It became clear as the twentieth century drew to a close that high school
or college graduates were likely to hold many different jobs through their
working lives and even engage in more than one profession. In response, formal
education gradually became a lifetime endeavor, and markets responded.
The first evidence of this was the dramatic increase in enrollment in
community colleges. After years of being viewed as the backwater of American
education, these institutions are now in the vanguard. Student enrollment
in two-year colleges rose from 2.1 million in 1969 to 6.5 million in
2004. Almost a third of the students are aged thirty or older. These institutions
specialize in teaching practical skills that are immediately applicable in
the workplace, and have been especially helpful in retraining people who
have lost their jobs for new opportunities. Some typical curricula: electronics
maintenance, collision repair technology, nursing, massage therapy, and computer
information security. These middle-income occupations require substantially
more skills than were required of middle-income workers when I
entered the labor force in the late 1940s.
A rising proportion of the population is also taking advantage of work-
related instruction. The "corporate university" is rapidly becoming a permanent
fixture in adult job-specific learning. Many corporations dissatisfied
with the quality of new hires supplement their education and capabilities,
equipping them to compete successfully in world markets. General Motors
has an extensive "university" system with sixteen functional colleges. McDonald's
educates more than five thousand employees a year at its aptly
named Hamburger University.
Such responses to market needs are not new to American education,
however; they have always been at its core. At the turn of the last century,
technological advances required workers with a higher level of cognitive
skills than was required for the dominant rural economy of previous decades—
for instance, the ability to read manuals, to interpret blueprints, or
to understand mathematical formulas. Youth were drawn from rural areas,
where opportunities were limited, into more productive occupations in
business and an advancing manufacturing sector. Our educational system
responded: in the 1920s and 1930s, high school enrollment in this country
expanded rapidly. It became the job of these institutions to prepare students
for work life. In the context of the demands of the economy at that
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time, a high school diploma represented the training needed to be successful
in most aspects of American enterprise. The economic returns in the
job market from having a high school diploma rose, and as a result, high
school enrollment rates climbed. By the time the United States entered
World War II, the median level of education for a seventeen-year-old was
a high school diploma—an accomplishment that set the United States
apart from other countries.
New demands created by economic progress also importantly influenced
the evolution of our system of higher education. Although many
states had established land-grant schools earlier,* their support strengthened
in the late nineteenth century as states whose economies specialized
in agriculture and mining sought to take advantage of new scientific methods
of production.
Early in the twentieth century, the content of education at an American
college had evolved from a classically based curriculum to one combining
the sciences, empirical studies, and modern liberal arts. Universities responded
to the need for the application of science—particularly chemistry
and physics—to the manufacture of steel, rubber, chemicals, drugs, petroleum,
and other goods requiring the newer production technologies.
America's reputation as a world leader in higher education is grounded
in the ability of these versatile institutions, taken together, to serve the
practical needs of an economy and, more important, to unleash the creative
thinking that moves it forward. It is the recognition of these values that has
attracted such a large segment of the world student population to our institutions
of higher learning. But while our universities and especially our
community colleges have responded impressively, in recent decades our elementary
and secondary schools have not.
In the foregoing, I have voiced concern about the state of our elementary
and secondary education while lauding the world-class university system
we have built over the generations. It should be clear, however, that
unless the former can be brought up to world class, the latter will either
*Beginning in 1862, the federal government granted land (later, funding) to the states for the
creation of educational institutions to teach engineering, agriculture, and military tactics. Cornell,
Texas A&M, the University of California at Berkeley, and Penn State are among more than
one hundred institutions founded under the land-grant program.
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have to depend on foreign students or sink into mediocrity. The average age
of our scientists and engineers is increasing, according to the National Science
Foundation, and large numbers will retire in a very few years, lowering
the supply of skilled workers relative to the growing requirements of
an ever-more-complex capital stock. If we cannot replace these skilled
workers, the pressure for a rising skilled-unskilled wage differential will
grow, since no comparable shortage of lesser-skilled workers appears on the
horizon.
One of the skills too many high school graduates lack is proficiency in
math. It is that skill more than any other that is required to achieve skilled-
job status. I do not pretend to be conversant with the details of U.S. education
in the twenty-first century. Yet people whose scholarship I respect, and
who are in a position to know, complain that the math teachers of my
childhood have been replaced with teachers with degrees in education but
much too often with no math or science degree or competence in the subject
matter. In 2000, for example, nearly two-fifths of public secondary
school math teachers did not have a major or minor in math, math education,
or a related field. Lou Gerstner, former chairman of IBM and founder
of the Teaching Commission, noted in an essay for the Christian Science
Monitor (December 13, 2004): "The heart of the problem is the arcane way
we recruit and prepare teachers, along with the lockstep single salary schedule"
for all teachers, irrespective of their subject specialty, "no matter how
desperately society may need a certain skill set and no matter how well a
teacher performs in the classroom. That's senseless, yet it's still the norm in
the teaching profession."
Different pay scales for high school teachers in different disciplines
may go against the ethos of teaching. Perhaps money should not be an incentive.
