I have repeatedly drummed on the problems in public education here in Texas. Well, just to keep you up to date there are three other pieces that have come across my desk in the last 24 hours in reference to education. Taken together with liberaltexans reporting and the context out of our past, they paint a pretty scary picture for our future.
First there was a report out of New York on the long term impact of excellent early education, especially excellent teachers!
Economists have generally thought that the answer was not much. Great teachers and early childhood programs can have a big short-term effect. But the impact tends to fade. By junior high and high school, children who had excellent early schooling do little better on tests than similar children who did not - which raises the demoralizing question of how much of a difference schools and teachers can make.
There has always been one major caveat, however, to the research on the fade-out effect. It was based mainly on test scores, not on a broader set of measures, like a child's health or eventual earnings. As Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, says: "We don't really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes."
Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.
[snip]
The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.
All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile - a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher - could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.
I have always maintained that the over-emphasis on test scores is a horrible and counterproductive way of evaluating what our teachers and schools are doing. It is compounded when it becomes the sole determinant on how we allocate our education dollars, as hard as they are to come by here in Texas. This , at the very least, challenges the basic presumptions of the testing regime both the one we are shedding over the next few years and the new one (end of course examinations) we are implementing.
There was also this tidbit that helps explain why it is so hard to recruit and keep good teachers:
A new survey by researchers at Sam Houston State University shows that the percentage of teachers who held second jobs this past school year was the highest in the three decades that the study has been conducted.
The survey also pointed to a potential toll in the classroom as two-thirds of those who moonlight said the quality of their teaching would be better if they didn't have to work another job.
But most say they can't afford to quit.
The new figures represented a jump of nearly 50 percent from two years ago. Teachers also were asked about working during the summer months - and 56 percent reported they held a job while on summer break. That figure also was up from the last survey in 2008
I have a friend of my stepson who is preparing to teach right now. She was told that schools presume that teachers will spend about $5,000 of their own dollars on their elementary classrooms per year. I reassured her that this was not an "official" requirement, but in fact teachers do spend several thousand dollars a year on their students. It is one of the hidden subsidies which allow the Repugs of the state to skate by with the broken educational funding system we now use. That system is at the point of collapse as we speak. The $19 billion dollar shortfall in the state budget will be made up partially on the backs of school children and teachers. So they can expect not more , but less funding in the coming budget.
Finally, the last piece of news - these short comings are cumulative.
The story that broke last week about the U.S. trailing other nations in college graduation rates may seem like one of those pieces you've read before. After all, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman beat the drum hard a few years back about India and China catching up with us in engineering.
College graduates by state
Nevertheless, the College Board's report about the U.S. falling to 12th in worldwide graduation rates has tremendous relevance here in Texas. As it turns out, not only is the U.S. lagging, but Texas ranks 40th among the 50 states plus the District of Columbia in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds who hold an associate degree or higher. In fact, only 27.4 percent of Texans in that critical age range have earned a post-secondary degree, placing our state well behind the national average of 41.6 percent and far closer to the bottom of the scale than the top.
Let's spell out the consequences for our future. Lower earnings for our citizens, less college grads, less tax revenues for our state, less competitiveness in attracting companies, especially high tech ones. These things can act together to produce, if left unchecked a sort of death spiral where the failures in early childhood education (and health care) produce even less competitive adults meaning less taxes to fix the problem. Rinse and repeat....
The data below compares the best states number with ours. The gap is 21 percent points. Anybody want to bet that Perry , if re-elected will do much to turn this around? Anybody think he has any new ideas? Do you think that more tax cuts will solve our crisis?
Percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. with an associate degree or higher, 2008:
THE TOP 5
1. District of Columbia, 62.2 percent
2. Massachusetts, 48.1 percent
3. North Dakota, 45.2 percent
4. Minnesota, 43.1 percent
5. New York, 41.9 percent
U.S. average, 41.6 percent
40. Texas, 27.4 percent
THE BOTTOM 5
47. Nevada, 25.2 percent
48. West Virginia, 24.7 percent
49. New Mexico, 24.4 percent
50. Arkansas, 22.5 percent
51. Louisiana, 22.5 percent
SOURCE: "The College Completion Agenda: 2010 Progress," collegeboard.org
