Rain and schools

We in West Texas have gone through several years of drought lately, though many of us have seen a good deal of rain in the last six weeks. Before the rains started there were cases around the area of politicians organizing citizens to pray for rain.  It seems that a large number of our adult citizens believe that changes in the weather – particularly rain storms -  are caused by supernatural forces.  Some may find this fact and others like it (including the gullibility of followers of the green religion in accepting their myths about climates) a cause for concern about the quality of the American electorate and what that might mean for the future, and they would be right to worry.

However, I thought instead about what it says about the quality of America’s government schools. Most adult Americans have done a twelve or thirteen year stretch in a government school. Surely at some point during their time in school, many or most sat through courses in science where some  general notions of the actual causes of atmospheric phenomena would have been mentioned. Yet the instruction seems not to have worked. (There was even a poll a while back reporting a large fraction of American adults did not know the earth orbited the sun.) Similar ignorance of history, English usage and composition, and basic arithmetic appears to be common. It would be unfair to blame the schools for  the ignorance of the  mentally deficient or completely unwilling, but these exceptions cover only so much. These schools are failing far too many people, and especially failing the people who need them most, and thus failing this country. Reform and competition are well over due. 

Don't Know Much About Much

A recent poll of Americans had one fourth of its respondents stating they did not know the earth orbits around the sun. Another poll found that forty percent of Americans do not know which foreign powers the United States fought against in World War II. Almost one hundred percent of Americans  attend schools, mainly government schools, and over eighty five percent of  adult Americans have high school diplomas. It makes one wonder exactly the “educators” employed by government schools were doing with their charges for twelve or thirteen years of their lives.  If such high percentages of the inmates at  these schools finished their time without learning such basic facts, one has to wonder what else  they missed.  Similar polls and surveys, coupled with really dismal results of many widely used tests, suggest far too many students miss out on far too much at government schools, particularly those schools serving largely poorer people, and most particularly those serving poor black and Hispanic people. Thirteen years are a long time, longer than many prison sentences or corporate careers. To see so many people getting so little from so much time spent is sad and infuriating. 

This  is of course not news, and one did not need the two polls mentioned above to know it.  The overall performance of government schools is a national disgrace, one masked somewhat in public discussions because many talented and successful people of the sort who drive and participate in public discussions see their children developing well, and give the schools credit for that development, when, in fact, their children would probably do well with almost any type of schooling, including the one room school house. More meaningful metrics would measure how well the schools do with average students and students from difficult backgrounds, and that answer would be not well at all.

 Politicians pretend to care about all this, but there is no evidence they are serious. Democrats tend to want more money for their constituents employed by government schools, but seem uninterested in improvements.  Republicans often want more local control, but seem uninterested as well in making improvements, perhaps because many of the worst schools are in places where there are few people who vote for Republicans.

An obvious first step  toward improvement would be to admit that the failures and problems of government schools are not unique to them but rather particular instances of the failures and problems of government enterprises in general.  Socialized enterprises do not work well, as experience and sound economic reasoning show. As many people have said, whatever the case for governments’ funding the schooling of children, there is not much of a case for governments’ providing it as a near monopoly, apart from its having been  done that way for a long while. 

Experience and sound economic reasoning also show that competition among providers of goods and services tends to offer purchasers better and less costly products. If we are to keep funding schooling with taxes, but wish to  introduce competition, then vouchers of one form or another would be an obvious method to try. Employees of government schools  oppose vouchers emphatically, but rarely candidly. Their arguments that vouchers would benefit mainly rich  people by allowing them to move their children out of government schools are specious.   Wealthy parents already have options for schooling their kids outside of government schools, and everyone knows it. It is the parents of poor parents who have no outside options for their children at present and would have with vouchers. They, along with families with middle sized incomes who might be able to afford other choices but only with difficulty, are the main beneficiaries of vouchers. I believe the real reason for opposing vouchers is simpler. The people on  the payrolls of government schools fear they would be unable to compete for the parents’ dollars. It is not unfair to suppose that the reason for such fear is an understanding that their product is not good enough to attract paying customers.

I believe we need to overcome this opposition. Doing so will help  children from all backgrounds  -  those from poor or difficult backgrounds probably the most. This may be the best way to start to help large numbers of such children improve themselves and their situations in life, and one which probably will shrink government and control costs as well. 

First High School, Then College

There are a couple of interesting things going on with respect to politicians and colleges these days. Many politicians say everyone or almost everyone should go to college to be able to compete in the global, high tech world of the 21^st Century, or something like that.  They also say colleges should be judged and held accountable on the basis of their rates of graduation, the percentage of enrolling students who get degrees.  A great many people lack the ability or the commitment or both to do college level work, and no politician can change that fact by legislation, executive order or his supposed inspirational qualities.  So if governments get serious about almost everybody going to college and very high percentages of enrollees graduating, colleges will have only one way to meet their demands. They will have to lower their standards and requirements for a degree drastically .

