Our Greatest National Shame

new york times

Op-Ed Columnist

Our Greatest National Shame

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: February 14, 2009

So maybe I was wrong. I used to consider health care our greatest national shame, considering that we spend twice as much on medical care as many European nations, yet American children are twice as likely to die before the age of 5 as Czech children — and American women are 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as Irish women.

Skip to next paragraph Yet I’m coming to think that our No. 1 priority actually must be education. That makes the new fiscal stimulus package a landmark, for it takes a few wobbly steps toward reform and allocates more than $100 billion toward education.

That’s a hefty sum — by comparison, the Education Department’s entire discretionary budget for the year was $59 billion — and it will save America’s schools from the catastrophe that they were facing. A University of Washington study had calculated that the recession would lead to cuts of 574,000 school jobs without a stimulus.

“We dodged a bullet the size of a freight train,” notes Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, an advocacy group in Washington.

So for those who oppose education spending in the stimulus, a question: Do you really believe that slashing half a million teaching jobs would be fine for the economy, for our children and for our future?

Education Secretary Arne Duncan describes the stimulus as a “staggering opportunity,” the kind that comes once in a lifetime. He argues: “We have to educate our way to a better economy, that’s the only way long term to get there.”

That’s exactly right, and it’s partly why I shifted my views of the relative importance of education and health. One of last year’s smartest books was “The Race Between Education and Technology,” by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, both Harvard professors. They offer a wealth of evidence to argue that America became the world’s leading nation largely because of its emphasis on mass education at a time when other countries educated only elites (often, only male elites).

They show that America’s educational edge created prosperity and equality alike — but that this edge was eclipsed in about the 1970s, and since then one country after another has surpassed us in education.

Perhaps we should have fought the “war on poverty” with schools — or, as we’ll see in a moment, with teachers.

Some education programs have done remarkably well in overcoming the pathologies of poverty. Children who went through the Perry Preschool program in Michigan, for example, were 25 percent less likely to drop out of high school years later than their peers in a control group, and committed half as many violent felonies. They were one-third less likely to become teenage parents or addicts, and half as likely to get abortions.

Likewise, the KIPP program, the subject of a fine book by Jay Mathews, has attracted rave reviews for schools that turn low-income students’ lives around.

There are legitimate questions about whether such programs are scalable and would succeed if introduced more broadly. But we do know that the existing national school system is broken, and that we’re not trying hard enough to fix it.

“We have a good sense from the data where there are big opportunities,” notes Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth College who studies education.

The hardest nut to crack is high schools — we don’t have a strong sense yet how to rescue them. But there’s a real excitement at what we are learning about K-8 education.

First, good teachers matter more than anything; they are astonishingly important. It turns out that having a great teacher is far more important than being in a small class, or going to a good school with a mediocre teacher. A Los Angeles study suggested that four consecutive years of having a teacher from the top 25 percent of the pool would erase the black-white testing gap.

Second, our methods to screen potential teachers, or determine which ones are good, don’t work. The latest Department of Education study, published this month, showed again that there is no correlation between teacher certification and teacher effectiveness. Particularly in lower grades, it also doesn’t seem to matter if a teacher has a graduate degree or went to a better college or had higher SATs.

The implication is that throwing money at a broken system won’t fix it, but that resources are necessary as part of a package that involves scrapping certification, measuring better through testing which teachers are effective, and then paying them significantly more — with special bonuses to those who teach in “bad” schools.

One of the greatest injustices is that America’s best teachers overwhelmingly teach America’s most privileged students. In contrast, the most disadvantaged students invariably get the least effective teachers, year after year — until they drop out.

This stimulus package offers a new hope that we may begin to reform our greatest national shame, education.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

The below blogs are a representative sample of the hundreds of blogs that this column received. They are included to provide multiple points of view on the Kristof article and perspectives. They hopefully provide a rich source for critical thinking discussion and analysis.

·  No one really seems to want to talk about the real problems in education. The real problem is socio-economic. You could take kids from a wealthy suburban district and send them to a school falling apart and they would still do well. Same as you could take some less fortunate kids and send them to palace like schools and they would still struggle. The problem is at home. What our kids really need is expectations from parents. They need to know that school is important and they are expected to do well. We can throw all the money in the world at education, but if the most important component, the parents’ attitudes, aren’t changed it won’t matter.

—  Anthony

·  As yourself this question: Why do homeschooled children and children from private schools perform so much better than those from public schools, and generally at least cost per student? Gee, maybe free parents know better than the government. The only problem is the poor can’t afford it-they are stuck sending their children to underperforming schools with underperforming teachers. When was the last time teachers went on strike for higher performance standards for their charges or for better discipline in schools. No, they only strike for themselves with no concern at all for the children they teach. Think about it.

