kids do well. It’s actually rather stunning, the degree of accuracy to such a gross analysis.
Yes, many individual stories can be told about people who overcame poverty to become well-educated. You can’t build massive national reform on the numbers of people who remain statistically insignificant. There is no meaningful opportunity for widespread educational gains in this country without removing children from poverty and ending the epidemic of fatherlessness. Period. All of our many magic bullets for solving our educational problem in this country are just pleasant fictions, whether it’s merit pay and charter schools on the left or busting the teachers unions and private school vouchers on the right.
If you want to talk about powerful inertial forces, don’t talk about the ephemera. Talk about the root causes.
— Freddie · Apr 30, 01:43 PM · #
I’m not being flippant, just thinking outside the, uh, you know, mainstream. But I wonder if Freddie’s comment, which is a good one, could be more accurately edited to read:
You know, a la The Republic.
— Sargent · Apr 30, 01:59 PM · #
<i>There is no meaningful opportunity for widespread educational gains in this country without removing children from poverty </i>
What’s the evidence that giving poor children more money would bring any educational gains at all, let alone widespread gains? Little to none. The primary thing that puts poor children at a disadvantage isn’t mere material poverty, but the fact that they often have a much less intellectually stimulating home environment — less conversation about abstract ideas, less reading or being read to, and the like. Giving people more money, however good an idea it might be for other reasons, doesn’t make them better at algebra.
— Stuart Buck · Apr 30, 02:13 PM · #
Returning to seriousness, let me play devil’s advocate for a second and defend the virtues of the educational system.
Simply, socialization and canalization. Regardless of the skills acquired and vocational doors opened, our public education system provides an effective and universal setting for socialization pressures: the horizontal feedback dynamics of peer-grouped youngsters, a setting which clearly overrides the flimsy top-down structures of adult enforced constraints.
I think this is a wonderful mechanism for producing self-centered individuals and novel generational content. It’s also a ready-made recombinative sorting processor of imparted values, powered by the sturm und drang of adolescent priorities and parental interruptions.
I think it’s clear why this might be a good thing, regardless of how much money one makes, regardless how many crappy jobs and shitshow relationships one is forced to endure. Viva la high school.
— Sargent · Apr 30, 02:55 PM · #
Look, I’m broadly in favor of limiting tenure and giving school administrations more power to remove poorly performing teachers— although the definition of what poor performance means, I’d wager, is very different for me than for many others. But I think two thinks are imperative to remember: 1), you can’t remove one of the primary incentives for anyone to take a job and at the same time seek to improve the quality of applicants for that job. That’s just folly. People take jobs because they offer attractive compensatory packages. If you want to attract better teachers, and at the sae time end teacher tenure, you better replace the employment incentive that tenure represents with a significant upgrade in salary. And I’m not talking a thousand dollars a year; I think to really attract higher tier candidates, you’ve got to be at least somewhat credibly competitive with other jobs that require an additional two or three years of school.
2), we just have to have realistic ideas about how much we can improve educational outcomes by nibbling at the administrative margins. There are changes to be made. But far too often, people who are ideologically opposed to unions and have great partisan incentive to oppose teachers unions seem to find, by a very odd coincidence, that destroying the teachers unions will solve our education problems. The conservative movement to reform American public school has to do a hell of a lot more to demonstrate that they still find killing the unions a means to an end, rather than the end unto itself.
— Freddie · Apr 30, 02:56 PM · #
Both you and Obama credit a good high school education. But you could both blame discrimination against women. Smart women born in the 1920’s and 30’s usually didn’t go to college. So your comparisons are a bit of apples to oranges. That’s accentuated by the better raw material for teachers schools had then—women had limited career choices.
— Bill Harshaw · Apr 30, 02:59 PM · #
Bill’s is a great comment, which reinforces Alan’s essential pessimism. I’ll add that it’s not just the dilution of talent that came from women having new opportunities, but the residue of low esteem that attached to a profession once deemed “women’s work.” That perception has now been reinforced by almost every new innovation undertaken by the professionalizers of teaching.
— Matt Feeney · Apr 30, 03:32 PM · #
The methods that made Obama’s grandmother’s and Jacobs’ mothers’ educations so good were all conservative ones: rigid discipline, rote memorization, teaching to the test, and so on. For the past century, the professional training of teachers has been progressively liberalized, with fad after fad getting rid of memorizing multiplication tables in favor of estimating answers, eliminating phonics in favor of “whole word recognition,” deemphasizing standard English in favor of ethnic variations of English (“there’s no right or wrong grammar, no one right way to speak or write”), getting rid of classroom discipline in favor of freeing childrens’ spirits, reducing the importance of grading in favor of improving self esteem, and so on, and so on.
