Students’ Covid learning losses portent a future workforce with fewer skills, lower earnings
Virtually no attention has been paid to the fact that there were major NAEP losses —heavily skewed against disadvantaged students — well before the COVID shutdowns.
Unless schools actually get better than they were in 2019, existing research indicates this will lead to permanently lower future earnings.
Nobody is talking about schools resuming completely to normal this fall, but the economic problems caused by the pandemic would not be solved even if they did.
Nobody is talking about schools resuming completely to normal this fall, but the economic problems caused by the pandemic would not be solved even if they did.
The single most important way to ensure that everybody can participate in the modern economy is to ensure that they have the skills that are demanded by the economy.
The nation is stuck with a bad deal on teacher salaries: salaries insufficient to attract new teachers who can fuel improved schools and yet not even high enough to satisfy current teachers.
Ohio can build on relative strength in math education to shore up the educational skills of Ohioans and better position the state for the coming artificial intelligence revolution.
Putting our heads in the sand is not the right answer. Test scores today say a lot about what our labor force will look like over the coming decades. Our current students' skills will dictate our economic future in the long run. Understanding the implications of higher skills—as measured by regular standardized tests—provides a way of assessing how our country as a whole will fare in the coming years.
In a knowledge-based economy, early employment gains with vocational training may lead to later problems when specific skills become obsolete.
Improved education is the key to the future for the U.S., as our economy depends on having a highly skilled workforce. Over the past five years, my sense of hope and optimism has actually overtaken despair with U.S. schools. First, there is now broad recognition that quality teachers can lead to revitalized schools that are competitive internationally. Second, there is a new willingness by legislatures in a majority of states to push actively for more flexibility in hiring, paying, and retaining teachers and for improved teacher evaluations so that we identify the teachers that we want to nurture and retain.
We argue that economic growth is what will ensure the other laudable Sustainable Development Goals and that quality education is the only way to achieve long run growth. Simply put, this economic growth goal and the means of achieving it through quality education stand at the top of the pyramid of the SDGs.
Ministers and education officials from a wide range of countries and international agencies are converging on Incheon in the Republic of Korea this week to discuss a new set of development goals at the World Education Forum. The evidence on international achievement tests showed dismal levels of knowledge for many of the countries that improved in school access – seat time is not the same as learning.
It is hard getting around the historic facts. Real per pupil spending has more than doubled in the past 40 years, but the mathematics and reading scores of 17-year-olds have barely budged. We must recognize that more of the same is unlikely to yield better results – and by implication reform through spending is not the way to improvement.
Despite decades of study and enormous effort, we know little about how to train or select high quality teachers. We do know, however, that there are huge differences in the effectiveness of classroom teachers and that these differences can be observed.
Given this situation, the path to improvement rests with enhanced evaluation systems for teachers combined with better personnel systems that link retention and reward to effectiveness.
It’s like the bad penny that keeps appearing, only it costs hundreds of millions of dollars. The city teachers union has begun pushing a new property-tax proposal tied to a union employment program. Everyone would be better off if they just stuck to teaching kids.
