I have deep doubts about the intellectual and social value of schooling. My point is simply, first, everyone eventually graduates from school. Second, most of what you learn in school doesn’t matter after you graduate. Third, humans quickly forget knowledge that they rarely use.
Oddly enough, these doubts mean that the costs of education due to the coronavirus pandemic have already passed. Despite the forced optimism, distance learning endured by millions of students during the pandemic looks like an educational disaster. , found that it was roughly equivalent to not attending school at all.
But given my doubts about the value of school, most of the learning students lost in Zoom School are learning they would have lost early in adulthood had the school remained open. My argument is not that remote learning is about as good as face-to-face learning in the long run. It’s about as bad as it gets.
How do I know all this? My work focuses on testing adult knowledge—what adults retain after graduation. A common pattern is that adults are surprisingly less academically savvy. College graduates know what to expect from high school graduates. High school graduates know what dropouts should know. Dropout knows almost nothing. This does not mean that these students did not know more. That means that only a fraction of what they learn will remain in their minds forever.
This is especially true in the three non-R subjects of reading, writing and mathematics. He is less than 1% of American adults who claim to have learned to speak a foreign language very well in school, even when two years of coursework is the norm. Adult knowledge of history and civics is minimal. Test the most basic facts, like naming her three branches of government, and they’re about half correct. So are basic science questions such as “Are electrons smaller than atoms?” “Do antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria?”
How bad are these scores? Terrible. Knowing half the alphabet doesn’t mean you can read and write half. We correctly call you illiterate. The same is true of the lack of rudimentary knowledge of history, civics, and science. If you don’t know half the basics of history, civics, and science, you can’t understand history, civics, or science at all.
The rewards of teaching basic literacy and numeracy are certainly much greater. However, school performance is mediocre here too, with no prospect of meaningful improvement. For decades, schools have tried to overcome the shortcomings of underperforming students in reading, writing, and math. It is quite possible to improve performance in the short term. A recurring problem is fading out. The effect of the intervention diminishes or disappears over time.
I frankly admit that my vague assessment of American education is in the minority among economists who have provided much evidence that education has a significant impact on adult earnings. They’re basically right about it, but that’s no excuse for ignoring the mounting evidence that education has little impact on adult knowledge.
This blind spot is especially strange because there are clear explanations for both piles of evidence. In other words, the school is advantageous because it primarily proves or communicates your employability. Most education is not vocational training. It’s your passport to the real training you get on the job. That is why graduation brings a very good reward to the individual. You won’t learn much in your last few weeks at school, but when you’re done, employers will trust you. And that’s why credential proliferation rewards nations so little. Even more high school, college, and graduate school diplomas will be distributed more than ever, but society as a whole will not be enriched unless students permanently learn long-term skills along the way.
If schools are closed and children are less likely to be ignorant than they were without COVID-19, in what sense were school closures even a temporary disaster? Simple: When schools closed, they stopped providing the only undeniably valuable feature: day care. In-person schooling allows parents to work full-time without distractions. Face-to-face schooling allows parents to care for young children and the elderly. Face-to-face schooling allows parents to get the household chores done. Face-to-face schooling also allows parents to relax.
School closures were inconvenient. And while you don’t hear political speech “more convenient than anything else,” actions speak louder than words. By February 2021, approximately 90% of private schools serving elementary and middle school students offered in-person instruction. why? Probably because they knew that their parents valued the convenience of face-to-face education. By that time, less than half of the corresponding public schools, funded by taxes rather than paying customers, were fully open. It remained in mixed mode. The educational cost of closure is a matter of speculation, but the cost of convenience is indisputable.
Putting wishful thinking aside and taking a sober look at what happened to education during Covid reveals two valuable lessons. First, pre-Covid schools gave taxpayers a bad deal, receiving large sums of money with little long-term knowledge. Second, schools during Covid gave taxpayers an even worse deal. and enjoy huge emergency funds, while refusing to provide at least day care in return.
Even before Covid, American schools were spending over $15,000 per student per year. Is there a way to get more value for your money? The easiest way is to drastically reduce your spending. American schools will never make American students bilingual, so why pretend not to waste precious resources? The same is true of most curricula.
The opposite is true for private schools. Are they actually improving test scores? The evidence is mixed. But when parents wanted day care during the pandemic, private schools provided it. Therefore, school vouchers that fund students on behalf of the system are another reliable way to provide value for our money. I am creating a voucher program. School choices don’t just protect families from future closures. It protects the family from future education problems. School choice isn’t a panacea, but sticking to the status quo is a sucker.
Brian Caplan (@Brian Kaplan) is a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of “Open Borders” and “The Case Against Education”.
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