by Mitt Romney
Because most of the funding we’ve added to education over the past decades has been used to reduce class size, it isn’t surprising that simply increasing spending does not correlate with higher educational outcomes. As national per-student spending has risen by 73 percent, student achievement has barely improved, something we affirmed in Massachusetts when we conducted the same kind of town-by-town analysis of spending per student that we had for class size. Once more, there was no relationship whatsoever. Cambridge again—spending more than any other city in the state at more than 16,000 per student—showed student outcomes in the bottom 10 percent statewide. Simply spending more money, particularly absent fundamental reform, did not create better-educated students.
International results mirrored ours. Singapore, for example, has one of the best education systems in the world, but it spends less on per-student education than all but three of the thirty OECD nations. Spending doesn’t drive education results abroad any more than it drives them here in America.
Performance and Per Pupil Spending, 2005
(dots represent Massachusetts School districts)
The usual coterie of proponents of ever-higher levels of school spending is, of course, ready with explanations for this undeniable data. Today’s American students are more expensive to teach, they argue, because more come from poor economic circumstances, because children are less healthy, and because there are more special-education students than ever before.
But the data does not bear them out. Over the past few decades, child poverty has actually declined and child health has improved. It is true that more children today are placed in special education than in previous decades, but interestingly, this is not because of an increase in severe disabilities. The number of students classified by the government as mentally retarded dropped by nearly 40 percent between 1976 and 2000.
A study conducted by Jay Greene and Greg Forster of the Manhattan Institute determined that almost two-thirds of the growth in special-education enrollment during the 1990s was attributable to funding incentives. Of the remaining third, much of the increase was due to better detection and diagnoses—learning-disabled kids were present in overall student groups at contemporary levels during the 1970s; they just weren’t diagnosed. If more money actually improved education, then spending more money on the same students should produce better results regardless of the categories into which we put students, Greene observes. Rearranging the labels we put on kids doesn’t provide an excuse for spending ever-greater amounts on them without seeing any improvement.
Simply putting more money into the system we already have has not and will not give our kids a better education. Neither reduced class size nor increased spending will repair our broken education system. There are much better answers.
The Home of Education
Education begins at home. My mother’s early reading to me undoubtedly gave me an understanding and fluency with language that stimulated my young mind and fueled my lifelong love of learning. I once asked a group of teachers in Boston if they could determine at the beginning of a school year those students who will succeed and those who will fall behind. To my surprise, they agreed that there absolutely was a way, one that was a virtual litmus test for every public-school teacher.
If a child’s parents come to school on the first day of school or reliably come to parent-teacher meetings, we know that that child will do just fine.
This is a very simple standard to observe, and all it measured was whether a student’s parents cared enough about his or her education to show up at school. Teachers rarely, if ever, saw the parents of a chronically failing student. Children with parents who show up fail much less frequently than children with parents or guardians who can’t make it.
I endeavored to find out something about those absent parents, the ones who didn’t come to school to learn about and support their child’s education. Some were addicts, and others were in entirely dysfunctional settings. But by far the largest number were simply single parents who were so busy with work, other children, meals, and housekeeping that they literally didn’t have time to be involved with their child’s education. They weren’t home when their kids got out of school, so video games, television, the Internet, and the street took the place of help with homework from a mother or father, activities at home, or sports in the community.
I knew as a matter of general knowledge that there were lots of young single parents. But I was shocked when I learned the actual figures.
Among all children currently born to mothers age thirty or younger, 44 percent are born outside of marriage. Among African Americans, the figure is 77 percent. Forty-six percent of Hispanic American births to mothers under thirty are unmarried, and 34 percent of those to Anglo moms are. The percentage is lower for Anglo mothers, but the absolute number of out-of-wedlock births is far larger—there are 420,000 out-of-wedlock births by under-thirty Anglo moms each year compared with 292,000 for same-age African American moms. Among all moms who do not have a high-school degree, of all ethnic groups, 62 percent of their children are born outside of marriage. That figure is only 13 percent to mothers with a bachelor’s degree. Among young, African American moms without a high-school degree, 90 percent of the births are out of wedlock.
It is very difficult for a poor, undereducated single mother to devote sufficient attention to her child’s education. Study after study demonstrates that these children are far more likely to perform poorly at school, drop out of school, end up on welfare, use drugs, and commit crimes that send them to prison.
I believe it’s time for all Americans to be honest with ourselves. We will never be able to truly address the achievement gap until we eliminate the high rate of out-of-wedlock births in our country. It is not a coincidence that student achievement scores by ethnicity mirror the rates of out-of-wedlock births.
This is not solely or predominantly an issue for minorities—remember, most out-of-wedlock children are born to white mothers. We must engage in a national campaign much like the one waged against smoking beginning in the 1960s and against drunk driving in the 1970s and 1980s. Kids must be taught in school about the advantages of marriage. Welfare and safety-net programs must be reshaped to ensure that they do not facilitate or encourage out-of-wedlock births. Media and advertising executives must be held to account if they tacitly encourage the choice to conceive babies with no intention of bringing them up in two-parent families. It would make an enormous difference if film, music, and athletic role models around the country began to take their influence on millions of young people seriously. Unlike them, single parents in real America can’t afford a phalanx of nannies.
