WHEN FIRST RUNNING TO BE PRIME MINISTER IN 1997, UK PRIME Minister Tony Blair described his top three priorities as ‘Education, education and education’.1 Rightly so.
I was once asked by a potential leadership contender for the UK Conservative Party who had justifiable hopes of becoming Prime Minister what priorities he should have and I said much the same thing – that the most important thing that government could do to make life better was to focus on education. Academic studies, particularly those by the St Louis Federal Reserve Bank, show that improving education is likely to do far more to reduce inequality than tax or other policies. ‘This evidence suggests that policies aimed at human capital enhancement, e.g., free preschool for everyone, may be as effective at combating inequality as those aimed at limiting the advantage of the wealthy, e.g., a policy of a high inheritance tax.’2
Earlier in this book, in Chapter 2, I showed how the spread of universal education was responsible for Scotland’s leading role in inventing much of the 20th-century world. This also helped create a relatively homogeneous and increasingly equal society in urban areas in much of Scotland in the 19th and early 20th century (though rural areas remained rather less so).
The most important way in which inequality can be reduced is to improve the skills of the less well-off. There is a substantial body of economic research which demonstrates that not only inequality but overall economic prosperity and growth are both enhanced most by educational policies that improve the skills of the least well-off in societies.3 Almost certainly in both the US and the UK the greatest scope for increasing productivity is by making the least advantaged better skilled and more productive, so this would be a win-win, both reducing inequality and also increasing productivity and the overall size of the economy.
Wikiprogress, a website set up by the OECD, puts much focus on education. The reason that education is a vital part of any social cohesion agenda is because educational outcomes affect all the many dimensions of the social cohesion triangle. When opportunities for quality education are possible across the whole of the population, schooling becomes a strong leveller of opportunities, bringing prospects for upward mobility even to disadvantaged groups. Increasing educational attainment is an important way for converging countries to reduce inequality in market incomes in the long run, particularly as returns to education change as a consequence of shifting wealth.
The OECD analysis puts much stress on publicly provided education for a mix of reasons. First, good educational opportunities mean that the prospects of social mobility are maximised. Given the concerns about ‘superbabies’ and the combination of genetically endowed and well parented offspring of the meritocratic elite, it is vitally important for any society that it provides the highest quality education for those least well endowed with economic or educational benefits from birth.
This in turn helps raise productivity. Many Anglo Saxon countries seem to offer little hope and encourage little advancement to their more deprived communities. More hope would boost cohesion but would also increase participation and encourage better use to be made of those opportunities that already exist. There is scope to reduce inequalities of outcome by better educating those with the worst start in life. Also, the greatest scope for raising productivity in countries like the UK and the US is from raising the attainment of those who are most likely to be left behind.
There are longer-term benefits as well. Improving the quality of education normally helps reduce malnutrition and the diseases associated with it like iron and iodine deficiencies which stunt growth and brain development and reduce brain damage from substance abuse. Also female education tends to have a multiplier effect in improving cohesion since better educated mothers tend to pass on the benefits to their children.
So by far the simplest way of reducing inequality is to invest in the education and skill development of the least well-off. Of course this will take time to show its economic benefits. But, provided that the investments in improving education and particularly that of the least well-off aren’t wasted, it is by far the surest way of reducing inequality.
The potential increased importance worldwide of Type 4 Inequality from homogamy makes this even more important since schooling is the only way to counteract the unfair advantages of good parenting from the meritocrats. This could be crucial in the future.
Of course wishing the result is easier than actually devising policies to make it work.
A powerful analysis by Eduardo Porter two years ago in the New York Times explains the problem well and I quote from it liberally here.4
The wounds of segregation were still raw in the 1970s. With only rare exceptions, African-American children had nowhere near the same educational opportunities as whites.
The civil rights movement, school desegregation and the War on Poverty helped bring a measure of equity to the playing field. Today, despite some setbacks along the way, racial disparities in education have narrowed significantly. By 2012, the test-score deficit of black 9-, 13- and 17-year-olds in reading and math had been reduced as much as 50 percent compared with what it was 30 to 40 years before.
Achievements like these breathe hope into our belief in the Land of Opportunity. They build trust in education as a levelling force powering economic mobility. ‘We do have a track record of reducing these inequalities,’ said Jane Waldfogel, a professor of social work at Columbia University.
…
For all the progress in improving educational outcomes among African-American children, the achievement gaps between more affluent and less privileged children is wider than ever, notes Sean Reardon of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford. Racial disparities are still a stain on American society, but they are no longer the main divider. Today the biggest threat to the American dream is class.
Porter goes on to explain that education is more critical than ever but the gap between the earnings of college leavers and others is larger than ever, while college is increasingly the preserve of the elite.
