Report: Reform education to help economy

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 (UPI) -- The U.S. school system may not be able to produce workers who can fuel prosperous economic growth because of the continuing poor performance of primary and secondary schools, according to a recent study from a prominent education policy scholar.

In "The Seeds of Growth," a study that appears in the fall edition of Education Next, a journal published by the conservative Hoover Institution, Hoover senior fellow Eric Hanushek argues that the economic boom of the 1990 was not, as some have claimed, proof of the superiority of the U.S. education system, but instead a reflection of other, deeper economic factors and the cyclical nature of the economy.

Nevertheless, Hanushek writes that future U.S. economic capabilities may be seriously curtailed unless reforms are undertaken to improve the quality of the American educational system. The problem, he says, is that for decades U.S. education reforms have focused on the amount of education children receive, rather that on the quality of the education.

"The way the United States has handled education over the years is by having the most (K-12) schooling, albeit of lower quality, than many of the other nations in the world," Hanushek -- who is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research -- told United Press International.

"So the United States got into universal secondary education way before everyone else, and has developed by all measures the best higher education system in the world."

A debate over the effect of education on economic performance has been going on since the early 1980s, when some critics began to compare the poor academic performance of U.S. students with their counterparts in Asian countries whose economies were growing at extremely rapid rates.

The extraordinary economic growth in countries like Japan and South Korea -- which was far outpacing American economic development -- lead to a deep concern that part of the reason these economies were outperforming America's was that U.S. schools were producing students of lesser caliber, who became less capable workers.

The fact that Asian students typically performed much better on standardized tests in key areas like math and science underscored this belief.

But the economic turnaround in the United States in the later 1990s, coupled with the generally poor performance of Asian economies during the same period, has stemmed many of those concerns. Some experts have even heralded the American economic boom as a reflection of our educational model's success in producing highly effective workers.

Harris said, however, that both of these views fail to differentiate between business cycles -- which are cyclical and short term -- and long-term economic growth, which is based upon past investments in physical and human capital, and on the impact of technological innovation.

The quality of the education system has little impact on short-term business cycles, he said, but real impact in the long-term economic growth, he said.

"The data suggest that the line is very, very strong," said Hanushek. "After you take into account the other factors that affect growth, the quality of the labor force has a real impact on economic growth and future economic well being."

Hanushek said that despite the long-term success of the U.S. economy, the existing American education model, which served the country so well in the 20th century, is in danger of becoming an economic liability. What has happened, says Hanushek, is that the sheer quantity of compulsory education in the United States has essentially been balancing out the increasingly poor performance of American schools.

This, coupled with the quality of the education provided by American colleges for those who went on to higher education, helped offset the better performance of students in other nations in the K-12 years, he said.

"What most people don't recognize is that many other countries have now caught up to the U.S. in terms of the quantity of education received by their populations," he said. "In terms of secondary schooling the (United States) is (now) slightly below the median for the developed and European countries."

In his research, Hanushek found that besides expanding the quantity (in number of years) of education available to their students to levels equal to or greater that that available to U.S. students, countries in Asia and Europe have also maintained their higher test scores.

"This is what I think is worrisome for the future, and is what we should focus on," said Hanushek. "We can no longer overcome the quality deficit by providing more schooling than everybody else does."

Although it is hard to predict the impact if U.S. schools do not improve, he said what is known is that other nations are quickly increasing the performance of their education systems to improve their human capital, while they are liberalizing their economies -- two factors that can help them performer better economically.

"Unless something happens to the other nations to jar their performance, they are going to be able to sustain higher economic growth rates than the United States," said Hanushek.

Tom Loveless, senior fellow and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the centrist Brookings Institution, said that Hanushek's argument about the impact of the education on the economy is on the mark.

"It certainly makes sense," Loveless told UPI. "Countries spend hundreds of billions of dollars to develop human capital."

Loveless said that throughout the past century a key goal of American education was to make sure that children got a high school diploma, while very little attention was paid to what they actually learned.

"We have always been proud of the fact that Americans get a significantly higher level of education but I think Eric is right that there has been a shift to better measures of quality," he said.

Doug Harris, an education economist at the liberal, labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute, said that Hanushek's thesis is not fully supported by the facts.

"It is an extremely weak argument, given how educational achievement is only a very small part of worker skills, let alone the economic progress of the country," he said.

He said that the argument has become "a common reasoning of those who really want to make major changes to schools," because it is intuitive that education would impact economic performance.

Harris said that in fact many studies examining the role of education on individual economic achievement have yielded results that conflict with Hanushek's findings.

Harris also said he believes that looking at the impact of education at the individual level would be a more accurate reflection of the economic effect of education on workers than the country-vs.-country comparison of test scores used by Hanushek.

"That is not to say that schools don't matter. Education clearly is important but it is a small factor in determining economic progress," said Harris.

When looking at college education, for instance, he said studies have shown that a college graduate's economic success is connected to how much education they receive (in terms of number of years), not the types of classes they take or quality of the education, which are considered difficult properties to measure accurately.

In addition, he said that comparing test scores between students in different countries, as Hanushek did, is a poor indicator of student capabilities, given that test scores reflect only a small portion of student performance because they measure a limited set of specific skills.

"There are better reasons for reforming schools (than improving the economy), especially for kids in inner cities with very high concentrations of poverty and problems attracting teachers," he said.

Hanushek said that the debate over how to reform the American education system is at a "very critical stage."

Despite growing recognition that there is a need to improve the quality of American public schools, the attempts at reform over the last two decades have amounted to very little, he said.

He said he believes the debate is now at a standoff between the "status quo" -- which to date has successfully lobbied that increasing spending was the answer -- and those who want to make more fundamental reforms.

"In my opinion, from all the work we have done to improve schools, we can see it is going to take some fundamental reforms in how we organize schools, and it may also take some more resources," said Hanushek. "We don't know that right now. We do know that simply putting more resources in our schools is not creating the improvements needed."