wooldridge

Current

March, 1993

SECTION: No. 351 ; Pg. 4; ISSN: 0011-3131

LENGTH: 10104 words

HEADLINE: A comparative view of education: effective school reforms.

BYLINE: Wooldridge, Adrian

The first problem has been the strength of the education establishment. In Britain the teaching unions have resisted (and educational theorists have denounced) almost every reform of the past decade. An intractable problem for governments in both countries is that they have to rely on a largely hostile workforce to implement their ideas.

The second problem is the difficulty of importing foreign models. The British and the Americans tried to glue on parts of the German training system by creating employer-led organisations modelled on German Chambers of Commerce, and wanted to emulate Germany by channelling public and private TRYING HARDER

Education reform is a booming business. In the past decade desperate governments, left-wing as well as right, liberal as well as authoritarian, have taken to reconstructing their schools and revamping their universities. In 1980 Singapore unveiled plans to turn itself into a model meritocracy. Four years later the Japanese Ministry of Education set up a National Council on Education Reform. In 1988 Britain imported the reform craze to the West by introducing a national curriculum and reorganising school financing on an almost-market basis. George Bush and Bill Clinton both championed radical changes in school funding. Educational reform is in the air everywhere, from France to South Korea, from Australia to Germany.

This survey will try to put this activity in perspective: are governments right to invest so much time and money in the business of learning? In the process it will try to cast light on two perennial issues: What makes a school successful? And what can be done to reduce educational failure? The survey will conclude by ranking the three powerhouses of the world economy--Europe, America, and the Asian tigers--in terms of their ability to educate their workforces and to attract and create high-value-adding jobs.

The reforming frenzy reflects a shift in the political fortunes of education. Half a century ago, you knew you were on the road to nowhere if you were made minister of education. Today education ministers are usually on their way up. Margaret Thatcher used the education portfolio as a stepping-stone to the premiership. Bill Clinton first captured national headlines with his reforms of Arkansas schools. George Bush tried to salvage his do-nothing reputation at home by dubbing himself "the education president."

Such politicians have a shrewd sense of what will go down in the bar rooms and boardrooms. Chief executives of multinational firms hold earnest conferences on skills shortages and training strategies. Serious newspapers and heavyweight magazines devote pages to education and national competitiveness. Throughout the rich world, voters put education near the top of their list of worries.

This concern for change has its origins in the 1960s, when the aim was to turn elite education into mass education. But the terms of the educational debate have shifted. Governments now treat education not as a consumer good but as a productive asset. They are increasingly unwilling to use public money to support a gentlemanly style of education, with its emphasis on humanities and learning for its own sake. They have also lost their enthusiasm for promoting equality.

COST AND QUALITY

They are particularly worried about cost and quality. The West and the East converged on the issue of quality from opposite directions. In Britain and America conservative governments turned against child-centered teaching and called for a return to basics. They wanted more rote learning and less creative writing. In East Asia governments now feel that they have solved the quantity problem. They aim instead to increase the quality of education, particularly the quality of the education of the brightest. Hence a current Asian fashion for such things as creative writing.

Governments throughout the world are bullying educationalists into providing value-for-money, shifting expenditure from high-cost universities to low-cost polytechnics, encouraging institutions to raise money from private-sector sources, introducing a variety of quasi-market reforms, such as per-capita funding and a split between purchasers and providers, and emphasizing the accountability of educational institutions. There is a burgeoning industry in designing league tables of school results and producing performance indicators sophisticated enough to deal with the myriad activities of the modern university.

Governments have also moved their emphasis from education to training. If education reform in the 1960s took aim at the university, it is now the training college which is in the sights of the reformers. A mixture of technological innovations and demographic trends is persuading governments to improve the vocational qualifications of their workforces. The rise of information technology (IT) means that many of the lowliest shop-floor workers need to be able to operate a computer. The ageing of Europe and the marked slowdown in the rate of population growth in America mean that firms will have to improve the skills of their existing workers instead of relying on recruiting new ones.

At the same time, the durability of skills is getting progressively shorter. This means that governments can no longer allow education to end at the university, let alone the high school. Further and higher education colleges will have to learn how to teach adults, particularly those who dropped out of education years ago. Companies will have to invest heavily in retraining. And universities will have to provide their graduates with regular refresher courses.

Same Ends, Different Means

Despite these common pressures, there is no consensus on how to improve education. Many prominent reformers are pushing in opposite directions. The most comprehensive reform programme has been the one implemented by the British government since 1988. This is a mixture of centralisation (imposing a national curriculum and reducing the role of local-education authorities) and competition (giving schools an incentive to compete for pupils and encouraging pupils to compete for results). This has attracted many imitators and would-be imitators. Sweden is reorganising its school system into an internal market. Denmark has introduced per-capita funding for technical colleges. Singapore is going for league tables to stimulate competition between schools. American reformers would like to introduce educational vouchers and national tests.

Other reformers are doing just the opposite. In South Korea and Japan the education ministries want to delegate power to local government. The Japanese authorities strongly disapprove of league tables of schools. Still, even if governments disagree about how exactly to proceed, they agree on the need for reform. Are they right to invest so much time and effort in doing it? Does education pay, or have the politicians merely been seduced by the professors?

HUMAN CAPITAL

The answer is yes, education does pay. If virtue gets its reward in heaven, education gets its payoff on earth. On almost every measure, education is a highly remunerative investment.

