The Audacity of Hope (20 page)

In other words, we should be guided by what works.

WHAT MIGHT SUCH a new economic consensus look like? I won’t pretend to have all the answers, and a detailed discussion of U.S. economic policy would fill up several volumes. But I can offer a few examples of where we can break free of our current political stalemate; places where, in the tradition of Hamilton and Lincoln, we can invest in our infrastructure and our people; ways that we can begin to modernize and

rebuild the social contract that FDR first stitched together in the middle of the last century.

Let’s start with those investments that can make America more competitive in the global economy: investments in education, science and technology, and energy independence.

Throughout our history, education has been at the heart of a bargain this nation makes with its citizens: If you work hard and take responsibility, you’ll have a chance for a better life. And in a world where knowledge determines value in the job market, where a child in Los Angeles has to compete not just with a child in Boston but also with millions of children in Bangalore and Beijing, too many of America’s schools are not holding up their end of the bargain.

In 2005 I paid a visit to Thornton Township High School, a predominantly black high school in Chicago’s southern suburbs. My staff had worked with teachers there to organize a youth town hall meeting—representatives of each class spent weeks conducting surveys to find out what issues their fellow students were concerned about and then presented the results in a series of questions to me. At the meeting they talked about violence in the neighborhoods and a shortage of computers in their classrooms. But their number one issue was this: Because the school district couldn’t afford to keep teachers for a full school day, Thornton let out every day at 1:30 in the afternoon. With the abbreviated schedule, there was no time for students to take science lab or foreign language classes.

How come we’re getting shortchanged? they asked me. Seems like nobody even expects us to go to college, they said.

They wanted more school.

We’ve become accustomed to such stories, of poor black and Latino children languishing in schools that can’t prepare them for the old industrial economy, much less the information age. But the problems with our educational system aren’t restricted to the inner city. America now has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world. By their senior year, American high school students score lower on math and science tests than most of their foreign peers. Half of all teenagers can’t understand basic fractions, half of all nine-year-olds can’t perform basic multiplication or division, and although more American students than ever are taking college entrance exams, only 22 percent are prepared to take college-level classes in English, math, and science.

I don’t believe government alone can turn these statistics around. Parents have the primary responsibility for instilling an ethic of hard work and educational achievement in their children. But parents rightly expect their government, through the public schools, to serve as full partners in the educational process—just as it has for earlier generations of Americans.

Unfortunately, instead of innovation and bold reform of our schools—the reforms that would allow the kids at Thornton to compete for the jobs at Google—what we’ve seen from government for close to two decades has been tinkering around the edges and a

tolerance for mediocrity. Partly this is a result of ideological battles that are as outdated as they are predictable. Many conservatives argue that money doesn’t matter in raising educational achievement; that the problems in public schools are caused by hapless bureaucracies and intransigent teachers’ unions; and that the only solution is to break up the government’s education monopoly by handing out vouchers. Meanwhile, those on the left often find themselves defending an indefensible status quo, insisting that more spending alone will improve educational outcomes.

Both assumptions are wrong. Money does matter in education—otherwise why would parents pay so much to live in well-funded suburban school districts?—and many urban and rural schools still suffer from overcrowded classrooms, outdated books, inadequate equipment, and teachers who are forced to pay out of pocket for basic supplies. But there’s no denying that the way many public schools are managed poses at least as big a problem as how well they’re funded.

Our task, then, is to identify those reforms that have the highest impact on student achievement, fund them adequately, and eliminate those programs that don’t produce results. And in fact we already have hard evidence of reforms that work: a more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math, science, and literacy skills; longer hours and more days to give children the time and sustained attention they need to learn; early childhood education for every child, so they’re not already behind on their first day of school; meaningful, performance-based assessments that can provide a fuller picture of how a student is doing; and the recruitment and training of transformative principals and more effective teachers.

This last point—the need for good teachers—deserves emphasis. Recent studies show that the single most important factor in determining a student’s achievement isn’t the color of his skin or where he comes from, but who the child’s teacher is. Unfortunately, too many of our schools depend on inexperienced teachers with little training in the subjects they’re teaching, and too often those teachers are concentrated in already struggling schools. Moreover, the situation is getting worse, not better: Each year, school districts are hemorrhaging experienced teachers as the Baby Boomers reach retirement, and two million teachers must be recruited in the next decade just to meet the needs of rising enrollment.

The problem isn’t that there’s no interest in teaching; I constantly meet young people who’ve graduated from top colleges and have signed up, through programs like Teach for America, for two-year stints in some of the country’s toughest public schools. They find the work extraordinarily rewarding; the kids they teach benefit from their creativity and enthusiasm. But by the end of two years, most have either changed careers or moved to suburban schools—a consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the educational bureaucracy, and a pervasive feeling of isolation.

If we’re serious about building a twenty-first-century school system, we’re going to have to take the teaching profession seriously. This means changing the certification process to allow a chemistry major who wants to teach to avoid expensive additional course work; pairing up new recruits with master teachers to break their isolation; and giving proven teachers more control over what goes on in their classrooms.

It also means paying teachers what they’re worth. There’s no reason why an experienced, highly qualified, and effective teacher shouldn’t earn $100,000 annually at the peak of his or her career. Highly skilled teachers in such critical fields as math and science—as well as those willing to teach in the toughest urban schools—should be paid even more.