The sons and daughters of college-educated parents are more than twice as likely to go to college as the children of high school graduates and seven times as likely as those of high school dropouts.
Only 5 percent of Americans ages 25 to 34 whose parents didn’t finish high school have a college degree. By comparison, the average across 20 rich countries in an analysis by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is almost 20 percent.
Even when they start in kindergarten in the US, children from families of low socioeconomic status are already more than a year behind the children of college graduates in their grasp of both reading and math, and despite the efforts deployed by the American public education system, nine years later the achievement gap, on average, will have widened by somewhere from one-half to two-thirds. As Porter says, ‘Even the best performers from disadvantaged backgrounds, who enter kindergarten reading as well as the smartest rich kids, fall behind during their schooling.’
Children from low socioeconomic groups in the US are seven times more likely to have been born to a teenage mother and only half live with both parents compared with 83% of the children of college graduates. They are more likely to suffer from bad nutrition and of course less likely to be able to benefit from expensive educational additions such as extra lessons and visits to museums and art galleries that children of better educated parents can benefit from.
When they enter the public education system, they are shortchanged again. Eleven-year-olds from the wrong side of the tracks are about one-third more likely to have a novice teacher, according to Professor Waldfogel and her colleagues, and much more likely to be held back a grade.5
Professor Waldfogel believes that the key to solving the problem is to reduce educational inequality before the age of 14 and claims that evidence from Australia, Canada and even the UK show it can be done.
Fifty years ago, the black-white proficiency gap was one and a half to two times as large as the gap between a child from a family at the top 90th percentile of the income distribution and a child from a family at the 10th percentile. Today, the proficiency gap between the poor and the rich is nearly twice as large as that between black and white children.6
A problem with class-based education in the UK reflects the private (quaintly called public) schools. These private schools cream off the children of affluent and intelligent parents and cream off the better teachers as well. I am temperamentally against banning things unless they can be proved to be creating damage on a significant scale. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it should be banned. And I am not sure that banning private education would work because it would be relatively easy for schools to set up in different jurisdictions. The best way to remove support from private education is to make state schools so good that no one in their right mind would want to waste money educating their children less well and more expensively.7
Any policy to increase the quality of education in the poorest schools needs to deal with a number of problems. Teachers in more capitalist societies have traditionally lacked status. From the right they are seen as sinks for those holding intolerant left-wing views, which discourages those on the right from supporting increased investment in schools.8 One way of building cross-party support for more investment in teaching (and also universities) would be to generate professional guidelines that would prevent the abuse of teaching positions for political propaganda purposes (my excellent Marxist supervisor at Oxford for my MPhil, Andrew Glyn, would never have dreamed of abusing his position for propaganda purposes – he was an economist first and a Marxist second, and I learned a lot from a generous and clever man).
The solution to the improvement in education for the poorest that is clearly needed will probably involve two aspects: the diversion of funds towards improved teaching (the ‘pupil premium’ promoted by the British Liberal Democrats and enacted by the UK’s Coalition government in 2011 looks like a promising initiative9 though the early stage assessments of its success available at present are currently mixed10) and the clever introduction of technology to make learning easier and more user-friendly for disadvantaged children.
It is worth noting that although disadvantaged children are typically falling back in their ability to benefit from formal education, they do not appear to be falling back as far relatively in their ability to absorb technology. The UK’s ‘Flat White Economy’ has benefited from the widespread ability of even those who have done badly in formal education to develop tech skills and to link their innate creativity with techie solutions.
Hershbein, Kearney and Summers (the former US Treasury Secretary) have shown that some fairly radical so-called investments in education will do very little to reduce income inequality.11
Instead the investments have to be very carefully targeted. The first step is to return to the analysis in Chapter 4 of why inequality is bad for society and what kinds of inequality do most social damage. The analysis showed that the biggest problems caused by inequality emerged when they meant that individuals and families in society did not get their psychological needs met. In general this happens when they feel that they have little control over their lives and when work loses what Arthur Brooks called its dignity.12
The most frequently quoted analysis of people’s needs is based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.13 This is a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five-tier model of human needs, often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid.
Maslow stated that people are motivated to achieve certain needs and that some needs take precedence. In his analysis the most basic need is for physical survival, which is the primary motivator of behaviour. His analysis suggests that once that need is met, one tries to meet the next need up in the hierarchy. And then the next one.
This five-stage model splits between deficiency needs and growth needs. The first four levels can be treated as deficiency needs (D-needs), and the top level as growth or being needs (B-needs).
The deficiency needs in this analysis motivate people when they are not satisfied. Moreover, the need to fulfil such needs grows the longer the period over which they are denied. For example, the longer a person has no food, the more hungry he or she becomes.
The deficiency needs have to be satisfied in order before the being needs. When they are all met, one is self-actualised. Maslow noted only one in a hundred people reach that point.
