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Find more Kappan articles in the
NATIONS HAVE many important goals in mind when they design their education systems, among them instilling in young people both a desire for democracy and the knowledge needed to perpetuate it and enabling them to understand and appreciate the highest achievements of humanity, to reason for themselves in a world of difficult choices, and to understand and empathize with others in a world full of conflict. But a nation that ignores the need to also educate its young people to earn a living does so at its -- and their -- peril. That is more true now than ever. Research conducted by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce shows that the middle class is shredding. It is not true that all of its members are getting poorer. It is much more accurate to say that there is a clear divide between those who have some college and those who do not. The former are becoming ever better off. The latter are sinking fast. The fact is that education holds the key to personal and national economic well-being, more now than at any time in our history. But it may well be that even those Americans who are very well educated will find their incomes falling, simply because companies all over the world are getting access to very large numbers of people who are as well educated as our best-educated students and are willing to work for much less. These people are in India and China and a rising number of other poor countries that have a longhistory of educating their elites very well. It used to be that large fractions of these elites sent their children to the West for their graduate education and that they stayed here, because the opportunities in their home countries were very limited. But now, many are staying in their home country to begin with or come here for their graduate work and return shortly thereafter, because enormous opportunities are opening up back home. The Internet now makes it possible for companies to employ these people wherever they are, without moving anywhere. And that is what puts our well-educated people in direct competition with millions of people in these less-developed countries who are just as well educated and willing to work for much less. Fifteen years ago, we realized that poorly educated people in this country were for the first time in direct competition with minimally skilled people in poor countries, who were willing to work for much less. Today, we are finding that highly skilled people in this country are in direct competition with highly skilled people in other countries, who are willing to work for much less. Raising achievement standards for our students who are the least well educated is still absolutely necessary -- and is proving very difficult -- but it is no longer enough to prevent a long, slow slide in our standard of living. The Commission concluded that, in the future, the only employers that will be willing and able to pay consistently high wages will be those that produce highly desirable products and services that can be obtained only from them and for which, therefore, they can charge the kinds of high prices that will enable them to pay high wages. American movies are one example. The Apple iPod is another. And it demonstrates an important point. Like our movies, it rests on a foundation of state-of-the-art technology. But, also like our movies, it represents enormous amounts of creativity and innovation, not just in the technology itself, but in every other aspect of its creation and distribution, from marketing strategy to industrial design. There are many other such examples. The Commission's analysis of the global economy is long and much more nuanced than I can be here (go to www.skillscommission.org for more information). But the bottom line is that most people in the U.S. will see their incomes falling in the years ahead unless we can match the best-performing countries in the academic achievement of our students, produce the most creative and innovative high school graduates in the world, and figure out how to educate our children so as to enable them to learn new things very quickly and well. This is a very tall order. And the U.S. is not very well positioned to fill it. We have the highest school dropout rate in the industrialized world. We have the second most expensive primary and secondary education system in the world. And the results it is producing are mediocre at best, as measured by all of the most widely accepted international comparative measures of achievement. To add insult to injury, after accounting for inflation, the cost of our system has risen by 240% over the last 30 years, while the scores on the fourth-grade reading test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress have barely moved at all (though we have done better on mathematics). We have tried money. And it has not worked. We have tried every kind of program initiative, and none of them have produced the kind of improvement we need at scale. The only thing we have not tried is changing the basic system we have for elementary and secondary education, which has been largely unchanged in a century. SO THE Commission proposed to do exactly that. In the space that remains, I will summarize the design the Commission put forward. First, we proposed basic changes in the way our students progress through the system. Schools in the best-performing countries typically send their students on to what we call college when they are 16 years old, not 18 years old. If we are designing a world-class system, we thought, we should do the same. It is also true that in most of the best-performing countries, students do not go on to college unless they can show that they can do college-level work. Virtually all labor economists these days say that, in the future, Americans will have to have at least two years of college to earn a decent living, so we set as a goal having 60% of our students ready for college by the age of 16 and 95% ready for college by the age of 18. To implement these goals, we envisioned a new state examination to be offered to our high school students at age 16. This would be a syllabus-based examination covering all the core subjects in the curriculum, from math and science to history and the arts. It would be set to the standard required for college-level work in our community and technical colleges. Students who met the standard would be able to go immediately to the community and technical colleges in their state without any further admissions test and would not be required to take any remedial courses (because they would not need them). These curriculum-based examinations would be modeled on the International Baccalaureate (IB) exams and the Advanced Placement tests as to form, though the standard would be lower. Thus these would be much higher-quality (and more expensive) tests than the states are now using for their accountability systems. As a general matter, the Commission is strongly in favor of having many fewer mandated tests but vastly improving the quality of those that remain. Students who were able to pass this new examination at a higher level could stay in high school to take a program of studies leading to an IB diploma, a program of studies made up of Advanced Placement courses, or a similar program put together by individual states or perhaps by the American College Testing organization. These students would be preparing to seek admissions to selective colleges, some of which would grant college credit for these courses, while others, as today, would not. Some have suggested that this sounds like a take on the European tracking system, assigning our children to life destinies at age 16. It is not. Our aim here is exactly the opposite: to get almost all students to college and ready to actually succeed in college. Even the choice as to whether to go to community college or to stay in high school to tackle the IB exams or their equivalent is not an irrevocable assignment to two different stations in