Take employment. The longer you spend in being educated, the less likely you are to end up on the dole. In America in 1989, 9.1% of people who went no further than lower high school were unemployed, compared with 2.2% of people who completed university. In Japan the equivalent figures were 7% versus 2.3%. The troubles of people who fail at school are getting worse by the decade. Over the past 30 years, each economic downturn has pushed a larger proportion of the uneducated into unemployment; and each upturn has rescued a smaller and smaller proportion of them for the labour market.

Or consider real incomes. It is hardly surprising that the well-educated have always been richer than the poorly educated. But the gap is getting steadily bigger. In 1980 a college-educated American ten years into his career earned 31% more than a contemporary who had finished only high school. By 1988 the earnings gap had yawned to 86%. Over the 1980s male college graduates saw their real incomes rise by 10%: high-school graduates saw their incomes fall by 9% and high-school drop-outs by 12%. College graduates will fulfil the American dream of earning more than their parents. The average high-school drop-out will not.

EDUCATION

Or take future prospects. Educational success in youth seems to pay mounting dividends in maturity. People who leave school early rapidly run out of rungs on the earnings ladder; university graduates not only find plenty of rungs, they also discover that each step upwards is increasingly remunerative. One reason for this is that the well-educated land jobs that provide them with more training, while the uneducated are locked out of opportunities to improve their skills.

Throughout the advanced world, employers complain that a shortage of skilled workers is holding up economic growth. Schools and universities seem to be incapable of producing an adequate supply of properly trained and technically qualified workers. The shortages come in two distinct flavours: quantitative and qualitative. The general workforce is insufficiently educated to do the jobs available. There is also a mismatch between the skills offered by people and the skills needed by industry. The universities continue to churn out humanities-trained generalists at a time of soaring demand for scientists and engineers.

The skills deficits show no signs of abating, even during today's economic downturn. All advanced countries predict a significant fall in demand for unskilled labourers and a significant increase in demand for skilled workers and high-grade administrators and scientists.

Mind the Gap

Why has education become such an economic asset in rich countries? Why are skills shortages mounting at a time of rapidly rising unemployment? The questions can be answered in just two words: globalisation and automation. Globalisation means that many low-value-adding jobs are exported to poorer and cheaper countries. Automation means that jobs that stay in rich countries are increasingly done by machines rather than men. Having made its first impact in manufacturing, automation is now affecting the service industries, with some excellent results (cash points, for example) and some execrable ones (such as automated junk faxes).

There is nothing new in the triumph of brain over brawn. The richer countries have long found that ever larger proportions of their populations are employed in jobs that require mental power rather than muscle power. For more than a century, relentless technical innovation and sustained economic expansion have been creating new and cleverer jobs and thus increasing the demand for better educated workers. At the same time, the rise in real incomes and the spreading of wealth has increased the demand for more sophisticated products and services. Prosperous people employ more people to look after their money and pander to their whims.

The shift towards smarter jobs seems to have accelerated in the past decade, mainly because of a kick from information technology. A decade ago some people worried that IT might, in effect, make the workforce stupid: the machines would do the thinking, the workers would simply watch and wonder. In fact, the opposite has happened. Information technology has not only increased the demand for scientists and engineers who invent and upgrade the machines, and for managers and supervisors, who put them to work. It has also put a premium on competence for everybody. You need intelligent workers to get the most out of intelligent machines.

Putting the Man into Manufacturing

New ways to organise production are also putting a premium on education. For the past 90 years, most factories have employed a system of mass production--dubbed Taylorism, after the man who invented it, or Fordism, after the man who perfected it. This is based on two simple principles: the division of labour (separate complex tasks into their simplest components) and managerial omnipotence (allow the managers to make strategic decisions and expect the workers to do as they are told). This system has little use for popular education, since it reduces workers to little more than cogs in a great industrial machine.

Successful firms nowadays stand Ford on his head, aiming at flexible rather than mass production. Rich countries cannot hope to keep their competitive edge through mass production: developing-country firms can run the same machinery at a fraction of the labour cost. Their only chance lies in going upmarket, providing affluent consumers with quality, variety and timeliness. This means reorganising production.

The problem with Fordist firms is that they are too dumb to exploit sophisticated technologies, too uniform to generate variety and too inflexible to respond to rapidly changing demands. Successful firms demand a new type of organisation and the rediscovery of the skilled worker. This points to a different set of goals to the ones earlier educational reformers set their sights on.

ALL TOO HUMAN

It is hard to listen to today's education gurus without feeling that it has all been said before. People spent much of the 1960s listening to extravagant promises made on behalf of education, and much of the 1970s wondering how they could have been taken in by them. Is educational history about to repeat itself as tragedy rather than farce?

The trouble with the 1960s optimists is that they promised too much. They were bewitched by the basically sound theory of human capital, which has it that education is the secret ingredient in economic growth. They were beguiled by politicians, who wanted an excuse to pour money into the welfare state. As a result, they made ever more extravagant claims on behalf of education: perpetual growth (more investment in education creates higher growth and higher growth pays for more investment in education); an end to poverty (better pre-school education gives poor children a head start); and a more equal society (the abolition of selective schools and the introduction of affirmative-action programmes break down class barriers).

Such promises led to sobering disappointments. The only self-sustaining growth produced by the burst of spending on education was in jobs for educators. Unluckily perhaps, the education boom coincided with a clattering slowdown in growth in most western countries. Educational investment failed to abolish poverty or deliver a more equal society. The middle class continues to get more out of educational opportunities than the poor. And, for whatever reason, the plight of the poor--particularly in America--has got worse since the 1960s. The result is that the claims of the 1960s produced a backlash in the 1970s.

