Brookings: Experts - Ben Wildavsky

College: What it Was, Is and Should Be

Ben Wildavsky — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:22:00 -0400

Editor’s note: Ben Wildavsky pens a thoughtful review of Andrew Delbanco’s book College: What it Was, Is and Should Be. The following review is reprinted with the permission of AKA Strategy.

At the outset of his deeply informed defense of the value of liberal arts education, Andrew Delbanco, a noted Melville scholar, illustrates one of his central points with a quotation from Moby Dick. When the novel’s narrator famously declares that "a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard," Delbanco observes, "he used the word ‘college’ as the name of the place where (to use our modern formulation) he ‘found himself.’"

Learning "How to Think and How to Choose"

Yet if college is in part a voyage of self discovery, it ought not to be simply a narcissistic extension of adolescence, contends Delbanco, a professor of American Studies and Humanities at Columbia University. At its heart, college is—or should be—about truth-seeking. Quoting an 1850 diary by a student at a Methodist college in Virginia, Delbanco declares that showing students "how to think and how to choose" ought to be the goal of every college. He ticks off a list of the habits of mind that a college should nurture in its students, from a "skeptical discontent with the present, informed by a sense of the past," to knowledge of science and the arts, to the capacity "to make connections among seemingly disparate phenomena."

Unfortunately, far too many colleges simply don’t give students anything approaching this kind of education. In College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Delbanco traces U.S. higher education from the establishment of religious colleges in Colonial days to the advent of research universities in the nineteenth century to the birth, more recently, of mass access community colleges. He thoughtfully details, among other things, how the goals of college have evolved, what meritocracy in admissions does and doesn’t mean, and how, although access to college has expanded massively, numerous shortcomings remain in the nation’s efforts to make higher education available to more Americans. Along the way, he writes, the meaning of a college education has changed radically.

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Reprinted by permission of AKA Strategy.

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Authors

Ben Wildavsky

Publication: AKA Strategy

No Barriers to Free Trade in Minds

Ben Wildavsky — Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Three stories tell the tale of the new global university marketplace:

A promising young Singaporean studies in the West, wins a professorship in the Ivy League, returns to Singapore to head its leading university, then becomes the first president of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Kaust).
The ambitious president of New York University begins to fulfill his vision for a "global network university" by opening an NYU liberal arts campus in Abu Dhabi.
A South African woman earns a bachelor's degree, then heads to Britain's University of Warwick for a Ph.D in chemistry, joining three million other university students world-wide who are enrolled in campuses beyond their own borders.

The rhetoric of globalization has become so ubiquitous in the business world that it is easy to forget how radically the same forces are transforming university education. According to OECD figures, the number of globally mobile students, many of them heavily recruited, has increased 57% in the past decade alone. Half the world's top physicists no longer work in their home countries.

Cross-border science collaboration has more than doubled since 1990, as measured by the percentage of internationally coauthored articles. Western universities set up branches in the Middle East and Asia. Nations from South Korea to Saudi Arabia, which for decades have sent their best and brightest to study in the West, now vie to create world-class research universities of their own.

Left unimpeded, this campus globalization will greatly speed the world-wide flow of human talent. Yet for all its promise, academic globalization—like its equivalents in the worlds of finance and industry—has proven controversial.

There are long-standing worries in the developing world about a brain drain, and the converse concern in the West that talented foreigners will crowd out domestic students. Above all, there is a broader fear in the West that as universities elsewhere become stronger and more competitive, we will lose our edge. As President Obama warned during the presidential campaign: How can the U.S. stay competitive when nations like China and Japan are outpacing us in the production of engineering PhDs?

This alarmism is perhaps to be expected given the magnitude of the changes under way. While America remains by far the biggest magnet for talent, followed by the U.K. and Australia, competition for students is fierce and U.S. market share fell to 19% in 2007 from 25% in 2000. There are new patterns of scholarly mobility, too. China and Japan, for instance, are hosting more foreign students from within their own region.

Trying to keep more of their top students and researchers at home, China and Singapore, among others, also are courting Western-trained faculty and pouring money into improving their universities, keenly aware that higher education is the pathway to innovation and economic growth. China has spent billions on a targeted group of campuses in an effort to become a serious player on the global scientific scene. Saudi Arabia opened Kaust with a $10 billion gift from King Abdullah that instantly gave it the world's sixth-largest university endowment. In France and Germany, universities now compete for state funds earmarked for creating a small group of globally competitive institutions.

This intense scholarly competition and exchange—call it free trade in minds—is shaking up the academy. But the anxiety it creates on college campuses and beyond has led to periodic outbursts of academic protectionism. In India, for example, foreign universities are barred from setting up branch campuses, a policy that is only lately being revisited in a contentious bill before India's parliament. Restricting mobility in the opposite direction, the director of one elite Indian technology institute banned his students from taking overseas internships. Malaysia has placed a 5% cap on the number of foreign undergrads at the nation's public universities.

Overt protectionism is rarer in the U.S. and Britain (amid plenty of populist grumbling about the high representation of foreign graduate students in science and engineering programs). Still, visa barriers for students and researchers often frustrate university recruitment efforts. Such restrictions also threaten global research collaboration. As Robert Dingwall, director of the Institute for Science and Society at the University of Nottingham once complained: "This vision for a world without borders where knowledge flows freely is not matched by the free movement of people."

An even bigger problem is what might be called psychological protectionism: the sentiment that if foreign nations are getting ahead academically, we in the West must be falling behind. Ian Gow, the founding president of Nottingham University's Ningbo campus in China, has cautioned that China's partnerships with British universities are a one-way street, intended to vacuum up Western science and technology strengths that China is desperate to gain: "British institutions must stop viewing this aggressively ambitious country through rose-tinted spectacles."

This apprehensive response to the globalization of universities is misguided. It amounts to modern-day mercantilism, the outmoded idea that in order to prosper a nation must grab the maximum share of a finite amount of global capital. Nothing could be further from the truth.

No doubt the new global brain race will be intensely competitive. But competition is as healthy on campuses as it is everywhere else. More world-class universities and better-educated people in countries like China and India are good for the West, not bad. After all, increasing knowledge is not a zero-sum game. It is a public good that can be used by everyone. The free flow of people and ideas made possible by a global academic culture fosters inventive thinking and prosperity for East and West alike.