Another approach is the Human Givens approach, which is very similar to the Maslow hierarchy. This points out that the major psychological needs which people have to deal with in their lives are: ‘security (stable home life, privacy and a safe territory to live in); the need for attention (to give and receive it); connection to others through friendship, fun, love, intimacy; a sense of autonomy and control; being part of a wider social community, which satisfies our need to belong; the need for status; a sense of self-competence (that comes through maturity, learning and the application of skills) and a drive for meaning and purpose’.14
The first need of education to cope with inequality is to encourage people’s inner resources to enable them to run their lives. These inner resources can include: curiosity; long-term memory; imagination (which allows us to focus our attention away from our emotions in order to solve problems more objectively); the ability to understand the world and other people and extract deeper meaning through metaphor – pattern matching; an observing self; the ability to empathise and connect with others; a rational mind both for its own sake and to cross-check emotional reactions.
The British government with its long-serving Schools Minister Nick Gibb has committed to this element of education. His speech on ‘The Purpose of Education’ contains the following passage:
Adult life today is complicated, and we owe it to young people to ensure that they have the character and sense of moral purpose to succeed.
There is now very clear evidence that schools can make a significant contribution to their pupils’ achievement by finding opportunities to instil key character traits, including persistence, grit, optimism and curiosity.
This is not about vague notions of ‘learning how to learn’ or ‘therapeutic education’, and we will not return to the failed approaches of the past. In 2005, the then government promoted and funded a strategy to schools named ‘social and emotional aspects of learning’. This was a well-meaning attempt to ensure children received a broader education. But it failed, because it was part of a wider retreat from the importance of knowledge-based curriculums in schools. Its evaluation found that SEAL was in fact associated with declining respect for teachers and enjoyment of school.
We have recognised that a broader education – including character and values – can only succeed when it is underpinned by the highest standards of academic rigour.
The Knowledge is Power Program schools – KIPP – are one of the earliest and best groups of charter schools in the United States. Their first school opened in Houston, Texas, in 1999. They now have 162 schools educating 60,000 pupils throughout the USA, 87% of whom come from low income families.
The first pupils to graduate from KIPP schools left with academic records which no one had previously dared to expect from young people growing up in the neighbourhoods from which they came. More than 94% of KIPP middle school students have graduated high school, and more than 82% of KIPP alumni have gone on to college.
But while these students from disadvantaged backgrounds were entering colleges in greater numbers than ever before, it soon became clear that they were much more likely to drop out than their more advantaged peers.
The American academic E.D. Hirsch has made a persuasive case that an important reason for this gap is a deficit of vocabulary and knowledge. KIPP charters are middle schools – so children enter aged 11 or 12. Even the excellent education they receive after they arrive cannot overcome the disadvantage which they have already experienced. Building vocabulary and knowledge simply takes too long. Once in college, without the intensive support provided by KIPP, some are falling behind.
I have no doubt that this explanation is correct. But I am convinced that that these pupils struggled in college for another reason, too. Recent research – particularly the work of Angela Duckworth and the Nobel Laureate James Heckman – has examined the impact of character on underperformance. They have found that key attributes including resilience, self-control and social intelligence are powerful predictors of achievement in education and success in adult life.
Robert Putnam, a Harvard Professor of Public Policy, recently published ‘Our Kids’, an account of the decline of social mobility in the United States over the past half-century. He places part of the blame on unequal access which disadvantaged children have to extracurricular activities, compared to the greater opportunities open to children in better-off circumstances.
If we are to deliver on our commitment to social justice, breaking the cycle of disadvantage so that every child reaches their potential, we must therefore ensure that all pupils benefit from an education based on these values.
Character education is already a part of the ethos and culture of many good schools. In the United States, KIPP schools now focus on developing grit, resilience and self-confidence in their pupils, and this work is showing results. As of spring 2015, 45% of KIPP pupils have gained a college degree, compared to a national average of 34%, and just 9% from low-income families.
As pointed out above, it is easy to say what is needed and less easy to achieve it. But it is encouraging that what is needed is well understood at ministerial level in the UK at least.
The second requirement for reducing economic inequality through the education system is to ensure that those educated have monetisable skills that enable them to earn decent incomes. Even if they will not become super-rich, they need to be able to earn enough not to feel excluded from society. Not everyone has the ability to become super-rich, but very few lack the ability to earn a decent living for themselves if properly educated and trained.
The third requirement for reducing economic inequality through the educational system is giving people an understanding of the need to keep changing so that their skills can be adapted to the changing world. This means knowing how to learn and about the need to keep learning so as to keep one’s abilities up to date.
Conclusion
Education is not the only factor needed to reduce inequality, but it is the most important. Without getting education right, it is hard to imagine a society where economic inequality can be kept to levels that are not damaging.