INEFFICIENTLY MUCH OF THE WRONG KIND OF EDUCATION? Greg Mankiw reacts to a David Brooks column proposing more public money for the common schools. (The column is behind the Times Select wall.) He recommends readers understand the arguments in Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? and points to an instructive review. Let me highlight a paragraph of the review.

Reviewing specific programs, Carneiro and Heckman find that preschool education is highly effective, although with more impact on noncognitive than cognitive abilities. Schools are much less productive, and returns are low to increased investments in K-12 education in the form of higher salaries, smaller classes, and so forth. They suggest that structural changes that increase school choice and competition should have higher returns, but are careful to note that returns to increased investment in schools are limited by what families contribute to the production process. They also conclude that added investments in job training and higher education have low rates of return, particularly for lower ability adolescents and adults.

That's a polite way of suggesting the focus on curriculum is misplaced and that inculcating the Habits of Highly Effective People might be more productive.

To some extent, my sparring partner at Anonymous Community agrees.

One of my bloggy sparring partners likes to say that the natural check on colleges' impulse to lower standards is employers' unwillingness to hire graduates with weak skills. I've seen remarkably little evidence of that – from what I've seen, the business climate at any given moment has a far greater impact on the rate of hiring than do graduates' writing skills, particularly for entry-level positions – but I will grant that employers prefer people who can be counted on to show up for work. If we teach by example that deadlines are meant to be broken, we're not doing anybody any good. Telling a kid he can't get into class two weeks late is also teaching, in its way.

Tough love, amen.

The review considers a number of other possibilities but does not rule tough love out.

Carneiro and Heckman note some exceptions to their general thesis. They find short-term credit constraints limit college attendance for up to eight percent of the population. Financial programs targeting these families could pay off. School-based interventions with adolescents still enrolled (but not dropouts) have substantial impacts, particularly on noncognitive skills. Private job training has a relatively high rate of return but does not reduce (and may increase) inequality. Public policies providing training in the classroom have high rates of return, though other public job training programs do not.

The exceptions are taken to prove the rule, because they are relevant to so few people and have such small impacts on inequality. Carneiro and Heckman conclude (123): “the ability that is decisive in producing schooling differentials is shaped early in life. If we are to substantially eliminate ethnic and income differentials in schooling, we must start early.” Thus, a “serious reformulation of human capital policy is needed.” Yet, even with the benefit of a response and rejoinder, the reader is left with only hints as to what this might entail beyond rejection of most current policies and movement toward choice, competition, and local incentives in schools. Most intriguing are their statements that emphasize early family policy (135): “Good families promote cognitive, social, and behavioral skills. Bad families do not. The relevant policy issue is to determine what interventions in bad families are successful.”

Challenging task, that. By what standard can policymakers regulate the behavior of "bad families" without making the case for requiring bicycle helmets or banning pate? (Policymakers haven't yet figured out that properly timed traffic lights are a cost-effective way of taming speeding, reducing gasoline use, and damping road rage.)