But it is. There are doubtless math teachers in our high schools
who are sufficiently dedicated to forgo the much higher incomes they
could earn in other jobs. But they must be few, for as Gerstner also points
out, "according to a 2000 study of the largest urban school districts, nearly
95 percent reported an immediate demand for math teachers—a quantity
problem on top of the quality problem we clearly already have."
It is becoming increasingly clear that a flat pay scale when demand is
far from flat is a form of price fixing that undermines the ability to attract
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qualified math teachers. Since the financial opportunities for experts in
math or science outside of teaching are vast, and for English literature
teachers outside of teaching, limited, math teachers are likely to be a cut
below the average teaching professional at the same pay grade. Teaching
math is likely being left to those who are unable to claim the more lucrative
jobs. That is far less true of English literature or history teachers.
Moreover, retirees or well-educated parents of students who volunteer
to teach, part-time, courses such as math in which they have some proficiency
are turned down because they lack a degree in education. To the extent
that such practices are widespread, they are bureaucratic impediments
to the functioning of market forces in education. Fortunately, proposals to
remedy this dysfunctional state of affairs are gaining traction.
For example, James Simons, a distinguished mathematician who applied
his skills to build one of Wall Street's most successful hedge funds,
in 2004 turned his efforts toward enhancing the teaching of high school
math. His Math for America has developed a high-stipend fellowship program
to recruit and train high school math teachers. Senator Chuck Schumer
of New York in 2006 embraced, and offered legislation to advance, this
initiative.
Enhancing elementary and secondary school sensitivity to market
forces should help restore the balance between the demand for and supply
of skilled workers in the United States. I do not know whether vouchers,
which bring an element of competition to public schools, are the final answer.
But I suspect that Rose and Milton Friedman, devoting the end of
their distinguished careers to advancing the policy, were on the right track.
(I do not recall either ever being off track.)
Another step toward enhancing competition is an interesting paper
written for the Hamilton Project (a Robert Rubin creation) at the Brookings
Institution. The authors note that certification of teachers (which generally
requires a degree in education) has little to do with whether a teacher is effective.
They recommend opening up teaching to others who are qualified—
including those who have a four-year undergraduate degree but not
the formal requirements for certification. They estimate that removing the
barrier of certification would encourage recent college graduates and older
professionals to try a teaching career. In addition, they recommend tracking
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teacher and student performance and making the achievement of tenure
more difficult. They simulated these recommendations through a model
based on the performance of 150,000 Los Angeles students from 2000 to
2003. The authors conclude that if the school system screened out the least
qualified quarter of teachers, student test scores would be raised by as much
as 14 percentile points by graduation. These are very large changes, and,
even if only fractionally achievable, such improvement in academic performance
could go a long way to remedying the international inferiority of
young American students.
A recognition of how poor our mathematics education had become
and perhaps some reason for hope was the report in September 2006 by
the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, reversing its ill-chosen
advisory of 1989. The earlier report recommended a curriculum that dropped
emphasis on basic math skills (multiplication, division, square roots, and so
on) and pressed students to seek more free-flowing solutions and to study
a range of special math topics. I always wondered how you can learn math
unless you have a thorough grounding in the basics and concentrate on a
very few subjects at a time. Asking children to use their imagination
before they know what they are imagining about seemed vacuous to me.
It was.
Another education imperative goes beyond fostering market forces in
schools. I recognize that left to their own devices, market incentives will
not reach the education of those children "left behind" (to borrow a term
from current U.S. education legislation). The cost of educational egalitarianism
is doubtless high and may be difficult to justify in terms of economic
efficiency and short-term productivity. Some students can achieve a given
level of education far more easily, and therefore at far less cost, than others.
Yet there is danger to a democratic society in leaving some children out of
sync with its institutions. Such neglect contributes to exaggerated income
concentration, and could conceivably be far more costly to the sustaining
of capitalism and globalization in the long run. The value judgments involved
in making such choices reach beyond the imperatives of the marketplace.
Unless our resident population, with the assistance of our schools, can
supply the level of skills we need, which to date they have not, as our
skilled baby boomers retire we will require a significant increase in the
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number of skilled workers migrating to the United States. As Bill Gates, the
chairman of Microsoft, succinctly testified before Congress in March 2007,
"America will find it infinitely more difficult to maintain its technological
leadership if it shuts out the very people who are most able to help us
compete." He added that we are "driving away the world's best and brightest
precisely when we need them most."
Much of our skill shortage can be resolved with education reform. But
at best, that will take years. The world is moving too fast for political and
bureaucratic dawdling. We need to address quickly a double U.S. disability:
the increasing income concentration and the increasing cost of staffing our
highly complex capital stock. Both could be "cured" by opening up the
United States to the world's very large and growing pool of skilled workers.
Our skilled jobs are the highest paid in the world. Accordingly, were we to
allow open migration of skilled workers to this country, there would soon
be a lower wage premium of skilled over lesser skilled and an end to our
shortages of skilled workers.* The shortages occur because we are inhibiting
world competitive labor markets from functioning. Administrative exclusionary
rules have been substituted for the pricing mechanism. In the
