On Education Reform and Unlabeled Photos

Ciao, Tutti!

I’m sorry that I have to keep writing so often. For those of you who haven’t seen, I just posted yesterday evening about the debate and a series of releases, mainly having to do with motion pictures. Please go ahead and read why I think Obama kicked major butt in the debate yesterday. If you want. No pressure.

I do want to revisit one aspect of the debate today, that of the education platforms of the candidates. I don’t really want to talk about vouchers (and, come on, the voucher system in Washington D.C. is not doing a great job, guys), but I want to talk about a very important statistic that John McCain mentioned. In defense of his argument against Obama’s big spending plans, he said that the United States puts more money into our schools than any other country in the world, yet our schools are ranked among the worst among developed nations. McCain went on to say (and repeat a few times) that we can’t afford to throw money at the problem and that the best course of action is reform. Obama asserted that he would do both, reform and fund, saying his catch phrase about No Child Left Behind leaving the money behind.

As much as I hate to say it, McCain nailed it on the head.

However, identifying a problem is only half the fruit pie. I’m not thrilled about the solution to our education system’s woes being a voucher system based off a Washington D.C. experiment. Here is what will happen if the voucher system is implemented and people have the free-market choices McCain claims they will have: people will choose the best schools if possible, and the worse schools will decline even further. In other words, the gap between the rich and poor, the good and the bad, will widen between schools. In the aggregate we may see an overall per capita increase in the achievements of our nation’s students, but a lot will be, how should I put this, left behind.

This is all assuming that everyone has access to perfect information and the capacity to make a choice indiscriminately. Of course a middle class family would choose a better school over a worse school. But some families simply don’t have the information to determine which schools are better than others and some families don’t have the option (or don’t want to have the option) of choosing a school far away from home, no matter its superior quality. According to Mike Davis, the main choices made by the poor are due to location and people sacrifice quality of living for a central location close to work. This would logically apply to choices regarding schools as well.

So it would seem McCain’s plan, a very neo-liberal, free market approach at schooling, would help some people, yes, but end up making poor people even more worse off. However, I do think he is right that we can improve our education system without pouring more money into it. I am probably going to be ridiculed forever for saying that. But McCain’s fact – yes, folks, a fact and not an exaggeration – shows very clearly that other countries know something about investing money that we don’t. We’re not using our money in the most effective way.

Let me demonstrate what I mean with an analogy. Yay, analogies!

Today the New York Times released an article today (“Infant Deaths Drop in U.S., But Rates Are Still High,” by Gardiner Harris) wondering why the infant mortality rate in the United States is so high compared to other countries in the world; we rank 29th in the world with an infant mortality rate of 6.72 out of 1000, I believe (just so you know, the top three countries are, in order, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan with around 3.5 per 1000 infant deaths). However, we put more money into our medical system than most other developed countries. Somehow I think this article relates to what I was just talking about.

The article goes on to interviews with doctors and other medical experts, bemoaning the failure of the medical system. Some use it as a rallying cry for more centralized control of the system, others for more privatization. However, the consensus was that the problem is caused by a failing health care system. The article cites the fact that African American women birth the most infants that die before age 1, even if they have access to high-quality health care.

There are a couple of other ways to look at this problem that may make it easier to invest our money in the best places. First of all, the pure statistic “infant mortality rate” lumps the United States with countries much smaller than itself, like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. Our larger population is completely ignored by this statistic (Joel would like this). Whether or not the size of our population actually has a bearing on our infant mortality rates is up to someone who feels like researching it, but I would guess the answer is yes, as we shall see in a second.

Secondly, the article makes the assumption that everyone in America has access to health care. It seems absurd, but the article never considers the infant mortality rates of people who don’t have access to quality health care. It could possibly be the case that the U.S.’s high infant mortality rate is the result of more people within this country lacking access to health care than while people in Singapore have much better access to health care in general. This is where the population aspect resurfaces. The U.S. probably has a fairly large proportion of people with access to proper health care, but the percentage who don’t still make up a larger physical number than those of other countries.

As the health expert I am, I think the problem of our high infant mortality rates may be more due to people not having access to the health care system, not the operation of the health care system itself with respect to its patients. This means, you guessed it, that we should be looking into issues of poverty in order to solve the infant mortality problem, since those are the people who are least likely to have access to the system.

Actually, I’m not a health expert, but I do think we’ve got to approach these sorts of problems from multiple angles. It’s worth looking into. It would be a lot better than throwing money at a problem.

So how this all relates to the education system seems obvious, but it would take a lot of studies to really identify education’s unique problems. Both Obama and McCain call for reform, but neither do much specifying what kinds of reforms they want, always phrasing their positions based on No Child Left Behind, my least favorite piece of legislation other than the Patriot Act. We do need reform for the education system, but we need the right reform, and I don’t think anyone knows quite what that is. I certainly don’t. To solve a problem where we are throwing an exorbitant amount of money at something that isn’t working as well as it should, we should keep the health care article in mind. We must investigate how our statistics on education mislead us and cloud our perceptions of reality when we compare ourselves to other countries. We must also avoid at all costs the simple explanation that the education system is failing simply on its own merit or because it lacks the funds. We need to think like Billy Bean, using what we have to get the most we can by using science and statistics correctly (the “Moneyball” analogy doesn’t work so well this year seeing how poorly the A’s did. But when you look at the expensive Tigers and Yankees who basically bombed despite their high budgets it becomes obvious that success in no way hinges on money.).

Basically, we don’t exactly know what’s wrong with the education system, and it would be foolish to jump to haphazard conclusions about where the real problem lies. From the approach of access to quality being the problem, McCain’s vouchers seem like a good plan at first, but in reality it would not increase everyone’s access to higher quality like he hopes; the poor would be even more displaced than they are now. If we want to improve education across the board, vouchers are not the way.

To say anything else with any meaning would only be possible if I was some sort of expert on education policy.

Whew, that took a long time to write. I think I’ll explain the unlabeled photos from yesterday’s blog some other time.

-Sam goldsmith