To prevent this from happening again, educationalists will have to be more modest. They need to concentrate on basic issues, such as how to make schools work, and to leave social engineering to the politicians. It is hard enough to produce a literate and numerate labour force without offering to eliminate poverty and conjure up equality into the bargain. Anybody tempted to be too ambitious about education should ponder the following points.

* Nobody knows what makes a successful educational system. This is not because of lack of fundamental ideas; every generation produces its education gurus. Nor is it because chauvinist governments are unwilling to learn from others. On the contrary: there is an international trade in educational ideas. American children go to German-inspired kindergartens. English children attend comprehensives modelled on the American high school.

* There is no clear relationship between inputs and outputs in education. More money does not necessarily produce better results. In his study of the impact of the "Great Society" programme in American schools in 1966, James Coleman, the doyen of American sociologists, demonstrated that differences in expenditure between schools are almost wholly unrelated to differences in academic performance. Achievement depends on the student's family background rather than on the investment in the school.

A glance at OECD figures confirms just how complicated is the relationship between money and results. Canada devotes a higher proportion (7.2%) of its GDP to education than any other country, without being conspicuously successful; Japan devotes a lower proportion (4.9%), and is not conspicuously unsuccessful. The German government spends a lower proportion of its budget on education (9.1%) than any other OECD government, but boasts an education system which is the envy of the world. South Korea has twice as many students per class as Britain, but regularly trounces Britain in academic olympiads.

* The most potent educational institution is not in the hands of the government. The family accounts for educational success and failure far more than the school, let alone the college. The best way to ensure that a child climbs the qualifications ladder is to provide him with two parents who tolerate each other and value education. The disintegration of the family in much of the West is likely to frustrate government attempts to boost educational results by tinkering with schools.

* Educational expansion can be counterproductive. Double the number of graduates without doubling the number of graduate-level jobs and you promote graduate unemployment and debase academic qualifications (people who used to get jobs with BAs now have to get MAs). Students behave like football supporters who stand on their toes to get a better view of the match. Nobody gets a better view--and everyone ends up with aching toes.

The next few years could see another backlash against educational reform. This is partly because governments expect their latest moves to produce too much too quickly. The biggest reason, however, is the slowdown in the international economy. The most pressing economic problem is not lack of qualified workers but lack of demand. Graduate unemployment is rising. Businessmen have stopped complaining about skills shortages and started sacking skilled workers. But any country that reacts to recessionary times by neglecting its education system will lose out to its international competitors when growth returns. Now take a look at some of those competitors.

THE DROP-OUT SOCIETY?

This year's candidates for the American presidency were a peculiarly ill-assorted trio. But all three did at least agree on one subject: the need for a radical reform of education. George Bush took the unprecedented step of summoning all the state governors to a conference on education. (The result was a set of impressive but implausible targets to make America the best-educated nation in the world by 2000.) Bill Clinton first captured national attention as an educational reformer. Ross Perot acquired his taste for domestic politics when he took on the Neanderthal Texan educational establishment.

This is hardly surprising. America has been in a panic about education for at least a decade--and is right to be worried. Talk to businessmen and they will complain that they have a choice between providing new recruits with remedial education or moving their back-room offices abroad. America's high-school dropout rate is at least 14% compared with 9% in Germany and 6% in Japan. The school-year is 180 days--60 days fewer than in some other countries. Japanese children do five times as much homework per week as their American counterparts. Even when they are working, American children are seldom stretched. The lack of a core curriculum encourages a shopping-mall approach to education: pile up the soft options and leave the hard stuff on the shelves. The result is all too predictable. American children perform poorly in international academic tests.

The most dramatic problem is the collapse of inner-city education. Ghetto schools are churning out children whose lack of mental skills and surfeit of emotional problems would render them unemployable in the third world, let alone the first. Schools based in crime-ridden and drug-driven neighbourhoods inevitably have problems with discipline. Some have to install metal detectors to keep guns and knives out of the classroom. Drop-out rates of 50% are not uncommon.

Homage to Catatonia

It would be perverse to blame education for this social pathology. Children do not start toting guns because they flunk Shakespeare. But a reorganisation of American schools might do something to encourage the less academic children. The most glaring structural problem with American education is that it does not know what to do with pupils who are not bound for college; it has no vocational stream. In importing the German university system, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, America made the disastrous mistake of forgetting to import the apprenticeship system as well. For apprenticeships smacked of class-stratification, and America was hypnotised by upward mobility.

The result is that 16-18-year-olds face a stark choice between cramming for college or getting a job. (The two-year community colleges too often act as cut-rate universities rather than vocational schools.) This arrangement might have made sense when school-leavers could expect a secure and high-paid job in the local factory. Today firms demand higher basic qualifications and more specific skills.

This malaise has begun to touch even the one bit of education in which America still leads the world: higher education. The universities face their harshest decade since the 1930s. Institutions which enjoyed half a century of abundance are starting to learn the language of scarcity. The federal government has been cutting back on expenditure for a decade. Cash-strapped state governments are demanding value for money out of their investment in colleges. The budget crisis that compelled California to contemplate closing community colleges saw California paying its lecturers in IOUs; that could yet be repeated in other states. The private universities have raised their fees by so much that they risk turning themselves into finishing schools for the super-rich.

The result is a spate of cuts, and not just in California. The University of Chicago has imposed a hiring freeze; Yale University is merging departments. Everywhere the talk is of contraction. Some academic seers have started to argue that the admired monoliths of the post-war era--universities that combine teaching with research and try to excel in everything from chemistry to classics--are too cumbersome to survive.

