Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (34 page)

The foundation for success in life is laid early. We cannot do anything about the genes a child is endowed with, but nutrition during pregnancy and in early childhood makes an enormous difference to a child’s intelligence and health later in life. Poor nutrition in a child’s early years seems to be associated with the early onset of the degenerative diseases of old age such as coronary heart disease and diabetes.
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Poor habits of expectant mothers, such as drinking and smoking, also contribute to the long-term impairment of their children’s health. Unfortunately, because these problems are likely to be more severe among the children of the poor and the poorly educated, they perpetuate the cycle of poverty. To break it, more resources have to be devoted to very young children in poor families, whether in the form of nutritional supplements, medical monitoring and treatment, or parental education.

Early education also seems to matter considerably. By age eight, intelligence, as measured by standard metrics, seems pretty well set.
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Therefore it is critically important that young children have access to quality pedagogic resources. Studies show that early childhood learning programs tend to reduce the likelihood that a child will drop out of high school, increase the likelihood that the child will enroll in college, and increase earnings.
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They also make it less likely that the child will become delinquent, a criminal, a drug addict, or a teenage mother.

Although evaluations of the government’s Head Start program—a national program that promotes school readiness by enhancing child development through the provision of educational, health, nutritional, social, and other services—are still mixed, it is hard to believe that more attention to creating good day-care centers and preschool programs for poor children, funded by government resources, with scope for local experimentation and regular evaluation, will not produce benefits. Mexico has had tremendous success in encouraging poor parents to pay more attention to their children’s nutrition, health, and education by making welfare payments conditional on parents meeting certain milestones.
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Similar conditional cash transfers are being tried by Mayor Bloomberg in New York using donated funds, and although it is too early to tell whether they are effective, the success of similar programs around the world suggests that more experimentation is warranted.

Family matters. As far back as 1966, the influential Coleman report concluded that family background was a greater influence on school achievement than any measure of the school environment, including school districts’ per-student expenditures.
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Not only are the incomes of the parents important, but so is the relationship between them, as it influences the family’s access to resources and the kind of environment it provides. Being born to teenage parents, or growing up with one or both parents absent, tends to be detrimental to a child’s chances of success, as is divorce. Again, these problems tend to be more common among poorer families. Although the government has only a limited role, if any, to play in strengthening families (though it certainly should not tax married couples more, as it does now), greater community recognition of the harm done to the children by teenage pregnancies, absentee parents, and broken marriages can be a force for change.

More generally, as the Nobel laureate James Heckman from the University of Chicago has argued, many of the differences between children are set at an early stage: most of the gaps in abilities observed at age eighteen are already present at age five.
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Furthermore, a child is most malleable when young: it becomes much harder and costlier to alter abilities and behavior as the child gets older. Early intervention is important for changing outcomes successfully.

Interventions are not just about improving the child’s learning abilities. Success in school, as in work life, depends significantly on noncognitive abilities, such as perseverance, determination, and self-discipline.
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And whereas cognitive abilities are relatively fixed early on, noncognitive abilities can be changed for considerably longer.

Good schools inculcate values that serve students well in later life. Past studies have shown that students from Catholic schools tend to do better than students from inner-city public schools, perhaps because they produce more disciplined and motivated students.
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Substantial improvements to inner-city student performance seem to have been brought about by “paternalistic” schools that insist on discipline: students walk in an orderly way between classes, meet dress codes, sit up straight in class, do homework, use standard English, and are penalized for transgressions.
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There is, however, little systematic evidence on the success of such schools, the key ingredients that make them work, or the environments in which they work best. Nevertheless, it seems a reasonable hypothesis that both the learning environment and the learning of noncognitive skills could be improved through attempts to teach behavior as well as impart knowledge.

As important as what happens in schools is what happens outside. Dysfunctional families and communities make it more difficult for a child to acquire the values that can help them succeed. After-school programs and mentoring programs—pairing students with successful and caring adults—have helped remedy some of the damage. So too has community leadership and a shared sense of parental responsibility. As a U.S. senator speaking at the 2004 Democratic convention, Barack Obama said: “Go into any inner-city neighborhood and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach our kids to learn; they know that parents have to teach, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets.”
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This kind of parental and community responsibility is needed to make full use of any government support.

More generally, careful longitudinal studies in Chicago suggest that failing schools can be transformed through collective effort: by leadership that creates an environment where the faculty work with one another to challenge students, where the faculty themselves are encouraged to develop their skills, where the school and other social service organizations work together to attempt to improve the student’s entire learning environment and not just the one in school, and where parents and the community are drawn in to support this effort.
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Studies suggest that students from low socioeconomic groups who are enrolled in public schools make as much progress on math and reading exams during their elementary-school years as children from a high socioeconomic background, though they start at a lower level because of disadvantages inherited from early childhood. However, the gap in achievement scores grows over time, primarily because the achievement levels of children from low-income families fall or stagnate during the summer, while those of children from higher-income families continue to increase.
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The learning environment in families differs, with children of high-income parents growing up with educational games, books, private tuition, and summer programs, all of which continue their learning outside school. Some economists have therefore suggested extending the school year: Japan’s school year runs about 240 days, while the school year in the United States is 180 days.
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Others have suggested offering vouchers to poor families so that they can enroll their children in summer programs. Both approaches are worth experimenting with.

