8/4/05
COOL
SCHOOLS AS A KEY TOOL FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Nebraska
doesn't have mountains, seashores, lakes, pro sports, celebs or even a reliably
fantastic football team any more, although of course we hope they'll be back to
"normal" as No. 1 in the nation very soon.
We have
high taxes for reasons of sheer volume -- because of our beautiful, spacious
state with so many creeks and rivers, we have a lot of miles of roads and
bridges to maintain, and not all that many people to pay for it. Our taxes are
high for a few other reasons, too – notably, public schools. We're known for
having pretty okey-dokey schools.
Of course
we want to attract great new people to come to Nebraska to live, and new
industries and jobs. But it isn't easy. Frankly, even though we're the best
place in the country to raise a family, bar none, we're not real hotly
competitive in the economic development department.
So I got to
thinking: what better draw could we have for economic development here, than to
be able to claim that we have the best schools in the country?
We have
what it takes: favorable demographics compared to the rest of the country, a
solid work ethic among most educators, and most of all, a family-based culture
that values education as a top priority. Attitude matters tons more than money
when it comes to setting the stage for school success.
I believe
Nebraska needs to reshape our educational system in the next few years,
bigtime, to keep up with the Joneses – other states – and, hopefully, surpass
them.
We have a
long way to go. A few years ago, Nebraska got an "F" from the Thomas Fordham
Foundation for the public policies we have in place regarding teacher quality.
Ouch!
There were
some disturbing "brain drain" statistics that came out last spring, that people
new to Nebraska tended to be illiterate rather than highly educated, and the
people we lose to other states are our "value-added" contributions – born and raised
here, like corn, and then exported to other states to live and work, so that
those other states get the value of their citizenship that we actually created.
And their tax revenues, too.
I was
shocked to see another statistic like that the other day: Nebraska lost 9.7
people per 1,000 residents from 1995 to 2000, while our neighbor Colorado gained
43.8 (annual report, www.goldwaterinstitute.org).
It makes
you wonder how much the quality of the schools has to do with a huge gap like
that. Mountains aren't everything, you know. Why do so many more people think
Colorado is the place to be, and dwindling numbers think that about Nebraska? I
know Colorado has a favorable tax climate. But do they also have better
schools? It looks so.
Then I
winced to read that Iowa has started allowing parents the option to send their
children to 10 charter schools as of this fall. Reportedly, Iowa's charter law
is weak, so they might not be all that great there. But still, it sounds like
Iowa is more on the move with educational innovation than we are.
So now our only
neighboring state that does not allow charter schools is South Dakota. How many
new businesses do we lose to South Dakota these days? Not many. Yet Nebraska is
one of only nine states that don't have enabling legislation for charter
schools. That can't be good for attracting new people here. It sounds like
we're not in the swing of things, innovation-wise.
It's kind
of embarrassing that Nebraska doesn't have a relatively objective outside
assessment system for our educational quality, the way other states do, too.
Instead, we've allowed our educators to assess themselves, and eureka! They've
"found" that they're doing fantastic! It's totally meaningless, and damaging
our national image.
It's also
pretty disturbing to note that we have a Social Security-type mess looming on
the horizon in our teacher retirement system that needed addressing yesterday –
huge shortfalls in pension funding -- and that sloth is going to haunt us. Tax
increases are a real possibility, to cover our promises to our retired teachers.
Then the
big push at the state level is for more government preschool and all-day
kindergarten for everybody – the exact opposite move of what we should be doing,
based on the pointless, no-good record of Head Start. Subsidized, universal
preschools for all children will nuke private and faith-based preschools, which
are far, far better than public ones, and keep parents and the private sector
in charge of the sandbox set, which is as it should be.
Half-day
kindergarten using the right methods is much better for 5's than spending all
day in the grips of the public-school environment. Trust me on this, as the
mother of four who is spending $2,000 to send our youngest to a private
half-day kindergarten this fall instead of using the "free" all-day k in our
local public school. I know from experience and from the research that all-day
k a dumb move for all but economically deprived children.
And then we
have the War of the Laptops, as Nebraska schools fall all over themselves to
"provide" more and more of them for students and teachers. Go Big Ed reported
recently that Nebraska pays close to the top in the country for educational
technology – when there's not a shred of evidence anywhere that learning on a
computer is better than the traditional and far cheaper tools of teacher,
books, pencils and paper. Meanwhile, we have oodles of students who can't even
read at grade level in this state.
Why does
Nebraska keep doing all the things the research shows SHOULDN'T be done, for
educational quality? And why DON'T we do the things that have been shown, in
other states, to WORK?
In the
past, I've been embarrassed to see astoundingly high numbers of Nebraska
schoolchildren labeled as "learning disabled." What's up with that? Is it
something in Nebraska's water that gives kids problems? Of course not.
Obviously, we're teaching reading wrong. That's a real economic development
blooper. Surely, that can be reduced, bigtime, as well it should.
Now, our
ACT and SAT scores look OK compared to the rest of the nation, in the middle
third for the most part. But we "cook the books" because a relatively small
percentage of our high-school students are taking them. It's no big deal that
your state's top 5% "ranks" higher than your neighbor state's 55%. I like
Colorado's mandate that everybody takes the college admissions tests whether
they think they're college-bound or not. Kids who are bound for community
colleges need to be taking them, too. I like the tremendous boost in scores
that has resulted from that smart public policy.
We've got
to do something for gifted and talented kids, too. Political Correctness in our
schools is "leveling" their achievement to the norm, instead of letting them
fly, intellectually, because "it would hurt the other kids' self-esteem" if the
strong students got stronger.