life, since it is quite possible for our students to go to a community college and then transfer to our most prestigious state universities. By insisting that our students be ready for college before they are admitted to college, we will give them an incentive to take tough courses and work hard in high school. The majority of our upper-division high school students today have no such incentive. Thus they come to see high school more as a place to hang out with their friends than as a place to get on with their lives by working hard on academics. Sending our high school students to college early and eliminating remedial education in our colleges will save $60 billion a year. Add back $10 billion to account for the students who now drop out, but in our plan would stay in school, and we have saved a net $50 billion. The Commission threw in $8 billion (a tiny fraction of the total $500 billion we spend each year on elementary and secondary education), and we have an imaginary investment fund of $58 billion. We took that imaginary money and thought about how it might be invested so as to enable 60% of our children to be ready for college by the age of 16 and 95% by the age of 18. As long as our low-income students entering kindergarten continue to have vocabularies half as large as those of the other kindergartners, we will never make it, because those students will never be able to catch up to their peers. So we invested the first third of our new fund in early childhood education. That is enough to pay for high-quality early childhood education for all 4-year-olds and all low-income 3-year-olds. We invested the next third of our fund in teachers' compensation. Our aim here is to put the country in a position to recruit a large share of our teachers from the top third of the young people entering our colleges. The policies we have long had in place should have given us the lowest third of the distribution. But, because we have long had access to women and minorities whose choice of professional careers was often limited to teaching, we got much better teachers than we deserved. That is no longer the case, and we are about to get the very teachers we have long deserved, just when we need far better. Our economic analysis suggests that our students need to have much higher levels of academic accomplishment, need to have a much firmer grasp of the conceptual foundations of the subjects they study, and need to be more creative, more innovative, and better able to learn new material quickly. It is hard to see how our teachers will produce students with these characteristics unless the teachers themselves have them. These are just the characteristics that our best firms look for in the people they hire. So we will need to have policies, especially compensation policies, designed to attract such people. The Commission proposed many more changes in our system for recruiting, training, and compensating teachers than there is room to describe here. Suffice it to say that our proposals would result in setting average starting pay for teachers at the current median pay for teachers. Teachers at the top of a four-step career ladder would make about $95,000 a year, and those at the top of the ladder who are willing to work a full year would make about $110,000 a year on average. Those who work in high-cost states could make substantially more. Some accounts of our report have suggested that we would take teachers' pensions away and would pay for their raises by doing so. That is not the case. We would convert teachers' pension plans to defined contribution plans or cash balance plans, providing benefits comparable to those offered by the better private employers or by our colleges to their faculties. Newly recruited teachers would have to accept the new compensation system, with its greatly increased cash compensation and somewhat reduced retirement benefits. But teachers already serving would be offered a choice between staying with their current plans or joining the new one. Thus no teachers would lose anything they did not choose to give up. Some of the gain in teachers' pay in our plan is paid for by the change in retirement plans, but by far the largest share is new money. And now we get to the changes we proposed in the governance, management, and financing of the system. School boards would no longer operate schools. Instead, they would be responsible for contracting with third parties that would run the schools under performance contracts. The Commission hopes that most of the organizations running schools would be partnerships formed by classroom teachers, who would reach out to other classroom teachers whose work they admire and whose values they share to design and operate the school of their dreams. We would also end local financing of public education. Instead, the schools would be directly funded by the state, on the basis of the composition of their student bodies. Each student would be funded at the same base rate, but there would be additional increments for students who come from low-income families and for students who come from families in which English is not spoken at home. Mildly disabled students would get another increment in funding, and severely disabled students would get still another. This idea for funding our schools has been around for decades, but it has never been implemented, because, if there is no more money statewide for the schools, the increase in funding for the poorer schools must come from the wealthier ones, which is politically a nonstarter. So the Commission took the last third of our imaginary fund and used it to top up financing for the schools statewide. That would make it possible to pay Paul without robbing Peter. Thus it should be possible for the states to finally create truly equitable school finance systems, without which we do not have a prayer of getting all students to internationally benchmarked standards. Teachers, in the Commission design, would be recruited and employed by the state, according to the salary schedule briefly described above. But they would not have a job unless they were engaged by a contract school. If they were let go by a school, they would have to find another school willing to hire them. This design would transform the opportunities facing our disadvantaged students. No longer would they arrive at kindergarten with half the vocabulary of their peers. No longer would they get the teachers that wealthier districts did not want. Schools serving a high proportion of disadvantaged students would have the resources they need to open early in the morning and stay open till late at night. They would be able to diagnose students with vision problems and get them glasses and students with hearing problems and get them hearing aids. They would be able to get the mentors and hire the tutors these students need to succeed. They would be able to afford the extended-day and extended-year programs that these students need to catch up. This is a plan for a school system that is highly performance-oriented and entrepreneurial in spirit, and it would finally make it possible for our teachers to enter the ranks of the true professions in the United States. It would support competition and choice among schools, but it would not privatize them. It would make incomparable improvements in the prospects of our disadvantaged students, but it would also greatly improve the performance of our most advantaged students. The Commission's new design will cause considerable pain to some, not least because we are proposing a major reallocation of resources. However, the Commission would not insist on any of its specific proposals. Instead, we challenge those who disagree with our proposals to put forward better ideas for reaching the same goals. The penalty for failing to do so will be dire. MARC TUCKER is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, Washington, D.C., and co-chair of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. (c)2007, Marc Tucker.
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