Authors

Ben Wildavsky

Publication: The Wall Street Journal

The New Global College Marketplace

Ben Wildavsky — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

When Claire Booyjzsen finished her master's degree at the University of Witwatersrand in her native South Africa, the world was her oyster. Intent on pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry, she consulted global university rankings, corresponded with professors and students to narrow down her list, and ultimately applied to 11 universities. After the acceptances came in, she traveled to Coventry, England, to become a doctoral student at the University of Warwick, where 1 in 5 students comes from overseas. "I've met people from all over the world," says Booyjzsen.

Booyjzsen is among the nearly 3 million students who now study outside their home countries, an increase of 57 percent in the past decade alone. The trend is growing among faculty, too: Three quarters of young economists in top U.S. universities earned their undergraduate degrees in another nation. As globalization comes to higher education, students and professors increasingly pick and choose universities like shoppers in a worldwide academic marketplace.

So far, the United States has been the biggest winner in this talent race. Two thirds of all international graduate students study in America's world-renowned universities. In fields such as engineering and computer science, more than 60 percent of Ph.D. students on U.S. campuses come from other countries. Indeed, a recent survey found that China's Tsinghua and Peking universities have surpassed the University of California–Berkeley as the biggest source of students who go on to earn American Ph.D.'s.

Read the full article at U.S. News & World Report »

Authors

Ben Wildavsky

Publication: U.S. News & World Report

The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World

Ben Wildavsky — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

In an interview with Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Education, Ben Wildavsky answers questions about the themes of his new book, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World

Q: For many years, great students from much of the world have traveled to other countries for a higher education, whether to the great European universities or to universities in the United States. Beyond the fact that other nations are investing in building great universities, how is the global market for higher education changing? Is it just about more players, or is it more than that?

A: What’s happening is that a number of different factors have come together to create a truly global academic marketplace on a scale that’s never been seen before. Yes, there have been mobile students at least since the first Western universities emerged in the 12th century. But mobility today is unprecedented: There are about three million students studying outside their home countries, which represents a 57 percent increase in just the past decade, and the numbers are expected to continue growing even faster. We also know that faculty are increasingly mobile. So are universities themselves, as more and more colleges experiment with setting up outposts in other countries. And the fact that everybody from South Korea to Saudi Arabia is trying to build great universities is crucial to the globalization of higher education. We’re in an intensely competitive environment, with a huge race for academic talent taking place as everybody tries to build knowledge-based economies. Inevitably, global university rankings have emerged to keep score because global education markets, like other markets, need information to function effectively. Over all, we’re seeing the gradual creation of a global academic meritocracy, which I believe will have far-reaching and positive consequences.

Q: Your book is generally positive and optimistic about the new global higher education, yet much of the discussion of international education in the United State is competitive (fears that some nations' universities might compete with American institutions, or that other countries are becoming more competitive at attracting graduate students). Is the competitive nature of these discussions helpful or missing the point?

A: It’s perhaps understandable that we worry about foreign competition. I guess you could argue that warnings about being surpassed by universities in other nations are just an effort to inspire greater efforts at U.S. universities (and to get more funding). But to frame what’s happening in global higher ed purely in terms of a competitive threat is to miss the huge opportunities that exist in a world in which people and ideas are circulating more freely than ever before, a trend that I call “free trade in minds.” I think joining the competitive fray is great.

But the alarmist rhetoric we often hear has a destructive effect, because it suggests that we are going to lose out as other countries gain ground. It fosters what I call “academic protectionism,” which creates a climate of anxiety about what’s happening in other higher education systems. I’m not Panglossian about every aspect of global higher education -- there will undoubtedly be lots of missteps along the way, which is inevitable when the landscape changes so quickly. We’re in a period of experimentation. But it’s true that I’m optimistic, because I think we’re at an exciting time in the development of universities. In the United States, we should be looking at the growing academic prowess of other nations as a chance for greater intellectual exchange, collaboration, and innovation.

Q: How does the United States gain from other countries building better universities?

A: In the same way that we benefit when other countries become more prosperous. If China’s GDP and standard of living rise, this isn’t something we should wring our hands over -- we should welcome it, because we’re better off in a world with higher economic growth and greater trading opportunities. The same is true for universities. When China supersizes its university system and produces many more Ph.D.s, that’s good for us, not bad for us. The key insight here is that increasing knowledge is not a zero-sum game: there isn’t a finite sum of learning out there in the world that we all have to fight over. Improving education and economic growth in one country doesn’t make other countries dumber and poorer. In a similar vein, many scholars note that knowledge is a public good, which means that discoveries in one nation can be taken advantage of in others. As Amar Bhidé observes, ideas can’t be contained within national boundaries, which means that the U.S. share of the world’s research production matters far less than the proven ability of U.S. entrepreneurs, financiers, and consumers to take advantage of cutting-edge research, wherever it comes from.

Within the academic world, there are lots of other ways in which advances in other countries help the United States. For one thing there’s been an enormous increase in international scholarly collaboration -- joint research projects, coauthored papers, and so forth. In addition, the new global university marketplace is producing some entirely new arrangements. Yale has some collaborations in China, for instance, in which it takes advantage of cheap lab space and well-trained technicians -- China’s comparative advantage, for now -- and supplies senior faculty to lead research projects -- what Yale president Richard Levin, an economist, calls “the scarce factor of production … the sophisticated knowledge worker who is the leader of the enterprise, whose research design is driving the system.” Such partnerships have advantages for both sides, and the current dynamic will no doubt change over time as China’s high-end knowledge workers become more numerous.

Q: Your book notes the growth of branch campuses around the world -- and there is now movement from India to allow foreign campuses to set up there. Assuming this legislation receives final approval, do you think India will be the next big market for branch campuses?

A: I think that’s likely, but a lot will depend on the details of the bill that goes to India’s parliament. There are big questions about the regulatory regime that will govern foreign institutions, including whether they will have to abide by India’s strict admissions and hiring quotas for members of so-called backward castes. So far, the legislation says foreign universities can’t take profits out of the country, which has many foreign universities, especially the for-profits, pretty concerned. But overall I think this is a really promising development. India has a huge population that is hungry for educational opportunities and that has been badly served by a university system that’s terribly inadequate, both in quality and quantity. So it seems like a market ripe for new providers. Until now, India has been one of the worst offenders when it comes to academic protectionism, largely because of domestic politics. If its higher education market follows the rest of the economy, which has boomed since India abandoned large parts of its central planning apparatus, a lot of branch campuses will come in and I suspect the overall effect will be positive.

