AZspot — American “innovation” in education is almost…
- Education is a way to end poverty.
- Education is the best way to end poverty.
- Education is the only way to end poverty.
These are all false, but since number three is the one Rhee and Duncan and the education reformer crowd pushes, let’s start there. It is flatly not the case that to end poverty you need to alter education. Americans should know this. Starting from the 1960s, we as a society cut outrageously high rates of elderly poverty by 71%. We did that by sending old people checks called Social Security. We also know from international data that low-poverty countries get that way through tax and transfer schemes, not unlike Social Security (I, II). If you are saying nothing but education will dramatically cut poverty, when things other than education absolutely will and have, you are an enemy of the poor. You are contributing to a discursive world where people ignore the easiest, most proven ways to cut poverty. You are a bad person.
Now let’s focus our attention on number one, that education is a way to reduce poverty. In fact, we have dramatically ramped up educational attainment in the US in the last forty years or so and market poverty has not taken a dive. As a basic logical matter, being more educated doesn’t make you less poor. Having more money makes you less poor. So education, even if you think it is necessary, is not sufficient to end poverty. You need distributive institutions that actually generate a specific distributive result, and education is certainly not sufficient for ensuring that happens. A more educated populace will probably be more productive, but that too — as we have seen for the last four decades — is not sufficient for ensuring the gains of such productivity increases flow to the non-rich. Education is good, but sufficient for solving poverty it is not.
These are all false, but since number three is the one Rhee and Duncan and the education reformer crowd pushes, let’s start there. It is flatly not the case that to end poverty you need to alter education. Americans should know this. Starting from the 1960s, we as a society cut outrageously high rates of elderly poverty by 71%. We did that by sending old people checks called Social Security. We also know from international data that low-poverty countries get that way through tax and transfer schemes, not unlike Social Security (I, II). If you are saying nothing but education will dramatically cut poverty, when things other than education absolutely will and have, you are an enemy of the poor. You are contributing to a discursive world where people ignore the easiest, most proven ways to cut poverty. You are a bad person.
Now let’s focus our attention on number one, that education is a way to reduce poverty. In fact, we have dramatically ramped up educational attainment in the US in the last forty years or so and market poverty has not taken a dive. As a basic logical matter, being more educated doesn’t make you less poor. Having more money makes you less poor. So education, even if you think it is necessary, is not sufficient to end poverty. You need distributive institutions that actually generate a specific distributive result, and education is certainly not sufficient for ensuring that happens. A more educated populace will probably be more productive, but that too — as we have seen for the last four decades — is not sufficient for ensuring the gains of such productivity increases flow to the non-rich. Education is good, but sufficient for solving poverty it is not.