A Simple Government (12 page)

I fully realize that all health care is somewhat rationed, from the triage of the paramedics at the accident scene to the emergency room, where the most critical patients are given priority. But it’s one thing for your own doctor to tell you you shouldn’t have a procedure and quite another for it to be a government worker. I think I need a trip to the doctor just from thinking about giving the government that much power!

Dr. Berwick’s belief system is fundamentally un-American: “The complexity and cost of healthcare delivery systems may set up a tension between what is good for the society as a whole and what is best for an individual patient.” That’s what happens under socialism. Individuals—your child, your parent, you—don’t matter and may have to be sacrificed. By contrast, we have always believed that every life is precious; we have built the freest and most prosperous society in human history precisely by championing the individual. Americans believe that society exists to serve the individual, not the other way around.

 

 

 

 

I
love rock’n’ roll just as much as, if not more, than the next guy. One of my favorite tunes is the Pink Floyd megahit “Another Brick in the Wall”: “We don’t need no ed-u-cay-shun . . . Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone!” But as catchy as that song is, I don’t think it should serve as a motto for our education system. Unfortunately, if you look around, that seems to be the case.

Case in point: A friend of mine owns a printing business, and as part of the job-application process he gives a prospective employee a ruler and a piece of paper. He tells the wannabe employee to mark one-eighth of an inch, one-sixteenth of an inch, and a few other simple measurements. He tells me that only about one in ten actually know what he’s talking about!

If we are going to regain and retain our prosperity and keep America competitive in the twenty-first century, our children must get properly educated. Not only does a lack of education make children less competitive among their peers—often confining them to a life of low-paying, dead-end jobs (not to mention government handouts), but, as Americans grow up to be less educated than their counterparts in other countries—like China and India—our nation becomes less competitive as whole.

Already we see this trend taking a toll on American jobs as large companies seek talent from abroad to fill the spaces Americans aren’t skilled enough to fill. High-tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Cisco have had to recruit top talent from other countries such as India, Taiwan, Israel, and Japan, which have held students to higher standards in math and science while our students continue to fall behind in these areas. Our children are growing up without the basic skills they need to stay competitive in the job market. We’re pushing them through a broken system and setting them up for failure on the other end.

Our children are our most valuable natural resource. The children we’re educating (or not educating) today will grow up to be the presidents, business leaders, doctors, and scientists, not to mention teachers, of tomorrow. But you’d never know we were grooming such important people by the haphazard way in which we structure their education. “Book learning” needs to go a long way toward a focus on the student and not just the school. We need to ignite the innate curiosity in the minds of young people and inspire them to be lifelong learners with an insatiable appetite for knowledge and wisdom.

Yet about one-third of our students are dropping out of high school. For minorities, it’s closer to 50 percent. That’s more than a million students a year, or six thousand every school day. We must especially target the 12 percent of our high schools that currently produce 50 percent of our dropouts. It’s hard for the student to succeed when he or she is in a school that is a dismal failure.

This is a tragedy not just for those directly involved but for our society as a whole. Considering how much we spend to put kids in school, it’s a tragedy that there is such an economic impact when it simply doesn’t work. A dropout can expect to earn a quarter of a million dollars less than a high school graduate, to be in worse health by the age of forty-five than a graduate at the age of sixty-five, and to die nine years younger than a graduate. Dropouts are far more likely to become involved with drugs and crime. Economists estimate that for each 1 percent rise in high school graduation rates, we’d have one hundred thousand fewer crimes every year. Considering the average cost of an inmate to be about fifty thousand dollars a year, ignorance gets
very
expensive!

Even for those who finish high school, that diploma is not what it used to be. Are the taxes you pay going to provide a high school education or a high school diploma? In too many of our schools, the two are not the same. Recognizing that a high school diploma is not what it used to be, more than half of our states have adopted exit exams designed to ensure that those receiving diplomas really deserve them. They are responding to growing evidence that our high school graduates are not adequately prepared for higher education, since one-third of those going on to four-year colleges and one-half of those going on to two-year colleges need remedial classes. This means taking high school classes at college prices, and it’s costing us more than two billion dollars a year. At City College of San Francisco, a community college with one hundred thousand students, 90 percent aren’t prepared for college-level English, while 70 percent aren’t prepared for math.

While college enrollment keeps rising, graduation rates keep falling. Fewer than one in three students who enter a community college with the intent of getting a degree actually do so. Lack of adequate preparation is the major reason for dropping out of both two- and four-year programs.

Students who drop out of college are giving up tremendous earning potential. In 2008, the median income for workers with college degrees was almost $45,000, almost twice as much as the $25,000 median income of those with only high school diplomas.

Besides the lack of preparation for higher education, states are also facing the fact that many high school graduates can’t do jobs that employers traditionally considered appropriate for them. Companies that have been burned by low-performing high school graduates are increasing their entry-level requirements to insist on a two- or four-year degree. Young people who have studied hard and done well through high school are denied opportunities where they could thrive because of the wide disparity among high school graduates.

