While catching up on last week’s news, I ran across this op-ed piece in the New York Times by David Brooks. He laments our dwindling lead in competitivenes and fingers our inability to maintain the education gap we enjoyed for much of the last century as the culprit:
America’s edge boosted productivity and growth. But the happy era ended around 1970 when America’s educational progress slowed to a crawl. Between 1975 and 1990, educational attainments stagnated completely. Since then, progress has been modest. America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited, with many nations surging ahead in school attainment.
Since then, we’ve been trying to buy are way out of the problem, as inflation adjusted, per pupil spending has steadily marched up. This, unfortunately, is doomed to fail:
In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.
Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.
This is a societal problem which will require much more creative solutions than just raising my property taxes. Although, in the end, that will probably happen too.