That doesn’t mean the process will always go smoothly. We know that foreign providers come in for a variety of reasons and that not every branch campus will be a model of quality. There’s lots of evidence from Japan, Singapore, and, more recently, the Middle East, that branch campuses can fall apart. But there are also some very good satellite campuses. As long as reasonable regulation is in place, I think its important to allow students to get the kind of education they want, where they want it, and when they want it. As restrictions are lifted, I think we’ll be seeing more cross-border campuses where the economics permit. Giving Indians who want and need more education a bigger range of options to fill their unmet needs seems to me a no-brainer.

Q: As the global higher education market grows, what do you see as areas of enduring strength for the United States and areas in which the U.S. will lose its position?

A: Market are unpredictable – and I think that’s true of the global academic marketplace as much as any other kind of market. So I’m hesitant to make any grand pronouncements. Here’s a cautionary tale: In the late 19th century Americans flocked to the first modern research universities in Germany and brought the model back to the United States, where it was perfected to the point that we became the world’s research powerhouse. A little more than 100 years later, the quality of Germany’s universities had plummeted – and it is now copying the U.S. model as it attempts to create a group of world-class institutions. So things can change quite a bit over a century. One possibility worth considering is that universities may take entirely new forms. We’re already seeing a large number of cross-national partnerships between universities, including many U.S. institutions. As travel and communication gets even easier and cheaper, one could imagine wholesale mergers to create global institutions – the university equivalent of multinational corporations. Nigel Thrift, vice chancellor of the University of Warwick, talks about universities following the model of “firm theory,” in which business begin in one country, trade with others, establish international branches and alliances, and eventually merge with competitors and become multinationals. I have no idea whether this will really happen – there’s also a good argument that the best universities are strongly rooted in place. But I think this thought experiment illustrates how conventional notions of competition between the United States and other nations may fade.

In the near term, we shouldn’t lose site of the fact that we remain hugely dominant – we have a disproportionate share of top researchers, 70 percent of the world’s Nobel winners, hold most of the top slots in global college rankings, and so on. We also pass an important market test, continuing to attract the lion’s share of top international students. That said, patterns of mobility could well change, and with so many new and improved universities in other nations focusing on science and engineering, that seems likely to be an area where we might lose ground. But as I indicated before, this isn’t necessarily worrisome if we look at the sum total of knowledge production around the world. From a U.S. point of view, where we are likely to remain very strong is in our creative spark, in academia and beyond. This is something other nations urgently wish to emulate – our ability to innovate, and to use research discoveries in entrepreneurial ways. For undergraduates, we also have a tradition of liberal arts. It isn't as widespread here as I would like, but I think it’s been a crucial element of our ability to graduate creative thinkers. Universities in many other nations don't have a liberal arts tradition at all. A few are trying to change that, but for now our ability to ask questions, to challenge the conventional wisdom, to be nonconformist at times, is likely to continue to be an area where we stand out.

Q: A recent immigration reform proposal urges the U.S. to grant green cards to those who finish master's and doctoral degrees in science and technology fields in the United States. To realize the benefits of global higher education, are changes needed in immigration law?

A: Absolutely. As people like Vivek Wadhwa have pointed out, we have a big problem keeping talented graduates in the country when they finish their degrees because of the shortage of H-1B visas (which allow some highly skilled graduates to work in the United States for a limited period of time). What's worse is that some globally mobile students don't come here in the first place, because they want to work in the West when they finish their degrees and they know it will be hard to do so in the United States. So we're losing the best and brightest in several ways. Expanding H-1B visas is a great idea, but because they’re temporary it would only be a short-term fix. The proposal to provide green cards along with diplomas, which has been advocated by a number of reformers, including my Kauffman Foundation colleagues Carl Schramm and Bob Litan, is an even better solution. In a global market for talent, it seems to me that everybody benefits from having the most open borders possible for study and for work.

Authors

Ben Wildavsky

Publication: Inside Higher Education

Why Colleges Shouldn't Fear Global Competition

Ben Wildavsky — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

It is easy to become inured to the rhetoric of globalization, which seems to be on the lips of every ambitious college president. But the trend is real and important. National borders are simply less relevant than they once were. Student and faculty mobility has exploded. Cross-national research collaboration is more common than ever. International college rankings proliferate.

Perhaps the most fundamental shift for higher education is that the merit principle is becoming increasingly dominant, within and across nations. The best students are shopping for the best universities like consumers in a worldwide marketplace—and universities seeking world-class status are similarly eager to recruit top students and faculty members.

Many questions about the future of globalized higher education remain unanswered. The rising mobility of recent decades seems likely to continue—but at what rate and in which directions? Will the cross-border movement of students begin to change from a mostly elite to a mass phenomenon? Will the explosive growth of for-profit institutions continue? Those are just a few of the uncertainties.

Whatever direction global higher education takes, one thing is clear: The growing number of internationally mobile students, intent on finding excellence in research and teaching, have begun to create a world in which, to an unprecedented extent, talent can be identified and find the best possible academic home—a version of what, in real estate, is known as the "highest and best use." Policy makers who seek to reap the advantages of a thriving and open higher-education system will make little headway toward creating good universities, let alone globally great ones, without understanding that meritocracy and the free exchange of ideas form the core of the university.

Read the full opinion here »

Authors

Ben Wildavsky

Publication: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Globalization in Higher Education

Ben Wildavsky — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 13:46:00 -0400

When nine thriving Chinese universities banded together late last year to create an elite consortium informally known as China's Ivy League, the development seemed only natural for an education-loving nation that ardently embraces the view that world-class universities drive economic growth. Today, China is "Exhibit A" in the emergence of a new and increasingly freewheeling global university marketplace.

At the same time, China's impressive higher education progress has made it a symbol of what some see as the competitive threat posed by rising academic powers around the world. Such worries are unwarranted, but it is perhaps no surprise that they have become commonplace, given the surge of academic activity in China and beyond.

Long known primarily as the world's largest exporter of students, China is now doing much more to build its human capital at home. In addition to expanding the quantity and quality of its own universities, it is forging partnerships with Western universities that operate programs in China. And it has lured home some academics who left for the West, but who now find appealing opportunities in newly revitalized universities.

Moreover, China is not alone. The yearning to create competitive universities is also vividly on display in Singapore, which seeks to become a world-renowned educational hub and has brought in numerous Western partners, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. South Korea, for its part, is creating what amounts to an academic free-trade zone in a 52,000-acre complex near Inchon International airport, playing host to branch campuses of many Western universities.

