A new poll finds that 60% of Americans think a depression is “likely.” I’m not one of them, though I do think we’re looking at a long-lasting recession. Will this be a disaster for public education? It’s true that it will put strains on our system, with needy children coming to school even needier; state revenues, and thus education funding, tightening; and the flow of philanthropic dollars slowing. This last phenomenon may be particularly troublesome for the school reform movement, which has been catalyzed by private support. Had we faced a severe recession in the 1990s, there might not have been a charter school movement.

But there is a silver lining: teaching and other education jobs will suddenly look a lot more attractive to lots more people. Folks who went into the classroom during the tech boom of the late 90s might have felt like martyrs, while their friends from college went on to make zillions of dollars. Now I suspect “safety and security” won’t be values relegated to the over-50 set. This means we might have an opportunity to attract higher quality people into teaching than we otherwise would, and we should capitalize on that by giving them the support to be successful and cutting the red tape that drives so many good people out of the classroom. For better or for worse, an opportunity like this is unlikely to come around again anytime soon.

George Leef is no fan of David Brooks’s column in yesterday’s New York Times (which we were the first to “cover” so cite us or else). Here’s why he doesn’t like it:

I am all in favor of widespread prosperity, but am not convinced either that the college versus high school earnings gap is a problem or that a system of universal college education would make the slightest bit of difference.

Pure speculation or not, I find compelling Mike’s lead editorial in this week’s Gadfly, which argues that extra-curricular activities in U.S. K-12 education foster “creativity, leadership, and the other ’21st Century skills’ that employers crave.”

But his closing line, light-hearted as it is, really disappoints, because it exemplifies the wrong-headed thinking that permeates ed policy and engenders so many ridiculous ideas for revamping K-12 to make us “more competitive.” He says:

So the next time that foreigners come to investigate what accounts for America’s economic success, don’t show them the extra-curriculars. They’re our secret weapons; we might want to keep it that way!

To all you K-12 ambassadors out there, please don’t listen to Mike. If China dispatches a special envoy to come study our schools, show them everything we’ve got. Contrary to what Mike and many much more irrational fear-mongerers out there suggest, we want foreign economies to thrive, because trade is not a zero-sum game; improving circumstances in one country benefit us all.

That’s my synopsis of this E.J. Dionne column about our current economic tribulations.

Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing. You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution.

I can hear the education blob-osphere now: “That’s right, E.J., and we’ve had too much deregulation in education, too. Too many charter schools, too much ‘alternative’ teacher certification, too much power in the hands of principals. What we need are some good old-fashioned regulations!”

Hogwash.

First of all, I suspect that even E.J. would agree that merely calling for re-regulation wouldn’t pass as “sophisticated economic analysis,” either. But more importantly, in education, we’re nowhere near the point where we’ve deregulated too much. Yes, there have been some high-profile examples when certain states or jurisdictions went too far; the early days of Arizona’s or Texas’s charter school programs come to mind, as quality-control mechanisms were not strongly in place. But the answer is not a return to old-fashioned regulation, but a move to smart regulation.

That’s what the standards-based reform movement was supposed to be about: regulating outcomes (student learning especially) instead of inputs (class size, teacher credentials, etc.). We’ve followed through on the outcomes side (though still have plenty of tweaking to do when it comes to measuring student achievement fairly and accurately). But by and large we’ve failed to deliver on deregulating the inputs side. We still require teacher “certification” one way or another; plenty of states still mandate certain class size limits; most still require onerous procedures for removing ineffective teachers from the workforce; pretty much all of them burden schools with expensive and inflexible pension plans; and very few principals yet have significant control over their budgets.

Maybe some sectors of the American economy were deregulated too much. (I don’t know—that’s not my area of expertise.) But not the sector we call public education.

Probably not, but since I missed last week’s patriotismpalooza, I figure I have some catching up to do. (And he’s British!) Perhaps he just wanted to drive home his point, in this Financial Times column, that the American economy is in trouble if we don’t improve our school system. But he overreaches here:

Younger cohorts are no better educated than these soon-to-retire boomers. Broadly speaking, educational quality has topped out—and on at least one measure, it is actually deteriorating. In 2006, Americans aged 55-59 collectively possessed more masters degrees, professional degrees, and doctorates than Americans aged 30-34. This impending loss of educational capital is entirely outside the country’s experience.

