What Ails Education?

What’s wrong with education in the United States? It used to be that Americans were the most educated people in the world. Yet eduational performance seems to have peaked in the late 1960s, according to David Brooks.

[H]igh school graduation rates peaked in the U.S. in the late 1960s, at about 80 percent. Since then they have declined.

So what went wrong? Researcher James Heckman says that it’s not falling school quality.

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.

What we need to do is boost educational attainment at the bottom, according to Brooks. And on this the GOP is largely irrelevant. It is in Barack Obama’s education proposals that you can find attempts to improve early childhood education. McCain talks about school choice rather than “human capital policies”

Óf course this takes for granted the old progressive template: problem + expert research + government program = solution. Is it, David Brooks?

Maybe the problem is not so much the education system but the decline in family environment. The Economist ran an article a year ago about marriage (sub) in the United States.

Since 1964 the percentage of children raised by single mothers has gone up from five percent to 10 percent — for college graduate mothers. But it’s gone up from 12 percent to 40 percent for mothers with less than high school education.

Now that sort of result goes beyond misfortune or even the monstrous injustice of the liberal welfare state.

This is nothing less than a disaster. Forty percent of kids of high-school dropouts being raised without a father?

It’s not just a question of fairness you know. It’s a question of safety. A child living with mother and boy-friend is 35 times more likely to suffer abuse that a child living with its married biological mother and father.

This is not a question about who has the best policy analysis of recent research in education. It goes back to the enormous social changes that have been visited on the poor by the last forty years of liberal social policy.

And every year that we just sit and do nothing the liberal welfare state dumps another cohort of kids in the garbage.