More Money Than Brains (10 page)

Another set of international rankings, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, which assesses fourth-graders, also rated U.S. performance as middle of the pack. In the glass-half-full argot favoured by America’s National Center for Education Statistics, 2006 scores were “higher than the average score of students in 22 of the 44 other countries and educational jurisdictions that participated in the
PIRLS
assessment.”
¹⁶
Some of the jurisdictions that outperformed the U.S. include the Canadian provinces that participate in the
PIRLS
, Luxembourg, Singapore, Russia, and Latvia.

The United States does win the bronze medal in one
OECD
scholastic performance indicator: spending. Only Israel and Iceland spend a greater percentage of their
GDP
on educational institutions than Americans do. The next trio of countries on the spend-a-lot list are Korea, Denmark, and New Zealand. Some of them have better results to show for their spending: Korea’s and New Zealand’s scores are above average. But some of them do not, which just goes to show that funding isn’t the only factor that determines educational success.

Another thing worth noting about these figures is that Korea and the U.S. both spend a lot of private money on education. The rate of funding for U.S. public schools is actually below the
OECD
average, but the heaps of cash spent on private tuition at schools and colleges drives the overall average up. Moreover, this sort of survey doesn’t keep track of all the
money people spend on child-improving para-educational whatnot, a bustling business that starts with Lamaze toys and Baby Einstein videos and continues through extracurricular activities and lessons and test prep programs, summer camps, and educational video games.

Nevertheless, despite all the spondulicks and speeches devoted to education, the high-school dropout rate in America has risen. Back in the 1960s, the U.S. led the world in high-school completion, but in 2005 they placed twenty-first out of the twenty-seven
OECD
countries surveyed. The census data for 2007 says that 86 per cent of Americans twenty-five or older have at least completed high school, a figure that includes
GED
(General Equivalency/Educational Diploma) holders. But some economists have found this number suspiciously rosy.

One study, done in 2008 by economists James Heckman and Paul LaFontaine, says that inclusion of the
GED
inflates the numbers.
GED
holders, who log less class time and test their way to a diploma, do about as well in the workplace as dropouts do. Their projections are not nearly as optimistic as the official numbers. They insist that

In 2008, when the California school system got a long-awaited student-tracking system up and running, they found that one-quarter of their students dropped out. This was an improvement over some estimates, but much worse than the previous official numbers.
¹⁸

The experts may still be squabbling about the data, but one thing is clear. Dropping out of high school makes it way more likely that one will end up in the slammer, on social assistance, or in the worn-to-a-frazzle ranks of the working poor.

The Canadian dropout rate has been decreasing steadily since the 1990s. According to Statistics Canada, it fell from 16.6 per cent in 1990–91 to 9.3 per cent in 2006–07. The majority of dropouts, in both Canada and the U.S., are young men. In Canada the problem is more rural than urban, with the highest dropout rates occurring in Quebec and the prairie provinces.

It’s worth noting that Alberta’s dropout rate is above the national average, which helps to explain why Alberta schools score well in international assessments. The easy availability of oil-patch gigs lures most of the uninterested, low-scoring types out of the system, making Alberta experiments such as charter schools look more successful than they might be. Conversely, the east coast made the greatest gains in high-school completion. This makes sense, as the primary and secondary industries that used to pull young men out of classrooms and into lucrative labour – the fisheries and plants
that used to be our oil sands – have gone belly-up, so more people are staying in school.

The United States is split about the value of education. There’s a lot of hullabaloo about the state of the schools, but there is also more respect for unschooled, self-made successes. It has become an article of faith in Canada that people need education to succeed, which is one of the reasons why our public-school squabbles are not nearly so heated as those of our southern neighbours.

Canadian students tend to do well in international tests. In the
PISA
math and reading test results released in 2006, Canadian students performed above the
OECD
averages, placing seventh in math and fourth in reading. I’m not mentioning this so I can enjoy a gloating Canuck moment. Americans have a national education department and a national dialogue about the issue, which is more than I can say for my boring homeland. Sure, that conversation includes a lot of hysteria and crazy talk, but Canadians have no federal education portfolio or much in the way of a national conversation about schools.

Stephen Harper and his Cons are unlikely to start one. There’s barely a word about education in the party’s platform or on their policy website. Whenever Cons talk about education, they really mean trraining, a mere means to some job. And when Cons broach the topic of young people, they are usually talking about sending them to jail or to Afghanistan, not college or university. Inmates and soldiers, cons and cops, wardens and warriors – unlike lazy teachers and slack students – never get the whole summer off.

The gap between Canadian and U.S. test scores is interesting because it helps us rule out one of the usual excuses for poor student performance. Little Canucklings have equal access to all the distractions that cultural conservatives and pandering candidates blame for the stupefaction of youth. Canadian kids eat the same lousy food, watch the same moronic reality
TV
, play the same shoot-’em-up video games, and listen to the same dippy party rap as their southern coevals.

It is way too easy to blame
Grand Theft Auto
and text messaging for poor student performance. Sure, some pop culture glorifies anti-intellectualism, but the gap between Canadian and American test scores – and the fact that crabapples once said the exact same things about comic books, jazz, and the talkies – show us that pop culture is not really the problem.