Well, that’s technically true but somewhat selective, as the younger cohort also has a greater percentage of people with just bachelor’s degrees. If you consider bachelor’s degrees and advanced degrees combined, these two cohorts look about the same. (See figure 1.1 here.) And as someone with just a bachelor’s degree, I can’t help but wonder whether these “advanced” degrees are really related to “greater human capital.” We know that master’s degrees in education don’t make teachers more effective; maybe advanced degrees in other fields are also weakly related to productivity.

Still, there’s plenty of reason to worry. As Mr. Crook points out, our declining high school graduation rates spell trouble—and attacking the problem will require much valor. Or, as Mr. Crook might say, valour. (Did I mention that he’s British?)

Even as he announced an initiative yesterday to educate more mathematicians and scientists, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg thought it necessary to point out that anti-immigration policies pose a grave threat to our economy.

I’d wager that stupid immigration policies, which George Will assails in today’s Washington Post, pose a much greater threat to long-term American competitiveness than sub-par schools.

Mike thinks I’m overzealous in questioning the zeal with which ed reformers tie America’s sub-par schools to forecasts of economic doom. There is, he argues, compelling evidence that economic growth is influenced by educational achievement, an arena where the United States typically trails lots of other countries. For instance, a recent Education Next article and an accompanying graph suggest that “cognitive skills,” as measured by norm-referenced test scores, correlate positively with economic growth; the authors claim that “a highly skilled work force can raise economic growth by about two-thirds of a percentage point every year.”

They also acknowledge, however, that the United States “has had a higher growth rate [from 1960 to 2000] than would be expected given its test scores and levels of school attainment.” We can thank a number of factors for this lucky bit of American exceptionalism:

...the United States has other advantages, some of which are entirely separate and apart from the quality of its schooling. The U.S. maintains generally freer labor and product markets than most countries in the world. There is less government regulation of firms, and trade unions are less powerful than in many other countries. Put more broadly, the U.S. has generally less intrusion of government in the operation of the economy, including lower tax rates and minimal government production through nationalized industries. Taken together, these characteristics of the U.S. economy encourage investment, permit the rapid development of new products and activities by firms, and allow U.S. workers to adjust to new opportunities.

The United States has some subtler quirks, too, that are perhaps no less important to its economic strength and stamina. It has, for instance, K-12 schools and universities that are less beholden to a central agency than those of other countries, which may contribute to their ability to cultivate eccentric, creative types who revolutionize or spawn entire industries, even if they fail to churn out bevies of exam-acing engineers. It has high levels of productivity that may or may not be culturally rooted in something like the “Protestant work ethic” or the romantic inspiration of the “American Dream.” It has a uniquely diverse population thanks to high levels of immigration, both historically and presently. It has a voracious appetite for consumables and lots of enterprising folks to provide them. It has Wall Street. It has Silicon Valley. It has Hollywood.

Economists try hard to classify and organize the material transactions and social interactions that create growth, and they’re amazingly good at it. But even the most illuminating studies pierce but a little of the darkness that obscures the complex workings of our economy. It is because of our inadequacy as humans of limited intelligence to fully comprehend this mind-boggling complexity, more than anything else, that we should be wary of forecasts of economic catastrophe. For the common result of such alarm-ringing, usually framed in rhetoric much stronger than the prognosticator’s confidence in his actual claims, is an eventual unpleasant confrontation with the beast of unintended consequences. (George Will’s column yesterday on proposed changes to baseball—another exquisite example of American exceptionalism, by the way—offered some eloquent thoughts on this age-old but still neglected phenomenon.)

Mike and the authors of the Education Next piece are surely right that if American students, all things being equal, performed better on tests, the U.S. economy would see added growth. But knee-jerking lawmakers (at whom most of the economic competitiveness laments are aimed) are clumsy and in their attempts to “fix” math and science education won’t leave all things equal. They’re likely to improve scores by a small amount at best and wreak further havoc on the schools, and even the economy, at worst.

Speaking of the economics-related back and forth between my colleagues here, a new report out by RAND last week compiles a series of papers presented at a November 2006 conference on U.S. economic competitiveness (yes, that took awhile). It’s a pretty meaty compilation with lots of interesting good-news, bad-news data and insights from leading economists, engineers, and other scientists.