Any discussion of out-of-wedlock births must exercise extreme care and compassion to make sure that we in no way appear to judge or condemn these moms or their children. These moms are some of the best people we know. They work hard and sacrifice much to raise their children. But given the enormous human and national implications of nearly half our children being raised without the benefit of two parents, it is long past time to tell the truth: a marriage between one man and one woman is one of the best things a parent can do for a child.
It’s the Teachers
The best thing that can happen to a child once he or she arrives at school is to have a great teacher. Every one of us remembers the teachers who had the biggest impact on us—like Mr. Wonnberger, who taught my tenth-grade English class. He could barely see and, as a result, was the target of a lot of teenage humor, but despite the fact that he was nearly blind, he understood how to get the most out of all of us—and he did. He tore our papers apart paragraph by paragraph and line by line with critiques that sharpened our skills without crushing our confidence. He insisted that my classmates and I push our thinking and our writing beyond the superficial. I don’t remember what grades he gave me, but I do remember what he taught me.
When Bain & Company carried out an exhaustive study of education in Boston, the consultants followed individual students an
d their test results as they moved from class to class and from school to school. The study demonstrated the obvious truth that the quality of the teacher was the educational variable that mattered most. Some excellent teachers were able to move their students ahead by a full grade level, while other, less gifted educators simply could not. The best teachers were consistently the best, year after year, and the worst were consistently the worst. Classroom size, school-building quality, community income levels, access to computers, and the ethnicity of the students—all these factors paled in comparison with the individual capabilities of the teacher. These findings do not surprise us, but the Bain study confirmed with data what each of us knows from experience.
In 2009, McKinsey & Company carried out an exhaustive global study of education systems at both the international and the city level, analyzing student assessment scores, interviewing more than one hundred experts, policy makers, and practitioners, and visiting schools around the world. The best national performers, such as Singapore, Korea, Japan, and Finland, and the best city performers, such as Boston and Chicago, were studied in depth and were compared with underperforming systems. This study again confirmed what by now had become clear to anyone willing to immerse themselves in the data about educational achievement: The available evidence suggests that the main driver of the variation in student learning at school is the quality of the teachers, it concluded. [E]ven in good systems, students [who] do not progress quickly during their first years at school, because they are not exposed to teachers of sufficient caliber, stand very little chance of recovering the lost years.
This study also concluded that neither the level of education spending nor the size of the average class had any significant effect on student achievement—it all came down to the caliber of the teachers. The best education systems, the study determined, did at least three things to guarantee quality teachers: they hired only the best and brightest; they worked to develop and improve their teachers’ skills; and they monitored the performance of each child, teacher, and school, intervening when needed to ensure the best possible education for every student.
If hiring among the brightest of our graduates is key to creating schools with great teachers, then we have some serious work to do. McKinsey noted that the top-performing systems around the world recruit new teachers from the top third of their graduating classes. In Finland, they are recruited from the top 10 percent; in South Korea from the top 5 percent. But in the United States, McKinsey reported, our teachers are generally drawn from the bottom third of graduates. In too many cases, we send our weakest students to teacher-training colleges, and then expect that studying education theory and teaching pedagogy will transform them into great teachers.
Another key finding from the McKinsey study was this: A teacher’s level of literacy, as measured by vocabulary and other standardized tests, affects student achievement more than any other measurable teacher attribute. Consider the implications of that finding. If our goal is to have great teachers for our children, we have to recruit from among the best to produce the best. Boston, Chicago, and New York, for example, have begun to absorb this lesson and have established programs that seek to recruit top university graduates to the teaching profession. These three cities are now among the most rapidly improving education systems in the nation. The education writer for The Washington Post, Jay Matthews, recently authored Work Hard, Be Nice, which explains the success of KIPP—Knowledge Is Power Program—in charter schools. It is clear that talented, motivated, high-achieving teachers are at the core of KIPP’s success, and at the core of the success of schools that consistently outperform national averages.
Of course, removing the least effective teachers from the classroom is also an important way to improve overall teacher quality. My own boys had great teachers in the Belmont, Massachusetts, public schools, with a couple of glaring exceptions. In elementary school, one of our sons began to show some of the classic signs of trouble at school, and Ann called a few other parents with kids in the same class to see if their children were having difficulty as well. Some reported that their child loved the teacher, and others reported real trouble. After a bit more investigation, what Ann discovered was that most of the girls in the class were happy, and that most of the boys were miserable. One parent told Ann that her son had been called to the front of the class, and the teacher had held up his paper, said it was sloppily written, and had torn it up in front of the entire class. This, in elementary school.
