Last July, President Obama announced a $4.35 billion discretionary fund for reforms in America’s schools from kindergarten through grade 12, the largest such project in history. Education secretary Arne Duncan named the fund “Race to the Top” and has been promoting it with a very specific challenge: “To every governor who aspires to be his state's ‘education governor,’ this is your moment.”
Grants from this fund are to be made to States willing to advance reforms in (1) standards and assessments; (2) measurements of student growth and improvements in instruction; (3) recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals; and (4) turning around our lowest-achieving schools. If you wonder whether American education needs an injection of so much more money for the project’s stated goals, consider the existing conditions.
According to a recent Kiplinger Letter, only 73 percent of all students in public four-year high schools graduate, and only 25 percent of all adults have a college education. When asked, over 60 percent of America’s businesses said they encounter difficulties when looking for qualified workers. The shortages are particularly noticeable in engineering, nursing, medical and information technology, programming, and other skills requiring special training beyond a basic college education.
Many newly developing technical skills require more post secondary schooling. Yet, too few American students get the training they are likely to need in mathematics and science. Kiplinger reported that “more than half of the U.S. doctorates awarded in 2005 in engineering, mathematics, computer science, physics and economics went to students here on temporary visas.”
The outlook is not better for the two thirds of the jobs that do not require advanced education. In 2007, nearly 6.2 million students, or one out of five, between the ages of 16 and 24 dropped out of high school, thus fueling what has been called "a persistent high school dropout crisis." The dropout total represented 16 percent of all Americans in that age range, but 28 percent for Latinos and 21 percent for blacks, according to a study by the Center for Labor Market Studies, entitled "Left Behind in America: The Nation's Dropout Crisis."
The Center warned that it is almost impossible for high school drop-outs to earn an income sufficient for taking care of a family. Over a working lifetime from age 18 to 64, high school dropouts are earning an estimated $400,000 less than high school graduates. For males, the lifetime earnings loss is nearly $485,000 and exceeds $500,000 in many large states. Dropouts contribute far less in taxes than they receive in benefits from the public purse. Over their lifetimes, they stand to impose a net fiscal burden on the rest of society.
When Duncan announced the Race to the Top fund, he may have been daydreaming when he called it “the equivalent of education reform's moon shot,” but even Republicans could not deny that the Obama administration tries to reverse the dropout trend, at least by increasing the available finances. Yet, to what extent can money change the underlying handicaps in public schooling, as, for example, the tens of thousands of dysfunctional families whose children have few incentives to learn, the unknown number of mediocre teachers incapable of inspiring learning, or the widespread opposition to achieving the most for every child by tracking according to ability and performance?
Surely, money alone will not improve our schools but it ought to help.