Nor is academic globalization confined to Asia. The lavishly funded King Abdullah University of Science and Technology opened in Saudi Arabia last year, seeking to join the top ranks of world scholarship via alliances with the likes of Imperial College London and Stanford University. KAUST is also taking advantage of the new global talent market, poaching its first president, Choon Fong Shih, from the National University of Singapore.

In Western Europe, too, governments are eager to resuscitate once-great universities that have descended into mediocrity. Germany and France are engaged in sweeping and controversial efforts to move from a failed egalitarian financing regime to one in which universities compete for significant government funding. This shift, policymakers hope, will bring a small number of institutions up to a world-class standard.

Yet even as competition, university partnerships, global league tables and scholarly mobility spread, academic globalization periodically inspires resistance. In the UK, Ian Gow, the founding president of the University of Nottingham's Ningbo campus in China, warns in a report issued by the think-tank Agora that China's partnerships with UK universities are a one-sided effort to benefit from Britain's science and technology strengths. "British institutions must stop viewing this aggressively ambitious country through rose-tinted spectacles," he cautions.

In a different but related vein, during his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama spoke of the dangers to the United States of lagging behind Asian nations in the production of engineering PhDs. Malaysia and India, more overtly restrictionist nations, have placed limits, respectively, on foreign students and foreign university branches.

Some warnings about the rise of foreign educational powers may be rhetorical pretexts for greater funding. But protectionist attitudes and actions have consequences. Robert Dingwall, director of the Institute for Science and Society at the University of Nottingham, has noted that visa barriers are not just a problem for nations that may benefit from the brainpower of foreign students and professors, but for the whole enterprise of international research collaboration. When bureaucracy interferes with academic mobility, "this vision for a world without borders where knowledge flows freely is not matched by the free movement of people", he said.

The first step towards sustaining university globalization is to understand that, for the West, the growing strengths of overseas universities are an opportunity, not a threat. Similarly, developing nations can only benefit from the exchange of ideas and people brought by global academic competition. Why? Because, as economists often note, knowledge is a public good that many individuals and nations can use. Gains for one country need not harm others - quite the contrary. Thus, a turbocharged university system that produces more well-educated Chinese and more significant research discoveries is good, not bad, for the rest of the world. Left unimpeded, the growing global network of researchers, students and universities, with all the innovation and economic growth it stands to generate, seems sure to become a win-win proposition of ever-greater magnitude for all concerned.

This opinion piece was orginally published in The Times Higher Education

Authors

Ben Wildavsky

Publication: The Times Higher Education

Is Education on the Wrong Track?

Diane Ravitch and Ben Wildavsky — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: In a March 2010 education symposium held by The New Republic, Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Diane Ravitch and Guest Scholar Ben Wildavsky present the merits and pitfalls of market-based education reform.

From: Diane Ravitch
To: Ben Wildavsky
Subject: The education reform "consensus" ignores teachers, the very people needed to carry out change in classrooms.

Ten years ago, I would have written the same things that you wrote for this symposium. I too would have been hopeful that the business model of schooling would inject new dynamism into American education. I too would have been impressed by the lingo and data-talk of the corporate suits. I too would have imagined that deregulation was the answer to our problems and that the market would produce competition and improvement. The point of my book is to explain that these strategies don’t work and to supply the evidence for my conclusions.

Ben, I am no critic of the market economy. I love having choices about where I shop. But, as I point out in the book, going to school is not the same as shopping. Most parents want a stable school that is within a reasonable distance of their home, so that they can drop off their child in the morning and pick her up at the end of day or get to school quickly if she gets sick in the middle of the day. Schools operate differently from, say, shoe stores, which open and close in response to consumer demand. Schools are essential community institutions, like firehouses. They are cooperative enterprises, where the adults are expected to work closely with one another towards common goals. Teachers should not compete with each other for extra dollars (Edward Deming says that this kind of competition doesn't even work in business, that it demoralizes the workplace). Teachers should share what they know, not hoard their trade secrets for their private benefit.

Ben, you ignore the evidence that charter schools, on average, do not outperform regular public schools. Charter students have been tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009, and they have never done better than regular public schools. Charters have the supposed advantage of deregulation, non-union teachers, longer hours, longer years—and, in some cases, the extra money contributed by generous philanthropists, yet they have not outscored regular public school students on NAEP, which is the gold standard of educational testing. One sector or the other may get a blip one year, but there has been no sustained advantage for students in charters, be they black, Hispanic, low-income, or residents of urban districts, compared to their peers in regular public schools.

Nor has test-based accountability produced genuine improvement in education. The era of NCLB has been marked by lowered state standards, cheating, and widespread gaming of the system. While the states claim big leaps forward, NAEP shows very little improvement. In math, the gains were larger before NCLB than after it was implemented. On eighth grade reading, there have been no gains at all since 1998, even though these are the students who grew up with NCLB.

Read Diane Ravitch's full letter here »

From: Ben Wildavsky
To: Diane Ravitch, Richard Rothstein, and Kevin Carey
Subject: Ravitch misunderstands the roles of charter schools, teacher professionalism, and bipartisanship in education.

Diane, I appreciate your spirited rebuttal to my essay. I’m not surprised to hear you repeat what you say in your book--that you have no objection to the market economy per se (although you somewhat undermine your case when you toss around silly phrases like “corporate suits”). It is the entry of market principles into public education that bothers you. Schools, you say, are like firehouses and police stations, not shoe stores. To give teachers extra compensation based on effective job performance undermines the fundamentally cooperative nature of schools. And so on.

You are quite right that markets are no panacea, contrary to what John Chubb and Terry Moe once wrote. I did not claim that markets have such magical powers. It seems to me that we should regard markets as an enabling condition for the changes that public education badly needs. Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has made this case eloquently, arguing last week that both choice and accountability “provide invaluable opportunities to rethink schools and systems that are too often hobbled by anachronistic policies, practices, stifling contracts, and cultures.” Accountability and choice, then, are simply means to an end.

You chide me for allegedly ignoring evidence that charter schools, on average, don’t perform any better than conventional public schools on the NAEP. I never said they did. It’s widely acknowledged that, so far, charter schools have been highly uneven in quality. But that doesn’t mean the charter principle is a failure. For one thing, charters can be closed down for poor performance (although this hasn’t happened often enough). For another, the quality and motivations of charter authorizers matter a lot to charter success. As charter laws were enacted, political pressures—notably union pressures—put many of the entities opposed to charter schools in charge of them. Washington, D.C., is a great example. Two charter authorizers were initially established. One was the regular school board, which had no love of competition and permitted a number of terrible charter school to operate with little or no oversight. The other, an independent board established just to authorize charters, came to be highly regarded and now oversees all of the city’s charters.