The cult of political correctness hardly helps. Its extremist wing wants to stand traditional universities on their heads. Students are to be selected on the basis of group identity rather than individual merit. Courses are to concentrate on black women because they are black women rather than on white men because they wrote good books. The university is to serve as an instrument of minority liberation rather than an engine of economic growth.

This agenda is starting to have a practical impact, as the student radicals of the 1960s become the tenured professors of the 1990s. Some leading universities admit black and Hispanic students when they have lower test scores than white and Asian students. (The predictable result is that many beneficiaries of affirmative action either drop out or take soft options.) Universities merrily discriminate in favour of minorities in awarding academic tenure. Several non-conformist academics have been hounded out of their jobs for thought crimes on the subjects of race and sex.

The good news about American education is that so many people have produced root-and-branch plans for reforming it. The Bush administration tried to introduce a national curriculum (through a school-leaving exam) and to encourage competition (through vouchers). It also promoted the reinvention of the high school by setting up a national competition for new types of schools. Many states produced impressive schemes for raising standards. Texas led the way in improving teacher testing; Minnesota introduced a voucher system that allows parents to send their children across school boundaries. Boston experimented with closer relations between schools and local business.

McEgging Them On

Business has also produced hundreds of schemes for raising standards. These schemes--some inspired, some cranky--rely on four basic ideas. First, improving incentives. Well-known firms offer free hamburgers and pizzas in return for improved grades. Brand-name philanthropists offer college scholarships as a prize for graduating. Second, helping inner-city children escape from lousy public-sector schools. The Hudson Institute pays for some poor children to go to private schools. (Mr. Bush tried to turn this into national policy.) Third, adopting schools. Some companies donate equipment and personnel, others offer children jobs on condition that they graduate with reasonable grades.

All this is small beer compared with the fourth idea, something that could happen over the next few years. Christopher Whittle, an educational entrepreneur based in Knoxville, Tennessee, wants to turn himself into the Ronald McDonald of education. He plans to open a national chain of profit-making schools. The schools will charge pupils no more than the cost to the state of a public-sector education--about $ 6,000 a year--and will bring education into the age of fancy computers and mass marketing. Other entrepreneurs plan to take over the management of public school systems.

These educational entrepreneurs have no shortage of critics. The recapture of the White House by the Democrats will not make life any easier for them. But Mr. Whittle has attracted a formidable group of advisers. Many Democrats concede that it is more egalitarian to finance education through vouchers than through local property taxes. Most Americans concede that something dramatic needs to be done about education. So the 1990s could prove to be a decidedly useful decade for American education.

MEANWHILE IN EUROPE

Americans in search of ideas will have no difficulty getting advice from the Germans. When it comes to schooling, there is only one thing that the Germans like talking about more than the shortcomings of American education, and that is the successes of German education. Bump into them for breakfast and they brief you on their school-leaving exam. Take them to lunch and they boast about their tripartite high schools. Meet them for dinner and they enthuse about their apprenticeship system. Join them in a late-night drinking session and--with a brief break for Maastricht and unification--they will enthuse still more about vocational training.

They have much to be proud of. German education commands admiration abroad and enthusiasm at home. German parents like it because it provides flexibility and choice. Students like it because it is intellectually demanding without being soul-destroying. Employers like it because it churns out skilled workers as well as state-of-the-art scientists. The government did not have to think twice before imposing western German arrangements on the new Lander in the east.

What makes the system so successful? The first thing is the cheerful division of schools into three kinds: grammar schools, technical schools and vocational schools. (Socialist-inspired attempts to introduce comprehensive schools in the 1960s provoked much hostility.) This division lets schools tailor their teaching to the abilities and aspirations of their pupils. Grammar schools can challenge academic children without discouraging their less able contemporaries. Technical schools can motivate their pupils by introducing them to general principles through practice examples. The most striking achievement of this system--more striking even than its success in grooming the elite--is its ability to engage the enthusiasm and test the abilities of the mass of tomorrow's skilled workers.

The second wholesome ingredient is the breadth of elite education. German sixth-formers study half a dozen core subjects (including mathematics and German) and another half a dozen minor subjects. The Germans do not enjoy the dubious British privilege of making an irrevocable choice between the two cultures before their 18th birthday. Even university students study a range of minor subjects as well as a major subject.

The third successful element is the parity of esteem between science and the arts. The Germans do not share the British contempt for stinks and bangs. Technical universities enjoy equal status with the likes of Heidelberg. Engineers proclaim their status on their business cards and door plates. Leading scientists are loaded down with national honours and company directorships.

DUAL SYSTEM

Above all, the glory of German education is the so-called dual system. Any 15-year-old who does not want to go to university opts for a three-or-more-year apprenticeship instead. It combines on-the-job training in a local factory and theoretical education in school (this used to mean two days a week, but increasingly means three). Successful apprentices are guaranteed a job in a local factory. Their less successful contemporaries are more than likely to be able to put their training to good use.

Adolescents who were bored by school find their enthusiasm reignited, partly because they are treated more like adults and partly because they start to see the links between learning facts and earning a living. The cost of training is divided between the Lander, which provide the vocational schools, the employers, who pump 2% of their payroll costs into training, and the apprentices themselves, who work for only a nominal salary. The transition between school and work, so traumatic elsewhere, is rendered almost painless. Above all the system reinforces a culture in which training is cherished and skilled workers revered. For many Germans, an apprenticeship is simply the first step on a learning escalator which can turn them into trainers (Meister) in their own right.

