The Smart Society. Peter D. Salins

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СКАЧАТЬ much including the federal, state, and local governments of the United States—can also destroy human capital, or hold back its development. In taking the reader through all the ways that American human capital is created or used, this book will show where our governments might do more, but also where they might do less and, most often, where they should do things differently.

      THE REST OF THIS BOOK

      Given the indispensable role of government in generating human capital and making America the world’s smartest society, it matters a great deal how, specifically, government executes that role. Happily, the United States has long been a leader in developing vast amounts of human capital and for a few more years it can still be characterized as the world’s smartest society. But this is only because it continues to benefit from human-capital investments made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The rest of this book will delve in some detail into each of the three legs of America’s “human-capital tripod”—its schools, its workplaces, and its immigration policy—and recommend important changes in policy that could substantially and rapidly increase the country’s human capital. As noted earlier, most of these changes would neither expand the role of government in the United States—a highly fraught issue these days—nor increase its overall cost.

      Education America’s educational supremacy is being threatened by several factors. Large numbers of young Americans, mainly from disadvantaged backgrounds, are getting an exceedingly poor education, and have been for a long time. America’s middle-class youth are getting a middling education that used to be good enough for them to get by but, in the competitive twenty-first-century economy, will soon leave them in the dust. America’s colleges and universities, once the envy of the world, cost too much, teach too little, and are increasingly distracted from their primary mission.

      The American adult population is still the best educated in the world (see table 1.2) but only because our older generations (over thirty-five years of age) are better educated than their counterparts in Canada, Europe, or Asia. The sad fact is that the current generation (under thirty-five) is outshone by its peers in a dozen or so countries—including Canada. (Throughout this book I will be using Canada as a comparison for many of the human-capital issues under discussion. Canada is an excellent benchmark for comparative purposes because among all the nations in the world it is the most like the United States. In their history, population composition, primary language, popular culture, economy, housing, civic beliefs, and many other ways, Canadians are like Americans.) Americans used to lead the world in years of school completed, high school graduation rates, college attendance and graduation rates, and international tests of school performance. We no longer do. Even more disturbing, the current generation of young Americans is not doing as well in some key measures as that of its parents. All of these indicators are especially disheartening given the extraordinary efforts directed at educational reform these days.

      Behind these unsatisfactory indicators lie several stories. The most compelling is the continuing large discrepancy in academic performance between white and Asian children (higher) and African American and Hispanic children (lower). This performance gap has been receiving public attention—and efforts at remediation—for over half a century now, beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that ended formal school segregation. On its heels, as part of the late 1960s Great Society legislation, Congress instituted federal aid targeted to school districts with large numbers of poor minority children. In the 1980s, publicly funded, privately operated “charter schools” were launched to give poor minority children access to a presumably more effective alternative to their local public schools. Most recently, President George W. Bush persuaded Congress to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, which made federal aid conditional on local districts implementing rigorous annual testing regimes, with the specific—and mandated—goal of closing the ethnic performance gap. The sad truth is that half a century of efforts dedicated to closing this gap have borne only modest fruit. In chapter 3 I will address this issue and put forward policy recommendations that, if implemented, may finally give poor minority children a decent chance of catching up with their more successful white and Asian peers.

Table 1.2

       School Years Completed and Percent of College Graduates among Adults in Selected Countries, 2010

      Source: R. J. Barro and J. W. Lee, “A New Data Set of Educational Attainment in the World, 1950–2010,” Working Paper 15902 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, April 2010).

      But the ethnic performance gap is not the only reason that American children are losing the global education race. The largely unacknowledged fact is that the majority of white (and some Asian) students in most American school districts are not learning as much as they should, or as much as they are capable of. In other words, a large share of the “not left behind” face a substantial performance gap vis-à-vis their upper-middle-class peers in the United States, and their mainstream counterparts in northern Europe and East Asia. The children subject to this gap fall into two categories. The least worrisome component is made up of the vast cohort of schoolchildren who are insufficiently challenged today because of low academic expectations. Happily, this gap should be relatively easy to close. All it will take is the will, on the part of the fifty American states and their fourteen thousand school districts, to toughen up their school curricula and demand more effort from their schoolchildren.

      More troubling is the growing army of white children who perform poorly in school because, like low-income African-American and Hispanic children, they are being raised in single-parent households where they receive insufficient stimulation or motivation. No amount of social engineering, which would not be politically viable in any case, can change these circumstances. But the right kind of school environment and academic program can effectively compensate for them. How to help both subsets of these ostensibly “not left behind” schoolchildren will be taken up in chapters 3 and 4.

      The last stage of formal education’s contribution to the smart society is post-secondary education, “college” in ordinary parlance. The importance of a college education in today’s global, information-age economy is now taken for granted. Accordingly, most state governments and our national one are working hard to raise college attendance rates while also increasing student “diversity” (i.e., increasing rates of black and Hispanic attendance). If these efforts succeeded, American human capital would in fact be significantly enriched—assuming the new collegiate enrollees actually graduated and mastered college-level material.

      Unfortunately, while the percentage of high school graduates aspiring to a college education, 62 percent, is bigger now than it ever has been, and may be even bigger than in any other country, the United States now lags in college graduation rates. A growing number of young Americans do not even make it out of high school and many of those who do are not ready for college. As a result, only two-thirds of American baccalaureate enrollees today graduate after six years, and less than a third of those attending community and technical college earn any degree at all, including those who transfer to baccalaureate schools.

      These low academic success rates can be traced to several root causes. Perhaps the greatest is the inadequacy of the typical student’s high school preparation, something that colleges alone cannot cure—even when they devote heroic resources to “remediation.” Thus, meaningful higher education reform must begin in high school, with a thorough subject-by-subject, college-led integration of high school and college curricula and a refusal by colleges to admit underprepared students. Much СКАЧАТЬ