What caught my attention, though, was this news article that picked up on a particular stat in the lengthy report. We’re told that “overseas talent” is helping to augment our science and engineering workforce since “70 percent of [foreign born students] elect to remain in the U.S. after completing their degrees.” Phoebe Leboy, President of the Association for Women in Science, is apparently concerned that most immigrants “do not serve as good role models for our students” since children better identify with those who appear to come from a similar background. It got me thinking about the research on the question of teacher-student race and its relationship to student achievement, which has fascinated many a scholar. In short, the findings are mixed (yes, I know, we get tired of hearing that). Still, I prefer to think that a scientist’s or engineer’s strong content knowledge and passion for the subject matter is far more important in inspiring and challenging would-be scientists and engineers than is his skin color, accent, and/or nationality.

I’ve returned from a long weekend in New Hampshire to find my colleague Coby continuously questioning the concern that America’s economic might will be damaged by her educational mediocrity. To be sure, I think these arguments can be overblown and politically unsustainable. Still, there is some pretty compelling evidence about the connection between a nation’s educational achievement and economic growth. Take a look at this figure, for example, from a recent Education Next article by Eric Hanushek, Dean T. Jamison, Eliot A. Jamison and Ludger Woessmann. Coby, shouldn’t we get a little nervous about the United States’ lackluster performance?

Last month, the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews mustered strong evidence and taut logic to contest some of the more questionable claims surrounding the prospects for America’s economic competitiveness. The latest issue of The Economist resumes where he left off.

Most ed reformers are drawn to their calling by one, or sometimes both, of two considerations: civil rights and economics. The first concern addresses the achievement gap between mostly white, upper-class students and their mostly minority, low-income peers. That this gap exists—and that it’s shameful and unacceptable—is undeniable.

The claims of the economics crowd, however, are less unassailable. Landmark report after landmark report warns us that, unless we adopt the following thirty-six-point plan to fix our schools, we face a future of indentured servitude to the emerging behemoths of the East. But, in fact, there’s little evidence to support such claims, just as there wasn’t in the eighties and nineties when Japan was on its supposedly inexorable march toward world domination.

Thankfully, Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews has written an accessible and persuasive response to the economic armageddon crowd in the latest Wilson Quarterly. Choice lines:

Our best public schools are first-rate, producing more intense, involved, and creative ­A-­plus students than our most prestigious colleges have room for. That is why less-known institutions such as Claremont McKenna, Rhodes, and Hampshire are drawing many freshmen just as smart as the ones at Princeton. The top 70 percent of U.S. public high schools are pretty good, certainly better than they have ever been, thanks to a growing movement to offer Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate ­courses.

Our real problem is the bottom 30 percent of U.S. schools, those in urban and rural communities full of ­low-­income children. We have seen enough successful schools in such areas to know that many of those children are just as capable of being great scientists, doctors, and executives as suburban children are. But most ­low-­income schools in the United States are simply bad. Not only are we denying the children who attend them the equal education that is their right, but we are squandering almost a third of our intellectual capital. We are beating the world economically, but with one hand tied behind our ­back.

...the notion that the United States is losing the international economic race is implausible. China and India may be growing quickly, but they remain far behind and are weighed down by huge, impoverished rural populations. Both countries are going to continue to send many of their brightest young people to study at U.S. universities. Stupidly conceived and administered immigration laws give many of these foreign students little choice but to leave once they receive their degrees. Given the chance, many more are likely to stay in the United States, where the jobs pay better; creativity in all fields, including politics, is encouraged; and—another blow to education critics—the colleges their children would attend are far better and more ­accessible.

Thank you, Jay, for injecting some badly needed sanity into this discussion. This is one of those articles you want to bookmark or print out so it’s easily accessible when education or globalization comes up at your dinner party.

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen highlights the following passage from Peter Moskos’s Cop in the Hood: My Year Spent Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District:

An innovative analysis by Eric Cadora highlights “million-dollar blocks”—individual city blocks where more than one million dollars per block per year are spent to incarcerate individuals from that block. Some blocks cost over five million dollars per year.... A million dollars, coincidentally, is roughly what it would cost to pay for one patrol officer, twenty-four hours a day, every day for one year.

I suspect someone could produce an equally alarming study of million-dollar blocks in the context of K-12 public schooling. The raw per-pupil spending figures in several major cities with troubled school districts—$13,446 in D.C., $14,961 in N.Y.C., $21,295 in Newark, to name a few—are already stunning enough.

Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw makes the case in Sunday’s New York Times that the technological progress of the last few decades has eclipsed the country’s pace of educational advancement, thus driving up wages for skilled workers relative to the unskilled.