Clearly, the quality of teaching also affects a child’s educational experience.
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Motivated, inspiring, knowledgeable teachers make an enormous difference, as many of us know from experience. So does class size.

Getting good teachers starts with hiring. When other opportunities for women and minorities were limited, many talented people went into teaching because it was a respectable occupation that was open to them. As opportunities for these groups have expanded, it has become more difficult to attract the talented into teaching. Pay has to be one component of a more attractive package. But pay increments should be tied to teacher performance in and outside the classroom, which should be measured in part by improvements in student performance. Additional increments should be given to those who teach difficult but required subjects such as math and science and to those who teach in difficult school environments, such as the inner cities. Teacher unions have resisted pay differentiation, especially on the basis of performance. However, they are slowly becoming more amenable to change.

As important as pay is a career path that makes full use of a teacher’s experience. Only some teachers like, or are suited for, promotion to school administration. Others could play an important role as mentors to junior teachers, as master teachers conducting classes in pedagogy, or as subject-matter experts. These career paths need to be made clearer and rewarded appropriately.

Subject-matter expertise is important, but I am not persuaded that teachers need degrees in how to teach. Certainly, much of my own learning about teaching (admittedly only university students) has come from classroom experience and from mentoring by other colleagues. Requiring teachers to hold degrees in education or teaching tends to shrink the pool of candidates for teaching jobs substantially and likely deters many subject-matter experts who would otherwise become teachers. Instead, schools should create a more formal system of mentoring, with star teachers advising inexperienced teachers and sharing experiences. Furthermore, the school system should find ways to make use of those who are highly motivated and talented but are unlikely to see teaching as a long-term career. Both the young college graduate who wants to try out teaching, as in the Teach for America program, and more senior citizens, who want to give back to the community in a different role, should be welcomed.

Small classes help the learning experience because students get more attention. This is especially important in the early years, when children need help in developing focus and discipline. Resources will be needed to reduce class size. Resources are also needed for pedagogic aids, including computers, so trade-offs have to be made based on a careful cost-benefit analysis.

One way for the best teachers to reach more students is through technology. Technology can help teachers share experiences, lesson plans, and homework questions. I am a director of a company, Heymath, that is based in Chennai, India, and operates in three continents. The company helps teachers with the tools and templates needed to create math lessons and homework, as well as with the assessment process. It creates a community in which math teachers around the world share best practices. Heymath also offers students assistance with problems, to the extent permitted by the teacher. Technology can thus help upgrade the quality of teaching with relatively small investments.

Schools also need a system of accountability. A national standard of student achievement, coupled with testing at regular intervals to measure performance against those standards, is key to accountability. Because schools take in students at different levels of preparation and capability, performance assessments must take into account the quality of the intake: hence performance improvements as well as absolute performance levels should be measured. We also need to find ways of publicizing school-performance assessments in a manner that is both comparable across schools and easily understood by parents. Failing schools need to be given initial support to improve, but not multiple chances to do so. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 goes some way toward these goals but needs to be strengthened.

Finally, parental choice can help bring the discipline of competition to schools. School voucher programs, if properly administered, can allow students to vote with their feet and prevent failing schools from holding talented but poor students hostage. Charter schools can also help. These are quasi-public schools that have more freedom from regulation than public schools in return for greater accountability. They obtain tuition payments from school districts in proportion to the students they attract from them. Evidence suggests that such schools can lead to substantial performance improvement, especially relative to public schools that face little risk of closure.
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The poorest-performing public schools clearly need more time to change, since the problems in the school and the community are deeper. Organizational capital and community involvement need to be built up (much as in the developing economies). If everyone thinks the school is likely to be closed, collective action is unlikely. Therefore, a period in which resources are made available, change is encouraged, and the threat of closure is held in abeyance may be necessary. But if there is no requirement for improvements in performance at the end of the period, and a permanent guarantee of a quiet uncompetitive life, it will be equally hard to elicit collective effort. As with the developing economies, a combination of initial nurturing and protection followed by competition may work well.

The Obama administration has laid out a path for educational reform that involves a more detailed method of evaluating schools than the pass-fail system of the No Child Left Behind Act. It proposes nationwide testing standards, evaluation of teachers based on student test performance, and the entry of more charter schools, using the lever of additional cash for states and districts that adopt reforms.
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These are important and useful ideas and, if implemented, would be a major step forward in improving education. We should not, however, underestimate the resistance to common standards, transparency on performance, and student choice from failing schools and underperforming teachers, even if these constitute the minority—the attractions of a quiet life are immense and worth fighting for.