More on the McKinsey Report Debate

Pondiscio gets into the McKinsey Report debate over at CK:

Teachers, raise your hand if you chose your profession because you wanted to raise GDP? Anyone??

Here's a response I posted there. I think it's more concise and clear about how I feel about the report than my previous posts here on TP or over at Burell's blog.

I think the report said that GDP would have risen ‘if’ several achievement gaps would have been closed. Who doesn’t want to close achievement gaps?

And I think in terms of ‘performance’, the report notes Finland and South Korea specifically because of the success rates in education in those two countries with regards specifically to MATH and SCIENCE.

For the amount of money we all pay, both for public and private education, the US still basically sucks at math compared to the rest of the industrialized world. Don’t we want to change that?

Friedman and the McKinsey report may not be the best messengers, but in the haze of big money and big economics that cloud this report, there is actually some stuff we ought to look at much more closely.

Robert's original post states:

Look, everyone gets the connection between education, income and productivity. But economic arguments, however troubling, will neither win hearts and minds among teachers, nor create the “sense of urgency and follow-through” Friedman wants to see.

I would agree, except that at work today, two out of the three times I had conversations with teachers it was over this issue and they thought this IS the sort of thing that would create a “sense of urgency and follow-through”.

Folks are really attuned to what's going on in the economy right now. It will be interesting to see if TF's op-ed has any traction with the majority middle-class U.S. teaching profession.

CB on TF

Burell pokes Friedman in the eye.

Call me crazy, but I suspect we could make a connection between the wealth gap and the achievement gap in those halcyon days to the "decline of education" Friedman is wringing his hands about here.

I think there are all sorts of reasons why both American education pales in comparison to the position of America as a global power and why America faces the economic difficulties that it does. But when Burell notes that:

Friedman's fixation on test score rankings divorced from poverty rankings needs fixing. But it's standard in education punditry today. We ignore poverty, and instead only focus on schools and teachers.

he seems to overlook the part where TF quotes the 'ifs':

If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher. If we had closed the racial achievement gap and black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher.

The McKinsey Report suffers in its lack of definition, particularly with regard to any explanation of 'performance' that goes beyond comparative test scores. But, unlike some folks (perhaps even TF), I tend to read this not as prescriptive -- as in "let's us business-types show those durned teachers how if they just taught better, we'd all have more money"; but rather as damning -- as in "if" US education (and in the comparison with Finland and South Korea, the focus is directed here at math, science, and technology) were not lagging behind its global peers (and had not for the years 1983-98), "then" the result would have been a smarter and more competitive US populace and therefore (by Mc/TF standards) higher GDP.

This is basic economics stuff, it's just that the numbers crunchers don't always see the myriad social realities and the folks on the other side of the spectrum don't trust the reasoning.

Burell is absolutely on target in criticizing the report for its failure to recognize the impact of poverty on education in the US (even more importantly the distribution of poverty -- after all, on paper South Korea has got more poverty than the US [in terms of percentage of population / not raw numbers]). He also rightly gets under TF's skin for seeming to simplify exactly what the 'decline' of anything actually means. But I think in the end this report actually might offer a glimmer of hope in the ironic fact that it pars big economics with the international comparisons in education and in doing so, puts the educational comparisons in the limelight. It therefore could serve as catalyst for a more open and widespread discussion -- one much more open than the report itself could ever be.