Overall, charters seem to have done no harm, and, in a number of high-profile cases, they have done a lot of good. As you know, there are many efforts underway to study and replicate the very best charter chains--just what one might expect in, well, a market. We’re still in a period of experimentation. But the flexibility of the charter philosophy—and the availability of comparable achievement data across schools—permits educators to try new things and to measure whether they’re working.

Even as you disparage the performance of charters, you complain (echoing a longstanding claim of Richard’s) that they cream the most motivated parents and students, leaving the neediest kids in regular public schools. Isn’t this a contradiction? If your assertion is true, wouldn’t we expect charters to outperform regular public schools? The allegation of creaming also raises an important philosophical question—in fact, a moral one—that Mark Schneider of the American Institutes for Research touched on at the AEI forum where you spoke last week. Isn’t it preferable for some kids to have superior alternatives than for all kids to remain in underperforming schools? If you could wave a magic wand and get rid of charter schools, including the KIPPs and Achievement Firsts, would you really be doing kids in those schools a favor by sending them back to the crummy institutions they escaped? It seems to me that we can simultaneously provide appealing charter options that will cause some students to exit while doing much more to meet the educational needs of the kids who remain in regular public schools.

Read Ben Wildavsky's full letter here »

Authors

Diane Ravitch
Ben Wildavsky

Publication: The New Republic

Education's Tea Partier

Ben Wildavsky — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:00:00 -0400

Almost 20 years ago, as a young editor at The Public Interest, I wrote an admiring review of The American Reader, an anthology compiled by Diane Ravitch. At the time, a battle was raging over multicultural education, and Ravitch joined the fray with a wonderful collection of speeches, songs, essays, and poems spanning the nation’s history. She had a philosophical goal--setting forth a positive version of multiculturalist history that emphasized pluralism rather than identity politics--and also a practical one--creating a content-rich textbook that wasn’t, like so many others, homogenized and excruciatingly boring.

Today, Ravitch tells us in The Death and Life of the Great American School System that she still has a keen desire for students to be taught a rich curriculum in a variety of subjects. And who could disagree? But Ravitch then links this belief with her contention that the two central philosophies guiding today’s bipartisan reform movement--test-based accountability and school choice, both of which she used to embrace--have undermined teaching, learning, and content. It's here that her argument falters.

Indeed, while her closely argued polemic offers some useful insights into the inadequacies of many reform efforts to date, ultimately, she doesn’t deliver the goods. Ravitch fails to make the case that the broad philosophies governing today’s reform movement are off-target.

Perhaps most striking to me as I read Death and Life was Ravitch’s odd aversion to, even contempt for, market economics and business as they relate to education. She writes repeatedly, in withering terms of “corporate style superintendents,” the “tycoons and politicians” driving wrongheaded reform efforts, the “managerial mindset” behind experiments with value-added assessment for teachers, and the hopeless inapplicability of such business terminology as “return on investment” for foundations seeking to gauge the educational results of their grant-making. Decrying the “unfettered market” (cautionary tale: Wal-Mart!), she claims that “the problem with the marketplace is that it dissolves communities and replaces them with consumers.” Her populist ire is such that one almost expects her to announce that she will be spearheading a new Educational Tea Party movement.

Ravitch's rhetoric is so overblown that it doesn’t seem in keeping with her record of analytical gravitas. Who says markets are antithetical to community? Democratic capitalism in the United States, after all, has generally coexisted quite nicely with thriving communities. Moreover, who is to say that businesses and foundations (sorry, make that “mega-rich foundations”) shouldn’t participate in school reform? Are they not part of the civic fabric that Ravitch so commendably wants to nurture?

As for her claim that entrepreneurs see charter schools “as a gateway to the vast riches of the education industry,” that hardly jibes with reality at the most admired charter organizations. As far as I know, nobody at Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, or KIPP, all non-profits, is getting rich from those organizations’ notably successful efforts to help low-income kids learn. But if--if--for-profit charter operators are able to operate good schools, why shouldn’t those educational entrepreneurs get rich? Isn’t the point to make sure kids learn? It is not as if profit is an alien notion in the world of public schools. As Ravitch knows well, a vast industry of contractors, curriculum specialists, and the like was getting rich off public schools long before charters came along. (Ravitch also missed important aspects of the charter movement: its relentless self-examination, eagerness to weed out poor performers, and desire to take to scale those approaches that are really helping kids.)

Read the full review here »

Authors

Ben Wildavsky

Publication: The New Republic

Academic Globalization Should Be Welcomed, Not Feared

Ben Wildavsky — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

For several years now—and not for the first time in our nation's history—CEOs, politicians, and education leaders have regularly decried the shortcomings of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education in America's elementary and secondary schools. And they have vigorously promoted a reform agenda aimed at tackling those problems.

But what about our colleges and universities? On the one hand, America's research universities are universally acknowledged as the world's leaders in science and engineering, unsurpassed since World War II in the sheer volume and excellence of the scholarship and innovation they generate. On the other, there are signs that the rest of the world is gaining on us fast—building new universities, improving existing ones, competing hard for the best students, and recruiting U.S.-trained PhDs to return home to work in university and industry labs. Should we be worried?

There is no question that the academic enterprise has become increasingly global, particularly in the sciences. Overall, nearly three million students now study outside their home nations—a 57 percent increase in the last decade. In the United States, by far the largest magnet for students from overseas, foreign students now dominate doctoral programs in STEM fields, constituting, for example, 65 percent, 64 percent, and 56 percent, respectively, of PhDs in computer science, engineering, and physics. Tsinghua and Peking universities together recently surpassed Berkeley as the top sources of students who go on to earn American PhD's.

Faculty are on the move, too: Half the world's top physicists no longer work in their native countries. And major institutions such as New York University and the University of Nottingham are creating branch campuses in the Middle East and Asia—there are now 162 satellite campuses worldwide, an increase of 43 percent in just the past three years. At the same time, growing numbers of traditional student "sender" nations, from South Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia to France and Germany, are trying to improve both the quantity and the quality of their own degrees, engaging in a fierce—and expensive—race to create world-class research universities.

