RALEIGH – If you’re losing 30 cents on the dollar, you can’t make up the difference in volume.
That’s useful advice in lots of fields – I actually used it as a quip about the federal government’s Medicare dilemma during Wednesday’s election-preview event for JLF – but today’s application is in the area of education policy.
North Carolina’s public schools are (in)famously losing about 30 percent of their students before graduation day. I’m glad to see awareness of this depressing fact spreading among the state’s political class, though I’d still like to see some punishment for those Department of Public Instruction officials who were complicit in manipulating North Carolina’s graduation-rate data for years to hide the problem.
Unfortunately, the debate can’t yet move to solutions because of two facts that the political class has yet to accept. First, the problem is far worse than it appears. Because a large chunk of students who do graduate from our government high schools can’t pass the state’s relatively easy state tests, that means that far fewer than 70 percent of North Carolina students are truly educated at the high-school level. The number may indeed be below the 50 percent mark.
The second fact the political class doesn’t understand is that their preferred policy responses – raising average teacher pay, reducing class sizes, and extending public education by hours, days, or years – are unlikely to make any significant difference in improving graduation rates. The best-available data don’t offer much hope. Average pay doesn’t correlate with teacher effectiveness, while class-size reductions are an expensive way to produce only a modest academic gain among only some groups of young students.
As for extending public education’s reach, by lengthening the school day and year or creating universal preschool programs, the evidence is if anything even more overwhelmingly against the efficacy of such reforms. Take preschool programs. While there are some studies suggesting that desperately poor children benefit from carefully targeted pre-K programs, universal preschool is an expensive waste of time. Even for the targeted efforts, the benefits often fade out by the time a child reaches the second or third grade. Politicians are fond of preschool programs, likening them to inoculations against the ravages of poverty and neglect, but the truth is that they frequently devolve into expensive day-care services. They’re popular among middle-class parents who wouldn’t mind forcing other people to pay their child-care bills. That doesn’t make them sensible investments of tax dollars in improving educational outcomes.
But what about all the countries that outperform the U.S. in international tests? Sure, some of them have higher teacher pay, smaller class sizes, longer school years, and government-run day care. But most high-performing countries don’t. There are few consistent patterns of correlation between inputs and outputs. The comparisons are also trickier than commonly believed – many North Carolina politicians I know complain that our school year is shorter than many European countries, but don’t realize that in those countries the school day often ends at lunchtime, so the number of instructional hours per year isn’t all that different.
Our current education system is broken, on multiple levels. Solving the problem will not involve simply making kids spend more time in a broken system. You can’t make up a chronic deficit with volume.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.