We Don't Need No (Traditional) Education

The New York Times Magazine's education feature is getting some buzz today. Well worth a read, though the point is relatively simple: Poor and immigrant parents employ different parenting strategies that tend to result in worse developmental, academic, and professional outcomes (conversely, their children tend to be happier, but who cares about that?), and you can't fix that through traditional education techniques.So far as the different parenting strategies go, the author makes a point of noting that the poor and immigrant families raise their kids much as middle class Americans did a generation ago. That implies an interesting causal question of whether these strategies actually make kids better off, or just make them better suited to assimilation in a world where the educated set the standards. I've really no idea. On the other hand, I've read some arguments that the inordinate success of Jews in this country came because they deployed this hyper-verbal, negotiation-based parenting style before it was cool, so that might be evidence that it's legitimately helpful.

Lastly, one thing the author doesn't go into is the success of Asian and Indian children, who, in my experience, come from far more authoritarian homes than the yuppie parents being lauded in the article, and end up doing quite a bit better in school -- though their success appears to center in technical rather than verbal subjects. I don't know how you replicate that style of parenting, or even whether you'd want to, but it certainly appears to offer an alternative, and effective, template to the time-consuming "New School" parenting.

The piece does profiles an apparently effective school, which works to replicate the effects of "New School" parenting through really long hours and an intense concentration on socialization techniques. It's interesting and hopeful stuff, though I'm slightly doubtful these schools could workably be replicated on a large scale: It's not the capital that concerns me, but the human talent. There are only so many effective crusaders willing to work 14-hour days for moderate wages in an inner-city environment, and even they're only willing to do it for so long. If we paid these teachers much better, though, maybe this could be an alternative to law school for smart social science students.

That last may sound facetious, but it's not. There are certain professions we may want to heavily subsidize in order to attract excess talent. Society can place a higher value on top-flight graduates turning to inner-city teaching than the market does, and given the intense interest students have shown in Teach For America, it probably wouldn't even cost that much. I'd happily cut some deal in which we expand charter schools while eliminating funding inequities and putting real money towards fixing problems like these:

nationwide, the best and most experienced teachers are allowed to choose where they teach. And since most state contracts offer teachers no bonus or incentive for teaching in a school with a high population of needy children, the best teachers tend to go where they are needed the least. A study that the Education Trust issued in June used data from Illinois to demonstrate the point. Illinois measures the quality of its teachers and divides their scores into four quartiles, and those numbers show glaring racial inequities. In majority-white schools, bad teachers are rare: just 11 percent of the teachers are in the lowest quartile. But in schools with practically no white students, 88 percent of the teachers are in the worst quartile. The same disturbing pattern holds true in terms of poverty. At schools where more than 90 percent of the students are poor — where excellent teachers are needed the most — just 1 percent of teachers are in the highest quartile.

Government spending on education does not tend to compensate for these inequities; in fact, it often makes them worse. Goodwin Liu, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has compiled persuasive evidence for what he calls the country’s “education apartheid.” In states with more poor children, spending per pupil is lower. In Mississippi, for instance, it is $5,391 a year; in Connecticut, it is $9,588. Most education financing comes from state and local governments, but the federal supplement for poor children, Title 1, is “regressive,” Liu points out, because it is tied to the amount each state spends. So the federal government gives Arkansas $964 to help educate each poor child in the state, and it gives Massachusetts $2,048 for each poor child there.

Reducing educational inequality and drawing talent out of our inner cities strikes me as a perfectly acceptable social priority. I may have my problems with No Child Left Behind -- you're not going to make every single student proficient, you're just not -- but if George W. Bush has done anything positive since entering office, it's restoring momentum and attention to educational equality and advancement.