If U.S. Schools Are So Bad, Why Is America So Rich?
If education is so important to the development and future prosperity of young people, why doesn’t the latter reflect in compensation for teachers? It’s a question worth asking as conservatives continue to promote an education crisis narrative.
Better yet, if American education is so bad, why isn’t this reflected in the migration of financial, physical, and most of all, human capital, out of the U.S.?
Consider an otherwise optimistic editorial at the Wall Street Journal about the U.S. on its 250th. Amid the optimism, the members of the editorial board listed a few theoretical negatives, including “A K-12 school system that fails to educate half of its students to even minimal standards yet is controlled by unions that refuse to reform.”
It reads as awful at first glance, but are schools and teachers’ unions really the problem with public education? The guess here is that members of the Journal editorial board could off the top of their heads list numerous “good” or “great” public schools all over the U.S., and some perhaps attended the schools they could easily name. Also, roughly 87% of Americans attend public schools, which is a signal that many not only teach beyond the “minimal standards,” but do so effectively.
About the seeming disparity in public school quality, it’s not enough for conservatives to say there are rich and poor school districts simply because conservatives have long said money as a driver of educational outcomes (think Catholic schools in particular) is well overrated. The union excuse similarly isn’t wholly compelling considering the national reality that some of the “best” (whatever that means) K-12 schools are public.
What is compelling, however, can be found in an old Weekend Interview at the Journal with Thomas Sowell, in which he observed how different students historically brought different values into the classroom, and educational achievement was an effect of those values. Or as George Gilder put it in Wealth and Poverty, “Decent housing is an effect of middle class values, not a cause.” Extrapolate Sowell’s and Gilder’s insights to modern education, and it’s more difficult to blame schools, teachers, and teachers’ unions.
More than conservatives might like to admit, learnedness is a choice. If true, then blame for poor educational outcomes would have to wisely be shifted from teachers and unions to students.
It raises another basic question: opposite conventional wisdom on the right about the importance of educational success and the “right major” to future achievement, does it really matter? Consider the lament that followed the one about K-12 education in the previously referenced editorial: “A progressive university elite that views America as corrupt and exploitative. A generation of the young have been taught to dislike their country, and to believe that socialism is superior to the free-market system that made their affluence possible.”
Ok, but conservatives can’t have it both ways. That’s because the richest U.S. corporations continue to do most of their hiring at those elite schools allegedly teaching U.S. hatred and socialism, not to mention the educational resumes of a conservative commentariat (old and young) the best and brightest of which were largely educated at elite schools.
All of which seemingly answers the question at the top. Teachers seemingly aren’t paid well because what they teach dims in career importance by the day, assuming it was ever valuable. But even where teachers pollute American minds with socialistic and anti-American principles, they’re not doing so successfully as corporate hiring practices indicate.
Much ado about nothing? Capital flows, corporate hiring practices, and elite college diplomas held by top conservatives say yes.
Originally published on Real Clear Markets.