The Smart Society. Peter D. Salins

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СКАЧАТЬ debates in Congress and state capitals about growing income inequality, the scope of the American welfare state, and the size of federal and state deficits. What both sides (and the public at large) fail to understand is that all of these problems—and many others—are really caused by the ongoing erosion of Americans’ human capital. Most of the things the American left is exercised by these days—high unemployment, stagnant wages, rising poverty, homelessness, and diminished access to health care—result from human-capital deficiencies of the lower third of the population. At the same time, so do the concerns of the American right—the rising cost of welfare-state entitlements, subpar economic growth, alarming rates of out-of-wedlock child rearing (even among formerly middle-class whites), and idleness and criminality among the young.

      Failing to appreciate the degree to which human-capital erosion is at the root of their complaints, both the left and the right look to implement unproductive policies. The income redistribution favored by the left and partial dismantling of the safety net favored by the right are both politically infeasible and economically counterproductive—and they do nothing to make Americans any smarter. Even the favorite nostrums of the political center, best characterized as attempts at social engineering, may be more politically palatable but are equally ineffective.

      Americans do not have to choose between diverting a growing share of national resources to the welfare state (displacing other essential government spending and running up the deficit) or inhumanely letting many less fortunate Americans needlessly suffer. In this book, I argue for a third way. We can restore the status of the United States as the world’s smartest society by retooling all three legs of its once invincible human-capital tripod: reform American education, rebuild the American workplace, and welcome to America the world’s most capable immigrants.

      The rest of this book is dedicated to thoroughly examining each leg of America’s human-capital tripod, identifying its strengths and weaknesses, and recommending strategic changes for national, state, and local governments to adopt in programs already entirely under their jurisdiction. All of my policy recommendations meet two criteria: they do not expand the scope of American government and they are not too costly relative to the benefits they promise to generate.

CHAPTER TWO

       American Education

       THE KEYSTONE OF A SMART SOCIETY

      Building a smart, high-human-capital society begins with making sure that all children get a good education. A century and a half ago, within decades of its independence, America became the world’s most human-capital-rich—i.e., smartest—country by establishing the world’s best education system and having the world’s most-educated people. That is no longer true. While most young Americans today—across all ethnic and socioeconomic categories—are better educated than their parents or grandparents, they are not necessarily educated well enough for the contemporary, globalized knowledge economy. In contrast to only a few decades ago, they are no longer better educated than their peers in other advanced—and some not-so-advanced—countries. Some of this international comparative deficiency is due to “the rise of the rest,” but, whatever the reason, it is a condition that should rightly concern all Americans. Also, the quality of education across the United States varies far too widely—among Americans of different backgrounds and among the fifty states. How America’s educational shortcomings can be remedied is the subject of this and the following three chapters.

      Americans can once again become the best-educated people in the world through a few strategic interventions at key points in the schooling trajectory. One set of reforms should be aimed at closing two key academic performance gaps plaguing the country’s K–12 public schools: the vast gulf separating the achievement of disadvantaged American youngsters of all ethnic groups from that of the vast majority of non-disadvantaged mainstream children (which I discuss as the “Megagap” in chapter 3), and the smaller but much more pervasive one separating the achievement of mainstream students from that of the most privileged American youngsters and their mainstream foreign peers (the “Mainstream” gap discussed in chapter 4). Reforms of higher education should be aimed at enabling all qualified American high school graduates to go to (and complete) college or other relevant post-secondary training, and making sure that this experience is academically or professionally rigorous.

      AMERICA’S HISTORIC LEAD

      What is considered to be the right number of years to spend in school and what should be taught there obviously changes over time. Two hundred years ago, when Americans first laid the groundwork for a system of universal education—universal in that it was not limited to the children of the rich—being an educated person required about six years of school, what we today would call an elementary education. One hundred years ago, to be well educated meant completing high school. After World War II, the educational gold standard became a college education. Now, increasingly, to be at the educational frontier requires a graduate or professional degree.

      Whatever the contemporary educational threshold, Americans always got there first: building the institutional infrastructure, providing for public funding in whole or in part, and establishing the ancillary quality-control processes (like testing and accreditation). As noted in the previous chapter, even before the Colonies won independence from England, American schools were always accessible to all children in their catchment area, at a time when England and continental European countries restricted schooling to children of the aristocracy or the more affluent members of the merchant and professional classes. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the Land Ordinance of 1785 through the G.I. Bill of 1944, American education for students of all ages expanded in leaps and bounds, always staying far ahead of even the most enlightened European countries and somewhat ahead of America’s neighbor to the north, Canada (table 2.1).

      From the time of the revolution through the early decades of the nineteenth century, most American schoolchildren were taught in what educational historians label “district schools” because they were organized and paid for by local school districts, and generally territorially compact enough so that all pupils could walk to the nearest school. Characterized now as “one-room schoolhouses,” these district schools were unquestionably quite primitive by later educational standards, having fairly rudimentary 3-R (reading, writing, arithmetic) curricula, mixing children of all ages and abilities in the same classrooms, and employing teachers whose own education was quite limited. Nevertheless, even these basic educational facilities were revolutionary for the time. They were open and usually free to all local children and they brought together children not only of all ages but of all social classes as well, because all but the very richest families sent their children to them.¹

Table 2.1

       Public Elementary School Attendance in the United States and Selected Countries, 1870–1900 (percent of all ages 5–19)

      Sources: For U.S.: Thomas D. Snyder, ed., 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (National Center for Education Statistics, January 1993). For Canada: B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: The Americas, 1750–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). For Europe: B. R. Mitchell, International Historical СКАЧАТЬ