Brain drain & competition

All this competition has led to considerable handwringing. During a 2008 campaign stop, for instance, then-candidate Barack Obama spoke in alarmed tones about the threat such academic competition poses to the United States. "If we want to keep on building the cars of the future here in America," he declared, "we can't afford to see the number of PhD's in engineering climbing in China, South Korea, and Japan even as it's dropped here in America."

Nor are such concerns limited to the U.S. Beyond anxious rhetoric, in a number of nations worries about brain drain and educational competition have led to outright academic protectionism. India and China are notorious for the legal and bureaucratic obstacles they erect to Western universities wishing to set up satellite campuses catering to local students. And some countries erect barriers to students who want to leave: The president of one of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology effectively banned undergraduates from taking academic or business internships overseas. Elsewhere, educators institute quotas on foreign students, as in Malaysia, which places a five percent cap on the number of foreign undergraduates who can attend the country's public universities (just as the University of Tennessee once placed a 20 percent cap on the percentage of foreign graduate students in each department). Perhaps the silliest example of this protectionist mentality can be found in Germany, which for years prevented holders of doctorates earned outside the European Union from using the title "Dr." Even a recent reform plan would extend that privilege only to holders of doctorates from 200 U.S. research universities and a limited number of universities in Australia, Israel, Japan, Canada, and Russia.

There are other impediments to global mobility, too, not always explicitly protectionist, but all having the de facto effect of discouraging or preventing open access to universities around the world. In the post-9/11 era, for example, legitimate security concerns led to enormous student visa delays and bureaucratic hassles for foreigners aspiring to study in Great Britain and the United States. As the problem was recognized and visa processing was streamlined, international student numbers rebounded and eventually increased.

By 2009, however, visa delays became common again, particularly for graduate and postdoctoral students in science and engineering, who form the backbone of many university-based research laboratories and thus serve as key players in the U.S. drive for scientific and technical innovation. Then there are severe limits on H-1B visas, which allow highly skilled foreigners, usually in science and engineering, to work temporarily in the United States and serve as an enticement for the best and brightest to study and perhaps remain here. With just 85,000 or so H-1B visas issued each year—and permanent-resident visas for skilled workers also scarce—waiting lists are long, which sends some talented students elsewhere.

Perhaps some of the anxiety over the new global academic enterprise is understandable, particularly in a period of massive economic uncertainty. But setting up protectionist obstacles is a big mistake. The globalization of higher education should be embraced, not feared—including in the U.S. In the near term, it's worth remembering that, despite the alarmism often heard about the global academic wars, U.S. dominance of the research world remains near-complete. A RAND report found that almost two-thirds of highly cited articles in science and technology come from the U.S. Seventy percent of Nobel Prize winners are employed by U.S. universities, which lead global college rankings. And Yale president Richard Levin notes that the U.S. accounts for 40 percent of global spending on higher education.

Free trade in minds

That said, it's quite true that other countries are scrambling to emulate the American model and to give us a run for our money. Yet there is every reason to believe that the worldwide competition for human talent, the race to produce innovative research, the push to extend university campuses to multiple countries, and the rush to produce talented graduates who can strengthen increasingly knowledge-based economies will be good for us as well. Why? First and foremost, because knowledge is not a zero-sum game. Intellectual gains by one country often benefit others. More PhD production and burgeoning research in China, for instance, doesn't take away from American's store of learning—it enhances what we know and can accomplish. In fact, Chinese research may well provide the building blocks for innovation by U.S. entrepreneurs—or those from other nations. "When new knowledge is created, it's a public good and can be used by many," RAND economist James Hosek told the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Indeed, the economic benefits of a global academic culture are significant. In a recent essay, Harvard economist Richard Freeman says these gains should accrue both to the U.S. and the rest of the world. The globalization of higher education, he writes, "by accelerating the rate of technological advance associated with science and engineering and by speeding the adoption of best practices around the world ... will lower the costs of production and prices of goods." Just as free trade in manufacturing or call-center support provides the lowest-cost goods and services, benefiting both consumers and the most efficient producers, global academic competition is making free movement of people and ideas, on the basis of merit, more and more the norm, with enormously positive consequences for individuals, for universities, and for nations. Today's swirling patterns of mobility and knowledge transmission constitute a new kind of free trade: free trade in minds.

Expanding global knowledge

Still, even if the new world of academic globalization brings economic benefits, won't it weaken American universities? Quite the contrary, says Freeman, who predicts that by educating top students, attracting some to stay, and "positioning the U.S. as an open hub of ideas and connections" for college graduates around the world, the nation can hold on to "excellence and leadership in the 'empire of the mind' and in the economic world more so than if it views the rapid increase in graduates overseas as a competitive threat." National borders simply don't have the symbolic or practical meaning they once did, which bodes well for academic quality on all sides. Already, the degree of international collaboration on scientific papers has risen substantially. And there is early evidence that the most influential scholars are particularly likely to have international research experience: Well over half the highly cited researchers based in Australia, Canada, Italy, and Switzerland have spent time outside their home countries at some point during their academic careers, according to a 2005 study.

The United States should respond to the globalization of higher education not with angst but with a sense of possibility. Neither a gradual erosion in the U.S. market share of students nor the emergence of ambitious new competitors in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East means that American universities are on some inevitable path to decline. There is nothing wrong with nations competing, trying to improve their citizens' human capital and to reap the economic benefits that come with more and better education. By eliminating protectionist barriers at home, by lobbying for their removal abroad, by continuing to recruit and welcome the best students in the world, by sending more students overseas, by fostering cross-national research collaboration, and by strengthening its own research universities in science, engineering, and other fields, the U.S. will not only sustain its own academic excellence but will continue to expand the sum total of global knowledge and prosperity.

Authors

Ben Wildavsky

Publication: The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine

On College Campus, Unprepared

Ben Wildavsky — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

When President Barack Obama announced earlier this year that the U.S. should aim to have the world's highest proportion of college graduates by 2020, he was staking out an ambitious but hardly a maverick goal. It is widely recognized, by Republicans and Democrats alike, that the gap between the earnings of high-school graduates and college graduates has become a chasm in recent decades. More college graduates would mean more prosperity for individuals—and for the nation, too. Bowing to this logic, governments around the world—from China and India to the Middle East—are trying to boost college attendance for their knowledge-hungry populations.