—  Daniel

·  The teacher can point the way, but the student must walk the road. The idea that somehow if we could only get “better teachers” the education problems of the inner city would be solved is nonsense! If we put all the students from M.I.T into the City College of New York, we would have M.I.T. in Manhattan. If we put all the students from Bronx Community College into Harvard, we would have Bronx Community College in Boston.
A bit less blame for the teachers and institutions and a bit more responsibility where it belongs; on the students!

— Jack

·  An interesting column. As a former teacher (secondary) I would say that they key factor in educational success is class size.

Nothing will help a truly bad teacher, but even mediocre teachers can become better ones, and achieve a lot, with fewer children in the class.

The student-teacher ratio is, of course, directly related to funding.

— Charles

·  Mr. Kristof, I too feel hopeful about the boost for education in the stimulus package. However, as a veteran teacher of the NYC public schools, I am chagrined that people continue to speak of teachers in terms of “good” and “bad” - it is a dangerous oversimplification that won’t help solve the problem. Assessing the teachers to find out who is “good” and who is “bad” will prove to be as sticky a quagmire as assessing students, which we still have yet to get right. Where is the evidence that a “good” teacher in a large class is better than a “bad” teacher in a small class? I might be lost in the former but effective in the latter situation.

Teaching is more complex, individual and nuanced than anybody who hasn’t taught can guess. Don’t get me wrong — I am all for teacher accountability, and I believe that the tenure system in NYC should be overhauled. Teachers should earn tenure through an intensive process at the school level within the first three years. However, I have no faith that there will be an accurate, systematic measure on which to base effectiveness and to fairly link it to compensation.

I will fight against merit pay, primarily because there is no measure upon which to base it. If it is based on the kids’ test scores, few would elect to teach in my classroom of under-credited, over-aged students who make slow and slim progress. But I have been with them for 15 years and have no desire to teach any other kids. Trust me, many “good” teachers would run after some of the things we hear and witness before 9 am on any given day. Putting someone in there with a cash incentive will not make him or her a better teacher either. It takes commitment, love and perseverance. You can’t develop those qualities in a teacher with a cash bonus.

Thank you for your commitment to education.

— Kate

·  I am all for good schools. But let’s not get carried away. The “national educational system” you referred to does not exist, never has, and with any luck, never will. Unless I misread the constitution, education is a reserved power of the states.

The federal government has until recently been very chary about centralizing educational authority. It has tended to couch its interventions as aide to the states on issues of overwhelming national importance such as vocational education and national security.

No Child Left Behind and its kindred efforts are unconstitutional on their face, as many state level officials acknowledge. For the most part states have fallen in line because without federal money they cannot provide what a contemporary education requires. I do not know a single educational administrator at any level that thinks NCLB is anything but a disaster.

Where the federal government can be helpful is not in offering further intrusions into state educational efforts, but rather in offering inducements to states to modernize the entire apparatus of state governance — to establish regional consortia and to fade out the monopoly of the local school districts. As the central cities and suburbs become ever more differentiated by social class, the local districts are no more than the means to manage and perpetuate educational inequality.

Multi-district regional schools, under regional authority established by the states, have created amazing models for regional schools. Internet technology can further enhance the scope and reach of schools under regional authority.

As in the case of charter schools, targeted federal incentives can move the states to create more of these regional solutions.

Meanwhile, pumping all of the stimulus money into coercive federal programs operating through the local districts only keeps gross educational inequality in place.

— leonard

·  As usual you are totally wrong

In INDIA they speak English with a school system that is well below what we have in the USA in school buildings and teachers and SOME HOW they take away jobs from American complainers like you…

America has been able to lead the world with our education system despite all the additional money you think we need to invest

As long as students from abroad are able to master English you’re idea we need to over spend in education will FAIL…

The Indian school system disproves all you posit

When you can prove that education over spending will advance American jobs when in competition with English speaking foreign students, only then taxpayers might understand the commitment of money

OBAMA and YOU are simply wrong…

The waste is coming right out of the middle of your brains…

What we need to develop are the finest minds not the lowest…the NYTIMES is like education…its going down with its useless ideas especially yours

— princess

·  “One of the greatest injustices is that America’s best teachers overwhelmingly teach America’s most privileged students.”
It may surprise you, but teachers actually prefer having students who are strongly encouraged by their parents to study - and the best teachers have more opportunities to have their choice of workplace. And it may surprise you, but the parents had spent much more to buy houses in these “most privileged” places than they would elsewhere, and did that because of the schools - so they want their kids to succeed. I don’t think you can cure the injustice you are talking about unless you militarize the education system and force teachers into the schools of the commander’s choice; this is unlikely to fly.
Overall, I think one of the possible solutions for our educational crisis is the major expansion of vocational education, beginning it earlier (like e.g. Germany does it), removing its stigma and making it much more relevant. Those 40% of college freshmen that never graduate will be much better off if they came out from the high school without the right to immediately go into the higher education system but with the strong set of skills allowing to join the workplace not at $7/hr. We are losing manufacturing jobs not only because we are (for many reasons) more expensive, but also because we do not have enough smart and trained young workers.