Shared Visions

Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, probes into just what it is that make such successes as the Great Gretsky, Bill Gates, etc., the icons that they are.  He finds as much to credit in their dates of birth as in their other attributes.  Canadian hockey stars, IT giants and star New York lawyers tend to have birthdates within certain ranges.  Those birthdates confer opportunities which the highly successful then exploit.  For example, in a system which places young hockey players in levels by calendar year, talented young players who are bigger and stronger than equally talented players born late that same year will accumulate extra attention and coaching that leads to adult stardom.  New York lawyers who work in low status branches of law because of religious discrimination against them at top firms will find themselves the top dogs because of their experience when their fields suddenly become the most highly regarded.  Ah, opportunity, such an interesting word! 

In the article by Stephen Pearlstein that I have mentioned, Is Capitalism Moral?, Pearlstein comments that equality of opportunity  is the American spin on how to compensate for unequal market outcomes in a way that makes the market moral, but that the difficulty comes in figuring out which disadvantages require compensation. That comes to mind when reading about the current debates in education.  All agree that education is a key to future success in a 21^st century global economy.  And equality in educational opportunity seems a requirement for economic opportunity to be truly equal.  Jefferson rightly regarded public education as the key to maintaining our liberties and the health of the nation.

Two of the current issues in education are the proposed “core learning” standard and the extension of required free public education to kindergarten and preschool levels. 46 states have agreed to accept the standard, but four continue to hold out and a number of the nominally accepting states appear to be dragging their feet in preparing their teachers to teach it.  So equal educational standards across geographic areas, in a country where 25 percent of the people change their location each year, has a long way to go.  As for public preschool, congressional conservatives have planted their feet firmly against it.  Bah, humbug!  Cannot the poor learn by candlelight as Lincoln did?  Those are problems enough, but of course a bigger problem is that such proposals do not go far enough.

Gladwell’s observations about opportunity extended to education also.  He noted that while a major difference in educational attainment between rich and poor at the high school level shows up in all studies, when testing is done at both the beginning and end of the school year, it turns out that the learning gains between rich and poor are roughly equal.  The differences at the high school level for public school students are the cumulative effects of summer vacation!  Children from wealthy families continue their learning at summer study camps while the poor tend to forget parts of what they learned during the long summer layoff.

Differences are even greater between elite private schools and public schools.  A first grade student in good public schools these days is expected to start out knowing how to read the simple words learned in kindergarten.  That in itself is a step forward from pre Sesame Street days when all reading began in first grade.  But in the private school, the first grader is handed a book and expected to read it.  The curriculums and teaching methods at the private schools are equivalent to those in the gifted and talented programs of the public schools, but are available to all the students.  Each summer break has an extensive required reading list associated with it.  When combined with the summer study camp experiences the students all experience, the results at high school levels can be startling.  The fundamental assumption throughout is that students are capable of more than they at first think they are.

The attainment issues at such early ages are much less the results of difference between students than they are of differences in the resources applied to teach the students.  And here of course that equality of opportunity issue rears its head.  How can the product of a non advanced placement education in public school be equal in opportunity to the product of an elite private school education, and how does one compensate for the difference?  But this is where things get interesting.  In a global economy, our national competitiveness depends on the educational attainment of our whole population, not just that of a wealthy elite.  And we have come to recognize that attainment is also, like opportunity, a word with many dimensions.  We measure attainment only in terms of college preparedness, while the world and the markets recognize many different scales.  How do you compare the attainments of Wayne Gretsky and Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking and Picasso?  The big buzz word these days is the manufacturing renaissance, using American know-how in robotics and nanotechnology.  That renaissance will require millions of educated workers, some college graduates and others skilled technicians, to succeed.  We as a nation cannot claim lack of opportunity.  The solutions to our equal opportunity issue and our global competitiveness issue are the same. 

We need comprehensive educational reforms just as we need comprehensive immigration reforms.  The immigration reforms, in addition to satisfying a moral imperative, would provide the millions of additional workers we will need in a busy economy.  But all workers must be trained to acquire the skills to succeed.  Alongside our 7.5 percent unemployment rate, we currently have 600,000 jobs going unfilled because of the lack of workers with the skills to fill the jobs.  A booming economy would generate millions more jobs.  And a modern education process is the key to both creating and filling those jobs.  Lengthening of the school year, summer study programs, rapid implementation of “core learning” requirements, expansion of teaching resources and approaches to provide “gifted and talented” methods to all students, development of high-tech apprenticeship programs (Britain has increased its apprenticeship programs ten-fold in the past decade and Germany is racing ahead to become one of the world’s most prosperous economies through its high-tech training), all these are needed.  And plodding, piecemeal adoption of reforms will leave us further and further behind.

To accomplish the needed reforms we need to expand our economic vision alongside our moral vision to recognize that both seek the same goals.  Achieving educational reform requires a common effort that cannot be accomplished only through private business.  A selfish refusal to support education through taxes is contrary both to our morality and to our economic success. The necessary massive reform and support of the public education system is not going to be profitable to any one business, but its outcomes will increase the profits of all.  And the outcomes will contribute to restoring the morality of the markets.