As Mr. Obama's goal suggests, there is plenty of room for improvement in the U.S. While nearly seven in 10 high-school graduates go on directly to two- or four-year colleges (up from 49% in 1972), many students are poorly prepared for college and end up taking remedial courses. And huge numbers fail to graduate. Reformers believe, not without reason, that such problems can be solved in part by improved high-school preparation and better college instruction. But is it possible that aiming to increase the number of American college graduates is actually a fool's errand?

A few skeptics think so. Most prominent among them is Charles Murray, who in "Real Education" (2008) argued that most young people are just not smart enough to go to college and should be encouraged to take other paths instead, especially vocational training. Now comes Jackson Toby with "The Lowering of Higher Education in America," a provocative variation on Mr. Murray's theme.

Mr. Toby draws on social-science data as well as personal experience—he taught sociology at Rutgers University for 50 years before retiring a few years ago—to decry the intellectual conditions that prevail on the American campus. Sidestepping the matter of students' innate abilities, he blames low academic standards mostly on the easy availability of financial aid to undergraduates who are unqualified for college-level coursework.

Early on, Mr. Toby concedes that education has become the country's "main economic escalator." But he is alarmed at how few students are prepared to meet even the minimal demands of a real college education. He faults lax college-admission standards that give high schools little incentive to push their students harder. Too many undergrads can't write with minimal competence or understand basic cultural references. Students often take silly, politicized courses. And they feel entitled to inflated grades: Mr. Toby reports that one of his students spewed obscenities at him for ending the young man's straight-A record.

Perhaps this kind of experience accounts for Mr. Toby's seeming bitterness toward unserious students, whom he calls "unprepared, half-asleep catatonics who drift in late and leave early." Most undergrads, Mr. Toby suggests, enjoy a steady diet of extracurricular hedonism while skating through their coursework (though it's unclear how this claim jibes with his complaints about low graduation rates).

Worst of all, he says, students have been misled about the value of their degrees. Yes, a bachelor of arts degree commands a wage premium, but less because of a graduate's acquired knowledge than because of the signal that his degree sends to employers about the abilities that got him into college and about a variety of soft skills, such as reliability and problem-solving capacity. Graduates in undemanding majors—in the humanities, for example, or most of the social sciences—are unlikely to earn what their more studious counterparts in, say, engineering can. They are thus disproportionately likely to be saddled with debt and prone to default, Mr. Toby argues. He claims that this pattern amounts to the kind of unsound lending that led to our recent credit crisis—one that he darkly suggests may soon be repeated in higher education. He believes that today's "promiscuous" system of college grants and loans—which, at the federal level, is based largely on financial need—ought to be retooled to focus on academic merit.

But his platform is less radical than his book's subtitle promises ("Why Financial Aid Should Be Based on Student Performance"). He acknowledges that quite a few states already have merit-based aid. And in a concession to political reality he would continue the federal Pell Grant program, which focuses on need alone. Mr. Toby's main proposal, then, is to require good grades and test scores from those seeking federal student loans. This requirement, he believes, would improve incentives for academic performance and mitigate the inevitable trade-off between widening access to college and maintaining educational standards.

Strangely, Mr. Toby does not address the biggest objection to merit aid, which is that it usually subsidizes middle- and upper-income students who would go to college anyway. By contrast, need-based aid often provides make-or-break help to low-income applicants: Without grants and student loans, they would probably not go to college at all.

Mr. Toby sees reduced college opportunities as the price of keeping under-prepared students off campus. But that is one trade-off we should not make, especially when a college degree carries so much value in the marketplace. Our vast and varied college system, to its credit, enrolls all sorts of students. Mr. Toby delineates the system's manifold shortcomings, which badly need to be remedied. And to be sure, academic merit deserves a place in our financial aid system. But the indisputable benefits of college ought to be spread more widely, not less.

Authors

Ben Wildavsky

Publication: The Wall Street Journal

International Studies: How America’s Mania for College Rankings Went Global

Ben Wildavsky — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:00:00 -0400

Five years ago, Hashim Yaacob, the vice chancellor of the University of Malaya, was on top of the world. In a recently published international ranking of universities, UM had placed eighty-ninth among 200 top institutions. This was a big deal, not only for the university, but for Malaysia as a whole—for a country that was bent on creating a knowledge economy, it was a nice validation of the progress it had made. Yaacob ordered banners reading “UM a world’s top 100 university” and had them hung around that city.

UM’s moment of glory was fleeting—one year long, to be exact. When the next international ranking came out, UM had plummeted, from eighty-ninth to 169th.^.In reality, universities don’t change that much from year to year. And indeed, UM’s drop turned out to be caused by a decline in a questionable measure of its reputation, plus the discovery and correction of an error the university itself had made. After the drop, UM was pilloried in the Malaysian press, and widespread calls for a royal commission of inquiry into the unfortunate episode followed. Within a few months, the vice chancellor, who had been vilified in the media, was effectively fired when he was not reappointed to a new term.

The instrument of Yaacob’s rise and fall was a periodical called the Times Higher Education Supplement, published by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (until a 2005 ownership change). For the past five years the newspaper has offered a ranking of universities around the world in a more-or-less open effort to duplicate internationally what U.S. News & World Report has done in the American higher education market. The impetus for the rankings was straightforward: “Particularly where research is concerned,” John O’Leary, the creator of the Times Higher rankings and the publication’s former editor, explained in an essay accompanying a recent installment, “Oxford and Cambridge are as likely to compare themselves with Harvard and Princeton as with other UK [institutions].” Universities are operating “at a time of unprecedented international mobility both by students and by academics”; furthermore, “governments all around the world have expressed an ambition to have at least one university among the international elite.”

Although Times Higher Education, as the publication is now called, wasn’t the first effort at producing international rankings, it has become the most controversial; its assessment of the global university pecking order is widely read not only among university administrators and students, but among government officials and politicians keen to assess their place in a world where educational achievement is a proxy for power. And for understandable reasons. Like most other economic sectors, higher education is fast becoming a global enterprise. Students and professors hopscotch from nation to nation more than ever. Western universities set up branch campuses in Asia and the Middle East, catering to huge demand for the best diplomas. In places like South Korea, Saudi Arabia, France, and Germany, a fierce race is in progress to create world-class research universities. Times Higher is now one of the chief de facto arbiters of who’s winning the knowledge industry competition.