Germany certainly has its problems. The school-leaving examination is rather lacking in Teutonic rigour. Passes are awarded on the basis of teacher assessment--an arrangement which allows teachers to sit in judgment on their own performance--and oral examinations. This not only institutionalises grade inflation (Germany could do with an educational Bundesbank); it also tempts over-praised children to prefer university to the dual system. Between 1984 and 1990 the number of West German youths seeking apprenticeships dropped from 765,000 to 600,000.

Choosing to go to university is often a mistake. The non-scientific universities are perhaps the least successful parts of the system; they are monuments to 1960s-style Utopianism rather than engines of the Wirtschaftswunder. The lack of a proper degree structure means that undergraduates can dawdle for a decade over a degree. Chancellor Helmut Kohl complains that Germany has the oldest graduates--the average age at graduation is about 28--and the youngest retirees in the world. German professors enjoy the rewards of senior civil servants but frequently cultivate the habits of Bohemians.

The authorities are desperate to prune this Arcadia. They want to introduce shorter degree courses and promote technical universities (which boast well-organised courses and carefully cultivated links with industry) at the expense of traditional universities. So far they have enjoyed little success: German politicians do not have much experience at taking on middle-class interest groups.

Even vocational training is under strain. Unification has reinforced fears that the dual system is too costly and too rigid--perfect for old worthies like the car industry, but too cumbersome for entrepreneurs with a bright idea and a bank loan.

Many small firms cannot afford the $ 19,000 a year it costs to train a recruit. And even those who can afford it cannot necessarily find trainers. Germany is so short of trainers--the Cologne area alone needs another 4,000--that it is scouring Europe for recruits. The emphasis on consensual decision-making and legal form (training codes have to be embodied in law) means that training often lags behind technical innovation. Periodic pruning by the authorities has not been enough to emasculate special interests or modernise the laws governing training. There are still 375 officially defined occupations in Germany.

The training system is not only adding hugely to the cost of absorbing the eastern states. It may also be hindering the transition to a service economy driven by high technology. Germany has the smallest service sector of any EC country save Portugal--a statistic which will not surprise anyone who has tried to get a cheque cashed on a Saturday.

Going One Better

To see the German system with most of these problems removed and some interesting improvements added, you need to travel north, to Denmark.

The Danish labour market has rectified the problem of academic drift. The sight of so many geriatric graduate students working as taxi drivers by day and completing their dissertations by night has persuaded school leavers of the value of vocational training. Competition for places on training schemes is now fierce. The Danish government has also tackled the problem of over-indulgent universities. In the past couple of years the universities have introduced a BA qualification (to speed up graduation) and imposed detailed timetables (to cut out time-wasting). It seems to have gone down well with students.

The Danes delight in explaining why they have the edge on the Germans. They argue that Danish technical education puts more emphasis on theory (which could last a lifetime) than on practical knowledge (which is quickly outdated). Technical students are based in technical colleges but win assignments to local firms. The Danes also introduced big improvements in vocational education in 1991, cutting the number of apprenticeships from 300 to 80 and changing the financing of technical colleges so that they compete for pupils.

This is tame stuff compared with the long-established deregulation of secondary education. The Danish government is unique in allowing something like a free market in schools. Parents who are dissatisfied with state education can group together to set up their own schools and--provided they comply with certain minimal requirements--expect the state to pick up 90% of the bill. This approach appeals to all segments of the political spectrum. Some independent schools are based on Freudian or Maoist principles. Others are dedicated to excellence in language or science. All enjoy much more control over decision-making than is the case in the state sector.

Catching Up

Two big European countries have made heroic efforts to bring their educational regimes up to German and Danish standards: France and Britain.

The French have an enormous advantage over the British in implementing reforms: the legacy of Bonapartism. Scientific and technical schools have enjoyed a high status in France for two centuries. French schoolchildren have long been accustomed to spending much of their adolescence working for the Baccalaureat, an examination that is at once broader than English A levels and more rigorous than the German Abitur.

This has left the government free to concentrate on the weakest link in its educational chain: vocational training. Thirty years ago French vocational training was lamentable. The academia-obsessed school establishment despised it. Business was too short-sighted to invest in it. Apprenticeships hardly existed outside the artisan industries. So the government decided to act. It compelled firms to spend 1% of their sales on training, and encouraged vocational schools to expand; it created a clear set of vocational qualifications; and it set out ambitious targets for improving the technical qualifications of the working population. Today almost all school-leavers who do not go to university enrol in full-time vocational courses that lead to nationally recognised qualifications.

The British have been even more radical than the French. The past five years have seen a frenzy of educational innovations. No sooner has the public digested one far-reaching reform act--invariably described as the biggest since 1944--than another one is prepared for consumption.

INNOVATIONS

Tory policy is composed of four main elements. First, introduce a national curriculum backed up by regular examinations. Second, free parents to send their children to the best available school--open enrollment--and finance schools on the basis of the number of children they attract--per-capita funding. (Incidentally, the government is also using per-capita funding to bribe universities to increase their intake of students from one in five to one in three of school-leavers.) To help parents make an informed decision between competing schools, the government is making schools publish their exam results and obliging local authorities to classify the schools in convenient league tables.

Third, bypass local-education authorities and hand budgets to individual governing boards. Fourth, encourage schools to develop distinct identities. The government pioneered this idea in 1986 by co-operating with industry to set up a new type of school--the city technology colleges (CTCs). It is now encouraging thousands of established schools to opt out of local authority control and establish their own characters.

