Education: Getting What You Pay For

By Jack E. White

This is the first in a series of articles that will attempt to stimulate debate by examining the issues facing the next President, exploring solutions and analyzing how the candidates are dealing with them.

An appalling number of America's schools are atrocious.

Study after depressing study confirms what has been painfully obvious to millions of parents, teachers, prospective employers and students. Every year our schools turn out more than a million young adults who cannot keep up with the intellectual demands of an increasingly technological economy or with their counterparts in Western Europe and Japan. In addition to the 700,000 who, despite twelve years of what passes for formal education, have such poor reading skills that they cannot digest a newspaper or fill out a job application, an identical number drop out, forfeiting whatever educational benefits might be osmotically obtained from simply showing up for class.

Far too many inner-city schools are less centers of learning than custodial institutions complete with wardens (principals) and guards (teachers) striving to control a mob of prisoners (students), some so preoccupied with the three Cs -- crack, crime and casual sex -- that they have no time for the three Rs. But the educational blight is not confined to underclass ghettos and barrios. Despite efforts to upgrade the math skills of U.S. students, a recent survey indicates that nearly half of American 17-year-olds cannot perform simple calculations that are normally learned in junior high school. Other surveys have documented equally dreary student performance in reading, writing and critical thinking. So ill equipped is the current crop of high school graduates that U.S. corporations spend $25 billion a year for remedial * training programs for new employees on whom state, local and federal agencies have already lavished $130 billion in an attempt to teach them to read, write and cipher.

As the Department of Education warned in 1983, a foreign power scheming to weaken America could not have concocted a more insidious plot than the debasement of public education. The threat to U.S. security ranges from the fact that nearly a quarter of military recruits cannot understand written safety instructions to the growing shortage of students in science and engineering. At the dawn of a new era of international competition, less than one-quarter of public high school students are currently enrolled in a foreign-language course. The bulk of American students cannot locate the world's most important nations on a map if their lives depend on it, which, in a sense, they do.

Each new revelation of the flunking performance of many U.S. students provokes a loud outcry for tougher standards, better instruction, classroom innovations. So far, all the noise has had shockingly limited impact on what actually goes on in the schools. Most high schools still do not require students to meet widely accepted standards for math and science. On the average, a student takes only 2.3 credits in math and 2 in science to graduate, instead of the 3 credits in each subject recommended by the National Commission on Excellence in Education.

Seldom has there been such a clear-cut case for presidential leadership. But judging by their performances on the campaign trail thus far, Michael Dukakis and George Bush deserve no more than a marginal grade for their proposals for rescuing America's schools. Like Hare Krishnas entrancing themselves by chanting a euphonious phrase, both candidates repeat the frugal mantra of the Gramm-Rudman age: no new taxes, no new social programs, no bold initiatives from the Federal Government. So fearful are they of angering taxpayers that their timid proposals appear more concerned with holding down federal spending than with mounting the comprehensive policies that a solution to the educational crisis demands.

Both Bush and Dukakis have avoided the reality that a huge new investment by the Federal Government is needed to rebuild America's schools because the sums required are beyond the reach of local governments that depend on property taxes or the private sector. There is remarkably little dispute about what is necessary: better textbooks, better facilities and above all restoration of the prestige of teachers by paying them more and improving their working conditions. What remains at issue is how to pay for these worthy objectives and which other goals might have to be sacrificed to raise the required funds.

After loudly declaiming his desire to be known as the "education President," Bush seems to have forgotten the subject. On those occasions when he has proffered specifics, Bush has put forth sound, if not exciting, ideas. He would establish a $500 million program to provide awards of $100,000 to individual schools that show a marked reduction in dropout rates or improvement in test scores. An additional $50 million would be given to states for matching grants to create or support magnet schools, which offer special programs not generally available in other schools. A third program would grant $1 million to each state to experiment with raising teacher pay, creating a year-round curriculum or allowing parents to enroll their child in any school within a system.

But the Vice President's plans run headlong into a contradiction: although he supports efforts to raise standards for teachers and students nationally, he insists the funds to support such efforts come almost exclusively from state and local governments. He would raise federal expenditures for education less than $1 billion a year -- a third of what the Reagan Administration proposes to spend on Star Wars. That is tantamount to fighting a war with local police forces while the U.S. Army sits on the sidelines.

Dukakis has proclaimed his intention to become the "No. 1 advocate for good schools and good teaching." He would create a $250 million national teaching excellence fund to finance the college tuitions of students who become teachers and revive the national teacher corps to give recent college graduates a taste of the classroom. He would establish "field centers" of teaching and learning for veteran teachers, ask businesses to encourage their employees to accept temporary assignments as teachers, and establish levels of teacher competence similar to those that govern doctors and lawyers.

