Social Democratic America (10 page)

All three strategies—improving preparation, enhancing retention, and reducing cost—would help. But where do we start? Christopher Jencks offers the following sensible advice: “Making college a lot more affordable is a challenge governments know how to meet, while making students learn a lot more is a challenge we do not currently know how to meet. Under those circumstances, starting with affordability is probably the best bet.”
²⁸

In Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, attending a four-year public university is free. In those countries the odds that a person whose parents didn't complete high school will attend college are between 40 percent and 60 percent, compared to just 30 percent in the United States.
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Some feel it makes no sense to try to increase college attendance and completion.
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After all, there is a limited supply of high-skill jobs, so some graduates will end up in jobs that don't require anything near college-level skills. Yet if our aim is to maximize capabilities, including the ability to make informed preferences, we must help more Americans from low-income families into and through college. In addition to providing a vocational skill and a valuable job-market credential, a college education can aid in the
development of general skills, such as complex reasoning, critical thinking, and written and verbal communication.

Moving backward through the education system, what about K-12? After rising steadily for a century, the share of Americans completing secondary school has been stuck at 75 percent for several decades.
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Social and economic shifts are partly to blame: there are more students for whom English is not the principal language at home, more children grow up in unstable families, and the incomes of low-income households have barely budged. Despite these obstacles, or perhaps because of them, we need schools to do better.

A generation ago many blamed the huge inequality of school resources, a product of our decentralized, property-tax-based system of school funding.
³²
Some of that inequality has been rectified, as state governments now contribute a larger share of funds to schools and distribute them to offset the unequal distribution of local property values.
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While funding inequality across states remains substantial, overall the situation is better.

Some believe the problem lies in lack of competition among public schools. If competition works, it is in one respect an ideal policy strategy: it requires little or no understanding of why some schools perform well while others don't. Customers (parents) simply choose the effective schools, and the bad ones go out of business. Choice is a good thing in and of itself. We want to be able to choose our doctor, after all, so why not our children's school? Social democratic Sweden introduced choice into its school systems in the mid-1990s.

But so far our experience in the United States suggests that whatever its intrinsic merit, choice may not improve schooling. Charter schools—publicly funded elementary and secondary schools that are allowed considerable leeway in determining procedures and practices and that compete with regular public schools—have not, on average, boosted student performance.
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In any case, transportation barriers, friendship ties, and other factors cause many children who might benefit from switching to a better school to remain at their nearby school instead.
³⁵

The federal government's 2001 No Child Left Behind reform mandated regular standardized testing in America's elementary and secondary schools. This is a useful means of improving information about school effectiveness. But it is not in and of itself a strategy for making schools better.

Evidence from a variety of sources—standardized tests in the United States, international tests, quasi-experimental studies, and a host of qualitative analyses—suggests that teachers are a key ingredient in effective K-12 schooling.
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We should do more to attract, retain, and support good teachers. That means more-rigorous training, better efforts to identify effective teachers, higher pay, improved working conditions, and reduced restrictions on firing less effective teachers.
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Of the various things we can do to improve American schooling, the most valuable would be to introduce universal high-quality affordable early education. Here, too, we can learn from the Nordic countries. Beginning in the 1960s, these countries introduced and steadily expanded paid maternity leave and publicly funded childcare and preschool. Today, Danish and Swedish parents can take a paid year off work following the birth of a child. After that, parents can put the child in a public or cooperative early education center. Early education teachers receive training and pay comparable to that of elementary school teachers. Parents pay a fee, but the cost is capped at around 10 percent of household income. In these countries, the influence of parents' education, income, and parenting practices on their children's cognitive abilities, likelihood of completing high school and college, and labor market success is weaker than elsewhere.
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Evidence increasingly suggests that the early years of a child's life are the most important ones for developing cognitive and noncognitive skills, so the Nordic countries' success in equalizing opportunity very likely owes partly, perhaps largely, to early education.
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Early education also facilitates employment of parents, especially mothers, thereby enhancing women's economic opportunity and boosting family incomes.
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In a country that values
employment, that wants to facilitate and promote work, this is the type of service our government should support. About half of preschool-age American children already are in out-of-home care, but much of it is unregulated and therefore of uneven quality.
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While some parents can pay for excellent care, many cannot. Universal early education would change that.

When someone suggests borrowing a policy or institution from the Nordic countries, skeptics immediately point out that these countries are very different from the United States. They're small, they're more ethnically and racially homogenous, and their cultures and histories are quite distinct from ours. What works there, in other words, won't necessarily work here.