If this is all as splendid as it sounds, why is British education still in such a mess? Partly because there was so much to fix. It would be hard to imagine an educational system more likely to hold up economic growth than one which was designed by anti-industrial snobs in the mid-19th century and then redesigned by anti-industrial egalitarians a century later. And partly because the government started reforming education much too late--in 1988 rather than in 1980. It also devoted too little energy to improving the weakest bit of the system: like France, vocational training. A handful of CTCs and a host of TECs (Training and Enterprise Councils: employer-dominated bodies responsible for organising training in their local areas) will not be enough to hold the Asian tigers at bay.

TIGERS BEHIND DESKS

Nobody can travel in Japan and the newly industrialised countries of the Pacific rim without being startled by the cult of education. In Japan neatly uniformed children stride to school at eight o'clock on Sunday morning. In South Korea every other side street has a cramming school. In Hong Kong a newspaper contains a letter from a pediatrician blaming an epidemic of spinal curvature on the fact that children carry such huge piles of books home with them. In Singapore air-conditioned buildings are crammed with swotting children.

All this effort has paid off in spades (not to mention grades). Glance at any league table of educational performance and you will find several Asian countries bunched near the top. The achievements of the region are a puzzle to people who think that educational success is all a matter of public expenditure. Even in Japan most of the schools are shabby and ill-equipped by comparison with their western equivalents. In many schools in the region the average class size is more than 40. In South Korea schools invite parents with particular skills to come to the school and give a few lessons a week. In Japan schools cut down on overheads--and impart moral lessons into the bargain--by getting the pupils to do menial tasks such as serving meals and cleaning the school. In some countries--Hong Kong and Singapore are the most noted examples--there are more schools than school-buildings. One school uses the building in the morning, another in the afternoon.

The parsimonious approach is successful because pupils and teachers firmly believe that merit will be rewarded. Japan and the Asian tigers are the most meritocratic societies in the world. The universities occupy a clearly understood position in the social pecking-order, and act as powerful job brokers. People who win places in the most prestigious departments in the most illustrious universities--Tokyo law school is the most obvious example--go on to get the best jobs. And so on down to the janitors.

The result of this meritocracy is relentless academic competition. Senior high-school students prepare for their final examinations with a methodical intensity that unnerves western observers. The students respond to failure not by giving up, but by trying again. In Japan so many students resit exams that they have a special name: the ronin, or leaderless samurai. This competition for university places shapes the rest of the educational system. Some high schools are better than others at winning places in the best universities. So students compete like mad to get into those high schools. Some junior schools are better than others at winning places in the best high schools. So students compete like mad to get into them. There are even exams for places in some nursery schools.

The children are driven on by intense family pressure. Parents badger their children to succeed, but they also make big financial and personal sacrifices to help them do so. Mothers help their children with their homework and protect scholarship candidates from domestic chores. Fathers promise fancy toys in return for examination success. Families make every effort to give their children somewhere quiet to work.

All this competition has created a huge cramming industry. Most children in Japan and the tigers either attend a cramming school or employ private tutors. This is particularly common before crucial examinations and among adolescents who have to retake exams. Cramming schools (juku) are the norm in Japan and Taiwan. (The best Japanese juku are so hard to get into that there is a booming secondary industry of cramming people to get into cramming schools.) Singaporeans prefer private tutors. In South Korea and Hong Kong parents use a mixture of tutors and crammers.

SINGAPORE

In Singapore the government is turning up the heat on education, with a series of reforms that have been introduced in stages since 1980. It started off stimulating competition between pupils by dividing them up according to ability, selecting potential geniuses at the age of nine and streaming other children at the age of 11. It is now boosting competition between schools, publishing league tables of academic results and allowing top schools to raise their fees and become semi-independent. (One leading school even plans to build a residential wing and require all pupils to spend some time as boarders.) Over the past decade the Ministry of Education has also made the syllabus more burdensome. All Singaporeans have to pass exams in the official language of their ethnic group as well as in English; and university-bound Singaporeans have to do a general paper as well as three or more specialist A levels.

This policy is not universally popular. The semi-privatisation of the top schools cost the government seats in the 1991 election. People complained that it smacked of class-stratification rather than meritocracy. The language policy means that a Chinese student who speaks Hokkien at home will have to learn Mandarin as well as English. These contrasting policies of heating up and cooling down education are motivated by a common fear: the fear that China will steal all the mass-production jobs while the West keeps most of the high-value-added ones. Policy-makers throughout the region are worried that their schools will continue to churn out the well-drilled and disciplined operatives of mass production when what industry needs is workers with flexibility and imagination.

Japan and Singapore are leading the pack at producing skilled workers. The best Japanese firms put huge emphasis on training their workers. They pay them according to the complexity of the tasks they can perform, and move them from job to job in order to give them a broad perspective as well as particular skills. Singapore is determined to have the best-trained workforce in the region. The government has imposed a punitive tax on foreign firms with a high proportion of low-skilled workers. It has also persuaded companies from countries with good training records to set up training institutions in Singapore. Other countries have much shakier systems. South Korea has enviable labour mobility, but has allowed its vocational schools to contract. Hong Kong has plenty of labour mobility combined with a British distaste for vocational training.

ROTE LEARNING

The issue of innovation is likely to be much trickier. The tradition of rote learning--and how else do you learn thousands of Chinese characters?--combines with a culture of deference to discourage students from questioning orthodoxies. The universities have failed to develop a powerful research tradition. In Japan the professors are more like feudal lords (and rather smug ones at that) than like intellectual explorers. And the students treat the universities as a resting station between their horrific childhoods as examinees and their horrific futures as salarymen. The South Korean universities churn out the sort of articles that give academia a bad name. Singapore and Taiwan have yet to establish a research tradition in the humanities.