This has already happened in the schools. Before World War II, many schools had serious graduation ceremonies for students completing the eighth grade. There were at least two good reasons for doing so. First, many people’s schooling ended after the eighth grade. Second finishing the eighth grade was an accomplishment and indicated a person doing so could read, write, and perform calculations and had been exposed to at least a little history, literature, and maybe science.  Students continuing to high school were expected to go beyond that -  becoming proficient or at least adequate in simple composition, learning something about American and perhaps world history, studying the forms of the American governments, learning at least a little algebra and/or geometry, reading some good books and poetry, and maybe studying Latin or a modern foreign language.

High school was supposed to be fairly rigorous and supposed to require a fair amount of intelligence, commitment, and work from students. (Years ago, a professor of mine showed me his mother’s high school transcript  from the country school far out in the sticks she attended in the early days of the 20^th Century.  It listed only real academic subjects, and quite a few of them, including, as best as I can remember, Latin.) Fewer people graduated from high school in those days, but a high school diploma gave evidence of some actual learning and accomplishment. In the decades after  World War II, people in authority decided that almost everyone should graduate from high school. Over time the curricula and expectations changed to accommodate that goal. Now many more people graduate from high school, but a high school diploma does not guarantee the level of accomplishment once required to graduate from the eighth grade, not even the ability to read a newspaper or do simple arithmetic. (Of course many people these days graduate from high school having learned lots of thing well and studied a variety of serious and important subjects. However doing so is not a requirement, and many students can and do graduate without learning much or working much.) A prospective employer cannot assume much of anything about the worth of a young person on the basis of a high school diploma alone, and hasn’t been able to do so for a good while.

If politicians succeed in arranging for almost everyone to attend college and for almost everyone who enrolls to graduate, it will not be too long before a critic will be able to say the same thing truthfully about the value of a bachelor’s degree. That would be a sad waste of time, money, and four years of young people’s lives. 

College

It is a widely held belief in our society and a major article of faith among our politicians that going to college is a very good thing and that more young people should be doing it. Most people seem to think that going to college pays off handsomely financially, and a good number believe that attending college is the best or even the only way to acquire what people used to call a liberal education.   This is completely understandable. The last time I looked, the mean income for college graduates was  higher than the mean income for high school graduates, with the mean income for people who attended college but did not graduate falling in between. It is also true that most students do wind up taking some courses in science, mathematics, and arts and  humanities and that most colleges try to give the impression of taking those things seriously.

However, there are reasons to question both assumptions. It is difficult to decide how much of the difference in average incomes is due to college and how much is due to the fact that the population attending college contains a higher percentage  of people who are more prone to success due to intelligence, attitude, determination, ability to make and follow long term plans to meet long range goals,  patience, ability to and learn the house rules and know the score, expectations, or other factors.  The problem is complicated further by the fact that some high paying professions such as law, engineering, and medicine require certifications based at least in part on having a college degree. Excluding that, it is possible that college  is responsible for far less of the differences in average incomes than is usually supposed.

Then there is the obvious fact that college is very expensive, far more expensive than it used to be. One can ask: would  a young person be better off to reach the age of twenty two with a fresh bachelors degree and the contacts and career-focused skills he acquired  on campus, having spent and/or borrowed sixty to two hundred thousand dollars to get them, or would the same person be better off with four years of experience on a job, the contacts he made there, and that same sixty to two hundred thousand dollars in his pocket and/or off the debt portion of his personal balance sheet?  It is clear that  the answer will vary with circumstances, but it is by no means clear that the first  option will be the right answer for most people.

There are also reasons to question the assumptions about a liberal education. Beyond the obvious fact that there are many educated, cultured, well read people who never attended college, there is the less obvious fact that what passes for a liberal education in colleges has changed. Many programs in many colleges require no more than a few perfunctory “general education” courses taught at not much if anything above what used to be a high school level and often blown off by students interested only in their career-focused major programs.  Also, political correctness had done its work on the curricula  at many colleges.  It is an exaggeration to say that race and gender studies, post-modernism, and tendentious and mediocre diversity-based subject matter have crowded out  Shakespeare,  Sophocles, and Mozart, but there is a trend. There are also lots of places, online and otherwise, for an interested young person to pursue (and find help and stimulation in pursuing) a liberal education these days.

I worked in colleges  for many years. I think they are good places for young people to learn, explore life, and have fun and are the best places for a lot of things.  But the vast majority of students do not become doctors, lawyers, scientists, professional scholars, or engineers.  Nor do they attend Ivy League or equivalent institutions and make contacts and get degrees that function as gilt edged union cards. For many of those students these days, the value proposition is very shaky.

Colleges and universities have been on the gravy train since the end of World War II. Their product has been in high demand. They have been able to raise prices pretty much at will, and governments have subsidized them lavishly.  People running and working at colleges have had few worries. Yet college is a product people choose to purchase.  If it becomes too expensive or the public’s perception of its value declines too much or if attractive competitors enter the market too successfully, the easy good times could end.