The American adult population is still the best educated in the world (see table 1.2) but only because our older generations (over thirty-five years of age) are better educated than their counterparts in Canada, Europe, or Asia. The sad fact is that the current generation (under thirty-five) is outshone by its peers in a dozen or so countries—including Canada. (Throughout this book I will be using Canada as a comparison for many of the human-capital issues under discussion. Canada is an excellent benchmark for comparative purposes because among all the nations in the world it is the most like the United States. In their history, population composition, primary language, popular culture, economy, housing, civic beliefs, and many other ways, Canadians are like Americans.) Americans used to lead the world in years of school completed, high school graduation rates, college attendance and graduation rates, and international tests of school performance. We no longer do. Even more disturbing, the current generation of young Americans is not doing as well in some key measures as that of its parents. All of these indicators are especially disheartening given the extraordinary efforts directed at educational reform these days.
Behind these unsatisfactory indicators lie several stories. The most compelling is the continuing large discrepancy in academic performance between white and Asian children (higher) and African American and Hispanic children (lower). This performance gap has been receiving public attention—and efforts at remediation—for over half a century now, beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that ended formal school segregation. On its heels, as part of the late 1960s Great Society legislation, Congress instituted federal aid targeted to school districts with large numbers of poor minority children. In the 1980s, publicly funded, privately operated “charter schools” were launched to give poor minority children access to a presumably more effective alternative to their local public schools. Most recently, President George W. Bush persuaded Congress to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, which made federal aid conditional on local districts implementing rigorous annual testing regimes, with the specific—and mandated—goal of closing the ethnic performance gap. The sad truth is that half a century of efforts dedicated to closing this gap have borne only modest fruit. In chapter 3 I will address this issue and put forward policy recommendations that, if implemented, may finally give poor minority children a decent chance of catching up with their more successful white and Asian peers.
Table 1.2
School Years Completed and Percent of College Graduates among Adults in Selected Countries, 2010
Source: R. J. Barro and J. W. Lee, “A New Data Set of Educational Attainment in the World, 1950–2010,” Working Paper 15902 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, April 2010).
But the ethnic performance gap is not the only reason that American children are losing the global education race. The largely unacknowledged fact is that the majority of white (and some Asian) students in most American school districts are not learning as much as they should, or as much as they are capable of. In other words, a large share of the “not left behind” face a substantial performance gap vis-à-vis their upper-middle-class peers in the United States, and their mainstream counterparts in northern Europe and East Asia. The children subject to this gap fall into two categories. The least worrisome component is made up of the vast cohort of schoolchildren who are insufficiently challenged today because of low academic expectations. Happily, this gap should be relatively easy to close. All it will take is the will, on the part of the fifty American states and their fourteen thousand school districts, to toughen up their school curricula and demand more effort from their schoolchildren.
More troubling is the growing army of white children who perform poorly in school because, like low-income African-American and Hispanic children, they are being raised in single-parent households where they receive insufficient stimulation or motivation. No amount of social engineering, which would not be politically viable in any case, can change these circumstances. But the right kind of school environment and academic program can effectively compensate for them. How to help both subsets of these ostensibly “not left behind” schoolchildren will be taken up in chapters 3 and 4.
The last stage of formal education’s contribution to the smart society is post-secondary education, “college” in ordinary parlance. The importance of a college education in today’s global, information-age economy is now taken for granted. Accordingly, most state governments and our national one are working hard to raise college attendance rates while also increasing student “diversity” (i.e., increasing rates of black and Hispanic attendance). If these efforts succeeded, American human capital would in fact be significantly enriched—assuming the new collegiate enrollees actually graduated and mastered college-level material.
Unfortunately, while the percentage of high school graduates aspiring to a college education, 62 percent, is bigger now than it ever has been, and may be even bigger than in any other country, the United States now lags in college graduation rates. A growing number of young Americans do not even make it out of high school and many of those who do are not ready for college. As a result, only two-thirds of American baccalaureate enrollees today graduate after six years, and less than a third of those attending community and technical college earn any degree at all, including those who transfer to baccalaureate schools.
These low academic success rates can be traced to several root causes. Perhaps the greatest is the inadequacy of the typical student’s high school preparation, something that colleges alone cannot cure—even when they devote heroic resources to “remediation.” Thus, meaningful higher education reform must begin in high school, with a thorough subject-by-subject, college-led integration of high school and college curricula and a refusal by colleges to admit underprepared students. Much of the blame can also be placed on the shoulders of the colleges. Too many institutions are far more interested in the numbers of students who enter (on whose tuition and federal aid dollars they depend for survival) than on the numbers who graduate, and most colleges are hardly interested at all in how well any of their former students do after they leave. How American higher education can become both more accessible and effective as the human-capital foundation of the next generation is the subject of chapter 5.
Productivity It is not enough for the adults in a society to be well educated if their education is not put to good use and if no further growth in their capabilities takes place after they graduate from school or college as young men and women. For a society’s human capital to flourish, it must be applied and strengthened in its workplaces. As noted earlier, this means that as many adults as possible should be working, and their effort should be amplified by high-quality production technology. Consider the dismal productivity of Russia and some countries of the Middle East, where the people are quite well educated, but where the economies are so dysfunctional, and workplace technology so out-of-date, that their societal human-capital investments in the young are largely squandered by adulthood.
As it happens, the strongest leg of America’s human-capital tripod today is its workplace productivity, but that, too, may not be true for much longer. American workplace technology is still the world’s most advanced, but will start falling behind in the years ahead unless the United States maintains its lead in scientific research. American workers, long the world’s “workaholics,” are working less these days, some because of the dismal state of the economy, others due to misguided public policies.
Early on, American civic and political leaders understood that a modern, high-growth economy depended not only on a flourishing free-market economy uninhibited by stifling regulations, high taxes, or restraints on competition but also on the most modern productivity-enhancing technology. To this end, among the U.S. Constitution’s