CHAPTER TWENTY
Quality Education
The New Growth Area
THAT AMERICA’S SCHOOLS WILL IMPROVE—radically and quite soon—is certain.
How fast they will improve we don’t yet know, though it may be faster than anyone expects. Nor is it at all clear how the changes will come about. But the economic rewards for knowledge and skill, after a half century of steady decline, are going up sharply—and so are the penalties for their absence.
It is generally believed that in this century jobs have become more demanding. But this holds true only for a minority of jobs, and, in general, only for jobs that have always had high knowledge requirements, such as physician or engineer. For a good many others, educational credentials have often risen without any real change in knowledge or skill requirements; where applicants once needed a high school diploma, for instance, they now usually need four years of college, although there isn’t any discernible change in the job itself. But for the largest single group and the one that has fared by far the best in this century—low-skilled manual workers in manufacturing—neither knowledge nor credential requirements have become any stiffer. And whereas in this group the economic rewards for acquiring knowledge or skills were extremely high a half century ago, they have gone down so sharply as to have all but disappeared.
Seventy-five years ago it took an industrial worker three full years of steady work to earn the $750 that was the original price of that low-cost miracle, the Ford Model T. And the $250 a year in cash was all such a worker earned then—and only in the most unlikely event of being fully employed ten hours a day, six days a week, and fifty weeks a year. There were no “fringes”—no Social Security, no pension, no group life insurance, no health insurance, no sickness pay, no unemployment compensation, no workmen’s compensation, and, of course, no extra pay for working overtime or on Sundays.
The direct descendant of this manual laborer of yesterday, the unionized blue-collar worker in the mass-production industries—steel, automotive, electrical machinery, rubber, chemicals—costs a minimum of $50,000 a year (about one-half “fringes"), or nine times the price of a low-priced new car today. And this understates the real income gain; for today’s blue-collar worker with his eight-hour day and five-day week works one-third fewer hours in a year than his predecessor did seventy-five years ago. His hourly income, as measured by automobile prices, has thus increased forty- to fiftyfold. And although the average labor cost for semiskilled work in manufacturing is well below the cost in the big, fully unionized, mass-production industries—$15 an hour as against $25 at U.S. Steel—even that represents an annual real income of $30,000, or five new cars, or a twenty-fold increase in hourly income in seventy-five years.
This fundamental change in the economic position of the low-skilled worker in the developed countries is the central social event of this century. There has never been anything even remotely similar in social history. To a very large extent it reflects, of course, the rocketlike rise in productivity in the last one hundred years. But although usually called “a rise in labor productivity,” it was accomplished in its entirety through higher capital investment, better machines and tools, and, above all, better management.
Contrary to all Marx considered “scientific” and absolutely certain, labor, and especially the least-skilled and least-knowledgeable labor (Marx’s “proletariat"), received all the fruits of increased productivity, and perhaps a little more.
This is surely one of mankind’s more creditable feats. For the worker of today does not work longer and harder than the worker of 1907; he works fewer hours and, thank God, with a fraction of the backbreaking bodily toil and the accidents of yesterday. Above all, his work requires no more knowledge or skill. In fact, it is a pure euphemism to call it “semiskilled”—nothing that can be learned in three weeks, as is true of most production-line work, can be considered to need any skill. It took a good deal longer to become proficient at digging a ditch with pick and shovel.
But in most other occupations in our economy real incomes have gone up far less quickly. Indeed, the more skill or knowledge a job requires, the less its real income has risen. Salespeople in retail stores had about the same income as blue-collar workers in the early years of the century—perhaps a little more. Today they average between one-third and one-half. Doctors and lawyers had a real income at least five times that of blue-collar workers. Their total “compensation package” today is on average less than twice that of the highly unionized blue-collar workers in the steel or auto plant. The real income of teachers in the best-paying big-city systems was then about three times that of a blue-collar worker. Even adjusting for the teachers’ fewer working days, longer vacation, and liberal pension plans, teachers now make a good deal less than unionized blue-collar workers.
The compression of income differentials has been greatest in manufacturing. The differential between skilled people (machinists and electricians, for instance) and semiskilled is down to 25 percent; seventy-five years ago the skilled workers earned three times as much, with a famous early Ford car ad boasting that “the Model T costs no more that a good craftsman can earn in a year.” College graduates around 1910 started at around $20 a week, or three times a laborer’s wages. Now their starting salaries are lower than those of laborers. Even industry’s pampered darlings, the MBAs of the prestigious business schools, often work for five years before their total compensation package exceeds that of the unskilled blue-collar worker who survives the thirty-day probationary period.
One need not be a confirmed egalitarian to consider most of these developments beneficial and, indeed, elementary justice. But the by-product, neither intended nor foreseen, has been a steady devaluation of knowledge and skill, and with it a steady whittling away of the incentives for maintaining the performance capacity of the schools.
Seventy-five years ago the school was, by and large, the only way out of grueling poverty and total insecurity, and the only access to modest affluence, self-respect, and the respect of one’s community. Knowledge and skills were, of course, no guarantee of success. But without them failure was practically certain. Hence there was enormous community pressure on the school to maintain standards and to demand performance. The demands that the destitute Jewish immigrants made on New York City’s schools in the first quarter of this century have been described often. What is rarely realized is that these demands transformed what, before 1890 or 1900, had been a lackluster or even inferior school system into the educational pressure cooker described so vividly in the memoirs of the New York Jewish writers.
The Iowa farm community or the Swedish settlers in Minnesota put the same pressure on their schools, and for the same reason. “Just tell us if you have any trouble-maker or any boy who doesn’t want to learn and we’ll take care of him,” the eighteen-year-old “schoolmarm” from New England was told by the community elders when she arrived to take on the one-room schoolhouse in the prairie town, and the elders meant it.
Jobs requiring knowledge and skill—or at least their credentials—still carry far more social prestige, of course. And many other forces act on schools besides economics. Still, since World War II, knowledge and skill have ceased to be the only economic escape hatch. The college professor still thinks it’s disgraceful if his son “drops out” and goes to work on an assembly line. But the son lives just as well as his father. And what the blue-collar worker sees is that his older son, who works as a machine operator in the glass plant, earns just as much as the younger son who graduated from the state university, and earns it a good deal sooner. No wonder this worker is then willing to settle for a school that’s “caring” rather than “demanding.”
But this state of things is over now. It would be over even if recovery were to restore every blue-collar job, with full wages and benefits. The switch to knowledge work as the economy’s growth area and the large-scale movement to new technologies mean above all that productivity will increasingly be determined by the knowledge and skill that workers put into their task. And productivity, in the end, always determines the ability to pay and the level of real incomes.
This is the reason we can say with confidence that the American school will improve—fast.
(1983)