Glenn Harlan Reynolds - The K-12 Implosion

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Something that cant go on forever, wont.
E CONOMIST H ERBERT S TEIN

I N AN EARLIER Encounter Broadside, I wrote about a higher education bubble the notion that America is spending more than it can afford on higher education, driven by the kind of cheap credit (and mass infatuation) that fueled the housing bubble.1

Nothing has happened to make me doubt that, and, in fact, were beginning to see universities (like the University of the South at Sewanee and several major law schools) actually cutting tuition, or freezing it, and even reducing enrollments in the face of newfound customer price resistance.

But while the higher education bubble begins to deflate, I think were also starting to see the deflation of what might be called a lower education bubble that is, the constant flow of more and more money into K-12 education without any significant degree of buyer resistance, in spite of the often low quality of the education it purchases.

The leading case in point here is the battle over public-employee unions in Wisconsin and elsewhere. And it bodes poorly for the state of lower education. Wisconsin spends a lot of money on education, and its teachers are well paid. The average total compensation for a teacher in the Milwaukee public schools is more than $100,000 per year.

In fact, Wisconsin spends more money per pupil than any other state in the Midwest. Nonetheless, two-thirds of Wisconsin eighth-graders cant read proficiently.

But it gets worse. The test also showed that the reading abilities of Wisconsin public-school eighth-graders had not improved at all between 1998 and 2009 despite a significant inflation-adjusted increase in the amount of money Wisconsin public schools spent per pupil each year, according to CNS News. From 1998 to 2008, Wisconsin public schools increased their per pupil spending by $4,245 in real terms yet did not add a single point to the reading scores of their eighth-graders and still could lift only one-third of their eighth-graders to at least a proficient level in reading.2

So its lots of pay but not much in the way of performance. And in this, alas, Wisconsins situation is typical of public education at the K-12 level around the country. (In fact, one of the reasons given for the increase in higher education costs is the need to provide remedial education for many high school graduates who never managed to learn the things they were supposed to have learned before they arrived at college. Its a shaky explanation for high college costs, but the phenomenon itself is beyond dispute.)

So at the K-12 level, weve got an educational system that in many fundamental ways hasnt changed in 100 years except, of course, by becoming much less rigorous but that nonetheless has become vastly more expensive without producing significantly better results.

In the past, when problems with education were raised, the solution was always to spend more money. But as economist Herbert Stein once noted, something that cant go on forever, wont. Steady increases in per-pupil spending without any commensurate increase in learning cant go on forever. So they wont. And as state after state faces near-bankruptcy (and, in the case of some municipalities, actual bankruptcy), weve pretty much hit that point now.

Steady increases in per-pupil spending without any commensurate increase in learning cant go on forever. So they wont.

So what does that mean? Well, in the short term, it means showdowns like the one in Wisconsin, where the folks who received those big increases in the past spent over a year raging against the drying up of the government teat.

Getting rid of teachers unions and overgenerous, underfunded public pensions is something states will have to do to remain solvent. But thats just the short term. Over the longer term which means, really, the next three to five years at most straitened circumstances and the need for better education will require more significant change.

When our public education system was created in the 19th century, its goal, quite explicitly, was to produce obedient and orderly factory workers to fill the new jobs being created by the Industrial Revolution. Those jobs are mostly gone now, and the needs of the 21st century are not the needs of the 19th.

Perhaps theres still a role for teaching children to sit up straight and form lines, but perhaps not. Certainly the rapidly increasing willingness of parents to try homeschooling, charter schools, online schools, and other alternative approaches suggests that a lot of people are unhappy with the status quo.

Like striking steelworkers in the 1970s, todays teachers immediate unhappiness may come from reductions in benefits. But their bigger problem is an industry that hasnt kept up with the times and isnt producing the value it once did. Until that changes, were likely to see deflation of the lower education bubble as well as the higher.

In the coming pages, well see how.

Traditionally, education was not considered the domain of the state. From ancient times, wealthy and middle-class families hired tutors for their children; other schooling was typically provided by parents and religious organizations. For most people, learning was on the job, and they started as children and gradually picked up knowledge about specific skills farming, shoemaking, merchandising, whatever along the way. There might be formal apprenticeship structure, or there might not be. Beyond basic arithmetic and writing skills (if that), not much in the way of formal academic training was needed, or obtained, except among the elites.

When our public education system was created in the 19th century, its goal, quite explicitly, was to produce obedient and orderly factory workers to fill the new jobs being created by the Industrial Revolution.

With the Industrial Revolution, things changed. Industrial-age factories needed workers with more knowledge and the rapid change brought about by technological progress meant that they needed more abstract skills too. At the same time, older workers didnt want to compete with low-priced child labor, while the Victorian eras more sentimental attitudes toward children made the idea of factory work by kids seem barbaric. In addition, public education was seen as a key component of nation-building. As Ellsworth Cubberley wrote in 1934, the point of public education wasnt that the student would suffer if uneducated; it was that the nation would suffer without compulsory public schools.