In America, however, relatively few people have heard of the Times Higher rankings, even in academia. That’s partly the result of our famous insularity, partly the dominant place the U.S. News rankings still occupy in American higher education. Mostly, though, it’s due to a sense of invulnerability. American universities remain the unquestioned leaders in research and the top destination for international students. The biggest brand names among them routinely dominate the upper echelons of international rankings like Times Higher. We know we’re great.

Yet in this new world of mobility and competition, challenges to America’s educational primacy are inevitable—and international rankings are the means by which those challenges are most likely to arrive. Indeed, a process is already under way to expand international rankings beyond the metrics of reputation and research—in which U.S. schools do extremely well—to include measures of classroom learning. That could lead to some surprises for top dogs such as the United States, not to mention for other nations whose overall performance educating students and preparing graduates for the workforce may not match their justly admired strengths in other areas.

This shaking up of existing hierarchies—if it occurs—could be both traumatic and useful for the American higher education system. Rankings, for all their shortcomings, have the potential to be a very useful consumer tool in a border-free educational world. Done well, they can expose weaknesses in research, highlight lackluster classroom teaching, and give universities—including sometimes complacent American institutions—incentives to build the research and human capital on which so much innovation and economic growth depends. Global education markets, just like other markets, need information to function efficiently. But it needs to be the right information.

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_{Reprinted with permission from the Washington Monthly. Copyright by Washington Monthly Publishing, LLC, 1200 18th Street, NW, Suite 330, Washington, DC 20036 202.955.9010. www.washingtonmonthly.com}

Authors

Ben Wildavsky

Publication: The Washington Monthly

When Learning Has a Limit

Ben Wildavsky — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:00:00 -0400

Review of Real Education by Charles Murray

In the early 1980s, my mother taught at an Oakland, Calif., community college. Her students ranged from blacks born in the rural South to Southeast Asian boat people. When I was myself away at school, she sent me a moving letter describing how much she loved the job. Whatever their backgrounds, she wrote, her students showed a hunger for education and for improving their lot in life. For the most part, she said, their writing got better, too.

The vision that captivated my mother and her students -- that education offers a chance not only for acquiring knowledge but for improving opportunity -- has long been central to the American dream. Yet it is a vision that has too often gone unrealized -- which is one reason that education reform has taken on such urgency in recent decades.

Since the release of "A Nation at Risk" 25 years ago, we have seen the introduction of top-down standards (including the No Child Behind Act), the spread of a bottom-up school-choice movement (including vouchers and charter schools), and the advent of entrepreneurial programs, like Teach for America, that combine a market-oriented approach with a focus on academic results.

Meanwhile, record numbers of students aspire to higher education, not least because the economic returns to a college degree are, despite a recent leveling off, indisputable. Thus all sorts of people are busy trying to make sure that more high-school grads get a shot not only at enrolling in college but at finishing it.

None of this much impresses Charles Murray. In "Real Education," he suggests that teachers, students and reformers are all suffering from a case of false consciousness. "The education system," he says, "is living a lie."

The problem with American education, according to Mr. Murray, is not what President Bush termed the "soft bigotry of low expectations" but rather the opposite: Far too many young people with inherent intellectual limitations are being pushed to advance academically when, Mr. Murray says, they are "just not smart enough" to improve much at all. It is "a triumph of hope over experience," he says, to believe that school reform can make meaningful improvements in the academic performance of below-average students. (He might have noted, but doesn't, that such students are disproportionately black and Hispanic.)

Thus students are being steered toward college when many should be directed toward jobs for which they are better suited. At the same time, Mr. Murray argues, we're giving short shrift to the academically gifted, who ought to be offered a rigorous education appropriate to their abilities rather than having their classroom experience dragged down by low-IQ underachievers.

Mr. Murray believes that Americans should forsake what he calls "unattainable egalitarian ideals of educational achievement" in favor of "attainable egalitarian ideals of personal dignity." For high-school students that would mean more realism about potentially lucrative vocational options.

Mr. Murray would also institute a series of CPA-like certification exams for which students could prepare in a variety of non-B.A.-granting postsecondary schools. Only true high-IQ achievers -- say, 10% or 20% of all students -- would go on to college, study the Great Books and learn virtue, too.

To be sure, Mr. Murray does see a place for a broad liberal education -- but only in elementary and middle school, where he would like teachers to use E.D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge curriculum.

What is one to make of all this? For one thing, it is dismayingly fatalistic. One can accept the idea that inherent academic abilities are unevenly distributed while also believing that many low-achieving kids -- and high-achieving kids, too, for that matter -- could learn a lot more than they are learning now. International tests show that students in many other nations bypass American kids in reading and math. Could such comparative results really be a function of higher raw intelligence overseas -- or are they more likely to reflect superior educational practices? It is telling that hard-headed education reformers like Eric Hanushek, Chester E. Finn and Jay Greene believe that we can do much more to boost the academic achievement of children upon whom Mr. Murray would essentially give up.

In Mr. Murray's deterministic vision of education, IQ scores matter considerably more than teaching or curriculum or effort -- variables that are within the control of individuals and not, as he would have it, mostly their DNA. He wants to make way for what is essentially an IQ-elite.

Let us hope that he has a fool-proof way of identifying this lucky group, beyond the universal IQ testing that he advocates. He does see his certification exams as egalitarian and notes in passing that otherwise nonelite students should be permitted to lobby for admission to advanced classes, so long as they accept the risk of flunking out. But one can't help thinking: Woe to those who get put in the wrong category.

While accusing education reformers of being wooly-headed romantics, then, Mr. Murray conjures up a romantic vision of his own. In his brave new world, the bell curve of abilities is cheerfully acknowledged; students and workers gladly accept their designated places in the pecking order; and happy, well-paid electricians and plumbers go about their business while their brainy brethren read Plato and prepare for the burdens of ruling the world. It is hard to believe that a dynamic, upwardly mobile society would emerge from such an arrangement, or "dignity" either.

The view outlined in "Real Education" seems far from the one that Mr. Murray put forward in "Losing Ground" (1984). In that influential book, a headlong assault on the welfare state, he called for an "infinitely forgiving" education system in which students can try over and over to succeed, even if only some will.

And indeed, there is something in the American creed that sees the classroom as exactly the place for such second chances, a place where the efforts of personal will (those of students, teachers and policymakers alike) can make a difference in what we learn and how we live.

Mr. Murray says that he is deeply concerned about the dangers of overestimating the abilities of students. To which one might reply: Aren't the dangers of underestimating their abilities vastly worse?

Authors

Ben Wildavsky

Publication: The Wall Street Journal