If you want to make this a political issue, it’s hard to blame conservatives for any of these educational trends, all of which originated in and were spread by very liberal graduate schools of education. These trends are why home-schooled kids routinely beat public school students in such old-fashioned contests as spelling bees and geography bees (which in turn is why so many professional educators want to eliminate such competitive contests — they may harm childrens’ self esteem).
You can’t improve education by blaming teachers for teaching as they’ve been taught to teach. You can’t improve it by currently popular “liberal” nostrums such as eliminating teacher tenure and giving school administrators (or political cabals, as in NYC and DC) the power to arbitrarily and capriciously fire teachers they deem to be “bad.” (School administrators, rather than classroom teachers, are the major source of foolish fads in education; they’re more likely to be influenced by education schools’ trends; they’re the most likely to be drawn into shiny new toys like “Teach for America.”) Primary and secondary education has been deliberately watered down and weakened for decades by educational theories that emphasize the “growth of the whole child” over merely learning facts and skills. It won’t be strengthened by scapegoating teachers who are merely practicing what they’ve themselves been taught in graduate schools of education.
— Gary Imhoff · Apr 30, 04:33 PM · #
As someone who reads and dialogues with quite a lot of conservatives, Freddie, do you realize how silly it sounds when you say things like this? I mean, what do you think that e.g. Ross and Reihan are doing in their book? You’re far too smart and well-informed for this kind of “conservatives don’t care about the poor” talk to be anything but self-consciously hyperbolic B.S., right? And if so, then why do you insist on going in for it?
— John Schwenkler · Apr 30, 06:05 PM · #
You only need look one comment above you to see a perfectly common (I would say almost ubiquitous) conservative approach to talking about education: talk about it exclusively in terms that allow you to bash an institution you think is too liberal. When you bend the conversation to constantly emphasize that the problem with education is the problem with liberalism, I think eventually it becomes fair to ask which, actually, is your real target.
I may be misremembering GNP, but it seems to me that Ross and Reihan talk about a lot of proximate causes for educational problems, a lot of interesting ideas about educational achievement, and swerve from conservative orthodoxy— but still end up where mainstream conservatism insists is the endpoint of any discussion of education, hamstringing the teachers unions. To the degree that Ross and Reihan identify fatherlessness and family breakdown as key components of educational difficulty, I’m with them, and I think they are refreshingly free-thinking on this issue. But I am disappointed by what seems like reflexive union bashing, and as you are well aware, Ross and Reihan’s book is far out of line with the conservative mainstream.
It’s nearly universal; conservative arguments about this issue begin and end with unions. And I’m sorry, but I’ve tuned it out. No arguments so obsessively focused and so relentlessly partisan can pass the smell test. It’s just like the auto industry. I can’t help but tune out conservative arguments on the issue when such a vast preponderance of them begin and end with the UAW.
By the way, I didn’t say “conservatives don’t care about poor people.” There’s plenty of reasons that people might ignore poverty as the chief cause of educational failure. But so many people ignoring the single most consistent correlative factor in an issue doesn’t help move the conversation forward.
— Freddie · Apr 30, 06:38 PM · #
The methods that made Obama’s grandmother’s and Jacobs’ mothers’ educations so good were all conservative ones: rigid discipline, rote memorization, teaching to the test, and so on.
Those methods were all well and good to educate a mass-production society who, in great numbers, were expected to go on to decent-paying jobs in manufacturing and industry. When your job was to fit Part A onto Slot B at an assembly line station, rigid discipline and rote memorization were the skills needed.
Those jobs no longer exist in the United States. Rote memorization of, and blind adherence to, your superiors’ orders won’t get you anywhere, except maybe the U.S. military.
We live in an information economy, where the most valuable jobs involve doing something differently or creating things anew. Asserting that an education program which worked 60 years ago is exactly the education program we should be pursuing today is to ignore 60 years of changing economic, social and technological reality.
— Travis Mason-Bushman · Apr 30, 06:50 PM · #
And how about: talking about conservatives exclusively in terms that allow you to paint them as narrow-minded, union-obsessed, or generally heartless?
But how is talk of fatherlessness and family breakdown anything but the oldest refrain in the conservative songbook?
This is clearly false, I think; if anything is universal or nearly so, it’s that they begin and end with vouchers. Maybe you should stop tuning them out and start reading them with a bit of charity …
— John Schwenkler · Apr 30, 06:53 PM · #
But how is talk of fatherlessness and family breakdown anything but the oldest refrain in the conservative songbook?