Ann and I went to see the school’s principal. He quickly acknowledged that we were not imagining things, that this teacher had a real problem with boys, and that the situation was clearly becoming worse. However, the principal’s hands were tied because the teacher’s years of seniority had secured her an assignment to our school. We asked whether there wasn’t some way she could be removed from the classroom. He explained that under the school district’s contract with the teachers, that was virtually impossible. This was one reason why, when the option of private school became available to us, we took it. But most parents are not in a position to place a child in a private, a charter, or a parochial school. If we truly want better public schools, we will have to insist on contract provisions that allow for removing the few teachers who should not be working with children.
There are several lessons we can learn from other nations about creating great teachers. First, make the application process to our teaching programs highly selective at the outset. Don’t admit from the bottom third academically. The winnowing process cannot wait until graduates have made it to the front of a classroom.
Second, select only those teacher candidates who have demonstrated high levels of intellect, literacy, and numeracy.
Third, open alternative pathways into teaching, particularly for individuals who have excelled in other fields. The experience of the best-performing education systems is that nontraditional teachers tend to be of high caliber.
And fourth, raise the base salaries of teachers who are beginning their careers. We spend much more than other countries on education, but in the United States, starting teacher salaries lag far behind the comparable starting salaries of other nations. When recent graduates are often faced with six-figure student loans, starting salary is a very significant issue in their choice of career. Further, as salaries increase over time, they should not be capped by adherence to a lockstep seniority-based salary grid. Teachers should be treated like the professionals they are—and low starting salaries and fixed salary progression dissuade some of our best students from choosing this essential and valuable profession.
The McKinsey study to which I’ve referred found that South Korea and Singapore employ fewer teachers than other systems: in effect, this ensures that they can spend more money on each teacher at an equivalent funding level. In the United States, then, the effort to reduce classroom size may actually hurt education more than it helps.
There are other reasons why we spend so much on education and still pay starting teachers less than comparable nations: we employ too many administrators and nonteaching staff, who drain dollars away from the pool available for teacher salaries. The political movement aimed at directing at least two-thirds of every education dollar to the classroom is motivated by this reality.
Obstacles to Better Schools
In addition to improving the quality of new teachers, we need to do a much better job building the skills of teachers throughout their careers. Too often, the undergraduate training our teachers receive does not significantly enhance their effectiveness in the classroom. In other professions like medicine, law, investment banking, consulting, and accounting, the most effective training occurs in the workplace. Similarly, teachers need mentors and coaches in the classroom, particularly in their early years. They need to see how their students’ progress stacks up against their fellow teachers’ classes. And young teachers especially need to be motivated to improve by viewing and adopting the best practices of others, to receive the kind of motivation tha
t isn’t helped by a compensation system that pays the same amount to every teacher, regardless of ability. Better teachers deserve better pay, and they should have access to a teaching-career track that provides higher status and greater rewards, such as in programs that create mentor or master teachers who supervise and support other teachers.
Teachers’ unions often oppose compensation differences among teachers, whether for different levels of accomplishment, or for qualifying to teach subjects in which there are teacher shortages, such as math and science. They often also oppose using student achievement data to evaluate individual teachers. If these measures continue to be blocked, our public schools will remain uncompetitive.
Accountability is one of those things we expect from others but would prefer not to submit to ourselves. Most of us would rather be rewarded regardless of whether we excel, yet we know that if that were the case for everyone, our society would falter. Teachers’ unions do their very best to secure these insulations from performance for their members, and the results are lack of accountability, rising pay as a simple function of years on the job, and near-absolute job security. These have a deadening impact on student achievement. I don’t blame teachers’ unions for asking for such gold-plated benefits; the unions’ job is to work for their members. I blame administrators, school boards, and parents for saying yes, even when schools are manifestly failing their students.
It is not the unions’ job to fight for our children. That is our job, and it’s the task of the people we elect to represent us. Our elected representatives’ role is to sit across the table from the unions and bargain in good faith in the interest of children and parents. But the teachers’ unions long ago discovered that they could wield influence—and, in some cases, overwhelming influence—over the selection of our representatives on school boards and in state legislatures. In states like Massachusetts and in many others, it’s almost impossible to be elected a city mayor if you are opposed by the local teachers’ union, and the same is true for candidates for state representative in many legislative districts. As a result, candidates for office woo the teachers’ unions. If they secure their endorsement and are elected, the official sitting across the table from the union at bargaining time is the very person the union campaigned for and helped get into office. All too often, no one at that bargaining table is there solely to represent the interests of children and parents. Of course, there are always the requisite public nods to education reform, accountability, performance pay, and all the potential education reforms that are currently in vogue. But meaningful change is seldom accomplished. Instead, the priority almost always remains more education funding and creating smaller classes—the two measures with the least positive impact on the quality of education, but the most impact on teacher pay and union dues. When citizens vote to reduce education revenues or the state cuts back on funds, the education officials typically make the cuts where the voters will feel them most—in sports, music, arts, libraries, and computers. You simply don’t see administrators being fired or salaries being cut across the board.