The most important factor in determining student performance is class. Poor students do poorly: a class divide that ensures future class divisions, undermining the meritocratic North American dream, the idea that poor people can, by dint of their hard work and smarts, do better than their forebears did. This ideal still brings immigrants to our fair shores, and in Canada, the children of immigrants are much more likely to complete high school and finish university degrees.

The term
meritocracy
is fairly new, coined in 1958 by British sociologist and politico Michael Young. Young was quite dismayed by popular adoption of the term, since he meant it pejoratively.
The Rise of the Meritocracy
was a dystopian satire of the new elite. Young worried that the education system was rewarding a narrow set of skills, such as doing well on
IQ
tests or getting into the right brand-name schools. The
meritocracy, Young argues, is just as unequal as the traditional British class structure, and even more disingenuous for pretending that anyone can succeed and that success is proof of merit. The poorly educated and just plain poor become embittered and disenfranchised, and the successes become smug at best and hubristic at worst.

In a 2001 editorial for
The Guardian
, Young wrote:

This is a pretty prescient description of the rhetoric we’ve heard lately from the geniuses of Wall and Bay streets. The successful routinely invoke the meritocratic bona fides of a system that tells them they are meritorious.

Still, North Americans exhibit a positively romantic attachment to the notion that Canada and the U.S are indeed meritocracies, societies that reward smarts and hard work. Meritocracy is an important part of Barack and Michelle Obama’s appeal; both frequently stress that they are poor scholarship students who have made good. People long for
examples of meritocracy in action because they are worried that their cherished dreams will not come true. Politics, pop culture, and self-help all sell assurances that we will succeed, but the demand for such assurances shows that we are really anxious about our prospects.

A 2008 Zogby poll on attitudes in the American workplace found that three-quarters of U.S. workers thought the American dream was less attainable than it had been eight years earlier. Another study on economic mobility, conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts in concert with lefty and righty think tanks, found that the American dream was alive and well – in Canada, France, and the Scandinavian countries, where citizens were twice as economically mobile as people in the United States or the United Kingdom.
²⁰

You may recall from a few short pages ago that countries such as Canada and the Scandinavian nations scored better than the U.S. on international tests. Coincidence? I think not. More economic mobility means more resources at home and more incentive to do well. Less economic mobility means more fatalism and resignation on the part of poor students and more dreams of winning the class lotto the way people on
TV
and in movies do, through luck and pluck and looks and the kinds of talents one develops over the course of an inspirational montage.

In the United States, the middle class has been more rudely and vigorously screwed by its financial betters than it has in Canada, so it stands to reason that Canuck schools score better on average and that U.S. schools exhibit greater extremes. America has some of the world’s most highly
respected schools, but they exist a world away from the under-funded, overcrowded ones that serve the students who most desperately need a good education. Even Dubya knew this was the big problem. Programs such as
KIPP
and Teach for America have made laudable efforts to improve impoverished schools. Some American school districts have also realized that class affects the classroom, and they are opting to modify their race-based integration policies to class-plus-race formulas.

But this isn’t just a question of cash; the U.S. does spend much more, if more unevenly, on education than we skinflint Canadians do. It’s also a cultural thing, a reflection of certain social attitudes, a side effect of our differing anti-intellectualisms. Canadian anti-intellectualism is not quite as vocal as the U.S. version, and there is a little more respect for education in the Great White North. Part of this is a result of something old: Canada’s Europeanism, much of which is a reaction against the mega-culture next door. Part of it is a result of something new: immigrants, who tend to push their kids to excel in school.

Canadians are generally more deferential than Americans, and therefore have more respect for those who succeed in the confines of established institutions. People are still mildly in favour of professors and science nerds, provided that they engage in wry self-deprecation. An intellectual cannot put on airs or come off like a swell. This is fatal in a land that loves to hack its tall poppies. So long as Canadian smarties act like secular monks, devoted to the greater good of research or their students, they’re fine. Not as good as hockey players, not
as loathsome as politicians, Canuck brains are largely out of sight and out of mind until they magic up a Canadarm or some medical doohickey and win a Nobel Prize and five approving minutes on the
CBC
. There is one exception to this rule. Illustrious foreigners, especially Brits and Americans, who choose to live in Canada have much more leeway to pontificate and greater licence to make pompous pronouncements. They’re kind enough to grace this global backwater with their presence, so they can puff and brag a bit.

Americans are more inclined to emphasize the goods an education can get you, treating school as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Consequently, the people who stay in school because they love the things they are studying have failed to reach the end, and are merely delaying the inevitable real world. American admiration of the self-made man or the rugged individualist means that scholastic success will always be a consolation prize at best, less worthy than starting your own company or inventing something. You can achieve the latter goals on your own, and the market determines whether or not they are successful, not some hoity-toity coterie of experts. It’s hardly surprising that a culture that routinely derides academic prowess – as opposed to fiscal and physical expertise, the objects of collective worship – produces middling, bored students.