Exit exams are a great idea for restoring the integrity of a high school diploma. Unfortunately, when the states started doing practice tests, they found that significant numbers of students failed them. You would think the states would take this as a sign that they need to smarten up their students. Instead, they are dumbing down the tests to avoid a high failure rate or putting off the testing altogether. This is not a solution; it is a sin. It’s the equivalent of a basketball coach deciding that the way to help his losing team is to lower the basket from ten feet (rim to floor) down to seven feet so that every player can slamdunk the ball. Problem is, the teams they face will be playing to the higher standard. The students from the rest of the world will increasingly be playing to a higher standard. So must we.

Lowering graduation standards is a disservice not only to our young people but also to our country. Those who receive diplomas they haven’t earned may get a job, but many get fired or don’t get promoted. They lack the reading comprehension and math skills they need to understand apartment leases and home mortgages; health, auto, and life insurance; and credit-card fees and terms. Besides being less equipped to care for themselves and their families, they are less able to be fully participating citizens.

I spend a lot of time at airports, and our education system reminds me of the people movers that take us between terminals. Our children get on in kindergarten and get moved along through high school. When they stumble, no one stops the conveyor belt. They just keep moving forward from one grade to the next, falling further and further behind in the knowledge and skills they need for success. It’s time that our states hit the emergency button and give those who fall the practical help they need, not a phony diploma to commemorate a wasted trip.

In Washington DC the initial group of students who won a voucher lottery to attend private school are reading two grade levels higher than those who entered the lottery but didn’t win. This is a telling comparison because it shows how even the most highly motivated students and parents can’t bridge the education gap without the necessary resources from our schools.

There’s no doubt that the right of every citizen to a free public education is one of the things that makes America great, but our schools are still failing us. Despite the years and money spent so far on No Child Left Behind, the results of national reading tests released in May 2010 showed that inner cities are still way below the national average at both the fourth- and eighth-grade reading levels. This National Assessment of Educational Progress, nicknamed the “nation’s report card,” revealed that our children are severely lagging in reading comprehension skills as they enter middle school. This affects their ability to do well in just about every subject, since you can’t succeed in history or science without solid reading comprehension skills.

As much as I believe education is a national problem, I want to be clear that I don’t think it’s best solved on the national level. As I said in chapter 2, I believe that our state and local governments are best suited to know the needs of our citizens—and that goes for our kids too. There’s been a lot of talk lately about national education standards, but I do not endorse letting the federal government take over education and would oppose having it set the curriculum, standards, class sizes, or teacher pay for our public schools.

So what to do? Lately charter schools have been all the rage. A charter school differs from a public school in that, even though it receives public money and is free for students to attend, it does not operate within the normal rules and regulations of traditional public schools. Instead, each charter school draws up its own mission, or “charter,” for producing results and is held accountable for achieving these results by its sponsor (e.g., a school board or state agency). Any student can apply to attend a charter school but, due to their popularity, spots are often limited and must be allocated by a random lottery system.

There are more than five thousand charter schools in the United States, with about 3 percent of our children, over 1.7 million, attending them. In some cities, that percentage is much higher, such as 57 percent in New Orleans and 36 percent in Washington DC. Much of the success of these schools depends on how much supervision they have. Charter schools in New York City have a lot of oversight and have been very successful. By contrast, in places where there is little accountability, such as Texas, Arizona, and Ohio, the charters tend not to perform very well. A 2009 study by Margaret Raymond, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, found that 83 percent of charters did not outperform their local public schools. In fact, almost 40 percent were worse than those schools.

I support charter schools and other methods of empowering parents with choices for their students and providing competition for the existing establishment government schools. Getting more children into private schools through vouchers and scholarships and supporting high-performing charter schools are good things. But the truth is that the overwhelming majority of our children are going to go to their local public school. We have to provide solutions for them.

Our public schools have historically been outstanding, and they can be again. Instead of fleeing our public schools, let’s fix them. Our schools aren’t failing for lack of money. Among developed countries, we are at the top in per-pupil spending but score in the bottom third in achievement. I am a product of public schools. All three of my adult children spent their entire primary and secondary education in public schools. As much as I support and appreciate Christian schools, home-schooling, private academies, and charter schools, I doubt they will be able to replace public schools for many of America’s students.

A gifted teacher can provide both the encouragement to overcome obstacles and the excitement about learning that our children need to stay in school and excel. We must attract the best possible talent to teaching. But for about the last forty years, we have been drawing from a shallower pool. We no longer have a captive, abundant supply of bright, ambitious men and women who lack other career paths. They’re no longer in our classrooms—they’re in our courtrooms, our operating rooms, our boardrooms. We must reestablish teaching as a respected profession, as a desirable, competitive career path, and that means abolishing tenure and providing merit pay.

In June 2010, Timothy Knowles, director of the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute, wrote an op-ed in the
Wall Street Journal
arguing that we must eliminate tenure for teachers:

Most school systems follow a first-hired-last-fired rule when they have to cut back on staff. In fact, fifteen states, including large states like New York and California, have laws requiring that layoffs be based on seniority. Firings ought to be based on performance. It’s a shame to keep a bad teacher because he’s been there boring his students to death for twenty years and fire a gifted, inspiring teacher just because he or she arrived a year ago. Cuts should be an opportunity to get rid of deadwood, not those bearing the most fruit.