Policy-makers are desperately trying to put the innovation back into the Orient. Japan's education ministry is trying to make the universities more free-standing. In South Korea the government is investing more in research. Hong Kong's government, helped by a substantial donation from the Jockey Club, is setting up a new scientific university. In Singapore the special education programme for the gifted emphasises learning-through-discovery.

There is something a little unconvincing about this new cult of iconoclasm and innovation. Japanese graduate students visiting Britain or America regard the local sport of puncturing received wisdom as ill-mannered, perhaps even immoral. In Singapore, the Straits Times, the semi-official newspaper, frequently prints editorials entitled "Be more innovative, Singaporeans--here's how." Budding Singaporean geniuses are taught to think "laterally" by a disciple of Edward de Bono, a desperate last resort. Cambridge and Harvard can rest on their laurels for a while yet.

MAKING IT WORK

Why do some schools succeed and others fail? Thirty years ago the answer seemed all too simple: resources. The best schools were the ones with the most lavish equipment and the most generous teacher-pupil ratios. The implication of this observation was equally simple: to raise educational standards, all you need do is invest more money in schools.

The problem with this analysis is that it has been tested in practice and found wanting. From the mid-1960s onwards, American and European governments tried to spend poor schools out of existence. The governments haemorrhaged cash but the poor schools remained. Meanwhile, many Asian countries were doing fine with shabby schools churning out well-educated children. The explanation for educational success clearly needs to be sought elsewhere: in the realm of psychological rather than material resources.

The result is that the region has not one but two education systems: one public and one private. This adds enormously to the amount society invests in education. Families can easily sink all their spare money in schooling. In Japan the average annual fee at a juku is $ 650 for part-time attendance and $ 3,800 for full-time university preparation. Cramming offers a lucrative career. In Japan, the juku boast well-paid staff and millionaire proprietors. The leading juku have several campuses and thousands of students. In South Korea successful tutors--many of them university students who have recently proved their prowess in the examination hall--buzz around in flashy sports cars.

Time as well as money is poured into learning. Children devote their spare time to cramming for exams. No sooner have they finished their day schools than they rush off to the juku, or home to private tutors. Weekends and holidays are an excuse to spend yet more time in the juku or with the tutor. People who fail university-entrance examinations become full-time students in crammers.

The private sector is also an engine of innovation: it adds to the variety of teaching methods available. The juku use a mixture of lectures, some attended by as many as 500 students, and seminars. The juku have perfected diagnostic examinations (which can pinpoint weaknesses) and predictive examinations (which tell them which universities are within their grasp). Private tutors can proceed at the same pace as the students, and solve whatever problems are befuddling them. The latest fashion in Singapore is for computer clubs for toddlers.

Throughout the region people take it for granted that education should be driven by a mixture of commerce and competition. The commercial principle has been developed to perfection in the Japanese juku. The more successful the school, the higher its charges; and the more successful the teacher, the bigger his salary. The best teachers earn six times as much as the worst.

Fee-paying is common in the public sector as well. In Japan upper-secondary schools (attended by 15-18-year-olds) charge about $ 1,600 a year. The best schools also expect parents to make hefty donations. Universities charge fees ranging from $ 2,000 per pupil in national universities to double that in private universities. This means that schools and universities have to compete for pupils just as much as students have to compete for schools. Failure to attract enough customers eventually results in bankruptcy. Schools often distribute brochures advertising their wares. In several countries the newspapers are full of league tables ranking schools by results.

This meritocratic model has significant local variations. South Korea and Taiwan model their universities on American ones and send their brightest students to get American PhDs. The American influence is omnipresent in Japan--its school system was reorganised on the American model after the war, and every decent high school boasts a baseball team--but the Japanese have reinterpreted American democratic ideas in more meritocratic terms.

The dominant influence in Hong Kong and Singapore is Britain. The best schools have the atmosphere of grammar schools in the England of the 1950s or the Ulster of today. The walls are hung with sepia photographs of old school heroes and plaques gilded with the names of scholarship winners. School children take O levels (now abandoned in England as too elitist) and A levels. (Teachers complain that A-level standards are now so debased that they are embarrassed by the number of students scoring top grades.) In Singapore the star students get scholarships to Oxford or Cambridge. In Hong Kong English education is less popular than it was--visa-hungry students prefer North America and Australia, and a growing number of students prefer vernacular education--but the University of Hong Kong still has a very British feel to it.

Examination Nerves

Government policy may also increase national differences. The politicians of the region are divided over the question of whether competition has gone too far. The Japanese Ministry of Education claims that it wants to cool down the competition. The annual toll of teenage suicides and nervous breakdowns is now something of an embarrassment. And the ministry wants to encourage schools to put less emphasis on rote-learning and more on innovation. Officials do what they can to discourage cramming schools and league tables (they were amused to learn that the new policy in Britain is to encourage league tables). But these reforms amount to tinkering rather than fundamental change.

The Japanese are certainly not likely to go as far as the South Koreans. In the 1960s the South Korean government, desperate to exploit popular resentment of elite schools, decreed that secondary-school places should be allocated by lottery. This anti-competitive policy is slowly being eased--the government has set up a handful of super-selective scientific schools for geniuses--but competition is still concentrated on the university-entrance exam.