There’s just one catch. In exchange for more money, teachers need to become more accountable for their performance—and school districts need to have greater ability to get rid of ineffective teachers.

So far, teacher’s unions have resisted the idea of pay for performance, in part because it could be disbursed at the whim of a principal. The unions also argue—rightly, I think— that most school districts rely solely on test scores to measure teacher performance, and that test scores may be highly dependent on factors beyond any teacher’s control, like the number of low-income or special-needs students in their classroom.

But these aren’t insoluble problems. Working with teacher’s unions, states and school districts can develop better measures of performance, ones that combine test data with a system of peer review (most teachers can tell you with amazing consistency which teachers in their schools are really good, and which are really bad). And we can make sure that nonperforming teachers no longer handicap children who want to learn.

Indeed, if we’re to make the investments required to revamp our schools, then we will need to rediscover our faith that every child can learn. Recently, I had the chance to visit Dodge Elementary School, on the West Side of Chicago, a school that had once been near the bottom on every measure but that is in the midst of a turnaround. While I was talking to some of the teachers about the challenges they faced, one young teacher mentioned what she called the “These Kids Syndrome”—the willingness of society to find a million excuses for why “these kids” can’t learn; how “these kids come from tough backgrounds” or “these kids are too far behind.”

“When I hear that term, it drives me nuts,” the teacher told me. “They’re not ‘these kids.’ They’re our kids.”

How America’s economy performs in the years to come may depend largely on how well we take such wisdom to heart.

OUR INVESTMENT IN education can’t end with an improved elementary and secondary school system. In a knowledge-based economy where eight of the nine fastest-growing occupations this decade require scientific or technological skills, most workers are going to need some form of higher education to fill the jobs of the future. And just as our government instituted free and mandatory public high schools at the dawn of the twentieth century to provide workers the skills needed for the industrial age, our government has to help today’s workforce adjust to twenty-first-century realities.

In many ways, our task should be easier than it was for policy makers a hundred years ago. For one thing, our network of universities and community colleges already exists

and is well equipped to take on more students. And Americans certainly don’t need to be convinced of the value of a higher education—the percentage of young adults getting bachelor’s degrees has risen steadily each decade, from around 16 percent in 1980 to almost 33 percent today.

Where Americans do need help, immediately, is in managing the rising cost of college—something with which Michelle and I are all too familiar (for the first ten years of our marriage, our combined monthly payments on our undergraduate and law school debt exceeded our mortgage by a healthy margin). Over the last five years, the average tuition and fees at four-year public colleges, adjusted for inflation, have risen 40 percent. To absorb these costs, students have been taking on ever-increasing debt levels, which discourages many undergraduates from pursuing careers in less lucrative fields like teaching. And an estimated two hundred thousand college-qualified students each year choose to forgo college altogether because they can’t figure out how to pay the bills.

There are a number of steps we can take to control costs and improve access to higher education. States can limit annual tuition increases at public universities. For many nontraditional students, technical schools and online courses may provide a cost- effective option for retooling in a constantly changing economy. And students can insist that their institutions focus their fund-raising efforts more on improving the quality of instruction than on building new football stadiums.

But no matter how well we do in controlling the spiraling cost of education, we will still need to provide many students and parents with more direct help in meeting college expenses, whether through grants, low-interest loans, tax-free educational savings accounts, or full tax deductibility of tuition and fees. So far, Congress has been moving in the opposite direction, by raising interest rates on federally guaranteed student loans and failing to increase the size of grants for low-income students to keep pace with inflation. There’s no justification for such policies—not if we want to maintain opportunity and upward mobility as the hallmark of the U.S. economy.

There’s one other aspect of our educational system that merits attention—one that speaks to the heart of America’s competitiveness. Since Lincoln signed the Morrill Act and created the system of land grant colleges, institutions of higher learning have served as the nation’s primary research and development laboratories. It’s through these institutions that we’ve trained the innovators of the future, with the federal government providing critical support for the infrastructure—everything from chemistry labs to particle accelerators—and the dollars for research that may not have an immediate commercial application but that can ultimately lead to major scientific breakthroughs.

Here, too, our policies have been moving in the wrong direction. At the 2006 Northwestern University commencement, I fell into a conversation with Dr. Robert Langer, an Institute Professor of chemical engineering at MIT and one of the nation’s foremost scientists. Langer isn’t just an ivory tower academic—he holds more than five hundred patents, and his research has led to everything from the development of the nicotine patch to brain cancer treatments. As we waited for the procession to begin, I asked him about his current work, and he mentioned his research in tissue engineering, research that promised new, more effective methods of delivering drugs to the body. Remembering the recent controversies surrounding stem cell research, I asked him

whether the Bush Administration’s limitation on the number of stem cell lines was the biggest impediment to advances in his field. He shook his head.

“Having more stem cell lines would definitely be useful,” Langer told me, “but the real problem we’re seeing is significant cutbacks in federal grants.” He explained that fifteen years ago, 20 to 30 percent of all research proposals received significant federal support. That level is now closer to 10 percent. For scientists and researchers, this means more time spent raising money and less time spent on research. It also means that each year, more and more promising avenues of research are cut off—especially the high-risk research that may ultimately yield the biggest rewards.