The New York Times, one understands, seeks to reach its audience, and those who casually turn the pages of Thursday Styles are of a sort that enjoys and relates to articles such as this.

How to prepare teens for the world of work? the piece asks. Should parents encourage children to do what they love, or should they push diligence and sacrifice as the road that leads to a successful and rewarding career? Probably more the latter; the author herself writes that her son is “part of a generation whose members are so convinced that work should be personally fulfilling that they see photocopying as beneath them.”

This is a well-documented “millennial” attitude. (Sometimes, though, it’s well-founded. Some of the most talented recent college graduates make loads of money because that’s what they’re worth to the companies that employ them. Why on earth would they deign to make photocopies when they could trot across town and get another job at which they don’t make photocopies?)

Conspicuously absent from the Times piece is the role colleges play in youngsters’ work preparedness. I’m still amazed at how ill-equipped for office life I felt after receiving my undergrad degree, and I imagine the adjustment is even more difficult for some grads, especially those who go in for stuff like this. (A particularly noxious “art” project by a Yale student.)

It’s easy to dismiss it as culture war fodder. But it makes a point—this selfish, relativistic stuff is eschewed in the real world, and yet it happens all the time (albeit not to such a repulsive degree), and is often applauded, on college campuses. K-12 schools have their problems—lots of them—but at least they enshrine certain codes of conduct into the school day. In this way, when it comes to preparing students for the work world, college can actually be a regression from high school. No matter how much self-esteem parents spoon-feed their kids, it’s nothing compared to the all-about-me culture that’s the norm at many universities.

Update: Turns out the Yale art project was a hoax. As Yuval Levin wrote, it’s an “abhorrent and disgusting one.”

Ben Bernanke and some around our office suggest that teaching more about finance in American public schools may have prevented our current economic crisis. (What crisis?) I’m unconvinced, and Free exchange, the Economist’s blog, points out that others are, too.

It’s dubbed “the dismal science” because economics offers conclusions that may “work,” but which often ignore ethical and moral considerations. Today at Marginal Revolution, economist Alex Tabarrok makes the dismal case that we should pay organ donors for their, you know, organs. (Iran does it, he writes, and while the Mullahs’ methods seem effective, “better follow-up of donors would be an improvement.” Follow-up of donors, one would assume, is a pretty basic aspect of any body-parts donation system.)

Evermore, it seems, education reformers are turning to economics for answers to education-related problems. Not a few commentators (including Mike and Diane Ravitch) have complained that many such economics-based answers eschew considerations of instruction and curriculum. Education’s economic solutions also sometimes neglect to account for unintended consequences, many of which pose ethical problems.

Take, for example, the suggestion that schools pay students for good test scores or attendance (the latest instance of which comes from New Jersey). It doesn’t render the repulsion that paying organ donors does, but it still involves ethical considerations (e.g., Is it right to pay a young person to do that which is expected of him, will benefit him, and his peers do for free?) and unintended consequences (e.g., creating students who work hard only when shown the money).

We debate such policies in terms of whether or not they’ll work, but rarely do we scrutinize the collateral damage they may cause and ask if the possibility of their supposed benefits outweighs the possibility of their unintended consequences. Certainly this happened with lax charter school laws, and partly because of it, many charter schools are in fact quite “dismal.”

Mike has a fair point that schools can’t do everything. He might have added that it’s hard to picture most high school teachers being able to confidently explain variable interest rates or balloon payments, or any students bothering to listen. But Liam reaches from that to imply that Bernanke is suggesting teaching financial literacy to 12 year olds—that wasn’t what he said (he was talking about high school).

But more to the point, it’s just wrong, and contradicts the Gadfly piece Liam refers to, to flatly dismiss the idea that financial literacy wouldn’t have prevented the current financial crisis. It might very well have. If more people had basic financial knowledge, they would be far smarter about buying homes they could actually afford, about taking loans they could pay back, and about accepting terms that were not “predatory” or overly dependent on variable interest rates. How to help people get that education is the key policy problem. Mike is probably right (as is Liam) that it’s not in high schools—so where, and how?

Mike is right: financial literacy is important, but schools can’t teach everything. In fact, we wrote as much several months ago in The Gadfly.

To suppose that America’s possession of more financially literate 12-year-olds would have somehow staved off or lessened the subprime mortgage crisis, as Bernanke seems to, is really a stretch.