SENSE OF IDENTITY

What marks out a good school is its ethos. To be successful, a school needs to be able to establish an identity and impose it on its pupils. Schools that enjoy a strong sense of identity pursue clear ends, and can alter their methods and adjust their incentives if those ends prove elusive.

In Germany three sorts of high schools pursue highly distinctive goals. In Japan children are so desperate for educational success that they happily take on the corporate identity of their schools. In Denmark children have a choice between a wide variety of schools. The opposite seems to be true for educationally unsuccessful countries. The traditional American high school recruits all the children in the neighbourhood without regard to their abilities and educates them without regard to their occupational destinations. This attempt to be all things to all men robs the high school of a distinctive identity. It is simply the local school: no more and no less.

The best American schools are now trying to become rather more than this. For the past decade or so schools across the country have been trying to turn themselves into something more distinctive, in a bid to motivate children and reverse educational decline. Magnet schools--that is, schools that specialise in particular subjects and draw their pupils from more than one neighbourhood--have been the pioneers of this movement. Elite academic schools such as the Bronx High School of Science and Boston Latin grew famous through specialisation and open enrollment. The aim of the magnet-school movement is to let more schools adopt similar principles.

How can policy-makers encourage the reaction of such successful schools? Two ideas have won mounting support among educational theorists: local management and per-capita funding. Local management means that day-to-day decisions about running schools are taken by headteachers rather than local bureaucrats. This increases the power of heads to establish a personality for their institutions. Per-capita funding means that schools are financed according to the number of pupils they attract.

The market revolution is destined to have only a marginal impact in America. Most middle-class people do well out of a system in which schools are financed out of local property taxes. The Democratic Party is too committed to the ideal of the universal high school--and too tied to the interests of the teaching profession. But these ideas are becoming widely influential elsewhere. They formed the basis of the 1988 Education Reform Act in Britain. Singapore is giving its most successful schools more power to run their own affairs and charge higher fees. Even Sweden is introducing per-capita funding.

For Underclass, Read Under-educated

It is worth applying market mechanisms to pupils as well as to schools. One way to turn potential drop-outs into reasonably educated workers is to improve their incentives. The nonacademic offspring of middle-class parents endure the pain of education (boring teachers and intrusive homework) because they know it will pay dividends in later life. Those who show signs of forgetting the link between pedagogy and prosperity are given a sharp reminder of it in the form of a lecture or a bribe.

American high schools have started applying the same methods. Some use simple incentives--a free pizza if you learn a bit of Shakespeare, a free hamburger if you master some geometry. Others have turned bribery into a more sophisticated art. The Renaissance Education Foundation, a philanthropic organisation that supports rewards-for-performance programmes in 1,500 schools, encourages children to improve their grades with a hierarchy of rewards. These start off with simple gifts, and grow in value to include university scholarships.

The logical conclusion of this approach is paying children to learn. This is effectively what happens in the German dual system: school leavers earn a modest wage for a mixture of academic instruction and on-the-job training. It is beginning to spread elsewhere. In San Antonio, Texas, the Rotary Club pays $50 a month to children who are at risk of dropping out of high school for financial reasons.

Another way to reduce failure is to improve vocational education. School leavers are easily tempted into taking high-paying but dead-end jobs. Apprenticeships discourage such disastrous decisions and also have a number of positive advantages. They smooth the transition between school and work: apprentices earn a wage but continue to learn. They encourage school leavers to realise that training is a source of status and prosperity. The better they do on their training course, the higher up the social ladder they will climb.

Eliminating failure cannot be left to loose-fisted charities and far-sighted businessmen. Governments need to do the odd thing themselves sometimes. But if government intervention is to be more successful in the 1990s than it was in the 1960s, policy-makers need to think again about what they are going to spend their money on. Governments spend too much on people who are predestined for educational success and too little on people who are prone to educational failure.

Governments could start by reducing public support for university students. Most western countries spend much more for each one of them than for each primary-school student. But university students are usually middle class by origin and overwhelmingly middle class by destination. The money saved should be spent on revamping compensatory programmes for deprived pre-school and infant-school children. These programmes may have pursued Utopian aims and adopted naive methods in the past. But their basic insight is correct: if you want big returns on educational expenditure, invest in the youngest.

BRAINS IN THE BALANCE

Investing in education is to the 1990s what nationalisation was to the 1940s and privatisation to the 1980s--the universal panacea of the day. Right-wingers value education partly because it promises to make labour markets more efficient, left-wingers partly because it gives a respectable role for state activism. Economists on both sides of the political divide insist that human capital is now the most precious form of capital there is.

They are right. In a global economy, the competitive advantage of nations depends increasingly not on their stock of physical resources but on the quality of their labour forces. Many large firms have been operating in this borderless world for decades. They move menial jobs to countries where labour is cheap, and mentally demanding ones to countries where workers are educated. Even medium-sized firms are starting to get in on the act. The fashion among American banks, for example, is to move some back-offices to Ireland or India.

This increase in the mobility of firms is particularly threatening to the rich world. Once upon a time rich countries could expect to stay rich because they enjoyed better technology or easier access to profitable markets. Now that wages are in effect being set by the global market rather than by local ones, the only way for rich countries to stay rich in the long term is to have more productive--which often means better educated--workers.

Rich countries everywhere--in the newly industrialised world as much as the old one--look over their shoulders and see people willing to do the same work for a fraction of the pay. The reaction is first panic and then reform. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Britain and America. In both countries reforming politicians have concluded that they are falling badly behind Germany and Japan. In both countries reformers have used various market mechanisms in an attempt to improve schools and close the gap between education and industry. And in both countries they have been frustrated.