Costs of Past and Future Learning Losses (September 09, 2020)
For the United States, the already accrued learning losses are expected to amount to $14.2 trillion, and would grow if schools are unable to restart quickly.
For the United States, the already accrued learning losses are expected to amount to $14.2 trillion, and would grow if schools are unable to restart quickly.
Make schools better than they were by relying more on the best teachers.
Technological advances in the economy present both challenges for firms and workers tied to outmoded production methods and great opportunities for those able to adapt.
The nation is stuck with a bad equilibrium in terms of teacher salaries: salaries are insufficient to attract new teachers who can fuel improved schools and yet they are not even high enough to satisfy current teachers.
The PISA scores are a good index of the future quality of the labor force in each country, and the quality of the labor force in turn has been shown to be a decisive factor in determining the long-run growth rates of nations.
Nobody can realistically improve if they do not know where they stand or what is possible. Throwing more money at the global learning crisis without solid information on the specific challenges facing individual low- and middle-income countries is unlikely to be more successful in the future than in the past.
Education policy in the U.S. is in transition. The policy directions of states will have a great impact on the future of each state’s economic development. And here the business community can significantly affect the future, essentially by promoting its own self-interest.
In September 2015, the United Nations adopted an aggressive development agenda that included 17 separate Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) designed to guide investment and development over the next 15 years. Two of these assume particular importance because they will determine whether or not the other 15 can be achieved.
My critique of the paper by Jackson, Johnson, and Persico is very simple and might be lost in the dazzling misdirection of their response. When I learned computer programming, I was taught to use simplified approximations of results to make sure that my more complicated, and harder to check, programs produced answers that were in the right ballpark. This step apparently is no longer taught.
Considerable prior research has failed to find a consistent relationship between school spending and student performance, making skepticism about such a relationship the conventional wisdom. Given that skepticism, new studies that purport to find a systematic relationship between school spending and student performance get disproportionate attention. Kirabo Jackson, Rucker C. Johnson, and Claudia Persico offer a new study suggesting that a clear money-performance relationship exists if you just look in the right place. Nonetheless, we really cannot get around the necessity of focusing on how money is spent on schools.