Poppycock. As
college prices mount, increasingly sophisticated parents realize that a
youngster's chances of making it into a selective college, especially back
East, are pretty small if the test scores are just good, not great. If you're
from a "flyover state" like Nebraska, attending public, not private, school,
you'd better have high scores and lots else to commend you, but especially,
those scores. By being happy to be moderately good, we are limiting our best
students' chances, and therefore, we will get fewer families with top students
to move here, if we don't act.
Another
deficiency: we don't really have much in the way of school choice in this
state. We do allow a student in one public-school district to switch to another
public-school district. But that's of limited value if you're looking for a
significant difference in things like curriculum, discipline and avoidance of
Political Correctness.
Because of
the financial difficulties of this monopoly education system, there are nowhere
near as many private-school slots in Nebraska as there is demand to fill them.
For example, our local Catholic grade school had a waiting list of more than 75
children for kindergarten last spring, and counting. If private schools made a
little more financial sense, more people would start them.
We need to
"incentivize" private educational development, bigtime. To my knowledge, we
don't have any collaborations between private schools and homeschools in
Nebraska, the way Texas does and some other states, that would give people more
flexibility to combine those two educational styles.
We don't
have many tutors, nor do we have any vendors of online education here, that I
know of. I'm not aware of any traditional, high-octane, classical academies in
Nebraska other than Brownell-Talbot, though they are springing up all over the
country elsewhere, with outstanding curriculum that's far more civilizing and
literate than anything I've seen in the three public districts our children
have attended. If you want a classical education for your kids, though, you
have to homeschool or move to Omaha and pay $10,000 a year to Brownell . . . or
move to another state.
And of
course, we're not among the 12 states that now have school-choice voucher
programs going on to help low-income families send their children to private
school with partial funding from tax dollars. We do have the Children's
Scholarship Fund, but it helps only a few hundred kids a year, vs. the 20,000
attending Arizona private schools through tuition tax credits.
We don't
have merit pay for teachers, nor alternative certification to get good people
in the classroom who didn't go to teachers' college but are still great
teachers. We don't allow districts to pay hiring bonuses, or pay more for teachers
in hard-to-find specialties like math, science, voc ed and special ed.
Nor do we
have value-added assessment like Tennessee, where teachers and principals are
financially rewarded for doing more for kids.
We don't
have tax credits like Minnesota, and we don't have very friendly homeschooling
regulations.
Nor do we
have one of the most exciting educational-freedom tools in the country – a
corporate scholarship program like Arizona's, where corporations can get tax
credits for sending a disadvantaged child to private school with a full or
partial scholarship.
You know, I
still think we have the smarts and the guts in this state to will ourselves to
the top of the educational pile. I really do.
I honestly
think the problem is that Nebraskans have been too "nice," have accepted the
status quo, aren't aware of the problems we have and how other states are
solving them, have allowed unions to dictate to our educators how schools are
going to be, and haven't demanded true accountability and innovation from our
public servants, and true options and alternatives for our kids.
So we need
to start now to make the changes that are necessary to blow away all other
states in the quality and cost-effectiveness of our school system. Can we do
it? Of course we can. Will we? Stay tuned.
Education as an Economic Development Tool
Q. In terms of quality of life and
business climate, nothing counts as much toward a state's economic development
efforts as having excellent schools. With increasing global competition, it's a
given that you have to work hard to create 21st Century schools to
turn out a workforce who can support high-value economic activity on down the
road. What should our state be doing to get, or stay, competitive?
It's a no-brainer. Good schools bring quality of life and
prosperity. Bad schools bring crime, drug abuse, gangs, reliance on transfer payments, and
all kinds of other problems that raise everyone's taxes and make the world a
worse place, not a better one.
We need schools that can maximize
the knowledge and skills of each "crop" of students to equip them for the
knowledge-based economy, where the most people can make the most money and live
the happiest ever after. But it's not easy.
The pressure is on those states with
the most increases in the numbers of disadvantaged students, or new immigrants,
as well as the strongest unions resisting innovation and "market
competitiveness" in education.
What it takes is good business
decisions by the education establishment. That's not happening on a widespread
basis now, but it should be.
Nobody likes the term "human
capital," since it is so demeaning, but the principle is valid: educational
resources should be used as intelligently as possible to make students as ready
as possible for fulfilling, lucrative careers.
So no state can afford to make big
errors in educational resource allocation. That means state government and
local school districts should do everything they can to make sure the evidence
shows that they are using the best methods, practices, curriculum and
infrastructure to maximize their students' acquisition of knowledge and skills.
Voters and taxpayers need to use
their leverage to force schools to be more cost-effective to do that.
If the evidence proves that using a
phonics-only approach to reading instruction in the early grades is the
fastest, cheapest way to build literacy, then that's what should be used,
instead of the ineffective and expensive Whole Language method that's so
popular.
If the research can show better
school achievement by low-income pupils who were able to go to preschool
through taxpayer subsidies, then more of those subsidies should be considered.
If aconnection can be made between
academic success and smaller class sizes, more technology and higher-paid, higher-trained
teachers for at-risk students who are low-income or non-English speaking, then
those investments would be worth it.
Homework: Get
the book, "Smart Money: Education and Economic Development," by William Schweke
(Economic Policy Institute, 2004). Schweke is research director for the
Corporation for Enterprise Development, which is dedicated to creating economic
opportunity for low-income citizens.
