Time to turn the page ……STEFAN THEIL
A lot of nations are spending on education. But are they spending right?
A lot of nations are spending on education. But are they spending right?
“I f we want to become a we want to become a strong economy again, the best thing we can do is have an educated workforce.” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s explanaArne Duncan’s explanation of why Washington is funneling $100 billion to schools and universities as part of February’s giant stimulus package. Indeed, other countries are following suit, with Britain, Germany, Canada, China, and others making new education funding part of their anti-crisis strategies.
What’s far less clear is that this money is going where it’s most needed–or likely to have the greatest social and economic payoff. In Germany, the bulk of nearly euro 10 billion in new school spending is being used to renovate buildings–a bonanza for construction companies and popular with parents and teachers, but unlikely to have much effect on the quality of German graduates.
InBritain,PrimeMinisterGordonBrownispushing for more PCs and Web access in schools–another policy that’s popular but considered irrelevant by educators. In the US, a July audit by the Government Accountability Office found that schools were using the stimulus money to fund their general budgets. And in still other countries, governments are using money to help build new world-class universities-projects that a World Bank study in July warned risk bleeding resources away from more desperately needed areas. “I’m not sure that the people making these decisions even realise the trade-offs involved,” says Jamil Salmi, author of the study. That’s particularly unfortunate today, given the economic stakes. According to an April report by McKinsey, the US’s GDP would have been 9 to 16 per cent–or $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion–higher in 2008 had US high-school graduates attained the average skills of their peers in Canada, Finland, or South Korea.
This fall, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will unveil a similar study in Paris detailing the losses suffered by other laggards. Andreas Schleicher, author of the OECD study, says that “in a whole row of countries, the economic losses of educational underperformance are significantly higher than the costs of the financial crisis.” What’s worse, he says, countries pay the price for their mistakes year after year.
The biggest error governments are making is to blindly push for more and better everything at all levels of education: more teachers, flashier facilities, more technology in the classroom, and more elite universities. Saudi Arabia, for example, is currently spending $13 billion on a single graduate school. All such efforts may seem sensible, but studies by academics at Munich’s IFO Institute and Stanford, among other places, show that simply spending more on education doesn’t yield better results. Kids don’t necessarily learn more if they sit in smaller classrooms, in more modern and better-equipped schools, or even if their teachers are better-paid (as opposed to just better). The United States, France, and Germany have upped spending significantly in past decades only to see performance stagnate, while countries like Sweden and Finland have boosted quality through structural reform.
Even building better universities has a lower return than one would think. Peer Ederer, who heads the Lisbon Council’s Human Capital Index Project, says the biggest problems university systems face today are high dropout rates and too fewskillstaughtforlatercareers–problemsmost current spending proposals do little to address.
Salmi says the huge resources now being spent to create elite schools would be better used for expanding and improving engineering programmes at unflashy polytechnics, for example.
President Obama’s advisers seem to be listening closely; in July, they announced a $12 billion boost for two-year community colleges.
President Obama’s advisers seem to be listening closely; in July, they announced a $12 billion boost for two-year community colleges.
Studies such as McKinsey’s suggest another important way education policy should be refocused. They find that the largest returns on investment come not from funneling more money toward top or even average performers, but toward those who have been left behind. Raising the achievement of the unskilled and excluded would lead not only to individual payoffs, such as higher incomes and more meaningful lives, but also would generate big benefits for economies, such as higher productivity and greater GDP. It would also result in broad social gains–less crime, less welfare spending, and a greater sense of cohesion.
If there is one thing most experts agree on, however, it’s that the earlier the system intervenes, the better. In Germany, where the educational achievements of immigrants and other socially disadvantaged groups are strikingly low, a study by Katharina Spiess of the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin found out that if you can get immigrant kids to attend kindergarten, they are 25 per cent more likely to go on to a pre-university track.
Harvard economist James Heckman estimates that preschool programmes for disadvantaged kids cost $10,000 per student a year–not cheap by any means–but generate a 16 per cent annual rate of return. He says 75per cent of the “profit” accrues to society, in the form of lower crime rates, fewer welfare payments, and greater economic productivity, as well as better integration of minorities and immigrants.
One country that has systematically pushed this maxim is Canada, which saw a big surge in immigration in the 1990s. In Toronto, where more than 40 per cent of schoolchildren speak a mother tongue other than English and more than a third come from socially disadvantaged families, the entire school system is concentrated on raising these kids to the level of their peers. Though it still struggles with high dropout rates, Toronto has been able to erase the achievement difference between migrants and natives–in marked contrast to cities in Germany and France, where the gap has been widening. It’s one reason why Canadian students get some of the highest scores on international achievement tests.
Given how obvious all this sounds, why haven’t more countries already figured it out? One answer is that determining what kind of education spending is most economically and socially effective–as opposed to merely popular–requires the kind of close self-scrutiny that is foreign to most school systems.