Unlike David Brooks, I don’t believe that Education is The Biggest Issue - as he conceives it, anyway. Brooks says, “America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited, with many nations surging ahead in school attainment,” because of an “educational slowdown” around 1970, which resulted in too few skilled workers to meet the demands of a surge in technological progress. “The relatively few skilled workers,” he says, “command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.”

But isn’t that what unions are for? Bargaining power?

From Schools as Scapegoats (Mishel and Rothstein, 2007):

Statistically, the falling real wages of high school graduates has played a bigger part in boosting the college-to-high-school wage ratio than has an unmet demand for college graduates. Important causes of this decline have been the weakening of labor market institutions, such as the minimum wage and unions, which once boosted the pay of high school–educated workers.

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What made semiskilled manufacturing jobs desirable was that many (though not most) were protected by unions, provided pensions and health insurance, and compensated with decent wages. That today’s working class doesn’t get similar protections has nothing to do with the adequacy of its education. Rather, it has everything to do with policy decisions stemming from the value we place on equality. Hotel jobs that pay $20 an hour, with health and pension benefits (rather than $10 an hour without benefits), typically do so because of union organization, not because maids earned bachelor’s degrees.

Brooks, who believes the “skills gap” is widening inequality, and that “Boosting educational attainment at the bottom is more promising than trying to reorganize the global economy,” wants to sidestep labor market and economic policy solutions to what he implicitly recognizes as the bigger problem - the global economy - by calling on schools to crank out more skilled workers. For what? For a shrinking supply of “knowledge worker” jobs.

Using the college “wage premium” as the sole factor to explain a widening gap between the poor and the affluent is easy. But then, that’s the point, isn’t it?

The Wall Street Journal provides a concrete example of the Declining Value of Your College Degree.

Mishel and Bernstein, writing for the Economic Policy Institute, explain that “…wage inequality is driven by a slew of factors, of which differences in education is but one.” Other factors include trade deficits and globalization that send manufacturing jobs overseas leading to the loss of good jobs for non-college-educated workers, declining union representation, and unemployment.

I’m all for “boosting educational attainment” in whatever form that may happen to take, which is why I was intrigued by Brooks’ mention of “Schools, Skills, and Synapses” by James Heckman [pdf]. Heckman discusses how cognitive as well as noncognitive abilities affect our lives, and points out that differences between children from advantaged and disadvantaged families appear early in life, pointing out that education policy is largely directed toward improving cognition, but (no surprise to most of us) “…more than smarts is required for success in life.” He claims that gaps in noncognitive and cognitive abilities can be traced to adverse early environments, and that “A greater percentage of U.S. children is being born into adverse environments.”

I and most teachers, I think, have long observed that many learning difficulties seemed to be linked to domestic home-life problems, and that there are a lot more of them than there used to be. So, the good news is that there is research to support this observation.

The bad news is that the longer we wait, the more expensive and difficult it is to effectively manage these problems, which is why Heckman and Brooks both advocate early intervention. In the meantime, we deal with the fallout in our classrooms. Brooks calls it “human capital development,” an outrageous term that reduces students to an economic commodity and belies his concern for our collective well-being. He believes that “America rose because it got more out of its own people than other nations.” How narrow-minded can you get?

What are some of the noncognitive skills Heckman identified? Well, they include physical and mental health, perseverance, attention, motivation, and self confidence. Every one of these is within a teacher’s realm of responsibility, and worthy in their own right, regardless of whether they enhance a person’s economic worth. In fact, attention to these human qualities sets great teachers apart from the clinicians. They’re impossible to test for, and they aren’t called upon until their exercise is required, but they are the foundation we need to build, and build upon.

Raising the bar, making school more rigorous, banging the drum for accountability, none of theses can begin to make a dent in the life of a kid who locks herself in the bathroom at night to hide from her mother’s boyfriend.