Dukakis has not put a price tag on his educational proposals or stated in detail how he would pay for them. Some of his ideas, moreover, simply do not stand up. Few businesses are likely to permit capable workers to leave their jobs in mid-career for three- to five-year teaching sabbaticals. Dukakis' plan to expand the so-called Boston Compacts and Genesis Programs -- in which wealthy individuals and businesses seek to motivate high schoolers by promising a job or college scholarship to each graduate -- is doomed to failure in areas lacking either a surplus of good jobs or a willing philanthropist. His notion of asking investment bankers and college administrators to devise investment programs that will allow families to set aside funds today against the cost of their children's college educations will do little or nothing for the poorest Americans.

The rhetoric notwithstanding, neither Bush nor Dukakis has made the conceptual breakthrough that would permit the U.S. to fashion the school system it deserves. While looking through different lenses, both seem to view federal education spending as a frilly, bloated social program rather than as a vital national-security program at least equal in priority to maintaining strong armed forces. During the Reagan years, despite growing concern about huge deficits, the largest peacetime military buildup in the nation's history boosted spending for defense 37% in inflation-adjusted dollars to annual levels of nearly $300 billion. Federal outlays for elementary and secondary education were reduced nearly 20% during the same period. Given that history, perhaps the next President ought to consider assigning the task of shepherding through his education-spending plan to the Secretary of Defense, who has had far more luck in sparing his requests from the budgeteer's ax. There is ample precedent for treating education as a national-defense issue. In the panic that followed the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which vastly expanded federal support for science, math and foreign-language instruction in public schools.

The U.S. Government's role in education policy, unlike that of its foreign competitors, is strictly curtailed by the Constitution. That encourages innovation at the state and local level, which, in such states as New Jersey and South Carolina, has yielded impressive gains in educational performance. Nevertheless, there are many ways in which the Federal Government can assist financially pressed school systems without unduly intruding into such thorny issues as the exact courses in a curriculum. The objective of federal policy should be to relieve school systems of burdens they cannot manage well while depriving them of excuses for failing to accomplish their stated purpose -- the effective education of young people. A number of realistic proposals that go far beyond anything Bush and Dukakis have put forth have been on the table. Among them:

Underwrite the cost of physically maintaining schools. No student can be expected to thrive in a dingy, dilapidated classroom. Yet many school districts, especially the 600 largest, which enroll 40% of all public-school students, lack the ability to raise sufficient taxes or sell enough bonds to keep their schools up to standard. The Federal Government should make no- interest loans available to tear down or rebuild old buildings and replace them with smaller, more attractive units. School systems would not be permitted to pocket the savings but, in exchange for the aid, would be required to shift their current expenditures for maintenance into areas directly related to education -- higher teacher salaries and reduced class sizes. It would cost $4.5 billion to renovate every school in New York City.

Expand Head Start and Chapter 1 programs. For the past two decades, the Federal Government has supported Head Start programs, which provide educational and medical services for disadvantaged preschoolers, and Chapter 1, which offers remedial help for those in higher grades. Both have repeatedly been shown to be beneficial and cost-effective. An annual $500 investment in Head Start, for example, makes it less likely that a child will repeat a grade -- at an average cost to the community of $3,000. Currently, only one out of five eligible children is enrolled in Head Start, and Chapter 1 programs reach only half of those who qualify. The cost of making them available to every child who needs them: $11 billion annually.

Write off college loans for graduates who go into teaching. No program for reviving public education can succeed until better-qualified students are willing to become teachers. One way to accomplish this would be to forgive the college indebtedness of top students who spend three to five years in the public schools. Academic underachievers need not apply. To qualify, students should be in the upper third of their graduating classes and major in subjects that are most in need of able teachers: math, sciences, computer technology and foreign languages. Annual cost: $500 million.

Obviously, enacting any or all of these approaches would be costly and entail hard choices. But making such decisions is a President's job. For the $3.6 billion cost of one nuclear aircraft-carrier task force, of which the U.S. already has five, the country could pay the full four-year tuitions of 90,000 private-college students. By forgoing one year's cost of living increase in Social Security benefits, the U.S. could raise the average salary of the nation's 2.3 million public schoolteachers by $3,260. The question the next President must decide is which of these expenditures will make the U.S. stronger and do more to ensure its future economic vitality. In answering it, he should keep in mind one bit of folk wisdom: you get what you pay for.