It sure is – except that the conservative argument which follows is invariably not a proposal to find some way to help families stay together, but rather a sermonizing wag of the finger and vague references to the evils of all those liberal things like contraception and “sexual immorality,” and if only we could undo the sexual revolution and put those gays back in the closet (or in prison), we’d all be hunky-dory.
— Travis Mason-Bushman · Apr 30, 07:04 PM · #
How are other folks managing to use italics, when my HTML tags get ignored? Weird.
Anyway, this is a QUOTE:
“There’s plenty of reasons that people might ignore poverty as the chief cause of educational failure. But so many people ignoring the single most consistent correlative factor in an issue doesn’t help move the conversation forward.”
Freddie, do you have any answer to my comment above? What makes you think that poverty, the sort of poverty that exists in modern America (where obesity rather than starvation is the problem), is causing poor academic achievement, rather than being caused by a third factor that also causes low academic achievement? For example, having parents who are drug addicts . . . drug addicts may have trouble holding down a steady job and thus end up poor, and may also neglect to read to their kids. But the poverty didn’t literally cause the poor academic achievement; both poverty and low academic achievement were caused by parental drug use.
Just an example; you could probably think of many more. And as I said above, there’s really no evidence or reason to think that merely giving poor people more money will make their kids better at algebra. It might be a good idea for other reasons, but not because of that.
— Stuart Buck · Apr 30, 07:25 PM · #
Just this past week the Supreme Court argued a case about whether a young girl could be strip-searched by school officials for the crime of being suspected of being in possession of a single tablet of over-the-counter ibuprofen.
I wouldn’t describe that as “lax discipline”; if anything, one problem facing our schools today is a stifling, authoritarian over-discipline.
— Chet · Apr 30, 08:09 PM · #
How are other folks managing to use italics, when my HTML tags get ignored? Weird.
Stuart, follow the Textile link just under the comment box.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 30, 08:25 PM · #
Freddie’s discussion of union-bashing has it upside down. It is not conservatives, but liberals, who claim that teachers’ unions are the main problem with education. Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein in New York, Mayor Fenty and Chancellor Rhee in Washington, DC, and liberal school “reform” foundations like Gates, Broad, and Dell all target teacher unions and make union busting a primary goal.
It is also liberals, not conservatives, who claim that educational problems can be solved inside classrooms simply by replacing old, worn-out, unionized teachers with better, younger, more enthusiastic, “Teach for America” types (who aren’t interested in unions because they’re not interested in teaching as a lifelong profession). They’re the ones claiming that societal problems can be ignored because they can be overcome just by having “better” and more “caring” teachers.
— Gary Imhoff · Apr 30, 08:44 PM · #
Freddie? Still looking for evidence, or what?
— Stuart Buck · May 1, 12:25 AM · #
Obama’s maternal grandmother didn’t got to college, but her sister became a professor of statistics. Her brother got a degree in engineering and the became the number two administrator in the University of Chicago library system. Their parents bought all the University of Chicago-sponsored Great Books editions.
Obama’s mother was accepted for admission to the University of Chicago at age 15.
So, it’s not hugely surprising that Obama got a job at the U. of Chicago Law School.
— Steve Sailer · May 1, 08:02 AM · #
Yeah he’s totally a legacy hire.
Because, you know, there’s such a thing as legacy hiring in colleges.
— jackal · May 1, 08:01 PM · #
I think he means Obama comes from a brainy family.
— Ali Choudhury · May 1, 10:57 PM · #
Dear Ali: Thank you.
Likewise, Obama’s paternal grandfather was the most successful and progressive landowner in his region. Obama’s father was legendary among his generation as the sharpest mind of any black born in Kenya in 1936. He graduated summa cum laude from the U. of Hawaii in three years and picked up a Masters in Economics from Harvard in one more year.
Obama’s mother eventually graduated from the U. of Hawaii with a bachelor’s degree in math. Her Ph.D. was in cultural anthropology, a notoriously soft field, but still, we’re talking at least, say, 97th, 98th percentile for his mother.
Obama’s estranged half-brother Mark (the son of his Barack Sr. and his second white American wife Ruth) has a master’s in physics from Stanford and an MBA from Emory. The two half-brother’s can’t stand each other because Mark, having grown up in Kenya, doesn’t share Barack’s misty romanticism about race. Mark is the truly post-racial one.
Obama comes from a brainy family tree.
— Steve Sailer · May 2, 12:45 AM · #