That's true. But it doesn't justify blanket skepticism about borrowing. We have to consider the particulars of the policy in question. There is no reason to think a system of public, or at least publicly funded, early-education centers (schools) can function effectively only in a small homogenous country. France has this kind of system, even though it's a pretty large nation. Belgium does, too, despite its diversity. And we do a reasonably good job with our kindergartens and elementary schools. Education experts and ordinary Americans routinely profess dissatisfaction with our K-12 public schools. But recall the evidence from summer vacations: children from less advantaged homes lose substantial ground when they aren't in school. American schools could be better, to be sure, but for less advantaged children they are, even in their current condition, far better than the likely alternative.

Why should early education be universal? Why not just expand Head Start, our existing public pre-K program for low-income children? The reason is that development of both cognitive and, especially, noncognitive skills is helped by peer interaction. Children from less advantaged homes gain by mixing with kids from middle-class homes, which doesn't happen in a program that exclusively serves the poor.
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I've focused on schools because they are our principal lever for enhancing opportunity. But they aren't the only one. Three other strategies are worth pursuing.
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First, we could get more money into the hands of low-income families with children. Greg Duncan, Ariel Kalil, and Kathleen Ziol-Guest have found that for American children growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, an increase in family income of a mere $3,000 during a person's first five years of life was associated with nearly 20 percent higher earnings later in life.
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Most other affluent countries, including those that do better on equality of opportunity, offer a universal “child allowance.” In Canada, for instance, a family with two children receives an annual allowance of around $3,000, and low-income families with two children might receive more than $6,000.
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We have a weaker version, the Child Tax Credit, which doles out a maximum of $1,000 a year per child. Moreover, receipt of the money is contingent on filing a federal tax return, which not all low-income families do.

Second, in the 1970s and 1980s, the United States began incarcerating more young men, including many for minor offenses. Having a criminal record makes it difficult to get a stable job with decent pay, dooming many offenders to a life of low income.
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We should rethink our approach to punishment for nonviolent drug offenders. States that have reduced imprisonment, turning to alternative punishments such as fines and community corrections programs, have experienced drops in crime similar to those in states that have increased imprisonment.
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If more states followed suit, we could avoid needlessly undermining the employment opportunities of a significant number of young men from less advantaged homes.

Third, since the late 1960s, affirmative action programs for university admissions and hiring have promoted opportunity for women and members of racial and ethnic minority groups.
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Affirmative action should continue, but with family background as the focal criterion.
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In
chapter 2
, I described the slow growth of income among lower-half American households since the 1970s. But what if there is no alternative? Do globalization, heightened competition, computerization, and manufacturing decline make it impossible for more than a little of our economic growth to trickle down to households on the middle and lower rungs of the income ladder? To assess this hypothesis, we can look at the experiences of other rich nations. Have they suffered the same decoupling of household income growth from economic growth?

Some have, but many haven't. In fact, in quite a few other affluent countries we see a healthy relationship between economic growth and household income growth since the 1970s.
Figure 3.5
shows the pattern in the United States and fourteen other nations. The horizontal axis shows change in GDP per capita, and the vertical axis shows change in average income among households on the lower half of the income ladder. The United States is one of the lowest on the vertical axis; the incomes of lower-half American households increased less than in most of the other nations. In some cases, such as Finland and Austria, that's because their economy grew more rapidly than ours did. But a number of countries, including Denmark and Sweden, achieved larger increases in household incomes despite increases in GDP per capita very similar to America's. Too little of our economic growth trickled down.
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Why did some countries do better than others? Lower-half households have two principal sources of income: earnings and net government transfers. Earnings are wage or salary income from employment. Net government transfers are cash and near-cash benefits a household receives from government programs minus taxes it pays.
Figure 3.6
shows the contribution to household income growth from each of these two sources. Data are available for twelve countries. Here I separate households in the bottom
quarter of incomes from those in the lower-middle quarter (together these make up the lower half). Among households in the bottom quarter, rising income came mostly from increases in net government transfers. Among those in the lower-middle quarter, rising income stemmed from improvement in both earnings and net government transfers.
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In America, neither earnings nor net government transfers increased much. That's why we observe the decoupling of economic growth and lower-half household income growth in the United States in
figure 3.5
(also
figure 2.5
).

FIGURE
3.5 Economic growth and lower-half households' income growth, 1979–2005

Change is per year on both axes. The actual years vary somewhat depending on the country. Household incomes are posttransfer-posttax, adjusted for household size (the amounts shown are for a household with four persons). The income data are averages for households in the lower half of the income distribution. Household incomes and GDP per capita are adjusted for inflation using the CPI and converted to US dollars using purchasing power parities. “Asl” is Australia; “Aus” is Austria. Ireland and Norway are omitted; both would be far off the plot in the upper-right corner.
Data sources
: OECD, stats.oecd.org; Luxembourg Income Study,
www.lisdatacenter.org
.