Guess what? Hillary was right!

According to a new international survey,
“Among adults age 25 to 34, the U.S. is ninth among industrialized nations in the share of its population that has at least a high school degree. In the same age group, the United States ranks seventh, with Belgium, in the share of people who hold a college degree.”

But before anyone calls the methodology into question (which is perfectly fair) it should be noted that the US was rated first (#1) just 20 years ago.

The CNN article that reported these findings went on to note that the issue is not just money: “In all levels of education, the United States spends $11,152 per student. That's the second highest amount, behind the $11,334 spent by Switzerland.”

Of course, the above statistic means nothing if that money is not being equally distributed, as it is not. In fact, I would speculate the state of education in America is probably artificially inflated by virtue of the minority of elite schools which produce extremely bright and talented children and drag our national average up.

Education is perhaps the most difficult problem in our nation to solve because the most important variables are so out of government control. We all know how government can do better: smaller class sizes, better pay for teachers to attract quality people into the profession, are certainly among them. I would also add that we need an national education policy, a system of funding that does not rely on the unequal property-tax method, and standards of licensing that are uniform and common-sense rather than varied from state to state and mind-bogglingly complex.

As economist Michael Podgursky notes:
“As opposed to licensing boards in other professions such as medicine, dentistry, and law, which issue only one license, states boards typically issue from 75 to over 150 certificates. Schools districts are expected to match these many licenses to the hundreds of courses that are taught in any school year. Since it is nearly impossible for a school district to be continuously in compliance in this system, virtually all states allow some sort of emergency or provisional licensing. It is widely reported that many urban districts are hiring large numbers of teachers with such licenses.”

All of that aside however, a specialist in the field of education has assured me that the real difference between student performances is not so much economic as it is how much help and reinforcement the student is getting at home and in his or her community (the specialist, by the way, is my wife, a 1st grade teacher in a school whose students are 99.1% poor- that is, living at or below the poverty line). But how do you make parents more interested in education and their child’s future? That is what makes the education crisis so vexing. There is no single law that will help, no amount of money will do the trick. Furthermore, education is so intimately related to so many other social and political woes, it is difficult to imagine much success in many other areas so long as our education continues to deteriorate.

As Hillary Clinton says in her book, It Takes a Village,
“Children are not rugged individualists. They depend on adults they know and on thousands more who make decisions every day that affect their well-being. All of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, are responsible for deciding whether our children are raised in a nation that doesn't just espouse family values but values families and children.”

I didn’t write this post to propose an answer to the problem, although I have a couple of ideas, but I did want to bring this study to everyone’s attention as one more reminder of what everyone already knows: that our education system in the US is woefully inadequate to compete in a global economy.