Averages can be misleading. The familiar, one-dimensional story told about American education is that it was once the best system in the world but that now it’s headed down the drain, with piles of money thrown down after it.
And while America does spend plenty on education, it funnels a disproportionate share into educating wealthier students, worsening that gap. The majority of other advanced countries do things differently, at least at the K-12 level, tilting resources in favor of poorer students.
Historically, the role of the federal government, which takes a back seat to the states in education, has been to try to close achievement gaps, but they have continued to widen. Several changes in federal education policy under President Obama have actually increased the flow of scarce federal dollars toward those students who need it less, reinforcing inequities and further weakening overall educational performance. Reversing America’s slide in international education rankings will require turning that record on its head.
America’s relative fall in educational attainment is striking in several dimensions. American baby boomers ages 55 to 64 rank first in their age group in high school completion and third in college completion after Israel and Canada. But jump ahead 30 years to millennials ages 25 to 34, and the United States slips to 10th in high school completion and 13th in college completion. America is one of only a handful of countries whose work force today has no more years of schooling than those who are retiring do.
On international tests, American students consistently score in the middle of the pack among advanced countries, but America underperforms most on two measures — preschool enrollment and college on-time completion. Nearly all 4-year-olds in Japan, France, Britain and Germany are enrolled in preschool, compared with 69 percent in the United States. And although the United States is relatively good at getting high school graduates into college, it is horrible at getting them to graduate on time with a college degree. With more than half of those who start college failing to earn a degree, the United States has the highest college dropout rate in the developed world.
On average, money is not the problem. Given the country’s relative wealth, per-pupil spending on elementary and high school is roughly on track with other advanced countries. At the college level, the United States spends lavishly, far more than any other country.
The problem is that the United States is not spending its education dollars effectively. At every point along the education track, from preschool to college, resources are skewed to wealthier students.
The wealthy inhabit an educational realm very different from what national averages suggest. Consider these examples. If ranked internationally as nations, low-poverty Massachusetts and Minnesota would be among the top 6 performers worldwide in fourth-grade math and science. Among 15-year-olds, Asian-Americans, who also tend to be more affluent, are the world’s best readers; white Americans are third only to Finns and New Zealanders. In a 2012 Harvard Business School survey, high-quality universities were rated the country’s chief competitive advantage. The world’s brightest students clamor to attend them.
But educational excellence is increasingly the preserve of the rich. Everyone — black, white, rich, middle class and poor — is testing better and enrolling more in college than the previous generation. But rich students, and particularly rich girls, are making bigger gains than everyone else. Strikingly, these achievement gaps exist when children first begin elementary school and are locked in place all the way through to college.
Wealthy Americans have an advantage in the admission process for elite colleges, and despite the few who may slip in on family legacy, the advantage is largely based on academic merit. Students from families in the highest income quintile are now eight times more likely than students in the bottom quintile to enroll in a “highly selective” college, one that requires a high school transcript filled with As in advanced placement courses, SAT scores in the 700s and a range of enriching extracurricular activities.
Those who get in are doing better than ever. The best colleges are seeing their dropout rates fall to near-zero levels, especially for women. The education they offer is generally better than what students get at less selective schools, too. One very revealing fact is that even for equally qualified students, academic outcomes at selective colleges are better across the board and their graduates earn more and are more likely to progress toward an advanced degree.
The real quality crisis in American higher education — where the dropout rate is sky high and climbing — is in community colleges and lower-tier public universities. They have also absorbed most of the historic increase in college enrollment and disproportionately serve minority and low-income students. Money is a big reason for their worse performance.
At the college level, the divergence in per-pupil spending is staggering. Since the 1960s, annual per-pupil spending at the most selective public and private colleges has increased at twice the rate of the least selective colleges. By 2006, the funding chasm in spending per student between the most and the least selective colleges was six times larger than in the late 1960s.
In short, more money is being spent on wealthy students who have never been more prepared to excel in college. Meanwhile, poorer students who are less prepared — those who a generation ago would not have even enrolled in college — are getting a smaller slice of higher education spending. According to a study by the demographer John Bound and his colleagues, lack of institutional resources explains up to two-thirds of the increase in dropout rates at lower-tier colleges.
Of course, this divergence in educational investments begins long before college. Wealthy parents are piling on cognitive enrichment activities outside of school from preschool on up, and at a rate that is leaving everyone else in the dust. Schools could make up some of the difference by intensively investing in poor children, and the majority of richer countries do just that — spending more per pupilin lower-income districts than in higher-income districts. But it is the reverse in the United States, in large part because, unlike most other advanced countries, revenues for public schools continue to be raised mostly from local property taxes.
This record is a harsh indictment of the federal government’s efforts to promote greater educational equality. Out of the civil rights era of the 1960s and early 1970s sprang a host of federal programs whose sole objective was to close achievement gaps. One is Head Start, which now serves close to one million low-income 3- and 4-year-olds and has tried for many years, with modest success, to make sure they’re ready for kindergarten. For K-12 public schools, the federal government apportions money, called Title I and IDEA grants, to school districts based on the number of low-income or special-needs students they serve. Then there is the huge Pell grant program to help low-income students pay for college, which is the single largest component of the Department of Education’s budget.
via Schooling Ourselves in an Unequal America – NYTimes.com.
By ANHPE in Improving Education, International Comparison on June 17, 2013 .
I can’t see this tendency reversing considering the emphasis on charter schools.
I have not witnessed ANY indication that the Obama administration has “pushed for more cost and quality accountability for education providers who cater to low-income children “. Instead the administration has stood on the sidelines while Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia closed schools, many of which were NOT low performing. At the same time, they have stood on the sidelines while those same districts kept low-performing for profit schools opened. The fact that Obama has been silent during the devastating cuts to Philadelphia schools is especially appalling.