From Sputnik to the War on Terror, U.S. Education as a “National Security Crisis”
By Mary Theroux • Saturday March 24, 2012 4:03 PM PDT • 8 Comments
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) earlier this week released a little-noticed new report warning that “the education crisis is a national security crisis.”
The report notes that American students perform poorly on international tests compared to other countries that are making far better progress, and cites results of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment produced by the Institute of Education Sciences, showing U.S. students rank fourteenth in reading, twenty-fifth in math, and seventeenth in science compared to students in other industrialized countries. Further, more than half of Americans aged 17-24 can’t pass standardized qualification tests to join the military.
The CFR report continues:
The lack of preparedness poses threats on five national security fronts: economic growth and competitiveness, physical safety, intellectual property, U.S. global awareness, and U.S. unity and cohesion, says the report. Too many young people are not employable in an increasingly high-skilled and global economy, and too many are not qualified to join the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records, or have an inadequate level of education.
Alarms that the state of American education poses increased national security risks are nothing new: it was first framed as such when the Soviet Union beat the U.S. into space with the launch of Sputnik in 1957. The extraterrestrial spread of the Red Threat sparked a vast increase in federal funding to education to close the “achievement gap.” President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” in the 1960s further expanded the federal role in education to assist the poor, leading up to the creation of the Department of Education in 1979, and culminating in the Reagan administration with the 1983 report, “A Nation at Risk,” which warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
In that time, federal spending on education has exploded, more than tripling between 1960 and 2000 in real, inflation-adjusted dollars. President Bush’s No Child Left Behind added 39% in discretionary spending to the Department, while $115 billion of President Obama’s $800 billion, 2009 Economic Stimulus Bill was directed to education. Dubbed “the largest-ever single federal investment in school reform,” those stimulus funds include billions of dollars in discretionary funding controlled by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who proudly declared that the “$4.35 billion dollar Race to the Top fund dwarfs the combined sum of discretionary reform funding available to all of my predecessors as education secretary.”
Yet despite these vast expenditures, the U.S. educational system continues to produce students with third-rate math, science, and language skills. And the CFR report confirms that the problem is not one of spending—the U.S. invests more in K-12 education than most developed countries, yet achieves far worse results.
So what do the report’s authors now recommend for solving the crisis?
The Task Force proposes three overarching policy recommendations:
• Implement educational expectations and assessments in subjects vital to protecting national security. “With the support of the federal government and industry partners, states should expand the Common Core State Standards, ensuring that students are mastering the skills and knowledge necessary to safeguard the country’s national security.”
• Make structural changes to provide students with good choices. “Enhanced choice and competition, in an environment of equitable resource allocation, will fuel the innovation necessary to transform results.”
• Launch a “national security readiness audit” to hold schools and policymakers accountable for results and to raise public awareness. “There should be a coordinated, national effort to assess whether students are learning the skills and knowledge necessary to safeguard America’s future security and prosperity. The results should be publicized to engage the American people in addressing problems and building on successes.”
Unfortunately, while recommendations such as the first and third are certainly well-meaning and “aspirational,” top-down, centrally-tracked, outcome-based goals have not and will not produce students whose individual talents and interests have been nurtured and developed to their highest potential.
Happily, the second recommendation gets to the point: Choice and Competition. The shining exceptions to the failed schools under the direction of the Department of Education are various school choice programs across the country. Washington, D.C.’s voucher program has probably received the greatest attention, where students largely from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds are succeeding at high-quality private schools at a fraction of what it would cost if they attended traditional public schools. Even today’s “communist threat”—China—increasingly educates its children in private schools.
Thus, the real solution is for government to get out of education all together and return it entirely to the private and community level. The Independent Institute offers the Independent Scholarship Fund, providing privately-funded tuition assistance allowing parents to select among the more than 300, largely small private schools in the San Francisco East Bay. Recipients, drawn from among our area’s poorest, and coming from the worst school districts, achieve a median grade point average of 3.5, and 100% of the high school recipients graduate.
Even such lavish per-student spending figures as New York state’s more than $17,000 annually fail to capture the total Americans are paying in taxes for government education. On top of numbers like the $115 billion from the 2009 Stimulus bill cited above, one would have to search out and total local, county, and state funding and subsidies to public schools. Then add in private funding, of which foundations, corporations, and individuals across the country provide millions per year, hoping vainly they can “reform from within.” Suffice it to say, these resources, freed as private educational “venture capital,” would provide far more than enough money to spur the most dynamic, high-performing education choices in the history of humankind. How many more “crises” do we want to declare before accepting this basic fact?
