Robert Reich in his article, “Bail Out Our Schools,” makes the case for making a big infusion of tax money into our system of public education. He compares financial capital to human capital.
Reich says that the reasons that justified the $700 billion bail out to “save the engines of America’s financial capital” are the same reasons that should justify a big infusion of money into public schools — “the engines of our human capital.” Reich stresses that human capital is more important than financial capital and warns, “If we don’t bail out public education we face a bigger economic Armageddon years from now.”
Reich’s argument poses a couple of questions:
- What is the human capital we must develop in today’s students that is so essential that, if we fail in its development, we face economic disaster of Biblical proportions?
- To what degree is the development of this human capital a priority in our current system of public education?
The point is, any thoughtful answer to question #1, most probably, will be shown in the answer to question #2 to have a low priority in the current authoritarian, test driven system of public education.
Pouring more money into the system, as Reich urges, at best, will help the system to show success according to criteria that we currently use. The problem is, our current criteria of educational quality has little correlation to the criteria of the human capital needed for our future. The human capital needed for our future far transcends what can be measured in GPAs or SATs.
Reich is making a false promise that beefing up the current system with more money is the answer to avoiding future economic calamity. He is implying that in our system of public education, we have a wonderful machine for producing the human capital needed for our future, and we just need to keep pumping in more fuel. But this notion ignores the fact that, even when working to its maximum capacity, this machine is simply not good enough. Reich’s well meaning comments in his post, to me, simply underlines the fact that we need to transform our current system of public education.
Mike, I have a few questions:
1) Where in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to legislate concerning education
2) What evidence is there that massive increases in federal spending will improve education?
3) How can we afford this considering the massive federal deficit?
Rick, I’ll give your questions a shot.
The right to an education is not part of the original Constitution — nor part of the 27 Amendments. And, the 10th Amendment specifically says that states should have power over issues not specifically addressed in the Constitution.
The Constitution has had a lot of Supreme Court rulings that have clarified what is or what is not “constitutional.” One landmark case was Brown v The Board of Education, that showed that individual states could not organize their educational systems in any way they might choose.
I think you are right to question the Constitutional grounds for the federal governement infusing its control over state and local control of public education. But, it seems unlikely that a federal court would ever strike down something like the No Child Left Behind Law. It would take a Constitutional expert to explain why.
I campaigned for election to my local school board, and lost. But one huge issue to me is local control of public education. Another huge issue to me is the concept that system design is the biggest influence on the qualtity produced by a system. If we are ever to have an effective system design for public education, I feel, our opportunity is via unifying a local community, and via democratic processes. A local school board has a lot of authority it never uses to break free of bad practices and bad system design, and free itself of ridiculous constraints. But local school boards are invariably controlled by special interests. We need to get our democracy to work and this is not a federal issue, it is a grass roots issue.
As to your second question, I agree that massive increase in spending is not the answer to improving education. In Kettering, we already spend something like $11,500 per student per year. The 6.9 mill levy request for new tax money for the Kettering district, if taxpayers approve on May 4, will raise this per pupil to over $13,000 per year. The purpose of this increase is to maintain a program, in which 85% of revenue goes to salaries, but maintainence of a current program is not good enough. We need transformation. I will soon write a more carefully researched report giving more exact numbers.
And no, we cannot afford to continue adding to the federal deficit. Any solution will probably require a big increase in taxes. There seems no other way.
We need to get our democracy to work and this is not a federal issue, it is a grass roots issue.
Good luck making that happen when we can’t agree on what high school graduates should know about civics.
Thanks, Mike, good ideas. As for the deficit, I favor huge spending cuts. We have become too dependent on the federal government.