Education and Social Policy
Although he wrote this a little bit ago, I recommend that everyone check out Dylan Matthews’ reflections on volunteering at a SEED school in Washington, D.C. His post captures a lot about the education debate, especially how a narrow focus on education per se can obscure how other areas of social policy — namely child poverty and its attendant cultural blocks to achievement — can have a very powerful effect on educational outcomes.
Basically, what Dylan saw were a group of students and teachers and administrators who were all dedicated to boosting achievement for low income youth in a depressed urban area. Those who work at SEED put it in extraordinary hours, and the students who are there, though they are admitted by a lottery, are still from that group of students whose parents signed up from the lottery, meaning that they already have a leg up over the rest of the general population.
Yet, the results are still unsatisfying. Even though SEED repersents the type of holistic approach that most everyone agrees is necessary for truely disadvantaged youth — meaning that beyond more and better academic instruction, there’s an attempt to actually change their habits, culture, surroundings and outlooks — it still can only achieve so much. That’s because “The kids get there too late for these things to make that big of a difference” and so SEED can’t really manage to totally change the lives of all these kids, and thus has a very high drop out rate.
So here’s the big social policy problem. SEED, which already selects from a top strata of kids and has an all-encompassing approach to education, isn’t really working. And even if it were, it would suffer from the same problem that every type of model program has — the inability to scale. Quite simply, there are plenty of programs and approaches that can boost the achievement of a small group of disadvantaged students. The Knowledge is Power Program, for example, is considered to be the crown jewel of this model approach, and yet, there’s no evidence that KIPP is at all scaleable to actually educating all the kids in a single large, urban school district, let alone all the disadvantaged youth in the country.
Clearly, high school is much to late to start the interventions that are necessary to make equality of opportunity a reality in this country. Hell, middle school is probably too late for a large portion of the disadvantaged population. At that point, this stops being an education policy question and turns into a social policy question. And it’s an expensive one.
Countries that have effectively dealt with this problem of child poverty and early childhood education are ones in Scandinavia and Europe that devote a huge portion of their GDP to government spending. I imagine that if we were serious about dealing with educational inequality in this country, we’d probably have to spend even more money on this bundle of social programs because our dysfunction is on a much larger scale and is much more entrenched in entire communities.
One problem with this approach to educational achievements gaps — to focus on spending more money on social programs — is that you can’t describe it as education funding. That’s because it isn’t really education funding at all. For instance, pumping more money into DC public schools, even if its for something relatively good like paying good teachers more, probably won’t do much to improve educational outcomes. More money for early childhood programs, health care and the like, however, probably would do more. But the way most Americans approach and think about these problems, education is separate from these type of social policy issues.
So, when Dylan says that the 90 billion for education funding in the stimulus was an encouraging but paltry figure, I have to disagree. I don’t think that pouring 90 billion dollars into existing funding streams and institutions will do all that much. Instead, we need to think more broadly about education and realize that the biggest gains will come from making investments in social policy. Once we see improvement on basic health and early childhood issues, then we can have a discussion about “education” funding.
PS – I should note that just because addressing child poverty and the like is incredibly important, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t pursue other education reforms like a focus on the quality of teachers.