Tags: Budget and Tax Policy, China, Defense, Education, Family, Urban Issues 
Related item from the BLS projection on % job openings vs needed education levels. 25%, no high school diploma; 45%, high school diploma; 20% college degree. (I assume 10% , advanced degree).
richard | Mar 26, 2012 | Reply
Why are you just talking about the poorist, the middle class people work their tails off to make a living, and educate their children, pay their bills, buy homes, which is good for the economy, and they can’t get help for their children to go to college, the government should have thought long and hard about education long ago, to educate children properly, you have to start in the first grade, and everyone should have had that advantage, my husband and I did without lots of things, to send our children to private school, because of our faith, but my husband went to public schools, and at that time, those schools were good, today our states are going to allow illegal immigrants to go to school with assistance from the state, this is totally wrong, and a slap in the face to every family who worked hard and did without to educate there children, it is also wrong for all the public school children who’s parents worked hard to make sure their children attended school everyday, made sure they were dressed in decent clothes, had food on the table, etc. All our tax money for education, must have been poured down the drain, and for our schools to be in the shape there in, with children graduating and not knowing how to fill out applications, get a job, etc. must have had bad administrators in the public school system, and to much interference from the government, my personel opinion, is that every child who graduates from high school, with good grades should be able to go to college, and get a good education, without it costing thousands of dollors, these are the young people who will be in charge one day, I believe if you give thousand or millions of dollars to a college or university, you should have a plaque in the school with your name one it, but you should not have a college or university named after you, we are supposed to give from our hearts, and not expect anything in return, but some people only give to receive, if I had school age children today, I could not afford to send them to a faith based school, today we are lucky we can buy a new car when we need one, gas is sky high, groceries have gone up high because of the high gas prices, medicine is out of sight, health insurance is out of control, and student loans are ridiculous, how can a child who graduates from high school with good grades today go to college, they can’t afford student loans, they are not rich, but yet they have the grades, the dreams the willingness to learn, and it will be wasted, but again the very poor, the illegal, they will get all the help they need, that is not what America is about, even other countries educate their children. We need to be better in the United States.
Mary Kraus | Mar 26, 2012 | Reply
Mary,
I am talking about all children benefiting from the privatization of education. Your husband likely attended a pre-Department of Education public school, and, yes, they were better, but still not as good as those that can develop from a free market in education.
All of the negatives you raise result from government interference in these realms: gas, medicine and health insurance, and student loans are all areas of extremely heavy government regulation and control.
And immigrants are only a problem for a welfare state such as the U.S. that gives “money for nothing.” We used to view immigrants as what they are: human capital that enriches.
With best wishes,
Mary
Mary Theroux | Mar 26, 2012 | Reply
Mary Theroux, 3/26/2012
Your title includes “the War on Terror”, so I thought you might be interested in this site:
The White Rose Society
http://www.whiterosesociety.org/WRS_pamphlets_home.html
Thanking you for this opportunity to comment.
P.S. Sophie Scholl Interrogation on You Tube
James de Laurier | Mar 26, 2012 | Reply
I was born and raised in a socialist European country that tests in the top every time on these educational surveys. (I don’t believe socialism has anything to do with it, but the fact that young people in socialist countries have to work so much harder to get anywhere is a motivator to study).
Anyway, the problem with American education is that,
(1) it appears to be geared towards the lowest common denominator. Competitiveness and achievement is a good thing that should be acknowledged and encouraged rather than suppressed.
(2) The entitlement mentality has gone way too far. Student’s can do no wrong anymore. When they misbehave, teachers can do very little, and in many cases the parents will take their child’s side. The notion that “my child can do no wrong,” is dangerous because it undermines the teacher’s authority and the student’s motivation for learning.
(3)American high-school students are treated like kindergarteners. They lack freedom of individual choice which a person of high-school age should have.
Just my two cents...thanks for a great article!
Clara Madison | Mar 27, 2012 | Reply
Oh, Mary, I forgot to mention.
Privatization of schools is absolutely essential to the success of American students.
Clara Madison | Mar 27, 2012 | Reply
The education situation in the US sounds very like here in the UK where the 7% of pupils who attend fee-paying ‘private’ schools take more than a third of the places at our Russell Group universities (equivalent of Ivy League and including Oxford, Cambridge etc.).
I have been arguing for some years now that -apart from funding (for which the voucher system seems best) – the government’s sole duty should be to set the standard and content of a School Leaving Certificate – a certificate of competence to deal with the adult world NOT of academic prowess – without which no child leaves school. This certificate should be attainable by the age of 14/15, after which young people should be free to select their own education from Teachers, not Schools. The teachers would be paid by the number of pupils and hours they teach just as many people pay for piano or other lessons now. The selection of teachers by pupils would then ensure their high standard of teaching.
Other exams should be set by the institutions or professions that are recruiting new blood. Universities would set entry exams, the armed forces would set theirs, the Engineering bodies would set theirs and so on. Thus would the state no longer have dominion over ‘school success’ or national exam standards that are becoming increasingly irrelevent to the future needs of young people.
“The American professor deals with his students according to his lights. It is his business to chase them along over a prescribed ground at a prescribed pace like a flock of sheep. They all go humping over the hurdles with the professor chasing them with a set of ‘tests’ and ‘recitations’, ‘marks’ and ‘attendences’, the whole apparatus obviously copied from the time-clock of the business man’s factory. This process is called ‘showing results’. The pace set is necessarily that of the slowest, and thus results in what I have heard Mr Edward Beatty describe as the ‘convoy system’ of education.” [Stephen Leacock from 'My Discovery of England' 1922]
Sadly, Stephen Leacock’s mockery doesn’t seem to have altered things in the US in the last 90 years and the ‘convoy system’ has since been fully adopted over here.
I know it’s messy and apparently ‘wasteful’ not to have a standard number of children of the same age all being taught the same thing at the same time irrespective of whether it’s what they need, want or have the aptitude or inclination to learn as autonomous individuals, but then free enterprise is messy and wasteful if you choose to look at the constructive destruction of old, tired and oudated businesses in that way.
John Harrison | Mar 27, 2012 | Reply